Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (review)

Postcolonial studies and modern Greek literature are not regular bedfellows, and studies that bring the two together certainly deserve our attention. Martin McKinsey's Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott centers on the reception of the idea of Hellenism by three non-English subjects of the British Empire, whose poetic work converses with, but also deviates from, Western constructions of Hellenism and the colonialist narratives that these constructions served. While postcolonial perspectives are the rule in the study of Derek Walcott's work and are being increasingly adopted in studies of W. B. Yeats, they are very uncommon in approaches to C. P. Cavafy. By scrutinizing the role of the British culture and Empire in the poet's life and relating his work to contemporary postcolonial debates, McKinsey's study "baptizes" Cavafy in the waters of postcolonial theory and constitutes a departure point for further work in this vein.

What leads the author to conjoin works by Yeats, Cavafy, and Walcott as instances of "postcolonial writing" is the ambivalence in their engagement with Hellenism, resulting in an oscillation between "colonial desire" and "postcolonial reinscription" (10). McKinsey foregrounds the commonalities in the position, context, and personal histories of these poets without, however, claiming an unproblematic equivalence of his objects of study. In juxtaposing three poets from disparate contexts, interrelated through the common denominator of colonialism, the book performs the kind of postcolonial comparatism that Natalie Melas advocates in her study All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (2007): a comparatism that does not reduce works to "equivalent forms" but rather brings contrary and incommensurable forces into relation "over a ground of comparison that is common but not unified" (Melas 43).

McKinsey's study has an ambitious scope, combining theoretical insights and methodologies from diverse fields: postcolonial studies, comparative literature, area studies, and globalization studies. The three poets are examined in chronological order over 11 chapters, framed by an introduction and a conclusion. Although the book's broad scope and topic contain the risk of lapsing into generalizations, the specificity of the book's claims is safeguarded by the method of close reading, which is its main strength. The author skillfully zooms in on textual details, and even though the reader may sometimes disagree with the conclusions drawn from these readings, one can only applaud the author's preference for attentive interpretations of specific poems over sweeping overviews.

A constant theme in this study is the Homeric echoes in the work of all three poets. McKinsey first follows the fate of Homer's Odysseus in the Victorian English imagination, in which Odysseus gives shape to fantasies attached to imperial expansion. He then proceeds to show how Odysseus and other Homeric themes are refashioned by Yeats, Cavafy, and Walcott to convey different "messages back to the centers of metropolitan culture and power" (47). Along these lines, he reads, for example, Homeric echoes in Yeats's "The Wanderings of Oisin" through Walcott's Omeros. Through this comparative reading, McKinsey shows that Yeats sidesteps British Homericism and aligns Homer's text with Irish folklore and oral traditions. In Walcott's case, the poet's different affiliations—Caribbean traditions, the British colonial legacy—account for his ambivalent stance to Hellenism, marked by continuation and renunciation, and the desire to decolonize Westernized constructions of Homer and bring the epic poet closer to Caribbean reality. The book suggests that Walcott—similarly to Yeats—seeks Greece before its appropriation by Western Europe, although in his later work he also questions the idea of an "Adamic Hellenism" (chapter 10). As we read in chapter 11, Walcott traces the roots of his "Omeros" in the oral rhapsodiai of Homer's time, linking the Homeric epics directly to Caribbean oral performances. McKinsey welcomes Walcott's strategy as a situating of "his black Greeks within the fluid continuum of an oral tradition that refuses to accept the authority and finality of texts" (161), but does not address the essentialist undertones...