This book follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational 'others.' The book describes the diverse strategies they used — from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean 'signifyin(g)' — to make Hellenism their own.