The Poetry of Walcott by Derek Walcott

First published:Twenty-five Poems, 1948; Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos, 1949; Poems, 1951; In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, 1962; Selected Poems, 1964; The Castaway, and Other Poems, 1965; The Gulf, and Other Poems, 1969; The Gulf, 1970; Another Life, 1973; Sea Grapes, 1976; The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979; The Fortunate Traveller, 1981; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden, 1983; Midsummer, 1984; Collected Poems, 1948-1984, 1986; The Arkansas Testament, 1987; Omeros, 1990; The Bounty, 1997; Tiepolo’s Hound, 2000; The Prodigal, 2004; Selected Poems,2007

Type of work: Poetry

A Divided, Postcolonial Consciousness

Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott is a major figure of contemporary literature. Scion of both the Anglo-European and the Afro-Caribbean heritage, he has conducted a lifelong struggle to integrate the divided self engendered by the duality of his legacy. Dedicated to art as a means of coming to terms with the colonial and postcolonial conditions of the Caribbean, Walcott has braved controversies and labored furiously to define himself as a citizen of the New World while maintaining vital links with the Old. Writing as both a West Indian and an American, he also offers imaginative insights into racial matters in the United States and the relationship between the United States and the developing world.

Derek Walcott’s career can be understood in the context of the colonial condition and marginalized predicament that he epitomizes but endeavors to redress. Descended from mulatto parents with a Methodist background, he was born in 1930 in St. Lucia, a small Caribbean island (under British rule until 1979) with a largely poor, black, and Catholic patois community. His situation as a “divided child” was complicated by the loss, at the age of one, of his father, a civil servant (also an amateur painter and poet). Thanks to his mother (a schoolteacher active in the local theater) and to the books and paintings that his father left behind, Walcott had an excellent education, and he began to write at a young age. He also learned to paint under the tutelage of “Gregorias” (Dustin St. Omer), his mentor, to whom he was to pay tribute in the poem “Homage to Gregorias” in Another Life. Psychologically isolated, early on he developed a sense of being “chosen” to speak for his generation and his community and to immortalize their unique but neglected legacy.

Walcott published his first poem at fourteen and created a controversy in the local newspaper. At eighteen, he published his first book, Twenty-five Poems, with two hundred dollars that his mother had raised for him. During this formative period, the major literary influence on his writing were the European classics, especially the English literary canon. Representative of this period is Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos, which was modeled upon James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Thereafter, he published one more volume privately (Poems in 1951); along the way, his interest in the theater also developed. While receiving his college education (1950-1954), he started writing and producing dramatic plays on Caribbean subjects. This new development culminated in the success of Drums and Colours (produced in 1958), which won him a Rockefeller Fellowship to study theater in the United States. Upon his return in 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop, and from then on he played an eminent role in the West Indian theater.

Finding a Voice

Walcott’s apprenticeship in poetry came to fruition with In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960. The book’s title is derived from Andrew Marvell’s “Bermudas,” and many poems evoke the beauty of the islands, with echoes of François Villon, Dante, Catullus, and others. The most significant pieces, however, are those dealing with various aspects of colonialism and Walcott’s sense of cultural confusion. Examples include “Ruins of a Great House” and “Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire.” The often-anthologized poem “A Far Cry from Africa” is the most memorable in this group. Occasioned by the Mau-Mau Uprising and its bloody suppression, the poem dramatizes Walcott’s agony over the political and cultural tensions between the declining British Empire and the insurgent Africa. This poem exemplifies the divided voice that is the hallmark of much of Walcott’s poetry.

During the 1960’s and the 1970’s, at the height of the Black Power movement and the colonial campaign toward independence and self-determination, Walcott’s divided voice was heard but not readily appreciated by his fellow Caribbean natives with zealous nationalist sentiments. This was compounded by the fact that his earlier poems tended to be written in a high-style language that was formal, ornate, and replete with classical allusions, poetic devices, and complex rhyming schemes associated with the polite learning of colonial education. Although such a cultural tension was to remain unresolved, the drive toward synthesis brought about a significant response to his critics with the publication of The Castaway, and Other Poems. The book, which recalls William Cooper’s poem of the same title, contains important poems such as “Laventille” and “Codicil,” but its unity has to be found from poems such as “The Castaway,” “Crusoe’s Island,” and “Crusoe’s Journal.” Robinson Crusoe, the “castaway” of the book, had been occupying Walcott’s attention for some time. Although Crusoe suffers from an interminable isolation that bespeaks Walcott’s situation, this shipwrecked hero personifies Walcott’s view that it is important for colonized peoples to regard their predicament not in terms of loss and nothingness but rather as a beginning; instead of lamenting their past and their suffering, it would be more fruitful to start creating a new world. The Crusoe figure is a significant emblem of Walcott’s synthesizing impulse in that, as a composite of Adam (the archetypal man of the Old World) and Columbus (the archetypal discoverer of the New World), Crusoe is one who can create his own world by adapting to an environment akin to the geographical and cultural isolation of the West Indies. Walcott’s concept of a new beginning made possible by the shipwreck is associated with the condition of amnesia—the erasure of the burdens of the past—and with the notion of the tabula rasa, the unfolding of history on the blank page of the present. These and other related ideas were later articulated, with great passion and eloquence, in his crucial but at the time controversial essays “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” (1970) and “The Muse of History” (1974). Informed by the composite myth of Crusoe, Walcott’s poetry subsequent to The Castaway begins to quicken its pace in the direction of reconciling and synthesizing the dualistic opposites in his psyche.

The Poet’s Odyssey

As Walcott’s ties with the United States became closer during the late 1960’s, the frequent plane flights over the Gulf of Mexico inspired him to use the image of the gulf as the title for his next book, The Gulf, and Other Poems, which was combined with The Castaway and republished as The Gulf in 1970. The title can be traced to an epigram in “Crusoe’s Journal” in The Castaway, where Crusoe states that there is “a great gulf fixed” between him and the (old) world he has come from. The “gulf” is both geographical and symbolic. Accordingly, many important poems in The Gulf deal with connections and disjunctions, especially those between the two Americas and between the New World and the Old (for example, “Elegy” and “Negatives”). Significantly, a new element in the book is Walcott’s use of the myth of Odysseus to explore the themes of home, homecoming, exile, memory, and art.

With the publication of The Gulf, Crusoe recedes into the background and becomes absorbed into the Odysseus figure. As a matter of fact, references to Odysseus started appearing even in the earliest of Walcott’s poetry, but their conscious use for thematization rather than embellishment came later. As such, the focus on Odysseus can be regarded as a pivotal point in Walcott’s poetic career. In contrast to Crusoe, Odysseus is a more suitable emblem for Walcott’s project of synthesis, since an important part of Odysseus’ character—as portrayed in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.)—is his stubborn resistance against forgetfulness and erasure; memory, instead of being a source of nostalgia to be indulged in, provides Odysseus with the creative impetus needed for the new beginnings and reconnections that are essential to his homecoming. Subsuming aspects of Adam, Columbus, and Crusoe, the Odysseus myth can be seen in Walcott’s Another Life. This intellectual autobiography in verse represents a return to the poet’s childhood, home, and spiritual source by way of memory; but although it stands on its own as a statement of rediscovery and affirmation of the past, it is also an integral part of a bigger pattern that includes the subsequent volumes, for which the autobiography would serve as a prelude. Walcott’s Odyssean myth, eventually, would metamorphose into Omeros, an epic-size narrative that recasts the Odyssey in Caribbean settings and redefines the meaning of Western civilization in the terms of the New World (St. Lucia, for example, is embodied by a black Helen).

Sea Grapes, the title of which refers to a coastal plant found in tropical America, can be regarded as Walcott’s first organically structured collection, with the myth of Odysseus’ return serving as a unifying factor. The title poem also hints at the poet’s desire to venture beyond the bookish solace provided by the Anglo-European tradition. Related themes such as Adam and the New World (“The Cloud”; “New World”; “Adam’s Song”), exile (“Preparing for Exile”; “At Last”), and naming (“Names”) also figure prominently. Significantly, at the center of the volume Walcott pays tribute to his home island, St. Lucia, in a sequence of poems that employ patois as well as English (“Sainte Lucie”). The desire to immortalize his home island, the sea, and the Caribbean has always been strong in the poet’s life, but here such a desire is expressed with an indulgent tenderness that suggests that Walcott—an Odyssean wanderer—has found memory to be the medicine for his cultural schizophrenia.

