Although George MacDonald considered poetry his primary literary vocation, his own verse works have received very little critical attention. His works are characterised by a restless experimentalism and a deep erudition. This chapter works to establish a basic understanding of the nature and organisation of MacDonald’s oeuvre. Under consideration are the poems included in his 1893 summative, self-edited anthology Poetical Works. These are approached as a textus receptus to evaluate the intentions and structure of MacDonald’s poetic project. The approach to this chapter, then, is in four parts: the first considers the closely held question of ‘Is MacDonald’s poetry any good?’, the second examines three impediments to the appreciation of MacDonald’s verse, the third offers a section-by-section overview of MacDonald’s Poetical Works (1893) – his self-edited anthology of his poems – and the fourth, a praxis segment, looks at an individual poem to see the various strands of his interests ‘in action’, as it were.

Evangelical Christianity gave Phillis the means, motive, and opportunity to become a poet. She was writing poetry by 1765, a mere four years after she arrived in America. The poems she wrote in the next few years display an almost incredibly rapid improvement in her skills in versification. As a recently converted “Ethiop” she assumes the role of a lay preacher. Phillis experimented with various literary forms, such as allegory, as well as with rhyme patterns besides the rhymed couplets she uses in almost all her later poems. In response to the growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies during the 1760s, Phillis began writing overtly political poems, creating what I call a proto-national American voice. Phillis’s persona alternates between identifying as African and as American in Phillis’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770. She uses the occasion to address contemporaneous religious and political issues. Republication of her elegy brought Phillis transatlantic recognition.

To understand the crusades from the perspectives of the Muslims in the Middle East, the historian needs to mine a variety of Arabic sources written in the crusader period and subsequent centuries. The majority of these sources were produced in greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām), north-western Mesopotamia (al-Jazīra) and Egypt. They provide not only eyewitness and contemporary accounts on chronology and details of events, but also reflect first-hand testimonies about the variety of Muslim responses to and interactions with the Franks that ranged from amity to animosity. Added to this is the contextualisation of the crusades in the broader sweep of Islamic history. As such, the historian is able to see not only the dynamics between Franks and Muslims, but also those among Muslims and sometimes among Franks in the wider setting of other events occurring in different parts of the Muslim world and the Eastern Mediterranean. This contextualisation is important because events elsewhere affected the region directly or indirectly, factored in the strategies and approaches of the various Muslim and Frankish actors and camps, and impacted relations between them.

Because sainthood requires a renunciation of worldly attachment, it eliminates the need to stabilize relational identity. The saint identifies him or herself in relationship to God, who has no physical form, requires no social context or explanation, and does not change over time. Instability is an essential requirement of relational reiteration; without shifting landmarks and potential mistakes, there is no need to deploy the form. Mary of Egypt is an exception who proves the rule in this respect. When mistaken by Zosimus for a devil, she reiterates the landmarks of her identity to prove her sainthood: not because she needs them but because he does. Similarly, The Seafarer positions the chronological past as integral to the speaker’s rejection of worldly pleasures, and that rejection as equally integral to his ability to arrive at the “hotter” joys of his destination; thus loss itself becomes a crucial social landmark of the speaker’s identity. Rather than trapping the speaker in a state of stasis, it is through the loss of worldly landmarks that the speaker may find his way to a heavenly realm.

At the end of his life, the titular hero of Beowulf asks his young kinsman Wiglaf to build a mounment, hoping that his presence in the landscape will defend and preserve the memory of the people he leaves behind. Put another way, Beowulf seeks to remain a conceptual landmark by becoming a literal landmark. But in his desire to be reiterated, Beowulf is not alone. Navigating Landmarks of Identity shows that, across early medieval English literature, relational reiteration stabilizes relational identity when a subject’s relationships are uncertain or under threat—whether that be in riddles, catalogue poems, elegies, or charter boundary clauses. Such textual reiteration takes place not only when a boundary is transgressed, or a person is exiled, but throughout Old English literature when an author is confronted with the problem of “who” or “what” something is.

The practice of relational reiteration shapes the Old English and Anglo-Latin riddles. Challenged to “say what I am” without actually naming themselves, the books, bells, wild creatures, and mysteries of the early English riddle tradition respond by reiterating their own conceptual edges, drawing upon the same types of social, chronological, and physical “landmarks” that a local tenant would use to perambulate property bounds. Aldhelm, the first known English riddle-writer, declares that his aim is to “reveal with verse the hidden mysteries of things,” and his Enigmata are explicitly framed as a cosmology: an attempt to articulate the subtle links between individual elements of God’s creation. Although the Old English Exeter riddles make no such claim, these poems are even more invested in the link between identity and practice: each speaker’s physical form comes into view through the lens of their interaction with human beings. The result in both cases is transformative. Each riddle creature is “built” incrementally, piece by piece, as the riddle describes its interactions with the hierarchical world outside itself—not physically, per se, but as a conceptual entity.

