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DEREK WALCOTT

All that Greek manure under the green bananas,
under the indigo hills, the rain-rutted road,
the galvanised village, the myth of rustic manners,

glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.
What I had read and rewritten till literature
was guilty as History. When would the sails drop

from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War
in two fisherman cursing in Ma Kilman's shop?
When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse

shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop,
the echo in the throat, insisting, "Omeros";
when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?

from Omeros

Caribbean. Born 1930 on the ex British colony, the island of Saint Lucia, of slave descent on both sides. Nobel Prize winner 1992. He was only a little boy when his father, a watercolourist, died. His mother was a Methodist school teacher. He published his first poems at 18. He studied French, Spanish and Latin at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. In 1953 he moved to Trinidad, working as a teacher and as a theatre and art critic. In 1959 he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, where many of his early plays dealing with the effects on West Indian society of the colonial centuries, were put on. In 1962, he gained recognition with the publication of his poetry collection In A Green Night.

Walcott’s work explores and reflects the tensions, contrasts and divisions of his own cultural identity and those of the Caribbean region. In the words of James Dickey, ‘Here he is, a 20th century man, living in the West Indies and in Boston, poised between the blue sea and its real fish...and the rockets and the warheads, between a lapsed colonial culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and the English learned from books, between the black and white of his own body, between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture’.

These contradictions, the issue of authority, and the often strained relationship between art and life have each been a focus of intense concern. Walcott does not flinch from addressing their significance and the challenge they present. His poetry ranges from the epic to the lyrical and elegiac, from intense introspection to politics and history. While he analyses and deplores the destructive consequences of colonial rule, he exploits and celebrates Antillean culture with its fusion of English, French and Creole strands. Walcott’s friend and fellow poet, the late Joseph Brodsky, observed of the West Indies that they were ‘discovered by Columbus, colonised by the British, and immortalised by Walcott’.

poem of the day

ALL TRUTHS WAIT IN ALL THINGS from SONG OF MYSELF

30
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

Derek Walcott on poetry

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love that took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. . . . It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments. . . . Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent . . . . . . I mean, by "the Antilles," the reality of light, of work, of survival. . . . Survival is the triumph of stubbornness, and spiritual stubbornness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together go under one collective noun: "the world."

Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.

I am trying to make a heretical reconciliation between the outer world, and the world of the hermit . . . the poet and the objects surrounding him. . . . By objects I mean everything that can be loved, person, animal or thing, because a poet has no more respect for one noun, the thing by which an object is called, than he has for another, whether this is fish, stone, wife, cloud or insect, all are holy as he names them, although in his other life he cannot love them all equally, since he is not a saint.

on his vocation

(the) good poet is the proprietor of the experience of the race.... he is and has always been the vessel, vates, rainmaker, the conscience of the king and the embodiment of society, even when society is unable to contain him.

the conceit behind history, the conceit behind art, is its presumption to be able to elevate the ordinary, the common, and therefore the phenomenon. That's the sequence: the ordinary and therefore the phenomenon, not the phenomenon and therefore its cause. But that's what life is really like—and I think the best poets say that . . . it is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle, that is worth recalling.

For every poet it is always morning in the world, and History a forgotten insomniac night....The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of History.

that we would never leave the island
until we had put down, in paint, in words,
as palmists learn the network of a hand,
all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
every neglected, self-pitying inlet
muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves
. . . forests, boiling with life,
goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.

Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that, being poor, we already had the theatre of our lives. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect’

on his early life

My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.

They made me feel that this is what I should do. The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back that is phenomenal encouragement.

on craft and tradition

The fact remains, the masterpieces of the language in which I work are from a white literary history. That must not prevent me from mastering the language; it is not a matter of subservience, it is a matter of dominating. One becomes a master, one doesn’t become a slave.

