W. B. Yeats and the Angel of History: The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

Abstract

Modernism is not often mentioned in the same breath as colonialism. Edward Said, however, suggested a neglected connection in Culture and Imperialism: “Many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium.”1 How much more pronounced will those characteristics be, then, in Irish writers, who despite sharing a common language with English and American modernists, have inherited an historical situation and literary culture that are shaped by colonialism. The literary modernists, by and large, tended to be English (or adoptively English) and even, if ambiguously, to support empire; the Irish modernists are anti-imperialist: their experience has been on the receiving end of empire, and their writing has shown the way, as it were, to later, non-European postcolonial writers. Fredric Jameson’s pamphlet Modernism and Imperialism (in the Field Day series on Irish writing) also discusses the intersection between colonialism and modernism. Though he deals mainly with E. M. Forster, whom he wittily describes as “at best a closet modernist,” and the presence of empire in the literary form of Howards End, he eventually arrives at the possibility of Irish modernism as “a space no longer central, as in English life, but marked as marginal and eccentric after the fashion of the colonized areas of the imperial system.”2