This book explores what happens when poets identify vernacular language with the spirit of transnational modernity. It asks whether vernacular poetries are doomed to be provincial or implicitly xenophobic. And it explains how modernist poets created new “synthetic vernacular” discourses in order to reimagine the relations among people, their languages, and the communities in which they live. This book begins with introductory chapters on the formal, literary‐historical, and ideological implications of “synthetic vernacular” writing. It then offers five case studies of Scottish, English, C ... More

This book explores what happens when poets identify vernacular language with the spirit of transnational modernity. It asks whether vernacular poetries are doomed to be provincial or implicitly xenophobic. And it explains how modernist poets created new “synthetic vernacular” discourses in order to reimagine the relations among people, their languages, and the communities in which they live. This book begins with introductory chapters on the formal, literary‐historical, and ideological implications of “synthetic vernacular” writing. It then offers five case studies of Scottish, English, Caribbean, African‐American, and Anglo‐American poetries from the high modernist period through the 1990s. It combines discussions of critical theory and political history with extended analysis of poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamau Brathwaite and T. S. Eliot, Melvin B. Tolson and Harryette Mullen, and Mina Loy. In doing so, it produces a new interpretation of Anglophone modernism that disrupts the literary‐critical antinomy between “national” and “transnational” aesthetic and ideological values. Describing how poets make “synthetic vernacular” poems out of a disordered medley of formal and linguistic parts, this book explains how poetic modernism is shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of twentieth‐century history, in which the nation‐state's status as a primary mediator of cultural and political identity comes under unprecedented pressure but does not break.