..the classics console, but not enough

..in terms of Omeros I feel totally natural, without making it an academic exercise or a justification or an elevation of St. Lucians into Greeks, or some such nonsense, because of the harbors of the Caribbean, the work of the people in the Caribbean, the light of the Caribbean

I often think that the poetry written in the West Indies by people like myself is still precocious and artificial for this society, a society which has not settled and whose languages have a Protean vitality that has not yet formalised its own syntax and accent

my craft's irony was in betrayal,
it widened reputation and shrank the archilpelago
to stepping stones, oceans to puddles.....

..the first impulse of the referential - what I have called the free-form-choice – is not to verify the sources, but to accept the references, however ‘wrong’ they may be.

English is not a property of the English. And so English poetry doesn 't belong to an Englishman more than it does to me in any way. And if I continue English by saying I'm writing a poem that has the same force, if possible, as the beginning of Piers Plowman, it's deliberate. I do that deliberately.

..personally and subliminally, I acknowledge the presence that any person writing in this part of the world, in this language, would feel- every writer’s debt to Dante and Homer, every poet’s debt to Dante. They are just massive realities. To pretend to ignore them would be like saying that Mt. Kilimanjaro does not exist.

Since I am what I am, how was I made?
To ascribe complexion to the intellect
is not an insult, since it takes its plaid
like the invaluable lizard from its background,
and if our work is piebald mimicry
then virtue lies in its variety
to be adept....

What culture is not a mélange?

on language and method

But when I'm writing, the sound I hear is of a West Indian moving between—in a kind of, not a twilight, but a brighter thing than that—our own grammar and standard English, if you want. Now, sometimes I'm looking for the force that can happen in what appears to be the ungrammatical but which, in terms of its contradictions, is more authoritative.
You see, the discussion about the evolution of language is a sociological and political problem. It is not a problem for a writer. Because he has a new tone; he has his own voice.
Words shape themselves. If extra effort is required of the body, the body is going to drop those dead ends, and that's how tenses are formed. Tenses change, words change, language changes. Languages change. And they change because of physical attitude because more people begin to speak them. Now I ll just give you maybe one quick example.
This poem has been giving me a very hard time. I want to write it as true as I can in terms of not faking it by doing it in dialect, an easy dialect. I'm trying to find a sort of blend. Now it may not work but it ll be on record as some kind of experiment. Now one of the lines that I like, that I really feel is a West Indian line, a Trinidadian line [is] "and a wind start to interfere with the trees." Now, to interfere with the trees in the particular context of the poem is like the hand of the wind—to interfere with a girl, for instance, is to trouble her, to put your hand up her skirt and to do something.
The image for me, of the wind ruffling up the skirts of the trees and making noise, has a sort of West Indian sensuality. It also means at that point that the trees are stilli—t's early morning. And they are ruffled by the wind poking around in them. Ahh, making the sound. Interfering with the stillness of the trees.
To say then in a straight grammatical way, "the wind started to interfere with the trees" changes the meaning of the word interfere. It doesn't work. Or "a wind interfered with the trees" has the tone of a judge pronouncing on a court case about what the wind did. It's more lively to say, "A wind start interfering with the trees.

West Indian English, American English, Ceylonese English is a matter of the individual tone of the race that is speaking it, and I think what a writer goes for if he wants to be true is the sound of his voice, which is the sound of his own race without any artificiality.
So Frost sounds American, Edward Thomas sounds English—even if they resemble each other. And so the inflection, the tone of the poet is not an artificial tone. And a lot of bad poetry is written or has been written because a West Indian poet or a colonial poet really, when he wrote the poem, would be speaking internally in an English accent. But if it is your personal inflection and the inflection of the race that you are writing in, then I think you are trying to be as honest as you can.
And then if you come across a word that is inevitable—and it's absolutely the right word—then it's up to someone else to find out what it means. I think it does come to a point where you say, yeah, all that is true but who in New York or London or Paris is going to check out the meaning of a particular word? And that's where you get into areas of influence, of power, of authority in poetry. I would think it doesn't matter.