The next volume’s title, The Star-Apple Kingdom, is again derived from an indigenous fruit of the Caribbean (the fruit’s “star design” can be seen when it is cut open). The volume opens with “The Schooner Flight,” a narrative poem about a Trinidadian sailor, Shabine, who goes into exile. This Odysseus-like mulatto, whose most memorable line is “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation,” bears many resemblances to Walcott and hence serves as his mask. Concluding the volume is the title piece, “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” a meditation on the colonial and postcolonial history of the West Indies and on the relationship between the developing nations and the British Empire as well as the United States. In the middle of the book is “The Sea Is History,” in which Walcott once again reiterates the notion of a new beginning; here, though, the beginning is “new” not because of forgetfulness but because of the cathartic and transcendental function of nature represented by the sea.

Synthesizing Caribbean Consciousness

Both Sea Grapes and The Star-Apple Kingdom suggest that the poet has located the Caribbean as the center of his consciousness. With the publication of The Fortunate Traveller, which is directly related to Walcott’s frequent travels between the two Americas, it is increasingly evident that he no longer operates on the basis of being “divided” as a person and “split” as an artist, but rather on his new synthesis, the Caribbean consciousness that is at the very core of his existence. St. Lucia, the center of his universe, is where he begins and must return. Alluding to The Unfortunate Traveller (a picaresque tale by Thomas Nashe dated 1594) with a degree of irony, the book rehearses the bittersweet pleasures of exile and travel and attempts to resolve the dilemma by exploring the differences between the North and the South in terms of geography, politics, economics, culture, and so forth. Divided into three sequences (North I, South II, and North III), the book follows a circular pattern typical of a journey with return, though it is also important to note that the persona here is an Odyssean figure with the qualities of a picaro as well. Walcott’s Aegean-evoking Caribbean home is placed at the center, at which the myth of Odysseus reappears (in the lyrical “Map of the New World” and the carnivalesque “The Spoiler’s Return”).

The most important poem in North I is “North and South,” in which Walcott meditates on his psychological break with the British Empire, on the predicament of the African diaspora, and on the problem of racism. In North II, the most important poem is the title piece, “The Fortunate Traveller,” in which the poet—by way of self-mockery—dramatizes the disparity between the industrialized nations and the developing nations, expresses his disgust with colonialism and comes to the bitter conclusion that “The heart of darkness is not Africa./ The heart of darkness is the core of fire/ in the white center of the holocaust.” As “England recedes” (“The Fortunate Traveller”) and as the poet is “falling in love with America” (“Upstate,” from North I), the dualistic existence that has dogged Walcott for many years is being supplanted by an Afro-Caribbean-American identity—an identity yet burdened with a new baggage, for example, the military role of the United States in the developing world that is alluded to in some poems.

Midsummer is a collection of untitled meditations on a wide range of subjects, such as self, memory, art, poetry, language, the imagination, colonialism, Africa, and racial conflicts, with a particular focus on the unifying diversity of the poet’s personal experience as an Afro-Caribbean American. In one of the volume’s best poems (known simply as “XXIII”), Walcott ponders bitterly the relationship between the Shakespearean theater and the practice of racism. Walcott is no longer able to see the English language and the English literary canon as something separable from the imperialism of the British Empire. Such a poem would very likely have startled the younger Walcott. He has come a long way in his spiritual odyssey, and it is only appropriate that such a triumph should find its commemoration in a retrospective volume, Collected Poems, 1948-1984.

