Brathwaite, Edward Kamau - Timothy J. Reiss (essay date autumn 1994)
Timothy J. Reiss (essay date autumn 1994)
SOURCE: Reiss, Timothy J. “Reclaiming the Soul: Poetry, Autobiography, and the Voice of History.” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 883-90.
[In the following essay, Reiss links the structure of Brathwaite's poetry to seventeenth-century England by positing that the poet's work often has an underlying structure derived from iambic pentameter, a meter that Brathwaite has tweaked to reflect the historical changes that have led to the postcolonial culture of Barbados.]
Through Kamau Brathwaite's work run three favorite metaphors. The earliest uses the iambic pentameter that had become a norm in English poetry from roughly the seventeenth century. The second represents the Caribbean Islands as the result of a child's (or god's) skipping stones in a great curve across the ocean from the coast of Guyana to the tip of Florida. The third transforms the waters buried deep in the porous...
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