1. Introduction

This is a comparative study of poetry in the context of decolonization, which examines the ways in which European literary modernism influenced certain poets from colonies or former colonies of Europe in the early twentieth century. This group of poets, who might be seen as forerunners of postcolonial modernism, includes Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941); W.B. Yeats (1865-1939); L.S. Senghor (1906-2001); Aimé Césaire (1913- ); and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). All opposed imperial rule in their countries, whether it was the rule of the British empire (one in India and one in Ireland), the French empire (one in West Africa and one in the Caribbean), or the residual legacy of the Spanish empire in Latin America (in this case, in Chile). The broad structural presence of European colonialism provides a comparative framework for a new understanding of their work.

These poets worked independently and in independent contexts, but they can be seen as a group to the extent that their work is viewed in the historical context of decolonization and in the literary context of modernism, a movement that coincided with and presaged the breakup of empire. They wrote in a defining moment at the beginning of the twentieth century, when high imperialism had passed, and the challenges to colonialism could no longer be ignored within Europe; when nineteenth-century forms of romantic nationalism no longer served the needs of artists or politicians, and more revolutionary modernist forms began to take their place. In periods of decolonization, in places where political and economic dominance have been accompanied by cultural influence, resistance begins in the cultural realm, before it brings about political or economic change.

Poetry in this period stands at a fulcrum of the world literary tradition: from this time forward, the world can no longer be divided into two literary hemispheres, into the European and non-European, for example, or into first-world and third-world literature; and, from the point of view of English literary critics, into the "English" and "other" or, subsequently, the "Anglo-American" and "Commonwealth" traditions. All these terms remained in use, and remained problematic for many decades following this critical moment of the "transfer of power," when Europe, passing beyond its period of political and econmic ascendancy, assumed its post-colonial status of being one among the many strands of the world's literary traditions. In the field of culture, this transfer had already begun to occur by the 1930s within the framework of a modernism that could be adapted to indigenous traditions. Beginning with the rich expansion of prose narrative in the novel beginning in the 1950s, no one literature could be written in total ignorance of the significance of other traditions. But the shift in European forms in the colonial setting could already be perceived earlier in the medium of poetry. Poetry is especially sensitive to linguistic change, since it has to take into account the musical and thus the spoken properties of language, and can not silence the languages of the people surrounding the poet. The mutation of European poetic form was possible above all when poets began to work with that most transformable of forms: modernism, the form that questions itself.

Despite the variety of traditions and places out of which they were writing, the work of these poets is bound together in two important ways: each poet adapts elements of the European literary tradition to the indigenous traditions into which he or she had been born and grown up, and each poet uses the forms of modernism, which had emerged out of Europe's own self-questioning, to make this adaptation possible. Furthermore, in responding to the circumstances of political change around them, each poet reaches out to his or her community to write public poetry that speaks for the community as well as for the individual within it. Thus, modernism is visibly politicized in the context of decolonization in a way in which it could not be in Europe, except by women, whose revolutionary agenda paralleled that of poets in countries seeking independence. As a group, these poets fashion both an indigenous and a modern epic voice, creating a form of poetry that was far less important within the framework of early twentieth century Europe.

This generation of poets -- and I am speaking above all of work in the interwar period, from the end of World War I when Yeats wrote his first deeply political poem, "Easter 1916," to the immediate aftermath of World War II, when Neruda finished the Canto general in 1950 -- faced crucial limits on their work, limits which their successors might have looked back on with some scepticism and wondered whether their work had given in too easily to the demands of the colonial rulers and slowed or qualified the steps, both literary and political, that their countries could take toward autonomy. They were born into a generation, and a time, in which the European powers had aimed to create an educated elite who could participate in a smooth transition to independence in the colonies they controlled. This generation was later accused of collaborating; of becoming more European than colonial; of betraying their fellow countrymen by capitulating to the standards and goals of the imperial power. Yet, all served as activists and backed the liberation movement and the transition to independent government. These poets, who each served in a public office at, or leading up to, the time of independence, from President and Mayor to Senator and Representative (député), were also critics of the status quo both in their words and their actions. The easy summary would be to say they were all nationalists, but each was too independent-minded; in fact, they were all anti-nationalist nationalists, and among their countries' severest critics once a new nation had been established.

The poets were each chosen for the depth and interest of their poetic work and for their dual roles in the literary and political definition of their countries. Of these poets, only Tagore wrote primarily in his native language. Most of them were educated in the language of the colonizer: and, since the foreign language was the language of literacy and education, it often became not a second but a first language. Neruda and Yeats, though aware of older indigenous languages, grew up speaking the language of the colonizer; Senghor and Césaire were schooled in French; and Tagore, though he sought an audience in English, identified with the strong literary tradition of his native Bengali. There were many other poets writing in non-European languages, but at this point in time, and for this particular generation of poets, it was impossible to get non-European language work published. They were caught in the position of having to seek an audience through the medium of the language of the colonizer. As late as the 1960s, the Latin American phenomenon of the "Boom" found its greatest supporters through translation into English and publication in the U.S. and Europe. How much harder it was for poets to find an audience almost a half-century earlier, at a time when indigenous presses were scarcely tolerated. Since World War II, after the rapid spread of decolonization through all the colonized parts of the world by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the appetite for non-European literary work has grown -- especially fiction written or translated into European languages that reflects the experimentation of modernist or postmodernist form. The poets can be seen as laying the groundwork for this later freeing of creative expression.

The purpose of the comparison is to analyze the legacy of European modernist poetry in the colonial setting, to delineate the relation between poetry and politics in the period of decolonization, and to define an early phase of postcolonial modernism. The dissertation especially focuses on the relationship of poetry to history and politics during the 1920s and 1930s --Yeats in the Irish context, Tagore in the Indian context, Senghor in the African context, Césaire in the Caribbean context of poetry in French, Spanish and English, and Neruda in the context of other Latin American writers, including Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) -- and in the wider context of European colonialism and the European aesthetic movement that we call modernism. Europe is a constant presence in the works of these poets, directly or indirectly, through education and influence—sometimes as a subversive force; alternatively oppressive and parental, stimulating and imprisoning. But another force, prior and opposite, is also at work, which in its simplest form Senghor terms “the kingdom of childhood:” the instinctual, deeply-rooted aural and sensual experience of the poet’s early language(s) and environment, which reshape the European/foreign tongue of the colonizer, and ultimately reinvigorate the language of the oppressor with the concerns of the oppressed, in a movement that I shall argue is a form of ongoing renewal or renaissance.

