LITERARY REVOLUTION AND DECOLONISATION IN LOUISE BENNETT'S POETRY 49

listen to them, her target audience was not the colonisers but the
colonised. She was concerned with the joys/sorrows, triumphs/defeats,
and vice/virtue of the common man.
 While her contemporaries struggled with the white man's linguistic
burden, and endeavoured to convey their messages) to the imperialists
in the latter's own linguistic code, Bennett was preoccupied with getting
the message out to the common folk. Bennett corroborated this view
in an interview with Lilieth Lejo Bailey when she said "if I can get
Jamaicans to understand what I mean, that's all I want." As a
consequence, she encoded her message in the linguistic variety that the
majority of the populace could decode with little effort. This in itself
was definitely a revolutionary move, because no writer in her right
mind would have conceived of writing for the oppressed. The two
principle misconceptions of the time were: (i) that the populace
comprised illiterate persons who could not appreciate poetry and that;
(ii) the "bastard tongue" which they spoke could not support the
sacrosanct art of poetry. Louise has thrown these philistine ideas in
their faces and her outstanding career bears testimony to the people's
ability to appreciate and understand poetry, and the Creole's potential
to be employed in serious literature. Not surprisingly, Dennis Scott
hailed her as "the only poet who really hit the truth about the society
through its own language" (qtd. in JL 9).
 Interestingly, William Wordsworth, in his introduction to Lyrical
Ballads a little over two hundred years ago stated that, "Since the poet
is a man speaking to men [Please forgive Wordsworth for his male-
chauvinism!], responding, though in a more sensitive way, to common
human experiences, his language should not differ substantially from
that of real men under-going real experiences. The poet thinks and
feels in the spirit of human passions. How, then, can his language
differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel
vividly and see clearly?" [my emphasis]
 Without a doubt, one ought to wonder what would cause Louise
Bennett to go against the literary traditions of her time by employing a
low-prestige variety in writing poetry. As a young girl growing up in
Jamaica, she was struck by the fact that "more of our poets and writers
were not taking an interest in the kind of language usage and the kind
of experiences of living which were all around us, and writing in this
medium of dialect instead of writing in the same old English way about
Autumn and things like that" (Scott 99). By using Creole, Bennett
demarcated her audience. The choice signalled explicitly that her
verses were not for the colonisers but for the colonised.