Bob Kaufman was born into a bookish and music-loving family in the Creole community of the 7th Ward of New Orleans, travelled widely as a teenager in the Merchant Marine during World War II, a context in which he blossomed as a labor organizer, an orator and a voracious reader of classic literature. By the late 1940s, he had developed friendships with leading figures in the Beat Movement and soon came to significant fame in San Francisco for performing his poems in bars and coffee houses. A victim in the late 1950s of horrific, continuous police harassment and brutality, he took a twelve-year Buddhist vow of silence after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and during this time began to publish with leading Beat presses. Although not widely remembered in New Orleans today, a street was named after him in San Francisco decades after he died in the mid 1980s.

The exiles, landowners, bookworms, and kings of early medieval English texts all faced a common problem: how do you know yourself, or anything else, in a relational and therefore constantly changing world? They answered that problem with relational reiteration: sometimes literally walking the edges of property bounds, and sometimes figuratively inviting a reader to walk the edges of a riddle’s solution, or an exile’s lost home. The reiteration of relational landmarks is a temporary solution; each time a relationship is altered or challenged, the bounds of relational identity must be traced anew. And in fact this problem of mutable identity changes only when literary characters or hagiographical narratives achieve Christian salvation, positioning God in these texts as an eternal relationship that cannot be lost, changed, or forgotten. But in the age of their making, most Old English and Anglo-Latin texts and characters relied upon reiteration to stabilize (or sometimes reimagine) their unsaved, ephemeral, relationally-constructed worlds.

Relational reiteration brings the allusive story worlds of Widsith into focus. Widsith has traditionally been defined as a catalogue of seemingly-random people and places visited by the speaker. But almost half of these “random” names and places, and all names repeated more than twice, are grouped and linked together through Old English and Old Norse narrative. In claiming lived experiential knowledge of these legendary worlds, Widsith establishes himself as a “local” guide to the intricacies of authority, kingship, and power. Leading the reader through a reiteration of these narrative landmarks, the poem both anticipates and rewards a reader’s previously acquired knowledge of the story—just as the reiteration of property bounds rewards the re-walking of familiar routes. The speaker’s positive references to kings are juxtaposed without comment alongside catalogues of the characters they have betrayed or killed, and the speaker says that he has been given “cystum,” choices, and knowledge of good and evil. These lists function as an implicit critique of what stories can be told, as the speaker quietly shows us the misdeeds of his benefactors even while celebrating their glory.

The Old English exile elegies attempt to recuperate loss by reiterating an inverted set of social and physical landmarks, mapping the past onto the present. The familiar imagery of the hall, the lord, and the voices of other human beings – the relationships that constitute community – are not absent in exile: instead, in the absence of the “real thing,” each exile must reconstruct and reiterate a set of replacement landmarks to understand their current situation. Similarly, The Ruin navigates the loss of living memory by imagining the past context necessary to fit its subject back into the fabric of a living world. The frequent depiction of the exile elegies as nostalgic, repetitive, or static is not an incidental formal element, but a core response to the loss of relational landmarks. In exile, alienation from the past—the spoliation of memory as well as the loss of community—suspends the relational self in time. Yet the Old English exiles continue to navigate inverted relational landmarks of identity. The solution is not to abandon relational reiteration; it is instead to seek a new point of departure when familiar points of reference are lost.

There has been a longstanding tendency within the domain of Turkish and Comparative Literary Studies to associate the history of Turkish modernism with Nâzım Hikmet’s early career in the Soviet Union by focusing on his mediation of the international avant-garde. While his early futurist poems calling for the abolition of traditional verse are frequently cited as illustrating the emergence of Turkish modernism, his prose poems “The Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” and “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” signify the conclusion of a Soviet-inflected Turkish avant-garde. Acknowledging the importance of Nâzım’s early poetics, this chapter provides a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of Turkish modernism’s “Easterly” trajectory. Scholars of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literary Studies refuse to ascribe any literary value to socialist realist aesthetics, immediately dismissing it as Soviet-sponsored dogma. Challenging this critical “prejudice” against leftist literatures (excepting the avant-garde), this chapter demonstrates that the history of Turkish modernism cannot be understood without exploring its entanglements with the histories of socialist realism and Marxian aesthetics.

