South Asian Poetry

Harvard FAS

Originally, this course centered poets resident in, and writing from, post-Independence India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It will now also examine South Asian-American and British-South Asian writers. In terms of poets living in the Global South, it will concentrate on those who break with the wannabe-colonial, archaically emulous stuff which came before them—with the aid of European modernism, and US poetry’s turn to open forms and a streetwise vernacular. Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Arun…