DescriptionThis dissertation develops the notion of what I call 'transatlantic poetic transfer,' through which I analyze how differing models of cultural and linguistic hybridity are produced in the process of poetic composition by twentieth-century writers at both sides of the Atlantic. The concept of transfer refers to a carrying over, a transport, a displacement, or a transformation of an object, medium or event into a new form or configuration, thus constituting an extremely productive critical tool for the analysis of the work of poets located at the interstices of differing languages, traditions and media. My dissertation locates a tension or dialectic at the core of much of twentieth-century transatlantic poetry between a cosmopolitan impulse to transcend national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries and a vernacular need to ground the poetic voice within a particular local culture. This dialectic informs my readings of poets whose work encompasses different strands of European and American modernism including Fernando Pessoa, Vicente Huidobro, Federico GarcĂa Lorca and Ezra Pound, as well as the experimental poetry of a later generation of avant-garde poets also operating within a transatlantic framework: the U.S. poet Jack Spicer, the Brazilian artists Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, and the Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite.