Being of mixed blood and living as artists in a society of colonialcultures, Yeats and Walcott developed almost the same kind of poetics.Their major poetics centered on individual struggle to reconcile thedisparities of human existence - past and present, individual and society,nationalism and colonialism. For them, particularly poetry is a means toredeem the inarticulate and unformed society into which they were born,creating the self in the process of writing about the problems of nationalidentity.
In this essay, I tried to shed light on the poetics of nationalism in Yeatsand Walcott through their poetic self - Yeats’s Mask and Walcott’s Crusoe.
Yeats’s Mask is a way of attempting to restore the lost unity betweenartifice and sincerity, art and nature, an example of the wholeness hesought to achieve, and a means of combatting the erosion of exterior fate.His doctrine of the Mask offered him a technique by which he couldstrengthen his own personality and shape his art. Seeking to be what hewas not, Yeats disciplined himself and his art to form. As the expressionof a great life it urges a man on to remake himself in order to be worthyof it. And this was what Yeats intended his art to do.
Walcott’s Crusoe may be Yeats’s Mask as an alter ego which is thepure truth of self. He is also Proteus, a mythological figure who canchange him into various shapes. Through his poetic self Crusoe, Walcotttried to answer his own questioning. The questioning can be abouthimself, and himself surrounded in the disjointedness of the world.Through this self-questioning, his poetic vision draws the figure it basedon the poetic mediation.
In a word, Yeats and Walcott not only enlarged their poetic horizon, butdeepened their insight into national identity by creating their poetic self.