Transcultural Hybridity and Modernist Legacies: Observations on Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century British Poetry

Abstract

Peter Burke’s 2009 publication Cultural Hybridity opens with the following observation: “the tendency of the period we live in is to celebrate the ‘cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri.’”2Similarly Fred Dervin writes of “the widespread discursive use of ‘hybridity’ and/or plural identities.”3 Yet, as Burke shows, hybridity is not new, and one might think that where English poetry is concerned, it is more often the norm than the exception. Indeed, Chaucer’s poetry mixed local and continental traditions, Shakespeare’s theater was an adaptation of Classical forms to English ebullience, and English prosody is itself an accentual-syllabic hybrid. With the twentieth century and in particular modernism, hybridity rocketed as Eliot, Pound, and others created a new aesthetic out of collaging Western and non-European texts. This was followed by the development of local voices within a modernist aesthetic by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, or David Jones, who brought juxtaposition and parataxis to bear on a sense of place akin to that of Hopkins and Clare, reflecting a withdrawal from cosmopolitanism. Later, Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney evolved a less explicit hybridity and captured his sense of cultural in-betweenness with the term “inner emigre,”to refer to betrayal and self-betrayal, caught between a rural Irish childhood and a Belfast English education. Of course, these are the British Isles and class barriers compound cultural ones; in 1985 Tony Harrison’s V, which was nearly banned from its projected television broadcast because the Conservatives were concerned about the corrupting effects of the four-letter words on Britain’s youth, displayed diglossia between two conflicting social classes.