A Post-Colonial Look Yeats And War Poems

Abstracts - Yeats The Tower contains some of his best-known works. Even while its name suggests the poets willed isolation Yeats could not escape the radical changes that his country underwent in the 1920s. Written in 1928 the collection serves as a type of retrospective on Irelands tumultuous decade the two major events of which were the Anglo-Irish war 1919-1921 and the Irish Civil war 1922-1923. Of all Yeats poetry Meditation in Time of Civil War is perhaps the most personal in its explanation of his protestant ascendancy past. Especially in the first section the speaker seems ambivalent about his family history and his place in the civil war. Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen was originally titled Thoughts Upon The Present State of World and then Yeats changed it to Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen. The title of this poem is the year in which the Anglo-Irish war began. It signals the beginning of a new era after the Great War and marks the first year of that struggle. In both these poems Yeatss position is to live in an in-between status. Two key elements in Bhabhas writing when it comes to describing the colonial identities of both the colonized and the colonizer are the concepts of ambivalence and hybridity. This study attempts to examine Bhabhas views on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized to evince this relationship in Yeasts Meditation in Time of Civil War and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.