Poetry in English as Comparative and World Literature

Abstract

English literature as a national literature is in many ways a non-starter. Form and context, language and translation all exert centrifugal forces on English language and literature and, more specifically, poetry. English poetry becomes poetry in English, but even from the start in Old English, there are external cultural and linguistic forces. Here, I do not deny that we speak of English poetry or poetry in English, but I wish to explore the countervailing pressures away from the literature of a nation or an unbroken poetic tradition in English because literature in English was written before England was unified and is written in English in English-speaking places and other territories that have changed over time. T.S. Eliot’s tradition and the individual talent, which he first discussed in The Egoist in 1919, is a perceptive idea, but I would suggest that some of the individuals, even early on, were bilingual or multilingual and that the tradition is not unified culturally, socially, and politically. So here I offer a brief selection of literary history – that is, a historical account of poetry in English, in the context of Latin and other languages, with examples from Anglo-Saxon texts through those of Shakespeare and Ezra Pound to those works in the present – that shows aspects of comparative and world poetry from the beginning and not simply English poetry or poetry in English.