One theme that unites these poets is the relation of their poetry to the politics of their respective settings, especially the relation of their poetry to the worldwide historical movements of imperialism, nationalism and decolonization. Why should poetry be important in this context? There are several distinct periods of interaction between the culture of the colonized (indigenous cultures) and the culture of the colonizer (metropolitan cultures). Their interaction can be defined with respect to a series of rubrics of power: first, when the indigenous culture defines the known world; second, from the time of first contact with a foreign power or country; third, once a foreign power has established its sphere of influence; fourth, once that sphere of influence has been challenged by the colonized country; and fifth, the reestablisment of relative independence.

These phases, which form a chronological pattern, can be analyzed in turn from many perspectives--political, economic, social, and cultural, to name a few. In fact, these perspectives, despite their range, act simultaneously on people, their communities, and their art. When the interaction of cultures within certain spheres of power is of concern--and that is necessarily the case in studying decolonization, or the process whereby the colonized country moves away from the control of the colonizer--cultural disciplines or artifacts, even through the arbitrary fact of their survival, can become key sites of scrutiny. Poetry is one of these. Because language is a crucial area of negotiation between colonizer and colonized, and in particular because of the open and sensitive nature of poetic language as compared with that of prose,¹ poetry can be a bellwether, a signifier of change, long before that change has registered its presence in political or economic spheres.

1. Poetry and Politics

Each of the poets under consideration was engaged with the formation of his country both politically and poetically: Yeats was deeply critical of the political activism of Maud Gonne, but later became an Irish senator in the newly created Republic of Ireland from 1922 to 1928; Tagore wrote extensively on nationalism and was for a while active in the Swadeshi (Our Country) movement in Bengal, which paralleled the Irish Sinn Féin, though, like Yeats, he distanced himself from the politics of independence; Senghor became a député to the French assembly from Sénégal in 1948 and his country's first president in 1960; Césaire became a député from Martinique in 1946, the mayor of Fort-de-France, and the founder of his island's strongest political party; and Neruda was a diplomat during the 1920s and 1930s, a senator during the 1940s, and in hiding and exile between 1949 and 1951 from the very government he had helped to elect.

Fascism in Europe in the 1930s posed a challenge to each of these poets. Through their exposure to France in the 1930s and to the Spanish Civil War, Césaire, Senghor, and Neruda were all strongly influenced by Communism or socialism. For Neruda, the Spanish Civil War wrought a profound change toward a politically committed position in his poetry. Yeats faced the challenge of his seeming endorsement of the Irish "Blue Shirts" even as he continued to direct his voice over and above politics to the people of Ireland. Other anglophone poets, including Eliot and Pound, flirted with European fascism as a way of restoring a coherent myth of race and nation after the disenchantment, loss and suffering of the first World War, a myth which they evoked even as they criticized it.² As a poet identified with the struggle for freedom in his own country, however, Yeats (along with other British writers, including Auden and Spender) rallied to the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War and opposed Franco’s fascist Spain.

For Senghor and Césaire, there was also the challenge of racial identity to which they responded with the creation of négritude (a cultural identity associated with both race and nation, and with a liberating anti-colonial position for black people worldwide). Black French colonials who were studying in France in the Thirties, along with Aimé Césaire, began developing ideas of protest and liberation. Césaire first coined the word "négritude," which Senghor, among others, developed into a philosophy. Négritude was their critical response to the call for a union of selfhood and nationhood. Césaire's long poem "Cahier d'un retour à mon pays natal," published in 1937, became one of the strongest poetic expressions of solidarity among people of African descent, and of literary self-definition of blacks in the French language. Léopold Sédar Senghor, at the time also a student in Paris, became a co-founder of the négritude movement, but, because conditions in Sénégal were very different from those in the Caribbean, Senghor emphasized pan-African union particularly within francophone Africa, which, after the war, he termed "africanité." The various forms of nationalism--and the different paths toward nationhood--pervade the poetry of decolonization in complex and contradictory ways.

All these poets come from lands that had been colonies of Europe, but attained independence at different times: after almost eight centuries of conflict and more than a century of struggle, the Republic of Ireland gained its independence in 1922. India, whose colonization had come first with the Portuguese in Goa and later with the British in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, extending to Delhi at the end of the eighteenth century, began to agitate for independence in the nineteenth century, and gained it in 1947. Spain colonized the New World in the sixteenth century and, after three hundred years of rule, lost it in a decade. The French territories in the Caribbean and in Africa, first acquired in the seventeenth century, elected representatives to the national assembly in Paris in 1944, but continued to be administered as "départements" of the French state and did not begin to attain independence until well after World War II.

The New World posed problems all its own. Since decolonization never ends with political independence, the weight of economic and cultural dependence on Europe, and later on the U.S., continued through the twentieth century. Most of North and South America had gained political independence by 1821, with the exception of the Caribbean, which, for a multitude of historical and geopolitical reasons, remained part of Europe or of the U.S. Even such well-established countries as Chile, Peru, and Mexico did not develop an indigenous literary tradition in Spanish until the nineteenth century. Of course, there were outstanding figures from earlier centuries such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, but the economical and social circumstances of the New World did not begin to foster indigenous literary talent until the period of independence. National epics written under the influence of European Romanticism are structured like European poetry with native content. It was not until the period of Modernismo, when a post-Romantic or symbolist aesthetic took root in the poetry of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), that the Latin American countries could be said to have produced poets of their own.

Thereafter poets and writers in Latin America began to develop an indigenous body of writing, some of which was concerned with an American or 'pan'-American identity. Certain poets had increasing impact, both on the evolution of their respective national identities and of a collective South American identity, as the Latin American states began to carve out their own political identities and economies: among these, Pablo Neruda in Chile, Cesar Vallejo in Peru and Octavio Paz in Mexico come to mind. Neruda in the Canto general reaches most towards a pan-American identity, whereas Vallejo, writing in Europe in the thirties, finds in the Spanish Civil War his strongest nationalist theme. Paz in Mexico integrates themes from both Native American and (East) Indian traditions. Similarly, in the United States, William Carlos Williams in Paterson (1946-58), following Whitman's epic example almost a century before, wrote a poem to his homeland and community.