In the terms of the writer, the division that is there instinctually is can I resolve the feeling that I have toward the sound of the language without splitting and going in one direction or another, without sounding English or without sounding over-Caribbean ...

like Crusoe . . . The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.

on colonialism

So if you ask me about how I feel if I’m reviewed, I think I’ve had a parallel equivalent, politically I have been through, in my life, an identical series of phases which would be that of being a colonial, being someone given adult suffrage, being someone given self-government, and being someone who becomes very public so that the decades of my life may be the equivalent of the political decades of the Caribbean. Now, on the other had, those decades or those definitions have sometimes been bestowed by the empire; in other words, the empire has said, okay, you are no longer a colonial, you can now have adult suffrage; you no longer have adult suffrage, you an now be independent; you are no independent, you can now be a republic.

The whole idea of America, and the whole idea of every thing on this side of the world, barring the Native American Indian, is imported; we’re all imported, black, Spanish. When one says one is American, that’s the experience of being American—that transference of whatever color, or name, or place. The difficult part is the realization that one is part of the whole idea of colonization. Because the easiest thing to about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality.

At great cost and a lot of criticism,what I used to try to point out was that there was a great danger in historical sentimentality. . . . The whole situation in the Caribbean is an illegitimate situation. If we admit . . . from the beginning that there is no shame in that historical bastardy, then we can be men. But if we continue to sulk and say, 'Look what the slave-owner did,' and so forth, we will never mature."

The whole struggle is to not remain inferior, not to be made to feel inferior. Then the next phase is to resent also being called equal which is really like being called inferior. And the next phase is, of course, to be superior. Now I think that no matter how aristocratic it is, a writer has to cultivate an intelligence that is in its nature superior, in the sense that it is more organized. He has to learn more. He has to know everything. The more he knows, the better for him. Both about life and about literature. So this whole process of agony and refinement goes on in the writer. And a colonial writer should have behind him, not only the knowledge that he is beginning something, but all the knowledge that preceded him as well.

Wiping out the past is a sin— for the ultimate meaning of history is original sin. And what is interesting is not what they did but why.

on Europe

Europe fulfilled its silhouette in the nineteenth century
with steaming train-stations, gas-lamps, encyclopedias,
the expanding waists of empires, an appetite for inventory
in the novel as a market roaring with ideas.
Bound volumes echoed city-blocks of paragraphs
with ornate parenthetical doorways, crowds on one margin
waiting to cross to the other page; as pigeons gurgle epigraphs
for the next chapter, in which old cobbles begin
the labyrinth of a twisted plot.

I resisted the idea of Europe physically for a long time. I felt I couldn't go and be in Italy, I couldn't be in Greece, unless I felt I could go into some ruins and see the Mediterranean without any aesthetic longing or envy. I think that now I can go anywhere in Europe. But I think that I had to know that I felt West Indian.

the old world felt more familiar

There was a vow I made, rigid apprentice,
to the horizontal sunrise, acolyte
to the shallows' imprecations, to the odour
of earth turned by rain, to the censer of mist,
to the pennons of cocoa, though I hated its darkness,
to the wrist of a cold spring between black rocks,
and any road that lost its mind in the mountains,
to the freight train of the milipede, to
the dragonfly's biplane, and the eel's submarine,
as the natural powers I knew, swearing mnot to leave them
for real principlaities in Berlin or Milan.

on the Caribbean

You know we have three things going that create that sense of awe, of being diminished in their presence. And that is a very vast sky, a really large sea and, of course, the landscape you are standing in.
What we were taught as young colonials, is that our awe was inferior. We were taught that the sky in Italy was superior, that the light of their sky was really superior to the light in Barbados or somewhere.
I think I got rid of that feeling of inferiority extremely early as a painter practicing the actual skill of painting light, which is what painting really is about, at least representational painting.
The blue of some of the bays in the Caribbean is incredible. You really believe that if you went down there and put your finger in it, your hand would be stained. And if you are painting the intensity of that blue, or the intensity of that light, which is extremely difficult, then you are doing a whole new thing. And it affects the way you do your art.
When asked if it's a fallen Eden, I would say that wherever the landscape offers a genuine feeling of beginning, in that sense it is Edenic. You know, in terms of the history, what history has happened here.

