Publications

Criticism

  • Poetry and Opinion (forthcoming from Cambridge UP).
  • Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton in the US and Icon in the UK, 2025).
  • Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (New York: OUP, 2023).
  • Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (New York: Columbia UP, 2022)
  • Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015 / paperback release, July 2017).

 

Edited

  • The Complete Poems of Eunice de Souza (Penguin Random House India, 2025).
  • Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diaspora, edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2023 and Penguin Random House India, 2024).
  • Selected Poetry and Prose of Srinivas Rayaprol, edited with Graziano Krätli (Carcanet, 2020).
  • Selected Poetry of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, edited (NYRB Books, 2020).

 

Verse

  • Avidya (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2025).
  • The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2019).
  • Grun-tu-molani (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2014)

Individual poems have been published in a number of anthologies, as well as periodicals such as The Nation, the London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Poetry, and all the major UK poetry magazines.

 

Selected articles (peer-reviewed)

  • 'Wanderstop, Restlessness, Respite,' forthcoming in a special issue of Utopian Studies, edited by Stacy Gillis and Jon Quayle.
  • ‘Hazlitt, Ramanujan, and Opinion’, The Hazlitt Review 17 (2024): 5-20.
  • ‘Sri Lankan Anglophone Poetry and Modernist Painting’, Interventions, 236.3-4 ('Poetics from the Global South', 2024): 392-415.
  • ‘Minerality and Minoritization in Vijay Seshadri’, Essays in Romanticism, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Apr. 2023): 55-71.
  • ‘Keats, Distance, and Feeling-States’, English Literary History, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter 2022): 1019-1048.
  • ‘Seamus Heaney and Contingency’, Essays in Criticism (2021) Vol. 71, No. 4: 454–481.
  • ‘(Indian) verse and the question of aesthetics’, New Literary History, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn 2019): 647-670.
  • ‘Race, Style, and the Soul of Saul Bellow’s Prose’, Essays in Criticism (2016) Vol. 66, No. 4: 488-517.
  • ‘Arun Kolatkar’s Description of India’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2014) 49 (3): 359-77.
  • ‘How James Wright Wasted His Life’, Literary Imagination (2014) 16 (1): 95-116.
  • ‘The Blank Verse Moo of Wallace Stevens’, Thinking Verse (2013) 3: 108-30.
  • ‘The Spontaneity of Hopkins’s Journal Prose’, The Review of English Studies (2013), Vol. 64, No. 267: 838-56.
  • ‘Auden and Bishop: Another Look at “At The Fishhouses” ’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 58, No. 5 (December 2011): 597-603.
  • ‘Dante and Shelley’s terza rima’, Essays in Criticism (2011), Vol. 61, No. 2: 155-72.
  • ‘The “Liquid Texture” of the Elgin Marbles: Hazlitt, Reynolds, and the Miltonic Sublime’, The Hazlitt Review, Vol. 2, 2009: 21-32.

 