Since Irish nationalism grows directly out of nineteenth-century European nationalism and comes to partial fruition in 1922, more than twenty years before India's independence and at least forty years before that of most African and Caribbean countries, there is some historical justification for comparing poets who may not have been exact contemporaries, but whose work can be seen as parallel with respect to the period approaching independence: 1892 to 1922 in Ireland, for example, with 1919 to 1947 in India or even 1930 to 1960 in Africa. In fact, the thirty years preceding independence seem decisive in all three cases; yet it is the interwar years in which the repercussions of these movements begins to be felt within Europe. The paroxysms of the center evolved from the contradictions of the periphery--the political impossibility of continuing colonial rule.

By examining the relationship between political reality and literary representation in the different colonies, and considering the impact of the literary on the political and vice versa, I will argue that the aesthetic changes of this period ushered in a new "world order" in literature as much as in politics or economics. In as much as the advent of different national movements led to the establishment of many new countries, they paradoxically dispensed with national traditions in and of themselves and forced a new international context onto any act of literary act of creation or reading. The colonial literatures of necessity looked to traditions other than the national tradition of their mother tongue as a means of overcoming the cultural domination of the past. The cross-fertilization of literature of the interwar period, and the continuing importance of exile in twentieth-century literature, bring about a transition from a modernist to a post-modernist aesthetics.

B. Theoretical Overview

An important way of looking at literature in this century grows out of the legacy of colonialism, which, in redrawing the political map of the world, redrew its economic and cultural maps as well. Although many critics have begun to explore the implications of colonialism in fiction, few have studied its implications for poetry. The post-colonial writers have themselves addressed this theme from different regional persepctives. Their different interpretations of colonialism are remarkably consistent across space--in Ireland and India, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. And their interpretation of colonialism tells a parallel story across time. The critical period runs from the end of the ninetenth century, in the final decades of which a possible post-dependency can be envisioned, to the end of the twentieth century, in which even post-coloniality had not escaped a continuous set of references to a colonial tradition which is part of its past, a sort of sub-text of its history.

There was a time, under imperialism, when education demanded that students in the subjugated colony be taught only the history of the conquering nation: for example, students in Martinique, instead of learning the history of Martinique (which, in western terms, then perhaps had no history but only an anthropology) would learn the history of France; study French language and literature; and learn French botany, as if the plants around them did not exist. In reaction to this, in the interwar years, researchers such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire in their publication Tropiques (1941-45), or Jean Price-Mars, a folklorist in Haiti, began collecting and publishing local folk tales and the local names of flora and fauna, as if to rename--hence, to reclaim--the land that surrounded them. From this point, looking backward, colonial histories were reinvented. They included at least four phases: a pristine period of pre-history; a time of contact and of conquest, told from the viewpoint of the conquered; a time of growing nationalism and finally of independence; and then the complex political history of modern government complicated by lingering economic dependence. It is this clash of colonial education with native culture that is partly responsible for the phenomemon called "nativism" in poetry.

In an introduction to a 1975 essay by Carlos Fuentes, "Don Quixote or the Critique of Reading"³ Rudolfo Cardona summarizes some of the phases of cultural development under colonialism:

There is first what Vargas Llosa has termed the period of colonial dependence during which the novelists are always ready to copy the themes, techniques and styles of their European counterparts, except that the Latin Americans were always decades behind. (...Novel experimentation and strivings for autonomous personality...took place in genres such as the essay and poetry.) After this mimetic period...comes a strong movement toward the assertion of national characteristics. Folklore enters as an important element of this new period of 'aggressive provincialism.' Blacks, Indians and Mestizos make an important contribution at this stage....The avant-garde movements that developed in the periods between the two world wars, as different as they were one from another, had one thing in common: experimentation. This...permitted, for the first time, a truly creationist art that allowed for originality at the same time that it permitted the luxury of deep national roots without loss of meaning in the the most diverse geographic latitudes.

Cardona applies this pattern equally to music and to writing, and in particular anticipates the emergence of that phenomenon which appeared first in the Latin American novel described as "the Boom."⁴ (He begs the question of the extent to which this has resulted in the creation of a novel that is more metropolitan than it is Latin American: a question that can best be answered from a comparative perspective. Fuentes provides one response when he comments: "once the fictitious universality of certain races, certain classes, certain banners, certain nations, was conquered, the writer and the man discover their common origin in the universal structure of language.")

In her studies of Latin American literature, Jean Franco describes the difficulty of moving away from colonial dependence:⁵

But in a colonised society it is not always easy for talent to express itself. The imagination is also colonised, that is, it cannot draw its sustenance from immediate experience but tends to be parasitic on the developments of the metropolitan society. (3)

In Latin America, poetry of the early colonial period tended to imitate Spanish conventions. One exception is the poetry of a remarkable woman, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz who, on account of her triple exclusion -- as a seventeenth-century woman, a Mexican, and a nun -- from the pursuit of conventional poetry, set the conventions of that poetry in high relief through brilliant and radical subversion.

Of the next phase, Jean Franco says "Once the Conquest was complete, the intellectual task was not merely one of description, but also that of fitting the variety and strangeness of the New World into acceptable and recognizable forms" (7), and this form of ongoing conquest continued until the time of Enlightenment and Revolution. But even those movements brought with them European ideas of independence. Franco continues, "Spanish language and tradition were the foundation of Spanish American literature, but the absorption of American experience and its transmutation into art was a far more daunting task than it first seemed. From the Independence movement onwards, we shall observe how hard was the writer's struggle to free himself from his colonised imagination and how urgent was the quest for authenticity" (13).

Franco suggests " different stages in that long search for identity which the trauma of Conquest and Colonization made inevitable," and notes that "[c]ultural dependency was not solely a matter of influences, whether Spanish or French. Dependence was also translated into the myth-structures of Spanish America…. In dependent countries progress is cut off, the linear is false, there is a tendency to look backwards to try and find authenticity in a past Golden Age…. " She claims that "[i]t is in the study of these broader patterns of structure that we can often observe the manner in which the shards of European literature were incorporated into the new artefacts of Spanish American culture" (13-14).

In Culture and Imperialism,⁶ Edward Said emphasizes the importance of the colonial relationship for poets beginning with the generation of Yeats and Tagore. Their poetry grows out of a relationship with Europe, defined in part by a European education and in part by European social, political and economic domination of their countries, a relationship which required the imaginative recreation or reidentification of their own countries through a type of poetry we might term nationalist or nativist. Yet many of these poets were not in fact political nationalists, despite the fact that they held influential political roles during a period of political nationalism. Even among the poets –Yeats, Eliot and Pound -- who have been used to define the mainstream of the Anglo-American tradition, important elements of their colonial origins belie the apparently apolitical character of their poetry. Whereas the poetry of the Anglo-American Modernists tends to intensify the private voice and look inwards, poets outside Europe often took the mantle of modernism and turned it to political ends.

