This book is about poetry and the poetic in the cultures and literatures of Britain, Canada and the United States. Close reading is the primary method. The figures discussed in the book were born from 1911 to the post-war years after 1945. The volume proceeds from Marshall McLuhan as a poet through Douglas LePan, Ted Hughes, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Thomas King and Forrest Gander to Hannah Lowe, Russell Leong, Marilyn Chin, Fred Wah (interpoetics, poetry and culture in Chinese diasporic poetry), Louis Riel, Pauline Johnson, Naomi McIlwraith (Indigenous and Métis poetry), Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Joan Kane, Russell Leong, Marilyn Chin and Forrest Gander (the multiple makings of poetry of North America). Here is a poetry of the North Atlantic world, a transatlantic poetics then and now. The book reads poetry and the poetic in terms of media, aesthetics, drama, criticism, music, interpoetics, diaspora, culture, diversity, and African, Asian and Indigenous poets.

Jonathan Locke Hart received his PhD in English from the University of Toronto and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. Dr Hart is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Member of Academia Europea; Chair Professor, the School of Translation Studies; and Director, International Cooperation Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities, Shandong University. He is also Senior Fellow, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College, University of Toronto; Associate, Harvard University Herbaria; Life Member, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Senior Fellow, Abigail Adams Institute; and Adjunct Professor, Amity School of Languages, Amity University Jaipur. In recent years, he was Core Faculty, comparative literature, Western University; Chair Professor, School of Foreign Languages; and Director, Centre for Creative Writing, Literary Culture and Translation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has written over 30 books, edited others and contributed book chapters. A winner of many international awards, including two Fulbrights to Harvard, and having served on national and international committees, including Fulbright and Killam, he has written over 100 articles and essays and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III), Leiden, UC Irvine, Peking University and elsewhere and has given classes, talks, readings and lectures internationally.