Poetry and Displacement

The paradigmatic figure of twentieth-century history is the 'displaced person', a concept which emerged from the demographic migrations, deportations and genocidal purges that accompanied two world wars, the destruction and construction of nation states and the restructuring of the global order which they occasioned. These processes almost inevitably fostered a poetry of exile and expatriation intimately bound up with the experience of modernity and the culture of modernism, culminating, in t…