Caribbean worldliness: The search for a globalized poetics in the poetry of Lorna Goodison and Victor Hernandez Cruz

Caribbean poets Lorna Goodison and Victor Hernandez Cruz have created poetry that collapses the boundaries of national and regional communities, fashioning alliances of style and sensibility across vast distances of geography, history, and culture. The object of my research is to examine the poetry of Goodison and Hernandez Cruz in the hope that the texts themselves reveal the elements of a transnational or globalized poetics. As the recurring themes of travel, religion, magical realism, music, and language came to the forefront, I realized that this study would require an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, each chapter discusses a particular feature in order to determine if it could constitute the foundations for a globalized poetics. Chapter One argues that Goodison and Hernandez Cruz's travel poems besides enriching their poetry, also reveal an underlying political and ethical consciousness. Besides offering cultural gain, travel creates in these poets a wider social consciousness, a way of reaching out beyond the Caribbean and acquiring a globalized perspective. Chapter two shows how Goodison and Hernandez Cruz in their poetry pay homage to their peoples' religious beliefs and express their adherence to Sufi mysticism, which helps them find common threads between diverse religious systems. Chapter three demonstrates how magical realism in their poetry permits these poets to expand the concept of reality to include the spiritual domain. In chapter four, I show how music is used in their poetry as a way of expressing an alternate reality. Chapter five proposes the use of Bakhtinian metalinguistics in the study of Goodison's and Hernandez Cruz's poetry. Since the whole world is becoming creolized, it is hoped that a globalized poetics such as the one proposed in this dissertation may help analyze poetic texts that exhibit such transnational features.