Epilogue

Summary

Throughout this book, I have tried to question prevailing assumptions about the regional, national and ethnic subdivisions of American literature; to explain how, and why, modernist forms appealed so strongly to black poets in the Americas; to discern the intricate, peculiar filigree of New World cultures; to uncover analogous contexts, surprising comparisons and unexamined areas of textual study; and to demonstrate that Caribbean poetry, like African-American poetry, needs to be understood within the larger contexts of transamerican modernism and the multilingual, diasporic, New World contexts of imperialism. The dense intertextual relations among Eliot, Perse and Laforgue – relations, as we have seen, that helped inspire the first stirrings of poetic modernism in the Francophone Caribbean – were fostered by their common history and cultural predicament as New World poets, and their shared, abiding and, at times, ambivalent attraction to Poe and Whitman.

My consideration of Hughes's cosmopolitan ethos, involvement with French modernism and pervasive influence in the Francophone Caribbean raises important complementarities between Hughes and Eliot. By disclosing key parallels in their lines of stylistic development, I question the widely held view that Hughes was part of a literary movement that starkly opposed and rivaled Eliot's modernism. Both Eliot and Hughes were vitally concerned that poetry should provide a cherished medium of exchange in the New World, and their amply documented influence on the formation of modernist styles in the Caribbean is strong indication of their success in this regard.