The romanticized, pastoral vision of Africa that many black people hold can be an escape from the reality around us. In the West Indies, where all the races live together, we have the beginnings of a great and unque society. The problem is to recognize our African origins but not to romanticize them.

Most of the history of the Caribbean—the physical history— took place on the sea. The battles for the islands, the forts at the edge of the sea—it's just a fringe kind of history on the edge of these islands. And the inside part of it is not where the original sin in the landscape took place; it took place on the water—right in the battles and stuff like that. And so these things keep getting more and more quickly erased. There 's a big difference between a sea culture, like the Aegean and a sea culture like the Caribbean and, say, a plains culture or mountain culture. And we are a sea culture. So this renewal of the sea is a strong thing for me. So, in terms of the isolation of the poet himself in that kind of setting, the kind of figure that one is drawn to is the Crusoe figure, the explorer figure.But not in the historic sense of white men coming and finding, the imperialist discovering a paradise. That's not the kind of process one is talking about. One is in that paradise
and owns it. The sense of possessing it is great too.

critics on Walcott

Joseph Brodsky

Walcott is neither a traditionalist nor a modernist. He belongs to no school....He can be naturalistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, imagistic, hermetic, confessional - you name it. He simply has absorbed, the way whales do the plankton or a paintbrush the palette, all the stylistic idioms the north could offer; now he is on his own, and in a big way...He is the man by whom the English language lives.

For thirty years (Walcott's) throbbing and relentless lines have kept arriving on the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of contemporary literature would be like wallpaper...If the theory of evolution...holds any water,then both thematically and stylistically (his) poetry is the case of the highest and most logical evolution of the species

Walcott's poetry is Adamic in the sense that both he and the world have departed from Paradise - he, by tasting the fruit of knowledge, his world, by its political history....For all its disheartening precision, this knowledge is free of modernist despair (which often disguises one's shaky sense of superiority and is conveyed in tones as level as its source.

P.N.Furbank

(the poems of In A Green Night are) full of summery melancholy, fresh and stinging colours, luscious melody, and intense awareness of place.

Seamus Heaney

(his poetry) can be incantatory and self-entrancing, as in the early 'Sea-Chantey' and the later 'Season of Phantasmal Peace'. It can be athletic and demotic as in 'Tales of the Islands' or 'The Spoiler's Return'. It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words.

Clive James

You made me think last night. Your lines about
How people on those islands you evoke
As easily as blowing smoke
Could not look down from high ground to the sea,
Or even see a cargo ship, without
Fear of the worst, reminded me ---
Reminded me I still need the reminder ---
That my own ships and oceans linked a kinder
Imperium. Though free for generations
The crime's descendants are not free of that ---
The open water is for drowning in.
Embarked now for the erstwhile ruling nations,
The migrant's back still hears the spitting cat.
He looks up through the grille at the least grin
Of condescension. Railway station porters
With one impatient word rape teenage daughters ---
Terror invades perception when it gives
That tinge of death to where your verse most lives,
In the lost luxuriance
Of how you, growing up, were made to feel
By history that your childhood was unreal
Because the actual so usurped romance
That even the sweet white of breaking waves ---
Their stately bridal veils of spray ---
Looked startling as the bones of broken slaves:
Unsleeping infrastructure of the trance
The tourist brochures lovingly display,
Taking your time out of their time away.

