This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.