Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.

Introduction: negotiating the era of decolonization; 1. Provincializing the Greenwich meridian; Interchapter: Mbari publications and the CIA; 2. Editing the Commonwealth; Interchapter: Derek Walcott and the London Magazine; 3. Fashioning the modern African poet; Interchapter: James Simmons's Nigeria and the Honest Ulsterman; 4. Publishing the troubles; Conclusion: the haunting of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma is Assistant Professor of English at Emory University, Atlanta, affiliated with the Institute of African Studies, Irish Studies at Emory, and the Program in Global and Postcolonial Studies. His essays have appeared in Éire-Ireland and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, amongst other venues, and he is Co-Editor of a special section of Research in African Literatures: 'Religion, Secularity, and African Writing'.