New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (review)

Charles Pollard argues that to appreciate Caribbean poetry—and, for that matter, language and culture in the West Indies—it is necessary to juxtapose Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. To regard Walcott and Brathwaite as the two poles of Caribbean poetry is, of course, a critical commonplace; critics, however, have tended to favor one poet over the other or to regard them as entirely opposed to each other, and have relied too much on the poets' self-descriptions and manifestos, ignoring the poetry. Pollard avoids such simplifications. His analysis of how the two poets developed as poets in response to each other is the most careful and sound of any I know.

Brathwaite's project was to recover an essential African identity for the Caribbean and to fashion a nation language that would restore a whole where there were only fragments. Walcott, feeling the lack of a cultural essence in the Caribbean, believed it was the task of the writer to create an identity from nothing but the ironic imitation and repetition of fragments. In spite of their large differences, Walcott and Brathwaite have in common the strategy of juxtaposing parts in order to discern a whole, however provisional, that contains them. Pollard calls this strategy modernist, and he attributes the West Indians' shared modernism to the selective listening that they did to T. S. Eliot when they started as poets (they did not just read Eliot—they listened to him on recordings). Brathwaite and Walcott responded to different things in Eliot, but they both heard things that were there. For that reason, it makes sense for Pollard to introduce Eliot as a third term illuminating the other two. Pollard does not say that the West Indian poets write like Eliot: Walcott and Brathwaite transformed Eliot's ideas and his poetic example beyond all recognition. For instance, Eliot renewed poetic language through his experiments with jazz rhythms and with working-class and dialect voices, but he himself deeply mistrusted what he regarded as the fragmentation of culture. Ironically, Brathwaite responded to the very thing that Eliot feared: the potential for social revolution in poetic fragmentation. Like Eliot, Walcott and Brathwaite treated their vocations as poets with the utmost seriousness and self-consciously constructed their careers into consistent and meaningful wholes.

Pollard discusses three topics in particular: the three poets' relation to tradition, their various attempts to renew language, and their role as public poets. Modernism is an aesthetic response to modernity. It is also a movement of poets who read each other and who then borrowed from or distanced themselves from each other. This movement was cosmopolitan in nature but also deliberately cosmopolitan in inspiration, meaning that it sought to account for the world. Pollard discusses Eliot, Walcott, and Brathwaite as expressing "discrepant cosmopolitanisms," a term he borrows from James Clifford. Many critics discuss the value of local cosmopolitanisms in principle, but Pollard shows just what a local cosmopolitanism actually looks like. I highly recommend this study.