You made me think last night, but not today.
Today I found out that a girl I know
Was bailed up by two little boys in hoods
Who claimed their hidden knives were not for show.
She made a weapon of her front-door key.
They took off. No doubt short of worldly goods
Through no fault of their own, they make me long
To see them kicked and whipped. Don't get me wrong:
Where she lives, there are whites the same age worse.
But let's not kid ourselves. Race is a curse,
And at a time like this it curses me.
To put it bluntly, I don't think at all.
Terror invades perception:
Reaction, ruled by what we first recall,
Enrols an ethnic type without exception
Among the threats to life, as it must do
Even for you. Tell me that isn't so.
Hand on your heart and say it isn't true.

You made me think last night. How can I know
Your deepest wish is not for me to go
To Hell? Should I pretend I understand
What it feels like, before the burning sand
And scalding water teach me how to die
Day in, day out, under that pretty sky?
Before I, too, can hear in the surf's roar
The landlady's slammed door,
Can see the lynch mob strutting with the gulls
Gathered among the hulls
Of yachts whose owners don't just patronise
A raw colonial, but spurn my hand
And still would if it held the Nobel Prize ---
Proof of my right to land
Having sailed so far, and, stranger yet, survived
A setting out from which so few arrived,
And fewer still thrived, on the further shore?
I know: I should have thought of this before.

William Logan

Despite his fluent and deceptive language, despite a career restless in its forms, Walcott has written few poems memorable as poems. There is intoxicating writing, with striking images by the hundred (if they come from the warehouse at times, most poets work out of a shed), but rarely a poem that bullies its way into memory the way poems by Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin or W. H. Auden often do. What you remember in Walcott is the texture, never the text.

Walcott has to try hard to write badly, but ''The Bounty'' often lacks the language of resonant detail that takes the attentions of the visual beyond mere decoration. His rhetoric is as powerful as a trumpet, but every line has the same emphasis -- you scarcely know where the crescendos are, because they're all crescendos.

This surfeit of the visual cannot repay the losses the poet has suffered, the life estranged in the medium of its language.

publications

POETRY

In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 Cape, 1962

Selected Poems Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA), 1964

The Castaway and Other Poems Cape, 1965

The Gulf and Other Poems Cape, 1969

Sea Grapes Cape, 1976

The Star-Apple Kingdom Cape, 1980

Selected Poetry (with Wayne Brown) Heinemann, 1981

The Fortunate Traveller Faber and Faber, 1982

Midsummer Faber and Faber, 1984

Collected Poems 1948-84 HarperCollins, 1986

The Arkansas Testament Faber and Faber, 1988

Collected Poems Faber and Faber, 1990

Omeros Faber and Faber, 1990

Poems 1965-80 Cape, 1992

The Odyssey: A Stage Version Faber and Faber, 1993

The Bounty Faber and Faber, 1997

Tiepolo's Hound Faber and Faber, 2000

The Prodigal Faber and Faber, 2005

PROSE

Another Life Cape, 1973

The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory - The Nobel Lecture Faber and Faber, 1993

Homage to Robert Frost: Essays on Poetry (with Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney) Faber and Faber, 1997

What the Twilight Says: Essays Faber and Faber, 1998

PLAYS

Dream on Monkey Mountain: And Other Plays (contents: 'What the Twilight Says: An Overture'; 'The Sea at Dauphin'; 'Ti-Jean and His Brothers'; 'Malochon, or the Six in the Rain'; 'Dream on Monkey Mountain') Cape, 1972

The Joker of Seville; and O Babylon!: Two Plays Cape, 1979

Remembrance and Pantomime Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA), 1980

Plays for Today (with Dennis Scott and Errol Hill) Longman, 1985

Three Plays: The Last Carnival, Beef No Chicken, A Branch of the Blue Nile Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA), 1988

links

A bibliography of critical studies up to 2001 can be found on the nobel prize website

An audio interview for the bbc is available on the bbc website

A list of general articles can be found on the literary history website

An overview is available on the post colonial literature website

RECENT STUDIES

New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (New World Studies S.) by Charles W. Pollard
Derek Walcott (Cambridge Studies in African & Caribbean Literature) by Edward Baugh
Derek Walcott (Modern Critical Views S.) by Harold Bloom