Worlds Woven Together

Writing about poetry follows models provided either by academic scholarship or literary journalism, each with its pitfalls. The former distances the reader from the poem and effaces the critic’s personality. In literary journalism, the critic is front and center, but the discussion is introductory and prioritizes value judgments. In either case, entrenched practices and patterns of privilege limit one’s perspective. The situation worsens when it comes to minoritized poets and poets from the Global South, where the focus is on restrictive notions of identity: the stylistic innovations of literary works get ousted by prefabricated historical narratives.In Worlds Woven Together, the critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of writers. His essays are open-ended, attentive, and curious, unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative. Discussing neglected authors and those well-known in the West, Ravinthiran sees politics as inseparable from literary form and is fascinated by the relation of the creative consciousness to the violences of history. The book features essays on writers including Mir Taqi Mir, Ana Blandiana, A. K. Ramanujan, Marianne Moore, Eunice de Souza, Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, Rae Armantrout, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Galway Kinnell, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Vahni Capildeo. Revealing serendipitous connections—between poems and cultures, between lines of verse and the lives we lead—Worlds Woven Together is for all readers fascinated by the mechanics and politics of poetry.

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., Ravinthiran is a rare critic: one whose deep-diving, finely wrought readings across multiple poetic traditions are dexterous as well as authoritative. He brings a poet’s enthusiasm for craft and language to a reevaluation of critical culture, speaking with great clarity and personality in a voice so capacious that we are compelled to listen, to learn., Vidyan Ravinthiran writes with readerly passion and intellectual commitment about poetry he loves, at once deeply expert and finely attuned to the pleasures of literary language. The range of authors he celebrates is as impressive as the critical imagination with which he celebrates them. His is a distinctive and memorable voice which speaks eloquently to readers both within and without the academy., Vidyan Ravinthiran’s beautifully written, richly insightful collection is extraordinary in its geographic and cultural breadth, its incisive attention to form, its fusion of the strengths of journalistic and scholarly writing, and its chameleonic openness to, and close tracking of, the twists and turns of poetry. An eye-opening delight for poets and poetry readers., Incisive, reflective, illuminating.

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).