Form in contemporary anglophone Caribbean poetry

This thesis offers the first extended form-led exploration of contemporary anglophone Caribbean poetry by emerging and established writers from across the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. The thesis highlights and explores five key areas of growth and significance in anglophone Caribbean poetic form: metaphoric representations of poetic form, notions of received form and the sonnet, the limits of poetic expression and prose poetry, expansions of poetic expression and multiple-form poetry, and poetic medium and oral poetries. Through detailed close readings of poems by over twenty-five poets, I observe the technical breadth of contemporary Caribbean poetry, drawing attention to the innovative aesthetic practises of contemporary Caribbean writers. The thesis argues that contemporary Caribbean poets frequently put their aesthetic strategies and inclinations under critical scrutiny within their poetry, and that seemingly aesthetic aspects of poetry, such as its form, can encode nuanced expressions of cultural politics. I suggest that stylistic choices, such as the use of received forms and references to cultural and aesthetic traditions, have no one ubiquitous metaphorical inference, and that form and cultural politics cannot be straightforwardly mapped together. Therefore, I argue that it is only through close attention to the manner and context in which forms are employed that their significations can be observed. Contrary to the notion that a focus on aesthetic concerns might represent a deprioritisation of the cultural, political, social and historical questions that motivate much of literary studies, I demonstrate that analysis of poetic form is a particularly effective methodology for exploring the connection between poetry and the world from which it originates. I also highlight the problematic impacts of eurocentrism in taxonomies of poetic form, demonstrating the need for increased attention to cultural diversity within poetry studies in order to better represent the full range of contemporary anglophone Caribbean poetry in a global context.