Eliot in the tropics

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

by Charles W. Pollard

University of Virginia Press, 2004. 231 pages

Probably the most important recent book in the field of Caribbean literature is The Other America (1998), a study of Caribbean modernisms by a leading scholar, Michael Dash. Charles Pollard's name will not yet be familiar to many readers in that field (though it will be familiar to readers of Twentieth-Century Literature, where some of this work was published in 2001). That situation, however, is likely to change. Pollard's book is a magnificent complement to Dash's work; while both offer probing and subtle analyses of the manifestations of modernism in the region, they are focused on different eras and different genres--Dash emphasizing fiction and Pollard poetry.

Broadly speaking, this is a study of the impact of Eliot's work on the two leading Anglophone Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. As Pollard duly notes, these relationships have been acknowledged and occasionally disputed, but Pollard for the first time spells out in full detail what these writers make of their model. The result is not reducible to an influence study in the usual sense: how Eliot contributes to the formation of the Caribbean poets. Mindful of the tendency among Caribbean critics to set Walcott against Brathwaite, Pollard also intervenes to demonstrate how choices made in the management of the legacy from Eliot articulate the two poets' aesthetic and ideological differences. In addition, he makes a strong case for the conclusion that what they discover in Eliot forces us to reconsider our accumulated assumptions not only about Eliot's poetry and criticism but also about high modernism itself. As Pollard puts it, "In fact, Brathwaite and Walcott have recast modernism in general and Eliot in particular because aspects of his modernist aesthetic enable them to understand and to represent better their postcolonial experience of modernity" (2). The book demonstrates how the Caribbean poets absorb and reshape three modernist principles dear to Eliot: the importance of sustaining a living tradition, the revitalization of poetic language through an openness to common speech, and the responsibility of poetry as a public and social art. Concentration on the modernism of Eliot specifically is partly a strategic move; to attempt to account for an array of high modernist poets along with their Caribbean counterparts would make the book either longer or more superficial, and in either case less manageable. But it also reflects historical realities--Eliot is the main conduit by which literary modernism comes to the Anglophone Caribbean. Yeats is an important figure to the extent that he was perceived as a writer of non-Standard English who experiences the passage through decolonization, but his influence is manifest only in very specific cases, such as the poetry of Eric Roach and the early plays of Walcott. Other major modernist poets, such as Pound and Stevens, are virtually unknown in the Caribbean.

Pollard's argument is complex but agile and carefully qualified throughout. The introduction and opening chapter outline that argument with great lucidity, and at the same time convey a vivid sense of what is important and exciting about it. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork, preparing readers to think about these three writers together by exploring crucial relationships among modernisms, (post)colonialism, and creolization. In the course of that exploration Pollard presents a magisterial review of the relevant theorists and critics, making the genealogy (and originality) of his own study abundantly clear. Here are spelled out the author's debts to and demurrals from Dash, James Clifford, Neil ten Kortenaar, Timothy Brennan, Anne McClintock, and Jahan Ramazani, among many others.

The remaining chapters present wide-ranging discussions of each of the three modernist principles in turn. Thus the second chapter concentrates on conceptions and mechanisms of tradition in these writers. The third turns to the choices that Walcott and Brathwaite make in their language of expression. For Caribbean writers this is hotly contested terrain, perilous with the crossfire of counterclaims about high vs. demotic style, standard vs. creole language, oral vs. literate aesthetics. Pollard sheds important new light here by approaching these problems from the perspective of Eliot's handling of cognate matters. The ostensible subject of the fourth chapter is the writers' positions on the social role of poetry, though much of this chapter is again about language. A final chapter functions as an epilogue, studying some images of traveling in the poems as a way of drawing together the argument and themes of the book as a whole. One of the great strengths of this study is the nearly equal depth of reference provided for both the modernist and Caribbean contexts. Throughout the book Pollard gives his readers an excellent feel for the lively literary milieu in which these poets work. There is very perceptive attention to major Caribbean theorists like Michael Dash, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, and Antonio Benitez-Rojo. Unlike many North American writers on Caribbean literature, he also gives full attention to the regional reviewers of Brathwaite and Walcott, many of whom are themselves significant poets.