The Poetics of Identity: Nationalism and Self in European and Anglo-American Literature

Abstract

This paper investigates how European and Anglo-American writers have explored the intricate relationship between nationalism and the self through poetic and narrative expression. Centering on W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Walt Whitman, it examines how literature constructs, contests, and redefines identity at both personal and collective levels. From the Romantic celebration of the unified imagination and nationhood to the fragmented consciousness of modernism, these writers reveal how cultural transformation reshapes the meaning of belonging. Yeats’s mythic nationalism, Eliot’s spiritual modernism, Woolf’s psychological introspection, and Whitman’s democratic individualism together illustrate the evolving “poetics of identity” that transcends geographical and historical boundaries. The paper argues that literature does not merely mirror national identity but interrogates its contradictions, turning the act of writing into a dialogue between freedom and inheritance, unity and dissonance. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that European and Anglo-American literature share a transnational vision—where poetic imagination becomes the bridge between the private self and the collective life of nations.