Between Old World and New: Transatlantic Poetic Dialogues in the Modern Age

Abstract

This paper explores the intertwined trajectories of poetry in Europe and the United States, focusing on how poets have negotiated questions of identity, nationhood, and cultural belonging within a transatlantic framework. From the Romantic era, when William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman articulated new visions of the self in relation to nature and democracy, to the Irish Revival led by W.B. Yeats, which positioned poetry as a vehicle for national identity, literature on both sides of the Atlantic has reflected and shaped evolving conceptions of individual and collective voice. Modernism, marked by the experimental poetics of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, revealed the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, with American poets finding inspiration in European traditions and vice versa. Later, voices of protest and liberation, such as Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney, expanded the boundaries of poetic identity, engaging with themes of race, gender, exile, and political conflict. By drawing connections between European and American poetic traditions, this study argues that poetry operates as both a national discourse and a transnational dialogue, one that has continually redefined cultural identity in response to historical upheavals, modernist experimentation, and social change. The analysis contributes to comparative literature by highlighting poetry’s role as a mediator of identity in the shared yet contested space of the Atlantic world.