Part Two: William Butler Yeats, Postcolonial or Postmodern!

William Butler Yeats can be aligned with Postcolonial Poetics because he was an Irishman overcoming British Imperialism. He can be aligned in the Modernist Poetics early stirrings of Postmodernism with his poems that moved against the grain of institutional thought. Regarding his poem, The Lake of Innisfree, Yeats states that he had “begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from the emotions that rhetoric brings” rather nothing but the common syntax (Norton Anthology). However, Yeats had an internal dilemma in his resistance of the common syntax, when to use it and when not to.

            Will William Butler Yeats eat yeast? Yes, this rising dilemma in his work may contribute to the need to flush the British language with Irish slang and Celtic terms. Like Spanglish today, a hybrid mixing of Spanish and English to bring together the growing communication between communities in the United States of mixed ethnic background; Jahan Ramazani contributes that “In order to de-Anglacize ourselves,” arrest our decay of imperial standards, we must ‘Yorubize,’ Carribeanize’, ‘Urudize’, and numerous other languages of diverse cultures, once controlled by the British, and flush the language with new terms, slangs, and ever expand the dictionary until more words root to hybrid cultures than just that of the Anglo, just as Patrick Chamoiseau suggests with Creole to French. Like Yeats had with Irish and Celtic, the forging of the nation’s collective conscious awakening and reshaping the public’s desire to create a space outside of conquest, overcomes the domination (Ramazani).

            Expanding and flushing vocabulary to adhere to the new global collective is one way of resisting the dominant institution. Ramazani quotes Yeats stating, “Civilization is held together … by artificially created illusions.” Illusions can be ‘skin, race, gender,’ or ‘economic unit’, or ‘fortified nation’; agreeing on disagreeing to interpretations, that is why Ramazani calls on the focus of hybridity. However, Yeats did not step far enough away from the institution that he could not be postmodern, like his contemporary T.S. Eliot and Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, the Modernist dominance was still in full swing in the early 20^th Century.  The century of State-hood and Nation-building was further being developed rather than disintegrating. While most Postcolonial voices emphasize the development of a national identity or language, Postmodernists tend to favor a disintegrating nation in an embrace of a new hybrid. ... (to be continued)...

acknowledgement to Jahan Ramazani's book, Hybrid Muse