My work on these poets embraces Yeats and Tagore, Senghor, Césaire, Neruda, and touches on many other poets of Asia, Africa, and the Americas writing in the first half of this century. Defining these poets as having some collective identity presents many problems. They span the years 1880-1960, anticipating and following on from the struggles for liberation from European rule that have taken place all over the world since the French revolution (1789).⁷

These poets wrote at a crucial juncture in literary history, at a time of creation or recreation of an indigenous literature in their respective countries--a literature separate from Europe but drawing on European literary traditions, a literature first imitative and eventually independent of European literary norms. In many cases, too, poetry foreshadowed prose literature, because I would argue that it is in the nature of poetry to confront the ontological reestablishment of the possibility of language or of utterance, in any one time or place. Hence, the emphasis on naming in, for example, the poems of Neruda and Césaire.

Among the many characteristics which these poets have in common, I would especially point out the following:

• the resistance to colonialism, and in particular to definition by a colonial "Other" - in this case, Europe;

• a commitment to independence in both a political and a literary sense, often stemming from a precise moment of politicization in the poet's work;

• an evocation of place which occurs through the adaptation of the European language - whether French, English, Spanish, or another European colonial language - to a new geographical setting;

• an adaptation of language itself as it is shaped to adapt to new settings and uses;

• a poetic interest in collective identity as distinguished from private introspection, a collective identity which in many cases precedes the establishment of the "nation";

• an incorporation of local languages or patterns of speech as part of the process of appropriation of European poetic language, a process whose nineteenth-century roots are traditionally traced to Europe during the Romantic period with Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads ;

• an interest in folk lore and mythology which supports the creation or recreation of a national myth - a tendency also having its roots in the Romantic period;

• a reliance on innovation in European poetic form, which originates in the Symbolist movement in France and continues through Surrealism and other experimental forms of the European avant-garde to the moment of high modernism;

These add up to a complete rewriting or inversion of the European tradition, which no longer has its roots in Europe but becomes rooted in turn in the colonized land, and contributes to the process of both cultural and political decolonization. Among these characteristics, Said (1993) emphasizes:⁸

A. "the primacy of the geographical element" (225);

B. "the search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history" (226);

C. the "redevelopment of the native language": or the exploration of "the predicament of sharing a language with the colonial overlord" (227);

And adds:

D. the tendency to resolve this "urgently political and secular tension...on a 'higher,' that is, non-political level." (227)

Although the very practice of poetry does imply " the tendency to resolve this 'urgently political and secular tension...on a 'higher,' … level," and a tendency therefore for a poet like Yeats to create A Vision alongside the attempt to capture, and perhaps influence, current history through poetic images, I would argue that, in the later poetry, his engagement with the present is imaged in the poetry and does not retreat to a non-political level. This "elder' generation of poets, who aim to forge a way between the European legacy and a new, indigenous identity, stand in contrast to the later generation of more militant writers. Yet, in their own time, they were path-breakers and revolutionaries, despite the subsequent reevaluaiton of many of their political and literary positions.

Yeats, Tagore, Senghor, Césaire, and Neruda are poets whose work has played a defining role in the literature of their respective countries of origin. Their work has an overarching concern with public themes and with the European traditions intertwined with their own culture, but they also share other common elements such as a sense of exile or self-alienation stemming from their dual inheritance. Each has left behind a significant body of work by any standards. Their poetry is permeated by conflicting images of Europe; its colonial presence; and the struggle to find an independent, non-colonial identity. Since the past cannot be replaced, “post-colonial” -- meaning not only “after” but “after having assimilated” colonialism -- stands in for the negation, that is, "non-colonial."

At one level, this poetry is concerned with the recreation of a self or a language for the race or nation--ultimately with ideology or group consciousness. The 'stream of consciousness' style so explored in the modernist novel becomes, in poetry, a dialectic between the individual and the group consciousness--a forging of the 'self' from the crucible of the 'other.' In "Per Amica Silentia Lunae" (1918),⁹ Yeats writes:

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.... The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.

The passage suggests the proximity of rhetoric to poetry in the early twentieth century — and the need to distinguish between the two. Hence, by extension, there is a close relationship between poetry and politics that is negated in many modernist texts now regarded as classics. Yeats also comments on an “other”, and “anti-“ or “antithetical” self formed, at least in part, by colonialism, so that there is a constant dualism in the self and in the reality that the self experiences. Such critics as Frank Lentricchia in After the New Criticism (1980) and Perry Meisel in The Myth of the Modern (1987) were among the first of the post-deconstructionist¹⁰ critics to look at the critical construct of modernism in terms of its political background. My work shows that it is possible to re-examine the political subtext of European modernism by using texts on the periphery of Europe to comment upon its 'center'. Problems of personal liberation, literary freedom, and political domination are as important at the center of modernism as on its periphery. Although I argue my case from the works of poets not at the geographical center of the European tradition, I demonstrate that their work begins to broaden the definition and possibilities of what most critics recognize as Anglo-European modernism through a continuing dialectic of the periphery and the center.

This work focuses on the major poetic and prose works on public themes of each of these writers. For example, I touch upon Yeats's involvement with the Irish Nationalist movement from the publication in 1889 of The Wanderings of Oisin through 1899 to 1909 when the poet was intensely concerned with the Abbey Theatre. But I take as major political sequences the volumes from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) to The Tower (1928). For Neruda, the first major public work is "España en el Corazón" (1937) which anticipates the Canto general (1950); for Césaire, it is the "Cahier" (1937); and for Senghor, poems from Chants d'ombre (wrtten beginning in the mid-1930s and published in 1945) and Hosties noires(written beginning in 1940 and published in 1948).

I am interested in the colonial poets' borrowings from (and contributions to) European literature, their doubt and negation of that tradition, the changes they wrought in it, and their relation to the emerging traditions of their own countries. In this sense, although Yeats, for example, had come to seem central to European modernism (to the extent that, around 1980, when the work of the Field Day Company was still young, it may have seemed farfetched to insist on the relevance of Ireland's political position as a colony of Britain up to 1922 and as a newly independent nation thereafter), his work may now legitimately be examined as Irish nationalist poetry which both resists and assimilates the British tradition in which it is partially formed. When Yeats was seen as a modernist poet, he was not taken seriously as a political poet in the Irish context; now that he is seen as a political poet in the Irish context, Yeats’s innovations as a modernist poet are not taken so seriously; and this is, in part, a result of the fact that modernist form in poetry was seen essentially as apolitical. The reconciliation of form and politics, for which there is no alternative in the colonial setting, makes it possible to reconsider these poets from a broader perspective.

