Vidyan Ravinthiran is associate professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015) as well as two books of poetry, Grun-tu-molani (2014) and The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction“A slave and worshiper at love’s doorstep”: Mir Taqi MirCensorship and the Role of the Poet in the Work of Ana BlandianaAt Home or Nowhere: A. K. RamanujanYour Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Marianne Moore and Stevie SmithEunice de Souza and Indian Speech“Emmental freedom”: Czesław Miłosz“There must be something to say”: On Verse SoundElizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Communication, and Other PeopleTed Hughes, Keith Sagar, and the Poetics of Letter ProseRae Armantrout’s Lonely DreamDreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary SentencesSrinivas Rayaprol and Gāmini SalgādoYou Can’t Close Your Eyes for a Sec: Arvind Krishna MehrotraThom Gunn’s Shadows Hard as BoardGalway Kinnell, Trying to Become WingedA. R. Ammons and “the political (read, human) world”Postlyric and the Already Known: Dawn Lundy Martin“I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”: Vahni (Anthony) CapildeoBibliographyPermissionsIndex

What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is associate professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015) as well as two books of poetry, Grun-tu-molani (2014) and The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction“A slave and worshiper at love’s doorstep”: Mir Taqi MirCensorship and the Role of the Poet in the Work of Ana BlandianaAt Home or Nowhere: A. K. RamanujanYour Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Marianne Moore and Stevie SmithEunice de Souza and Indian Speech“Emmental freedom”: Czesław Miłosz“There must be something to say”: On Verse SoundElizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Communication, and Other PeopleTed Hughes, Keith Sagar, and the Poetics of Letter ProseRae Armantrout’s Lonely DreamDreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary SentencesSrinivas Rayaprol and Gāmini SalgādoYou Can’t Close Your Eyes for a Sec: Arvind Krishna MehrotraThom Gunn’s Shadows Hard as BoardGalway Kinnell, Trying to Become WingedA. R. Ammons and “the political (read, human) world”Postlyric and the Already Known: Dawn Lundy Martin“I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”: Vahni (Anthony) CapildeoBibliographyPermissionsIndex

What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is associate professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015) as well as two books of poetry, Grun-tu-molani (2014) and The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction“A slave and worshiper at love’s doorstep”: Mir Taqi MirCensorship and the Role of the Poet in the Work of Ana BlandianaAt Home or Nowhere: A. K. RamanujanYour Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Marianne Moore and Stevie SmithEunice de Souza and Indian Speech“Emmental freedom”: Czesław Miłosz“There must be something to say”: On Verse SoundElizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Communication, and Other PeopleTed Hughes, Keith Sagar, and the Poetics of Letter ProseRae Armantrout’s Lonely DreamDreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary SentencesSrinivas Rayaprol and Gāmini SalgādoYou Can’t Close Your Eyes for a Sec: Arvind Krishna MehrotraThom Gunn’s Shadows Hard as BoardGalway Kinnell, Trying to Become WingedA. R. Ammons and “the political (read, human) world”Postlyric and the Already Known: Dawn Lundy Martin“I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”: Vahni (Anthony) CapildeoBibliographyPermissionsIndex

What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.