Abdulla Goran (d. 1962) was an eminent promoter of, and contributor to, the modernization of Kurdish poetry. In his own time, Goran was hailed by many contemporary writers, critics, and poets as the leader of this endeavor. While describing his project in modernizing Kurdish poetic forms, for instance, Goran mentions only two achievements, both of them on the grounds that they were motivated by a patriotic sentiment: the replacement of classical quantitative meters with syllabic meters, and the “purification” of the language from non-Kurdish loanwords. However, we know that Goran was not the first modernist to dabble in syllabic meters or to attempt to “purify” the language of poetry. This chapter focuses on the main reasons for his immediate popularity. It argues, first, that, unlike many of his peers, Goran publicly identified as a modernist from the outset; that he greatly contributed to the expansion of Kurdish poetic forms and the promotion of Kurdish free verse; and that he played a major role in the internationalization of modern Kurdish poetry.

Through a series of readings in the modernist and non-modernist Persian and Turkic verse of the twentieth-century communist East, both Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian, this chapter explores how different repertories of poetic forms modeled the transregional literary connections in which their authors and texts participated. The modernist poems discussed in this chapter are among the most famous short works of two of the Middle East’s leading modernists, Nâzım Hikmet and Nīmā Yūshīj, while the neoclassical, neoromantic, or otherwise non-modernist poems are more obscure occasional works, although their authors are important in their respective national canons: the Iranians Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī and Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the Uzbek Zulfiya Isroilova, and the Azerbaijani Samad Vurghun. This latter cluster of poems is chosen in order to show how much the geopoetics of high modernism in Persian and Turkic owed to communist poetic and rhetorical systems that were at least as ubiquitous, but which have received far less attention from Western scholars.

This chapter reads the work of experimental poets who emerged in the 1950s in Turkey. The loose poetic movement known as İkinci Yeni (the Second New) was radical in the context of mid-century Turkish letters for its dense language, unusual images, and intentional flouting of conventional grammatical and syntactical rules. When this new style of poetry appeared around 1956, İkinci Yeni gave rise to a vigorous and sometimes vicious debate between its defenders and detractors. In hindsight, the central locus of this conflict can be seen as positions taken for and against aesthetic autonomy, the sine qua non of literary modernism. In order to challenge Eurocentric narratives of modernism that take concepts such as aesthetic autonomy for granted in terms of when and how they appeared, this chapter attends to the ways local histories of capitalist modernization and political developments help shape the appearance of modernist literature in geographies like the Middle East.

This chapter reopens the archive of so-called romantic Arabic poetry to ask “how romantic,” both as a question of definition (how was it romantic, exactly?) and as a question of degree (how romantic was it, really?). Drumsta offers a few microscopic glimpses at the archive of interwar Egyptian poetry and criticism that illustrate how dramatically aesthetic theories, poetic terminology, and critical “frames of reference” – to borrow a term from Einstein’s special theory of relativity – were shifting in this period, and not necessarily or always in the direction of the romantic. First, Drumsta analyzes the second of two essays by the poet and critic ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (1889–1964) titled “Shawqī in the Balance” (Shawqī fī al-Mīzān) from the 1920–1921 periodical al-Dīwān. Although al-ʿAqqād does not specifically invoke Einstein or relativity in al-Dīwān, his willingness to strike so decisively at the basic foundations of Arabic poetry and aesthetics mirrors Einstein’s approach to his period’s widely accepted principles of physics, and in this, the chapter suggests, al-ʿAqqād is a decidedly modern thinker.

Chapter 4 analyzes the concept of the unnameable or ineffable in ritual and art. The ineffable refers to the difficulty of comprehending specific contexts of intense individual and collective experience that frequently arise during the ritual process. The ensuing totality or emptiness of meaning emerges as a challenge to account for that which eludes logical representation within the social order. The chapter also explores how the experience of the ineffable manifests in the realm of art and aesthetic experience, investigating how this problem has been addressed within continental philosophy, particularly within phenomenology and poststructuralism. Finally, the chapter analyzes poetry’s role as a privileged means of accounting for that which lacks a name and apparent meaning, and of presenting itself to consciousness’s immediacy. Through poetry, it becomes possible to preserve the transient process of the experience of the hidden and unnameable in its existential and anthropological dimensions.