Selected public-facing writing

  • ‘Against Citation’, forthcoming in Literary Activism.
  • 'Eventually' (on Anton Shammas), forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation.
  • 'Pleasure' (on William Wordsworth), The Poetry Review 115.3 (Autumn 2025): 129-145.
  • 'Urizen' (on William Blake, and OCD), The Writer's Chronicle (May 2025).
  • 'Four Versions of a Field' (on Alfreda de Silva and poetic revision), Poetry London 109 (Autumn 2024): 64-70.
  • ‘Repetition Revisited: On a Poetics of Video Games’, The Sydney Review of Books (May 20, 2024).
  • ‘In the hot archive’ (on Lakdas Wikkramasinha), The Boston Review (March 1, 2024).
  • ‘What will I do in the future?’, review of Hannah Sullivan, Solmaz Sharif and Will Harris, The Poetry Review (Summer 2023).
  • 'T.S. Eliot, Edgelord', Poetry London 102 (Summer 2022): published online.
  • 'Poets of colour', co-signed letter to the Times Literary Supplement on bias in poetry reviewing, published in the April 29, 2022 issue.
  • ‘Interloper’ (on lockdown, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Ian Hamilton, and reading as a person of colour), Cambridge Literary Review 13 (Easter 2021): 92-104.
  • ‘Victim and Accused’ (on Sri Lanka, and empathy), Granta 154: 133-55.
  • ‘A flint holds fire’ (on poetry and speech impediments), Poetry London 97 (Autumn 2020): 25-7.
  • ‘Dreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary Sentences’, The Georgia Review, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 3 (Fall 2020): 753-767.
  • ‘Speech Acts: Eunice de Souza’, The Yale Review, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer 2020): 202-16.
  • ‘Myriad Minded’ (Vahni Capildeo), Poetry, Vol. 216, No. 2 (May 2020): 169-82.
  • ‘A Slave and Worshiper at Love’s Doorstep: Mir Taqi Mir’, Modern Poetry in Translation (2019) 3: 103-113.
  • ‘At Home or Nowhere: A.K. Ramanujan’, The Poetry Review, Vol 109, No. 2 (Summer 2019): 79-91.
  • ‘There Must Be Something To Say’ (on verse-sound), Poetry, Vol. 214, No. 3 (June 2019): 267-75.
  • ‘Collapsing Literature into Politics: Adrienne Rich’, The Dark Horse 40 (Winter-Spring 2019): 90-99.
  • ‘Trying to Become Winged’ (Galway Kinnell), Poetry, Vol. 213, No. 1 (October 2018): 71-82.
  • ‘What is good?’ (Czeslaw Milosz), The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 47, Issue 2, (June 2018): 168–200.
  • ‘The things of earth are not objects’ (A.R. Ammons), PN Review 241, Vol. 44, No. 5 (May-June 2018): 31-4.
  • ‘Shadows Hard As Board’ (Thom Gunn), Poetry, Vol. 211, No. 6 (March 2018): 597-608.
  • ‘“An undependable but sometimes marvelous thing”: Elizabeth Bishop, communication, and other people’, PN Review 238, Vol. 44, No. 2 (November-December 2017): 26-30.
  • ‘”Dream” makes a giddy sound: 100 years of Gwendolyn Brooks’, The Poetry Review 107:2 (Summer 2017): 82-90.
  • ‘The Lonely Dream’ (Rae Armantrout), Poetry, Vol. 209, No. 5 (February 2017): 475-87.
  • ‘Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You’ (Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith), Poetry, Vol. 209, No. 1 (October 2016): 83-103.
  • ‘Knowing and Unknowing’ (the Sri Lankan civil war), The Caravan (January 2016): 92-8.
  • ‘All the Animals in My Poems Go into the Ark’ (Silkin, Langley, Sisson), Poetry, Vol. 207, No. 4 (January 2016): 409-25.
  • ‘You Can’t Close Your Eyes For A Sec’ (A.K. Mehrotra), The Caravan (March 2015): 69-74.
  • ‘Stair Steps’ (Ana Blandiana), Edinburgh Review 140: 117-27.
  • ‘Poet and Critic’ (Ted Hughes), PN Review 210, Vol. 39, No. 4 (March-April 2013): 42-6.

 

Essays in books

  • ‘Gunn’s endings’, in Thom Gunn: A Prismatic Portrait, ed. Stefania Michelucci (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
  • 'New Generations: British Poetry's Futures,' in The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century British Black and Asian Poetry, ed. Omaar Hena (CUP, forthcoming).
  • 'Voice' (on Coleridge and neurodiversity), in The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Poetry, ed. Matthew Scott (OUP, forthcoming).
  • 'Mehrotra and memory,' in Essays on Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ed. Michael Hinds and Tapasya Narang (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
  • "Style," in William Hazlitt in Context, ed. Charles Mahoney and Ian Balfour (CUP, forthcoming).
  • ‘Graham’s forms’, in Reading W.S. Graham, ed. Edward Allen (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
  • ‘Journal prose’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, ed. Martin Dubois (CUP, 2025): 284-91.
  • ‘Prose’, in Elizabeth Bishop in Context, ed. Jonathan Ellis and Angus Cleghorn (Cambridge: CUP, 2021): 95-104.
  • ‘Nabokov and the Privilege of Style’, in Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (Oxford: OUP, 2020): 152-72.
  • ‘ “Manuelzinho”, Brazil and identity politics’, in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019): 33-47.
  • ‘The nature of Englishness: the hybrid poetics of Ted Hughes’, in Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture, ed. Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald and Terry Gifford (Cham: Palgrave, 2018): 107-23.
  • ‘T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry)’, in British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines, ed. Jane Monson (Cham: Palgrave, 2018): 133-47.
  • ‘Kolatkar’s Spontaneity’, in Poetry and Voice: A Book of Essays, ed. Stephanie Norgate and Ellie Piddington (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012): 89-103.

Vidyan has also written over forty shorter pieces of journalism for newspapers and magazines that include the TLS and The Telegraph.