Discrepant Affinities in Caribbean Poetry: Tradition and Demotic Modernism

Abstract

To properly situate the contributions of Lee Jenkins's The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Expression, one must first turn an eye onto three earlier books in the field of Caribbean studies. These books recognize a commonality in poetry across the region but give different accounts as to what it is based upon, and how it might be specified. J. Edward Chamberlin's Come Back to Me My Language (1993) places Caribbean verbal art within the history of black slavery and its colonial aftermath; his is a comprehensive effort to demonstrate the achievement of the poetry, as it shapes and participates in a social movement out of four hundred years of colonial conditioning toward the spirit of liberation and independence.' This movement fundamentally involves a struggle with language to win possession of it from colonial dictates-a decolonization of English that links Caribbean poetry to that of other parts of the Anglophone world such as, conspicuously, Ireland and Australia. Following up on Chamberlin's thunderclap, Laurence Breiner submitted a more systematic study of the ideas that shaped literary culture in the West Indies through the early 1990s: An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (1998) provides a