In this essay collection, Amit Majmudar meditates on the poetic canon of the West and the traditions of world literature.

In The Great Game, poet, critic, translator, and literary omnivore Amit Majmudar ranges widely, writing with characteristic verve on canonical authors such as Milton, Byron, and Emily Dickinson, contemporaries like Kay Ryan, and other traditions of world literature. He examines verse drama and philosophy and even touches on writers of popular prose like Robert Ludlum and Ray Bradbury. A radiologist as well as a writer, Majmudar brings together the diagnostician’s precision with the poet’s imagination and an encyclopedic base of knowledge. He practices literary criticism as a global art, one with the intensity of verse, the depth of philosophy, and the scope of history—and does so with the infectious curiosity of a passionate reader.

Some of the most powerful essays here are synoptic meditations on science and poetry in which Majmudar shows that anyone trying to make fresh sense of the world, be it Milton or Kepler or Dickinson or Darwin, is practicing something like poetic meaning-making. The collection’s diverse inquiries are held together by Majmudar’s sustained, thoughtful, delightfully inventive attention to poetic form as an idea, to specific forms like the ghazal and the epic, and by his nimble, empathetic readings of individual writers. The Great Game is an intellectually thrilling tour of poetry across centuries, geographic divides, and even the disciplinary boundaries that separate science from philosophy from poetry.