The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger's the Sugar-Cane

First published in 1764, The Sugar-Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the twentieth-century to achieve a place in the Western "canon." Grainger sought to interpret his personal experience of the Caribbean through his wide and deep reading in literature, from the Greeks to Milton. Grainger wrote a "West India Georgic," challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the eighteenth-century British empire. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work.