Walcott’s next book, The Arkansas Testament, is divided into two sections: Here, which deals mainly with his reconnections with the people and places of his childhood in St. Lucia (see “The Lighthouse”), and Elsewhere, which is concerned with the rest of the world. St. Lucia and the West Indies and the developing world in general continue to occupy a central position in the poet’s universe and loom large even in the Elsewhere section of the book. In “Elsewhere (for Stephen Spender),” for example, the poet notes that

we are free for a while, butelsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventhof this planet, a summary rifle buttbreaks a skull into the idea of a heavenwhere nothing is free, where blue airis paper-frail, and whatever we writewill be stamped twice, a blue letter,its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Even the United States has become a new source of ambivalence in Walcott’s consciousness as he tours around the country. For example, the poet remarks, apropos of the irrelevance of America’s entertainment industry, that “Nothing hurts as much as the word ’California,’” because “There’s sometimes more pain in a pop song than all of Cambodia” (“Summer Elegies II”).

Such observations are important hints about the nature of the volume, the title of which is taken from a sequence of twenty-four poems occasioned by Walcott’s visit to Fayetteville, Arkansas, an experience that triggered a revelation for the poet. Checking into a “$17.50 motel” and waking up early to get his coffee and breakfast, Walcott muses on the dark side of the history of the United States: as the Puritan ideology, the Indian Wars, the slavery of Africans, the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, the prolonged racism in not only the South but also the North, and so forth. One of the most horrible realizations is that there was a “recently repealed law/ that any black out after curfew/ could be shot dead in Arkansas.” These poems constitute a “testament” in the sense that Walcott, then considering whether to become an American citizen or to remain St. Lucian, was wrestling with the meanings and implications of what it is to be an American for a person of color. Wryly ironic and self-mocking, The Arkansas Testament problematizes Walcott’s new Afro-Caribbean American identity and thus arrives at yet another level of complexity.

Omeros and After

Walcott’s magnum opus emerged in 1990 in the form of Omeros, an eight-thousand-line narrative in terza rima stanzas (of mainly iambic hexameter lines). This postcolonial text immortalizes the poet’s home island, St. Lucia—a neglected outpost of empires and the site of contestations (St. Lucia is by personification the black Helen over whom France and Britain battled fiercely for imperial control). The poem revolves around Achilles’ rivalry with Hector to win the love of Helen and his transatlantic (and transhistorical) journey back to West Africa, while leaving behind in the Caribbean his friend Philoctete to tend to an incurable wound in the leg. This complex, multilayered narrative, endowed with epical ramifications, exemplifies the colonial history of the Caribbean as an atrocious tragedy, remembered for the genocide of Amerindians and the slavery of Africans. As the protean poetic figure of Omeros suggests, this is also a tragedy to be survived nonetheless by means of exilic quests for existential meaning, as well as cultural engagements and reconciliations with the legacy of colonialism. Inspired by and responding to canonical authors such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, John Milton, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and Stephen Crane, Walcott has created a world in which heroism is largely enacted by ordinary people (mainly fishermen of African descent), whose struggles for survival and legitimacy are dignified in this postcolonial odyssey, an “epic of the dispossessed.”

Walcott’s poetic output after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature appears to refocus decisively on the self, as the poet reflects and meditates on the meaning of his life experiences as an artist and an individual, addressing inevitably issues of ultimate concern. Tiepolo’s Hound, a book-length poem, traces the Caribbean artist’s search for identity by way of comparison and contrast between the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (born in St. Thomas, 1830; died in France, 1903) and the narrator himself. As a failed painter, the narrator turns to poetry but still finds himself obsessed with the elusive painting of a hound by Giambattist Tiepolo (1696-1726, a Venetian fresco painter and printer), which he is unable to track down despite remembering seeing it before. Illustrated with twenty-six beautiful watercolor paintings by Walcott himself, the book exemplifies the intersections and divergences of the visual and the literary arts and the dialogical relationship between the Caribbean and Europe in matters of art, taste, and imagination. In the elegy that is also used to name the volume, “The Bounty,” the poet pays tribute to his mother Alix Walcott, a “beloved teacher” buried in a cemetery lying “near the white beach stones,” a location to which “the bounty returns each daybreak.” In the poem, Walcott alludes to a series of intricate connections that inform his elegiac memorial: first, between the mother and Captain William Bligh, of HMS Bounty, who survived a mutiny (led by Fletcher Christian) in 1787 and eventually introduced breadfruit to the West Indies (to be used as a cheap source of food for slaves); second, between the narrator as a son and the mutineer Christian who rebelled against the God-Captain; third, between the colonial poet and the “Northhamptonshire Peasant Poet” John Clare (1793-1864); fourth, between the Caribbean native himself and the folkloric, childlike madman Tom O’Bedlam (“I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants”). As a complex synthesis, this poem transmutes the memory of the mother figure into the life-sustaining force of the West Indies, the bounty itself made possible by the confluence of personal memory, colonial archive, literary history, folklore, religious allegory, and mythmaking. With The Prodigal, a book-length poem in which the exile-traveler asks himself, “Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?” the now-cosmopolitan poet appears to be coming to terms, once and for all, with the notion of returning, after an arduous life journey through the physical and cultural landscapes of the Old World and the New, to the “unimportantly beautiful” island home, where the “music of memory, water,” has constituted his entire being all along.

