I found in Michael O'Loughlin's "After Kavanagh" (Raven Arts
Press, 1985) a paragraph to add to the recent discussions:

"The problem is that "English" is a polysemous term. English is a
language spoken by hundreds of millions of people,
containing with it seperate and diverging cultures. It is
the language of that place called Anglophonia, an empire,
says Anthony Burgess, upon which the sun never sets. It can
also mean that specifically English tradition in English literature,
which traces its way back through Thomas Hardy and Edward
Thomas, and which was once the only tradition in the language.
Or it can mean British, in a sense that includes England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, and sometimes, even the Republic of
Ireland. These distinctions are sometimes genuinely confused, but
more often they are tacitly understood. Thus, many critics in 
England tacitly accept that American poetry is, fundamentally,
poetry in another language, that it is part of a separate discourse.
However, they often practise a sleight of hand with the terms.
Philip Larkin, for example, in the anthology "The Oxford Book
of English Verse", includes poetry by American poets -about
twenty five per cent of the poems in the book. English in this
sense obviously means "in terms of the English discourse", 
rather than the language." 

	In a more general way, the problem has been also treated by
Declan Kiberd in his "Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the 
Modern Nation" (Vintage, 1996). On page 49 you can read:

"English literature had a libertaing effect on (Oscar) Wilde: it 
equipped him with a mask behind which he was able to compose the
lineaments of his Irish face. This was to be a strategy followed by
many decolonizing writers; an, as so often, it was the Argentinian,
Jorge Luis Borges who gave the fullest account of the method. He 
described the insistence that Argentine artists deal with national 
traits and local color as "arbitrary" and as a "European cult"
which nationalist ought to reject as foreign. there were no camels
in The Koran, he said, because only a falsifier, a unconcerned,
knew that he could be an Arab without camels. Borges, indeed,
confessed that for years he had tried and failed to capture
Buenos Aires in his stories, but that it way only when he called
Paseo Colon the rue Toulon and only when he dubbed the country
house of Adrogue Fiste-le-Roy that his readers found the true
Argentine flavour. "Precisely because I did not set out to find that
flavour, because I had abandoned myself to a dream, I was able
to accomplish, after many years, what I had previously sought in 
vain." (...) Borges found that being Argentine was either a fate or a
mere affectation: if the former, then it was futile to try consciously
for an Argentine subject or tone, and if the latter, then that was one
pretense that the mask actually was the face."

Jorge Fondebrider



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