#  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](https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgab023)’, *Essays in Criticism* (2021) Vol. 71, No. 4: 454–481.
- ‘[(Indian) verse and the question of aesthetics](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/747437)’, *New Literary History*, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn 2019): 647-670.
- ‘[Race, Style, and the Soul of Saul Bellow’s Prose](https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgw019)’, *Essays in Criticism* (2016) Vol. 66, No. 4: 488-517.
- ‘[Arun Kolatkar’s Description of India](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021989414533691)’, *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature* (2014) 49 (3): 359-77.
- ‘[How James Wright Wasted His Life](https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imt075)’, *Literary Imagination* (2014) 16 (1): 95-116.
- ‘[The Blank Verse Moo of Wallace Stevens](http://www.thinkingverse.org/issue03/VidyanRavinthiran_BlankVerseMoo.pdf)’, *Thinking Verse* (2013) 3: 108-30.
- ‘[The Spontaneity of Hopkins’s Journal Prose](https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgs090)’, *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](https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgr003)’, *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’](https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/repetition-revisited/), *The Sydney Review of Books* (May 20, 2024).
- ‘[In the hot archive’](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/in-the-hot-archive/) (on Lakdas Wikkramasinha), *The Boston Review* (March 1, 2024).
- ‘[What will I do in the future?](https://poetrysociety.org.uk/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](https://poetrylondon.co.uk/t-s-eliot-edgelord/).
- '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](https://granta.com/victim-and-accused/)’ (on Sri Lanka, and empathy), *Granta* 154: 133-55.
- ‘[A flint holds fire](https://poetrylondon.co.uk/a-flint-holds-fire-vidyan-ravinthiran-on-growing-up-with-a-speech-impediment/)’ (on poetry and speech impediments), *Poetry London* 97 (Autumn 2020): 25-7.
- ‘[Dreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary Sentences](/vidyan/)’, *The Georgia Review*, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 3 (Fall 2020): 753-767.
- ‘[Speech Acts: Eunice de Souza](https://yalereview.yale.edu/speech-acts)’, *The Yale Review*, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer 2020): 202-16.
- ‘[Myriad Minded](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/153186/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](https://poetrysociety.org.uk/essay-at-home-or-nowhere/)’, *The Poetry Review*, Vol 109, No. 2 (Summer 2019): 79-91.
- ‘[There Must Be Something To Say](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/150028/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](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/147852/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](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/145986/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](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92024/the-lonely-dream)’ (Rae Armantrout), *Poetry*, Vol. 209, No. 5 (February 2017): 475-87.
- ‘[Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/90643/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](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70300/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*.