Rooted Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky

This study focuses on three contemporary poets---an Irishman, a West Indian, and a Russian---who shared an ethical and aesthetic outlook, became close friends, wrote poems for one another, and occasionally worked together, notably on Homage to Robert Frost (1996), which contains an essay by each poet on their modernist predecessor. Their poetry, like that of many poets whose work develops out of the experience of hybridity, ought to be understood as an expression of rooted cosmopolitanism, a term that retains the sense of tension in their writing between home and abroad. Poets such as Heaney, Walcott, and Brodsky remain rooted in particular places while entering into conversation with cultures elsewhere, not to mention with each other, and that conversation becomes essential to their art. Critics typically contend with their work by placing it within a specific geopolitical context---Northern Ireland amid the Troubles, the Caribbean at the end of European imperialism, Russia during the decline of Soviet Communism---but this study offers a unified approach to poems by all three of them.