Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be like. ("Description", in this context, isn't simply a stylistic term -it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar's descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumbai a type of exact factuality with aspirations toward something more: a nuanced understanding of India and its history. His tropes of sight affirm the importance of accurate reportage while also promulgating an unillusioned view of his nation's colonial past. Documenting the lives of the poor and those caught between a superstitious and a rational understanding of the world, Kolatkar alludes to the larger processes of cultural and technological reorganization which condition their existence -while stressing that individuals are more than the product of their surroundings. His verse demands for its appreciation a true poetics of world literature, which would understand the tiniest cells of stylistic texture as historically expressive. This article therefore features several close readings of individual poems in which effects of rhyme, assonance, syntax, and tone outline a self-critical intelligence unique to Kolatkar's poems in English. Which start, mischievously, to interpret themselves -critical analysis should not jettison the playfulness which cannot quite disguise the poet's longing, when he writes in this language, for a greater intimacy with the people and places he describes.To the historian, poetic description might seem at the very least irresponsible, and at the most a contradiction in terms; an unlikely fusion of the subjective and the objective, difficult to validate. Is it creation, or a responsible accounting of the world? Two quotations may help draw out a range of pre-existing evaluative assumptions. The first is from a letter

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Melville’s creative inhabitancy of the space between two understandings of spontaneity combines a Protestant understanding of divine enthusiasm with the more secular inspiration of a Romantic poetics—in a strangely mistrustful, alienated way. This chapter tracks his metaphor of the economically appraisable heart through his letters and passages from Moby-Dick; moving to Billy Budd, which mentions spontaneity several times, I treat Billy’s spilling of soup across his enemy Claggart’s path as a literalization of Wordsworth’s poetics of spontaneous overflow, and indeed the relationship between these characters as a version of Melville’s mixed feelings towards the (that) Romantic poet. Billy Budd, more than any other text, dramatizes the conflict between spontaneity and form: naval rituals survive the protagonist’s spontaneity, but at the cost of his life. There are tensions that Melville’s plots, his characterization, and his sentences themselves either refuse to, or cannot, resolve—impulsivities shirking coordination either by the author or the critic.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha is neglected twice over. First, it’s poet’s prose, whose theme, of Black womanhood in the mid-century United States, we assume Brooks treated best in verse. Second, the mode of resistance it suggests appears too internal, intellectual, passive—at a remove from structural change. Combining Fred Moten’s theories on Black improvisation with the racialized phonetics of Brent Hayes Edwards, I explore how in Brooks’s prose, networks of sound establish against myriad forms of circumscription and constriction a replenishing, yet never secure, surplus. This isn’t a simple opposition—of, say, Maud Martha’s spiritedness to the entrapping, grey, kitchenette building in which she lives—because she, and Brooks, also take from Whitman a metaphor of stonecutting and sculpture he uses to describe the poet creating new forms for his nation, and which Brooks racializes to depict the challenges faced by the Black artist who would create for her people new traditions permitting a liberated expressiveness.

The book’s conclusion is also a new chapter: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah provides a means of revisiting and theorizing the innovations of the other writers. Adichie’s novel provides a digital poetics of migrancy: Ifemelu, moving between Nigeria and the United States, expresses her hybridized and unmoored sensibility in the spontaneous prose of her blog, which allows her to utter herself at once, without mediation. Adichie’s novel predicts such cycles of exposure and outrage as characterize today the dopamine-inducing loops of social media. Although it hasn’t previously been realized, Ifemelu’s spontaneous outbursts return us to evangelical Christianity, since she’s shaped by her mother’s search for communal security through a series of Nigerian congregations. The author draws on Cheng Pheah’s notion of the world as not the globe, but a temporally undecided zone of possibility—a Nigerian woman experiences moments of relation that, enabled by the instantaneousness of digital messaging, have serious consequences.