C. Poetry and Nationalism in the Age of Decolonization

In the period preceding independence, colonial poets often turned to the myths of origin in their own countries for material to support their struggle for autonomy. Accompanying the rise of nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, these poets also came to be known as nationalist, or nativist, poets. Neither term is fully descriptive: “nativist” implies that the poet’s interest is limited to the material of his homeland; but many of these poets were educated abroad, and, like their Renaissance antecedents, were schooled in forms of poetry that did not originate in their homelands. Some -- Yeats and Tagore among them -- sought native material to validate the past and create a viable foundation for the modern state, but their vision was oriented toward the future rather than toward the past. "Nationalist” is also not an adequate term, since many of these poets were not nationalists in a political sense, but instead might be called “anti-nationalist nationalists,” since they helped to establish a basis for independence, but were often critics of the new state and the interests it served once it was established. Poetry has an active voice in politics so long as the state is in formation, but, once the state is formed, the poet more often serves, from the outside, as critic or witness.¹

One formulation, which Said proposed in a lecture that was later incorporated into Culture and Imperialism, distinguishes several political moments that defined the generations of poets. The first, immediately pre-independence, he termed "nativist." Their work confirms or asserts their identity independently of Europe; this phase is concerned primarily with identitarian thought. A second phase of nativism turns to liberation; it denies, criticises, and withholds its identity from its dependence on Europe; this is the moment of negation. For this pre-independence generation, the synthesizing moment stands free not only of the colonizer but of time itself, as for example in Senghor; Soyinka; the Rastafarian movement; the Islamic movement; each of these might be seen as making, in terms of time or history, a backward move. The nativist dilemma then poses a way of abandoning history: the situation of the present is so complex that the poet or even the pre-independence national leader is forced to invent mythological realism. Forced to deal with a flawed polity, nativist poetry prefigures liberation.

A second moment follows on from this. It is at once post-independent and post-nativist. At this point, the poetry of decolonization and resistance provides an historical alternative to the nativist impasse, a way of entering the political process of nation building rather than returning to a form of regression or return to the mythological origins of the nation state. From this perspective, some critics claim, for example, that Yeats rejected politics and later became a spokesman for fascism. I would argue, instead, that Yeats’s post-1916 poetry becomes mroe politically committed -- not to the nativism of the 1890s and the Irish Literary Renaissance, but to an activist politics through which Yeats sought to criticize the state and to enhance its internal order.

Césaire's Cahier provides a similar example: after a recreation of the experience of slavery and African past, the poet reenters history through an existential encounter with himself. The poem begins again; the poet, overcoming his own egotism, summons the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and rejects the native kingdoms of Africa. After confronting an existential nadir, he reaches for an ontological self: "I accept my race." The climax of the poem comes with the redrawing of the map "measured by the compass of suffering;" by the refusal of all boundaries ("contredire toutes interdictions"); through the image of the sun. This climax has interesting parallels with Neruda’s long poem on Macchu Picchu, which is a turning point in the Canto general, and in which Neruda also claims solidarity with the people, with his brothers the Incas who came before him and built Macchu Picchu, and by extension, with all oppressed laborers.

In the twentieth century, these poets anticipated and argued for the continuing, immediate or eventual decolonization of their countries from economic or political domination using the medium of language. As their poetry enacts and reenacts the process and the steps along the way to freedom, it unifies their people into a nation of liberated men and women. For each of these poets, the concept of a collective people ("pueblo" in its Spanish form) or nation ("nación") remains essential as both subject and audience. This is very much in contrast to the poetry in Europe of the same period, which became increasingly introspective and subjective, far less concerned with creating a collective voice or identity. The poetry of decolonization creates and constitutes a concept not only of a new self, a new language, but also of a new nation, a new people.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry was defined primarily within its national and linguistic traditions. (At the end of the twentieth century, this was no longer the case.) The nineteenth century had been marked by the rise of the nation state and the competition among nation states for empire, or transnational spheres of influence. Dominant among these rising nations were many of the countries of Europe--England, France; Portugal and Spain; the Netherlands; Belgium, Italy, Germany; and Russia and Austria-Hungary, two multinational empires, already burdened by their internal diversity. By the early twentieth century, the U.S., itself a former colony of Europe, also sought a world role; and, in the Far East, Japan, too, had entered a period of modernization and expansion. From a literary point of view, too, these nations were productive both in terms of contemporary works -- defined both by the creativity of authors and by the creation of an ever-increasing middle-class audience or reading public² -- and in terms of the literary and historical (re)definition of their own past, leading to the creation of the ideology of the nation state.

If we look back at the beginnings of many of these nation states in the European Renaissance of the the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, we see a process that in many respects is subsequently reenacted in the expansion of empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³ Many European nation states came into being with the consolidation of the national languages--the Italian of Dante, Petrarch, and Bocaccio; the English of Langland and Chaucer; the Spanish of the golden age (Cervantes)--depending upon whether the state had the political or economic power to back the hegemony of the language within a certain territory, realm or kingdom. Certain authors directly invoke parallels between the literature of the Renaissance and that of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. First among these were authors of the Irish “Renaissance,” such as J.M. Singe, or Yeats when he writes on Tagore. Indeed, it is not only the Irish, but groups ranging from African-Americans in Harlem to the Bengalis and other colonials, who called the latter a period of "Renaissance." Why is this term so widespread?

Many poets of this colonial “renaissance” lived under a system of dependencies inherited from colonialism that resulted in their being educated in, or--at certain formative points--being confronted with the culture of a European metropolis. The dialectic between colony (or ex-colony) and ruling country is embedded in the form and content of their poetry, which transfigured the language and literary tradition inherited from the colonial power. This pattern of transformation not only defines the traditions of particular localities and can also be used to define the literature of decolonization across colonies.⁴

D. Poetry and Empire

Much contemporary literature is influenced by the phenomenon of European colonization, whether it is written within Europe or outside. Outside Europe, whether in North or South America or the Caribbean, some aspect of immigration or colonization is in the not-so-distant past; in Africa, few traditional literary practices were insulated from the effects of colonization; even in Asia and across the Muslim world, contact with Western forms of poetry and narrative, especially the novel, has had a deep influence on many contemporary writers.

