Subjectivity, Migration and Cosmopolitanism in Peter Horn’s Poetry

This book contains a collection of essays, critical articles, interviews and reviews of Peter Horn’s remarkable and prolific life as a poet spanning over half a century from his early mostly apolitical poems to the anti-apartheid poems and the poems and short stories of the South African transition to democracy in the 1990’s until the present. In this book the full spectrum of the critical reception of his œuvre from the highest praise – comparing him to Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda – to a rejection of his aesthetics as being too politically overt has been included. The readers have to decide for themselves how to respond to his literary production. This book contributes to a re-reading of his poetry and prose, as well as his critical work both on South African literature, but also on more general cultural and theoretical topics. One line of inquiry that is pursued in the first two essays and which makes Horn’s poetry uneasily relevant to today’s, 21st century readers are especially his early poems as well as those of the transition where he reflects on his experience as a refugee, which is the daily and often tragic reality for millions of people across the globe today. Here his subjective desires become interlinked with a politically engaged cosmopolitanism that can be traced throughout his œuvre.