‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and itself, is a violent attempt to resolve what Baldwin called the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity. But there are other possible Americas, some, like Baldwin's, described from voluntary exile. What can they offer at the present moment?

Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His Close Readings podcast series for the LRB, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards.

Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? This lecture will consider the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and whether Auden was right in thinking that a poem that exemplified the pluralist values of liberal democracy would be ‘formless, windy, banal and utterly boring’.

Seamus Perry is a fellow of Balliol College and professor of English at the University of Oxford. He has published numerous books on poetry and criticism, including most recently editions of Matthew Arnold and William Empson. With Christopher Ricks and Freya Johnston, he is editor of the journal Essays in Criticism. He regularly contributes to the London Review of Books and, with Mark Ford, has presented several series for the LRB’s Close Readings podcast (a new series on narrative poetry will begin in January).