Contact has not all been one way. As colonial settlers returned to Europe during the nineteenth century and the beginning of this century, they brought back with them traces of other cultures--an "other" in terms of which and against which Europe increasingly identified itself (see Said 1978). The traces of African culture in early twentieth century art deeply influenced the development of surrealism, which in turn opened the door for the artistic experimentation integral to high modernism. The internal transformation of European culture could not have been possible without the outside contact and the questioning and self-doubt that have come with the end of empire.

Colonization uprooted Europeans and sent them overseas. Some returned, some did not. Similarly, colonized peoples came to Europe for work and education; some returned to their countries, some did not. These displacements of people together with centuries-old diasporas--notably of Jewish and African peoples--have contributed to a contemporary literature that is largely a literature of displacement and exile, with the experience of living beside or inscribed within a dominant culture.

Following centuries of colonization in India, Ireland, West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, colonized people have used both modernist form and the mutability of language to break away from European dominance and to create a space in which it is possible to write indigenous poetry and prose. This experimentation occurred in both poetry and prose, but the use of modernist form had a definitive influence on poetry, and from that influence evolved what we now recognize as Third World literature. But what do we mean by “Third World” or “post-colonial” literature? Is there a displacement that occurs in language itself and that allows us to recognize the mark of colonization on a European language?¹

The meanings of nationalism have changed in the course of the history of the nation-state. The "nation" itself was just being defined during the nineteenth century.² Benedict Anderson defines these shifts especially well in Imagined Communities, a title that offers an umbrella term for the Idea (in a Platonic sense) that lurks behind all forms of nationalism. During the rise of the nation-state in the early part of the nineteenth century, “nationalism” referred to a romantic nationalism that played into the history of state formation initially within Europe -- Italy and Germany are the foremost examples. In the wake of the French revolution, the independence of the Latin American countries under the leadership of Bolívar elicited a sort of pan-national solidarity, with an element of racial feeling that was more pronounced in the subsequent "pan-"movements (see Arendt 1958); and, subsequently, in the resistance to and breakup of empire, nationalism was a recognizable force in Eastern Europe (for example, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, and Macedonian nationalism), reaching out to the edges of Europe, to Greece and Turkey, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, to the colonies.

By the last decade of the twentieth century, nationalism had taken on a new meaning altogether. For much of the 1980s and 90s, following the publication of Imagined Communities, nationalism became the darling of critics, and a preferred mode of reinterpreting postcolonial literature.³ But, with the closing of the twentieth century, and the intensification of political nationalisms throughout the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, of an international human rights movement, the nation and even the state have begun to be redefined.⁴

None of the poets discussed here, to whatever extent they might be associated with a national state or tradition in formation, would have considered himself or herself a nationalist in the political sense of the word. Their primary identification was not with the state or nation, which is after all only a tool of political formation--a mode of organization on levels (ideological, social, economic) so interrelated that it assumes at best a false totality, which Marx and Engels were among the first to perceive. They identify instead with elements of human experience and perception that exceed the boundaries of the state--with suffering, or love, or dimensions of freedom that often go beyond the tolerance of a particular state, rendering the poet more often its critic than its supporter. In fact, nationalist poetry per se eventually sits uneasily with its audience: it is too time-bound, too much caught up with the political events and preoccupations of the moment.

For example, Césaire's early poetry is not political in the sense of appealing to party or separatist politics in any then-established form. But the "Cahier" is not apolitical either: in its invocation, its calling into being of négritude, it creates a politics of blackness that would evolve into a politics of black separatism even before the existence of a postcolonial African state. Césaire was not so much preoccupied with nationalism, which was far less relevant to a Caribbean island, as with anti-imperialism or, eventually, decolonization. In the context of French politics in the 1930s, Communism was potentially an important anti-colonial force. Yet after World War II, Communism became less relevant to the colonies for several reasons. First, because of the divisions and conflict within the European Communist parties, the Communist parties turned away from the international idealism of the mid-nineteenth century (1848), which lasted until the Russian revolution (1917), and focussed instead on political organization and change within their own countries instead of outside it. After WWII, the colonies perceived that the French Communist Party was no longer their ally. Both pragmatically and ideologically, the party refocused itself on the liberation of the proletariat within Europe, and on the differentiation of Communism in the West from Communism in Russia, of an idealistic but non-Utopian European Communism from its corrupted Stalinist counterpart.

Neruda never perceived this split, or, when it was brought to his attention, he chose to ignore it. His allegiance was not to nationalism, but to two forms of Communism: to the idealistic, nineteenth century version; and to his own elaboration of it in the context of Latin America and the Spanish Civil War. His was a Communism based on love, and brotherhood--a poetic Communism, with political implications. His Communism had consequences: for example, the publication of his books was restricted and the Church would not even allow him to act in the capacity of godfather. In 1945, after having worked hard to elect a government with Communist representation in Chile, he found himself almost immediately persecuted and exiled from his own country. In Memorias, he writes:

Many have believed me a die-hard Stalinist. Fascists and reactionaries have described me as a lyric interpreter of Stalin. I am not particularly put out by this. Any judgment is possible in a diabollically confused era.

The private tragedy for us Communists was to face the fact that, in several aspects of the Stalin problem, the enemy was right….

If it is really true that we all shared this responsibility, the act of denouncing those crimes led us back to self-criticism and analysis, elements essential to our doctrine, and gave us the weapons needed to prevent such horrible things from happening again.

This has been my stand: above the darkness, unknown to me, of the Stalin era, Stalin rose before my eyes, a good-natured man of principles, as sober as a hermit…, a giant in wartime. (Neruda 1977, 318-19)

He saw the persecution of the Chinese writers under Communism. He embraced the Rumanian writers as brothers. He defended Stalin's literary sensibilities. And yet Russian Communism remained far distant from the social and economic reforms he envisioned for Latin America. Stubbornly, almost blindly, he persisted in his allegiance to Communism, and in particular to the Chilen Communist Party, long after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when many intellectuals broke with Russia, and continued in his visits to and support of China and the Soviet Union until the time of his death in 1972.

