Abstract

The article focuses on W.B. Yeats’s early critical and theoretical writings with a view to demonstrating the poet’s idea of poetical culture as a means towards moulding the identity of Ireland outside the polarity of English colonial discourse and Irish extreme nationalist agenda. It is argued that Yeats envisages the poetical culture as built around two ideals. On the one hand, he recommends the return to oral poetry as a source of symbolic continuity of Irish identity; on the other he infuses his belief in symbolic truth with an ironic doubt as to the possibility of ever unveiling that truth. Yeats’s idea is then set against Edward Said’s and Homi Bhabha’s theories of postcoloniality.