Poetry and decolonization: Tagore, Yeats, Senghor, Cesaire, and Neruda, 1914--1950 (Rabindranath Tagore, India, William Butler Yeats, Ireland, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal, Aime Cesaire, Martinique, Pablo Neruda, Chile)

The dissertation explores the relationship between European literary heritage and native experience in the poetry of Tagore, Yeats, Senghor, Césaire, and Neruda, and anticipates patterns in the development of postcolonial literatures during the twentieth century. The different national and racial identities of each poet, and their common experiences of decolonization, place and displacement, are examined in relation to their search for linguistic and cultural self-definition and freedom from European political hegemony.; The introductory chapter surveys the background of European colonization and defines a poetry of decolonization. The second chapter examines the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore in relation to the Bengali Renaissance and European modernism. The third chapter considers the poetry of W. B. Yeats in relation to Irish politics and nationalism. The fourth and fifth chapters explore the genesis of negritude through the poetry of L. S. Senghor from French West Africa and of Aimé Césaire from Martinique. The sixth chapter looks at Pablo Neruda through the Canto General. The final chapter defines a collective approach to the poetry of decolonization, which emphasizes the following characteristics: (1) Poetic interest in collective identity as distinguished from private introspection, as collective identity anticipates the establishment of the “nation”; (2) The adaptation of the European language to a new setting, including the incorporation of oral rhythms drawn from local patterns of speech, as part of the process of the ongoing reinvention of poetic language; (3) Interest in folklore and mythology, which supports the creation or recreation of a myth of the nation based in the past—a tendency rooted in the Romantic period; (4) Appropriation of a common heritage of European poetic forms which originate in the Symbolist movement in France and continue through Surrealism and other forms of the European avant-garde to the period of high modernism; (5) Resistance to definition by a colonial “Other”—in this case, Europe.; These factors culminate in an inversion of the European tradition, forming new literatures that no longer have their roots in Europe but become rooted in turn in the colonized land, and contribute to the process of both cultural and political decolonization.