Developed over more than a half century, Walcott’s poetry amounts to a formidable corpus; essentially, though, it emanates from his Caribbean existence, which is the center of his consciousness and the source of his inspiration. Owing to—and in spite of—the many opposites, conflicts, tensions, and confusions inscribed in his mixed heritage, he demands readers to see his poetry in terms of complex negotiations, or navigations, toward resolutions. Such maneuvers make him more than an island poet and indeed more than an African American poet. To characterize Walcott, it may be appropriate to borrow a line from one of his characters: “I had no nation now but the imagination.” In the final analysis, however, Walcott’s imagination does not create its own universe out of nothing, but rather out of an inexhaustible energy toward synthesis. It is this propensity toward synthesis, in the interest of a new world, that allows him to transmute the myth of Crusoe into the myth of Odysseus, and himself into the Omeros of his prodigal quest for home.

Bibliography

Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. In the introductory, chapter Baugh addresses the issues and directions pertaining to Walcott’s writing in the cultural and historical contexts of the Caribbean; five other chapters deal with Walcott’s major poetic output up to The Prodigal. Also included is a useful chronology of Walcott’s life and career from 1930 to 2005.

Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott—Memory as Vision: “Another Life.” London: Longman, 1978. Focuses on Walcott’s autobiographical poem.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Derek Walcott. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. In this volume from Bloom’s Modern Critical View series, there are fourteen essays about various aspects of Walcott’s work (with emphasis on his poetry) by significant poets including Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Rita Dove. Bloom’s introductory essay raises questions about Walcott’s “aesthetic eminence” despite the poet’s deserved fame as “a cultural figure of real importance.”

Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Breslin’s analyses of Walcott’s writing up to The Bounty and Tiepolo’s Hound focus on the issue of West Indian identity (as exemplified by the figure of Sabine, who says, “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”) and culminate in a plea for a “just evaluation” of Walcott by considering his “refusal of simplifications.”

Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1991. A collection of essays discussing Walcott as an artist in his poetry (volume by volume up to Omeros), drama, and prose; includes bibliography.

Goldstraw, Irma. Derek Walcott: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works. New York: Garland, 1984. Includes secondary sources and uncollected materials.

Hamner, Robert. Derek Walcott. Updated ed. Boston: Twayne, 1993. A comprehensive introductory study by an authority on Walcott; includes bibliography.

Hamner, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s “Omeros.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Book-length examination of Walcott’s West Indian epic, with considerations of the poet’s “creative imitation or assimilation of alien influences” from classical and contemporary sources; includes extensive bibliography.

Hamner, Robert, ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993. Substantial collection of articles divided into two parts: interviews with and essays by Walcott, and discussions of his career and works up to the early 1990’s; includes an extensive, seventy-page, partially annotated bibliography.

Montenegro, David. “Derek Walcott.” In Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. This article incorporates two interviews, one in 1987, and another in 1990.

Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Discusses Walcott’s poetry from a postmodern/postcolonial perspective; includes select bibliography.

Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. In this Nobel lecture, the poet evokes the violent history, cultural memory, and human geography of the Antilles by which his own poetry is informed.

Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. A collection of essays (including the Nobel lecture) in which Walcott examines the paradoxes of Caribbean culture and reviews the significance of writers ranging from Robert Lowell to V. S. Naipaul. Also included is the short story “Café Martinique,” which deals with the colonial writer’s predicaments.