Poetics

This chapter surveys scholarship in poetics published in 2019 that engages with concepts of ‘world’. I begin from the contention that poetics scholarship is at a crossroads: while questions of race, nation, and politics were often cast aside in poetry criticism of the late twentieth century in favor of considerations of modernist lineages and philosophical approaches to language, new work in poetics increasingly prioritizes the discussion of racial capitalism, colonialism, and dispossession. The review is divided into four sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetry and the World, which considers three works that discuss poetry in relationship to world literature; 3. Worlds of Poetry, which examines three works that consider the so-called poetry world; and 4. Conclusion. The works discussed in this review include two scholarly monographs, a collection of experimental essays by a poet-critic and translator, an introduction to poetry by a poet and literary critic, a short polemic by a poet-critic and ethnic studies scholar, and a journal article exemplifying what I take to be the most significant new direction in poetics scholarship, namely the re-evaluation of apparently abstract, depersonalized formal and generic categories through the analytic of race.