A Review of The Great Game by Amit Majmudar

Review by Maryann Corbett

Amit Majmudar, The Great Game: Essays on Poetics. Acre Books, 2024.

A title like The Great Game comes freighted with exotic connections. It’s historical shorthand for the nineteenth-century contest between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan. It’s the voice of Sherlock Holmes, shouting to Watson, “The game is afoot!” But those and others are red herrings for this book because its subtitle reads: Essays on Poetics.

Yet those distracting clues still say something true about the book: there’s an agon going on here, a struggle. What Amit Majmudar has to say about poetry and how it works is distilled from the contending forces in himself: between his Hinduism and his thoroughly Western life and education, between his work as a doctor and his immersion in all the world’s literature, and between his convictions in favor of poetic form and the disdain for it held by much of the Western literary establishment. It also distills from his notion of poetry as play.

If like me you have been reading Majmudar’s work for some time, you know already how prodigiously he plays this game. I’ve wondered how anyone could read and write so much while working as a physician, so for me this was one of the book’s great aha moments: the author’s admission that he chose radiology because it frees him from meeting patients and leaves him time. His bio at the Poetry Foundation lists four poetry collections, three novels, and a verse translation of the Bhagavad-Gita—and that bio clearly needs updating, since it overlooks another essay collection, Black Avatar, and the moving memoir Twin A. He has also edited an anthology, been included several times in noteworthy annuals like Best American Poetry, produced a steady stream of journal publications, and done past service as Ohio’s poet laureate. His daily posts on X (formerly Twitter) track—or did track, at the time when I left X for reasons of conscience—the continuing churn of his reading life.

What that churn produces is the writing collected in this book: twenty-four pieces, some extended, some brief, on poetic subjects general and specific. Majmudar has published these in a variety of journals over several years, ranging from the brand new Revel to the storied Kenyon Review. A miscellany rather than a through-composed project—despite the unified-sounding titles of its three sections—the book still makes a whole because Majmudar stresses again and again his fundamental notions about the reading and writing of poems, and because he constantly approaches that reading and writing in the spirit of play that he describes.

Those unified-sounding section titles are “General Theory of Unity,” “Specific Theory of Unity: Precursors,” and “Specific Theory of Unity: Contemporaries.” The first group is the most daring: a collection of grand statements about how and why poetry works. It’s in this section that he makes clear his devotion to form as a wellspring, to rhythm and metaphor as matters divinely inspired. It’s also in this section that he makes his most challenging claims, such as his treatment of the history of the claim that “originality” is essential, and of the real meaning of plagiarism.

The second section treats canonical writers individually: Milton, Byron, Kepler (yes, the astronomer), Darwin (yes, that Darwin), Robert Ludlum, Emily Dickinson, with some “Notes on the Ghazal,” a piece that begins with Agha Shahid Ali and takes flight from there. The Byron essay, one of the longest in the book, takes the prize among these for depth and detail and careful historical context. The Dickinson essay, almost a prose poem, is fascinating for its form, as well as for its thesis—drawn from the Lyndall Gordon biography Lives Like Loaded Guns—that Emily suffered from epilepsy. (Majmudar’s rendering is so compelling that I wish I didn’t know that the epilepsy diagnosis has been disputed.)

The book’s third section—ostensibly about contemporary authors—is by comparison more scattered, with an essay entitled “Our Hidden Contemporaries” that contrasts Matthew Arnold and Byron, one each on Kay Ryan, Ray Bradbury, Christopher Logue, and George Steiner, and a final four that return to Majmudar’s strikingly nonconformist ideas about reading and writing. To be most fruitful, those nonconformist ideas need to be read in conjunction with the claims in section I about form, rhythm, metaphor, and the divine. The individual-author analyses do exactly what work in this genre ought to do, which is to set us reading; for example, I’ve made up my mind to read Logue’s War Music.

Majmudar’s arguments are models of the serious playfulness, and the playful seriousness, that he enjoins on poets. Several essays proceed not in prose but in poetry: the opening piece, and two essays on repetition, fittingly composed in heroic couplets—one with sex as its extended metaphor, the other with pumping iron. “Notes on the Ghazal” illustrates each of its types with an original poem. When he sticks to prose, Majmudar constructs his essays in discrete chunks: connected, but not seamlessly, and set off by centered headings. His leaps from example to example, author to author, language to language seem to model sprezzatura. He can bound from (for example) the idea of the magic circle of the stage, to the magic of the poetic persona, to the opacity of poetry’s many different sets of rules, opaque not only to the uninitiated but to the poets who choose different rules. While he returns again and again to the notions of game and play, his considerations of those ideas carom around like billiards. “I myself,” he writes, “have made this essay up as I’ve gone along, playing with meanings instead of sounds. That is, I composed this essay just as I would a poem, playfully.”

The other great sources of poetry that Majmudar insists on are two that some may think of as contradictory: science and religion. Among the essays on science, “Sister Disciplines,” “Kepler’s Snowflake,” and “Voyaging with Charles Darwin on the Beagle” are by themselves worth the price of the book for their insights on the ways science and poetry have interacted, and still do. There are essays on ancient poems as records of science, on scientific naming as a language based on metaphor, on the scientific poems of men like James Thomson and Erasmus Darwin, and on moderns like Tracy K. Smith who mix science and lyric. Among the essays on religion, “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Poetry” in the first section, and “Credo,” which closes the book, are forthright declarations that poetry is grounded in the religious impulse. A sample: “I believe poetry is an animistic, if not pantheistic, art—an art that is most at home in a world where everything is meaningful and thus soulful, where God is not removed from the natural world.”

Full disclosure, then: I was drawn to The Great Game as a poet, a lover of form, and a longtime fan of all Majmudar’s work. If you’re not yet a fan (though you should be) why might you want to read the book? Obviously, The Great Game contains nothing so prosaic as a craft essay; Majmudar will not tell you how to write poetry. But he will tell you why he writes it, and reads it. The book is worth owning because all its contents will reward rereading. Whether or not you agree with its claims, read The Great Game for the energy of its prose and the pleasure of feeling your brain spark alive with the friction of an unusual mind.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press, 2023). Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, has appeared in Best American Poetry, and is included in the anthologies Christian Poetry in America, Contemporary Catholic Poetry, and Measure for Measure: an Anthology of Poetic Meters. Her recent poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Eclectica, Image, and Rattle in the US and the New Statesman in the UK. New poems are forthcoming in Arion, Crab Orchard Review and Raritan, among others.