Bridging the Black Atlantic: Caribbean Poetics from Calypso to the British Canon

After the arrival of the Empire Windrush generation in the 1950s and the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the post-war decades have seen an increase in the number of Caribbean poets publishing their work in the UK. Their poetry began to be recognised as significant literary products of the postcolonial situation, in parallel with the emergence of British cultural studies as a research field, with prominent theorists like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Referring to the literary relationship between home and diaspora, Sarah Lawson Welsh (2020) highlighted the shifting and transitional character of Caribbean writing in its connection with Britain, an aspect which in turn has influenced poets’ ars poetica substantially. Many Caribbean poets related to Britain by birth, residence or travel have searched for innovative ways of making sense of their diasporic experiences and of creating new subjectivities by delving into the transatlantic nature of a composite identity par excellence. The aim of this paper is to show that Caribbean poetry linked to Britain has simultaneously aesthetic and multicultural value. Based on individual and group poetry collections, it maps several poetic novelties brought about by the postcolonial social transformation and argues for a number of reasons why these were employed.