E. The Prose of Poets

The prose of each of these poets allows us to examine their rhetoric and political affiliations during the period of decolonization. But what can we learn from the prose of poets? It is, for example, possible to see the relation between Yeats's poetry, and actual people, events, and ideas, through the medium of his prose. Too often--and this is true of Tagore, Yeats, Neruda, Senghor and Césaire--the poet's prose is far less artful than his or her poetry. For a poet, form is imposed on materials symbolically, rather than through narrative.¹ Prose, on the other hand, shows the poets' interactions with the raw materials of their age, and brings into relief the transformative process of poetry. It shows those ideas that the poet transports into the work, picks up and wrestles with, viewing them from many sides, before incorporating or transforming them into poetry. History enters into poetry, but rarely enters it whole, though the whole of history can, for a moment, seem caught (or imprisoned, like the Sybil of Cumae²) in a single poem.

What distinguishes symbol from metaphor, and (why) must a symbol be a prerequisite for effective metaphor in poetry? Metaphor is a figure of rhetoric. Symbol is not. Rhetoric operates within the system of language; metaphor establishes a relation between two signs, or between two sign systems. Symbol is extra-linguistic, and sets up a relation between two orders of reality (necessary to the creation if not to the partial interpretation of literature): between sign and object, or between a sign system and reality. To bring meaning to the form which a metaphor sets up in a text, the metaphor must be grounded through symbol in the reality of the poet’s imagination.

Symbolism has been an element of every enduring work, since the artist crafts, from referential signs, symbols that both through the immediacy of their presence, and their lasting permanence, “transcend” their immediate context and become accessible to an audience in a totally different system of reference. To put this in the terms of more structural criticism, the signs that the artist creates are not concerned with the relation between two sign systems (of the work of art and of its contemporary cultural context, systems through which the art work yields only one interpretation³ and which develop a code for translation from one language into another), but between a single system of signs and a “reality” which is indefinable, unordered, and not entirely “subject to the will or understanding of men.” This latter relationship is translatable, yielding “subtleties that have a new meaning every day. . .” Two types of study, then, are needed: one, of forms which communicate themselves to any “homo sapiens” without being bounded by time and space; and another, of the forms which communicate most specifically to a certain day and certain age. These may even become so much a part of the “tradition” as to establish terms of understanding which render them universal, or accessible to succeeding generations. Whether this is the case with the specific Symbolist movement is debatable⁴ although its more general form has been of constant significance.

Persons, such as Maud Gonne and John O'Leary, later enter neither as symbol nor as metaphor, but as icons into the poetry: that is, they become subject to the symbolic transformation of the stuff of history into symbols, or the material of poetry. This process has many elements: one element is language; another is consciousness, of which subjectivity (or identity) is a component; a third is form.⁵ The relative importance of these elements can vary from poet to poet: one may rely heavily--even too heavily--on archaic language, or may import contemporary slang or regional dialect as a way of situating their work; reference to particular ideas, people, or events, or ways of understanding personality or human potential (as in the idea of the hero or heroine) may be embedded in the psychology of a work; and finally the form may be created, intuited, or imported directly out of experience, or adopted in reaction to an experience of extreme fragmentation, isolation, or rapid change. All of these elements influence prose far more directly than they do poetry.

The intent here is to open up the question of the relation between a poet's prose and poetry. With the exception of Senghor and, possibly, Tagore, none of these poets are prose stylists. Why does the question of the quality of the prose emerge? One element is the fact that these poets do not engage with questions of form in their prose to the extent that they do in their poetry. The language of prose is one that seems as if it were borrowed from the outside world, rather than fashioned, as Yeats might say, in the crucible of the soul. Yet what precisely does this difference allow us to perceive? It allows us to see contemporary impressions and ideas being imported or transferred onto the stage of poetry, where at times they act a significant part. The prose allows one to see the poet's imagination, as director on the stage of poetry, using ideas as the raw material of art. And this allows the critic a far more accurate view of the poet's relation to the overriding themes of his time -- nationalism, for example, or patriotism, or a little later such ideas as fascism, or Communism, or even ideas which critics might now call feminism but which were then referred to simply as the subject of "women" (or "ladies," if we wish to include the subject of class), and, more rarely, "gender." How can we look at the role these ideas play in poetry without looking at where they come from, how they are conceived in their own time? How can a modern critic look at the creative reformulation or overcoming of these ideas in the poetry, which helps to define the role of the poet in relation to history? Political ideas may play a constitutive role in poetry, or form a status quo in relation to which the poet often takes a revolutionary stance. But it is not this dimension that makes the poetry political. It is the transforming of this material, the overcoming of ideology, the assertion of poetic form that brings the poetry back into the political domain.

F. The Epic and the Nation

The first definition of epic in Western literature comes from Aristotle’s Poetics. Epics existed in the oral tradition, however, long before Aristotle defined them, and in traditions far removed from those of Greece. In fact, Alfred Lord used the continuing oral tradition of the Balkans to help define the boundaries between oral and literate traditions.¹ The epic tradition remained strong well into the twentieth century in almost all areas outside of Europe that had not been subjugated extensively to a colonial – and therefore a literate – culture: in Ireland, the British conquest resulted in the vanishing of the bards in the eighteenth century; in India, the tradition of the baul poets remains strong in Bengal; in Africa, the griot tradition remains in place; in the Caribbean, vestiges of the African oral culture survived in the music and religious traditions of the African people; in Latin America, an epic tradition drew on both the Classical tradition of the Spanish chronicles, and the local traditions of the mapuche themselves, about whom the Spaniards had written in epics.

Epics were defined first through the local interactions of poet, community, and tradition; Aristotle was among the first in Greece to codify them. But even before Aristotle, Plato points to two qualities of poetry. In Book Three of the Republic, he uses “mimesis” in the sense of “impersonation” (see 598b for the metaphysical sense and 604e-605c for the psychological sense). In Book Ten, he uses mimesis again “in a wider sense to mean emotional identification or sympatheia, …and also in the more natural sense of imitation when he argues that the poet who imitates sensual life … is at two removes from the truth.” (10.595a-608d) In the Laws, Plato also discusses poetry (poiesis) as mousike, or music, whose compositions are “imitation and representation.” (2.668b-c)² Aristotle takes this generally accepted idea of art as imitation and representation as the basis for examining the way in which the different genres of poetry are defined by differences in their means, models, and manner of imitation.

