Summary
Irish poet read by Edward Said in Chapter Three, III of Culture and Imperialism, “Yeats and Decolonization”, as the indisputably great national poet who, during a period of anti-imperialist resistance, articulates the experiences, aspirations and restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.247 / printed p.220).
Details
- Yeats belongs, by virtue of Ireland’s colonial status, to the cultural domain of the colonial world: cultural dependency and antagonism together; Ireland was ceded by the Pope to Henry II in the 1150s, and from that time a persistent cultural attitude treated its inhabitants as a barbarian and degenerate race (PDF p.247 / printed p.220).
- The primacy of the geographical element distinguishes the anti-imperialist imagination: for the native, colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality, recoverable at first only through the imagination; Yeats’s early poems in “The Rose” are among the striking cartographic examples, with Neruda on Chile, Césaire on the Antilles, Faiz on Pakistan and Mahmoud Darwish on Palestine (PDF p.252-253 / printed p.225-226).
- Yeats shares with Caribbean and some African writers the predicament of sharing a language with the colonial overlord, and belongs in many important ways to the Protestant Ascendancy; his progression runs from early Gaelicism to the systematic mythologies of A Vision and “Ego Dominus Tuus”, elevating the tension between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural heritage to an extra-worldly level (PDF p.254 / printed p.227).
- Seamus Deane’s Celtic Revivals is taken as the most interesting account of Yeats’s super-terrestrial idea of revolution, but Said corrects it: Yeats is more accurately an exacerbated example of the nativist phenomenon, and his slide into incoherence, mysticism and fascism in the 1920s is not to be excused or dialecticized into a negative utopian mode, without changing the view of Yeats as a poet of decolonization (PDF p.254-257 / printed p.227-230).
- Yeats’s work of the early 1910s has an uncanny resemblance to the engagement and ambiguities of Darwish’s Palestinian poetry half a century later (PDF p.259 / printed p.232); Neruda accepted him as a national poet representing the Irish nation in its war against tyranny, rallying to the defense of the Spanish Republic in 1937 despite his dispositions toward European fascism (PDF p.260 / printed p.233).
- Against Fanon, whose narrative is marked throughout by liberation, Yeats’s early work sounds the nationalist note and stands at a threshold it cannot cross, although he sets a trajectory in common with Neruda and Darwish (PDF p.261-262 / printed p.234-235).
- Yeats’s prophetic perception that at some point violence cannot be enough, and that the strategies of politics and reason must come into play, is the first important announcement in decolonization of the need to balance violent force with an exigent political and organizational process (PDF p.262-263 / printed p.235-236).
- Yeats stopped short of imagining full political liberation, but gave a major international achievement in cultural decolonization nonetheless (PDF p.265 / printed p.238).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Aimé Césaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Nativism, Imperialism