| The dissertation explores the role of language in the processes of colonization and decolonization by analyzing the poetry of three modernists with Celtic affiliations who wrote in English, a medium of Celtic subjugation: W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore. At a time when British imperialism had changed the linguistic map of the world and transformed the contours of English itself, the British Isles' own multilingual English, Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Scots culture was racialized and aestheticized along a bipolar axis of "progressive" prosaic Englishness and "primitive" poetic Celtism. I reconfigure Celticism as a discourse about the impact of anglicization on Britain's multilingual culture by approaching it from a bilingual colonial English and subaltern Gaelic perspective. I relate the Celticism of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold and Edmund Spenser's blueprint for coercive anglicization to nineteenth-century fin-de-siecle cultural politics in which context they elucidate the ethnocidal background to Celtic Twilight decadence and exemplify the rationale for de-anglicization through gaelicization.;"Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue," W. B. Yeats declares, identifying the quandary of my three subjects whose knowledge of Irish or Scots Gaelic is at best vestigial, though as a source of their Irish, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish ethnicities, "Gaelic" animates their ambivalence towards English. The salvo that launched the Gaelic Revival in 1892, "The Necessity of De-Anglicizing the Irish Nation," set the agenda for the Irish Literary Renaissance and for W.B. Yeats's extraordinary fifty-year career. I relate his early, middle and late style to his evolving idea of Gaelic and its changing symbolic status of Gaelic in cultural decolonization. I read Hugh MacDiarmid's "aggrandized Scots" as a poetics of caricature that tests the expressive potential of Scots and resists modulation into English, but that is ultimately unable to transcend the normative English base of Scots or to escape it via "the Gaelic Idea." Marianne Moore's "purely Celtic" American poetics of idiosyncrasy mixes regulatory public discourse about Ireland into private mythologies that secrete oppositional narratives within visible layers of authority. |