Much of the Poetics is devoted to a description of tragedy, but several sections are specifically devoted to epic, or epike.³ Chapter V (10) distinguishes between epic and tragedy. Though elements of epic are present in tragedy, not all the elements of tragedy are to be found in epic. Epic is narrative poetry with a moral purpose; its continuity of meter gives it unity of form, but it does not observe unity of time. Aristotle also requires that epics contain reversals, recognitions, and scenes of suffering. The thought and diction must be good. (The Iliad is simple, and an epic of suffering (pathetic), while the Odyssey is complex (it employs recognition throughout) and, as an epic of character, is ethical. Like tragedy, epic is concerned with human experience and is moral in its form and, in a political sense, in its effect.

Aristotle claims that the epic, in which the audience does not witness the actions, has greater scope for the inexplicable than tragedy. Tragedy may make people marvel, but epic can go beyond the marvelous to the inexplicable. Still, the inexplicable should not be illogical or unconvincing, or lead to misrepresentation or fallacy. This shows that the scope of epic remains ethical even when it reaches beyond history.

There is a heroic dimension to epic. In Greek, the heroic hexameter was chosen as the most appropriate meter for epic because it is the most steady and weighty, and, as a result, admits rare words and metaphors more easily. Over-brilliant language obscures both character and thought. The epic must be able to be grasped as a unity, from beginning to end. (In this, Aristotle does not follow Homer, but suggests a shorter length.) Unlike tragedy, the epic can make different parts of the action come to a head simultaneously, which increases the bulk of the poem. The diversity of incidents can also add grandeur and variation for the audience. Aristotle also praises Homer for letting his characters speak, always with characteristic traits, and minimizing parts in which the poet speaks in his own voice.

In analysing aesthetic objects, Aristotle shows his distance from Plato, for whom art was a detraction from, rather than an addition to, the ethical work of politics, that is of governing the state. Aristotle, who wrote on both politics and poetics, points out that “correctness for a poet is not the same as for a politician.” Art must be judged on its own truth, whereas a politician works with circumstances beyond his control. But in chapter nine of the Rhetoric, he identifies poetry as a “higher” or a “more serious pursuit” than history; and by this, he means that poetry will make men better morally. Hence Aristotle points toward the interconnected nature of all human activity by building a series of analogies that extend across the Politics, the Poetics, and the Nichomachaean Ethics.

One might pause for a moment to consider Yeats’s use of tragedy and of epic in his drama and poetry, especially during the period in which he was writing for the Abbey Theatre, from the turn of the century well into the 1930s. Yeats lets his characters speak even in the poetry, but he uses drama to enact scenes out of which they can speak. Often a poem is the result. In the poems, many of which are closely connected with politics and history, Yeats builds a mythology, but his object is not to use it to obscure the history behind the poems. Instead, by connecting one poem to another through the use of myth and sequences, Yeats creates distance out of which he (or his personae, in the form of figures that assume epic dimensions) may speak.

In Chapter Twenty-four, Aristotle considers whether the epic or tragic imitation is the more worthy. Tragic imitation, being more direct, might seem more vulgar than the epic, which is directed to a more select audience. Yet it is only the acting of the tragedy, and not the work itself, which can be overdone, just as the recitation of epic can likewise be exaggerated. Both tragedy and epic, however, can be judged independently of performance. For Aristotle, tragedy has all the elements of epic plus music and is therefore the more perfect form. Epic, however, usually emerges from oral poetry that is accompanied by music in traditions from the griots of West Africa to the bauls of Bengal. The most successful performances of Senghor's poetry incorporate the musical accompaniment that he has indicated for them, and much of Tagore's work is song. The distinction between the musical character of Greek epic and tragedy derives not from theory but from the Greece of Aristotle's time. It is no surprise therefore that the majority of the Poetics is devoted to a consideration of tragedy, which became the leading art form of Classical Greece.

Epic is an older form, of which the greatest practitioner by far of those known to Aristotle was Homer – and Homer lived, if live he did (and Aristotle at no point questions this), at least three hundred years before Aristotle's time. Tragedy may derive its plot from epic, but is in no other way influenced by epic. Yet tragic drama, too, emerged out of the local interactions of playwright/poet, community, and tradition, where epic was a part of the existing tradition. Rather than developing through the oral give-and-take of bard and community in a pre-literate community, tragedy arose as the product of a single writer in a literate community. Unlike epic, it is not even on the cusp of the oral tradition. The greater control over form, and the ritual place of tragedy in the polis, caused tragedy to take on a role in the community that Aristotle defined as catharsis. In an oral setting, epic had served as conscience and focus, memory and example, to the community; in the hands of later poets, especially when people had common concerns or fears at times of political development or change, epic was again able to take on a central role.

The urge to write epic exists in all traditions, wherever there are “nations” or communities of people with a common language and history. Rather than “nativist” or nationalist poets, we might choose a broader term such as “founding” poets. The Bible exists as and indeed contains such poetry, in the Old Testament, the Torah (which is chanted in Hebrew), the Songs of Solomon, the Psalms, and, for the Christian community, the narrative poetry of the New Testament. Many elements that go beyond poetry are brought together in these examples: language, law, history, prophecy, religion. Even before the Bible, there was the epic of Gilgamesh, which exists in fragments that were found scattered across the Middle East, from the eleven damaged tablets found in Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh in the nineteenth century to sites in Armenia, and in languages including Akkadian and Hittite. There are similar “founding myths” in Native American communities, from north to south, including the myth of “Popol Vuh,” the Mayan book of the dawn of life. Like Gilgamesh or, in India, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and, arguably, parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, these were oral tales that were eventually brought into a single composition and written down. ⁴

From the point of view of the Western literary tradition, to which we are no longer confined except through shared history and languages, this ongoing process of the merging of oral and literate traditions occurred in four phases. After the fall of the Roman Empire, as Christianity took over from the invading tribes, a rich mythology in the Germanic, Norse and Celtic traditions was displaced by or, in places, blended with the traditions of the Christian Church, which served as the bearer of literacy. By the Renaissance, although Latin remained the language of learning, poets began to write in the new vernaculars of the emerging European nations. In the nineteenth century, the process of nation formation was renewed again in the wake of the breakup of two imperial systems that had dominated portions of Europe: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. These revolutions were deeply influenced by the Romantic interest in the Volk or the common people, in folklore, and in the heroic image of the founding poet. At this point, European colonial expansion overseas was at its height, and countries outside of Europe were seeking, simultaneously, independence and their own traditions with which to affirm it. In a sense, revolution -- from a literary perspective -- becomes the expression of the oral local culture, over and against the written imperial forms.