Derek Walcott has studied the conflict between the heritage of European and West

Indian culture, the long way from slavery to independence, and his own role as a nomad
between cultures. "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." In these words from his 1992 Nobel Lecture, poet and playwright Derek
Walcott gives voice to a concern that is not only highly visible thematically in his
expansive body of work, but also central to his life and thought: the tension between
History and the here-and-now texture of the Caribbean world into which he was born. His
poetic oeuvre can be seen as the chorus of many languages and many cultures, and as the
product of a peculiar set of historical circumstances that made the small island of Saint
Lucia in the Caribbean the unlikely birthplace and home of perhaps the preeminent poet
writing in the English language today.
Walcotts widespread recognition as a poet came with IN A GREEN NIGHT
(1964). It manifested his primary aims: to create a literature truthful to the West Indian
life. In THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER (1981) and MIDSUMMER (1984) Walcott
explored his own situation as a black writer in America, who has become estranged from
his Caribbean homeland. The very titles of such books as CASTAWAY (1965) and THE
GULF (1969) referred to his feelings of artistic isolation and alienation. St. Lucia, where
he was born, belongs to a belt of French-speaking islands. Walcott himself is a native
English speaker and bilingual in also speaking Creole, the language of the rural areas.
Walcott's has called himself "a mulatto of style." His most ambitious work is
considered the epic poem OMEROS (1990), which takes its title from the Greek word for
'Homer', and recalls the dramas of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a Caribbean setting. The
central characters are two fishermen, Achilles and Philocrete. Among its subjects are
sufferings of exile and the contemporary Caribbean life. The task of the bard is sing of
lost lives and a new hope. The Odyssean figure of Shabine in 'The Schooner Flight'
expresses his rage against racism and rejection of colonial culture: "I'm just a red nigger
who love the sea, / I had a sound colonial education, / I have Dutch, nigger and English in
me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."
A Far Cry from Africa, (1962) focuses on Walcott's racial and cultural
consternation. The poem highlights the paradoxical problem of recognizing the individual
cultural components of one's heritage without compromising the singular identity that
their mixture creates. The poet maintains I who am poisoned with the blood of
both/Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? This severely pessimistic image illustrates a
consequence of displacement; isolation. Walcott feels foreign in both cultures due to his
lack of pure blood. An individual's sense of identity arises from cultural influences
which define his or her character according to a particular society's standards. The poet's
hybrid heritage prevents him from identifying directly with one culture and creates a
feeling of isolation. The title of the poem emphasizes Walcott's cultural instability as it
implies a type of alienation from Africa, despite its concentration on African themes.
Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of St. Lucia, the posthumous child of a
civil servant and a schoolteacher, and the descendent of two white grandfathers and two
black grandmothers. Though his first language was a French-English patois, he received
an English education, an apprenticeship in language that his mother supported by reciting
English poetry at home and by exposing her children to the European classics at an early
age. In "What the Twilight Says," an autobiographical essay published in 1970, Walcott

writes of the two worlds that informed his childhood: "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 theater
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." Walcotts art arises from this
schizophrenic situation, from a struggle between two cultural heritages, which he has
harnessed to create a unique "creolized" style. His early poetry booklets, published in the
late 1940s reveal a self-conscious apprentice determined to make what Walcott called a
verse "legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlow and Milton." Walcotts early
works seem overpowered by the voices of English poetry, and his entire oeuvre respects
the traditional concerns of poetic form. But his poetry also manifests an elegant blending
of sourcesEuropean and American, Caribbean and Latino, classical and contemporary.
Later apprentice works, including In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, reveal a poet who
has learned his craft from the European tradition, but who remains mindful of West
Indian landscapes and experiences. The task of the young poet, one he undertook with an
enthusiasm for both imitation and experimentation, was to develop an idiom adequate to
his subject matter.
Between 1964 and 1973 he published four volumes, which continued his
exploration and expansion of traditional forms, and which increasingly concerned
themselves with position of the poet in the postcolonial world. The Castaway and
Other Poems (1964) draws on the figure of Robinson Crusoe to suggest the isolation of
the artist. "As a West Indian," Katie Jones suggest, "the poet can be seen as a castaway
from both his ancestral cultures, African and European, stemming from both, belonging
to neither. To salve this split, Walcott creates a castaway who is also a new Adam
whose task is to name his world. Walcotts castaway is a poet who creates and gives
meaning to nothingness." Coping with internal division remains a concern in The Gulf,
which calls on the body of water separating St. Lucia from the United State as a metaphor
for the breach between the poet and all he loves, between his adult consciousness and
childhood memories, between his international interests and the feeling of community in
his homeland. Walcott explored these themes again in Another Life, a book-length
autobiographical poem that examines the important roles of poetry, memory, and
historical consciousness in bridging the distances within the postcolonial psyche.
This investigation transferred to his dramatic writings in the 1970s, which address
the problems of Caribbean identity against the backdrop of political and racial strife, and
which increasingly find solutions to these troubles in the individual. These works also
display an expansion of his artistic concerns into different genres. Derek Walcotts
Spoilers Return (1981) published in the collection The Fortunate Traveller,
highlights Walcott's satiric skills. The Mighty Spoiler is the Calypsonian that Walcott
impersonates in The Spoiler's Return and Bedbug is the calypso which he reworks in
the poem. The calypso is about Spoiler after death, wanting to come back as a bedbug,
but Walcott turns it into a satire. The returned Spoiler is on a mission to reveal a hellish
truth that is the reality of post-independent life in Trinidad.
Walcotts Saddhu of Couva is similar to his Spoilers Return in that the
Saddhu is presented as a dying figure in a contemporary world. Walcott depicts the
Saddhu as an old man at odds with modern life. Walcott impersonates the Saddhu just as
he does the Spoiler. He uses the Saddhu to try to understand time and change, to deal

with a serious subject humorously; that of the problems faced by society worldwide.
However, like the Spoiler, the Saddhu is ignored and misunderstood in society. The
themes and issues dealt with are similar to those explored in The Spoilers Return.
Laventille recognizes a continued European influence and counters that
influence by connecting with Caribbean and African pasts, constructing identity across a
black Atlantic through the discovery of what has been hidden. The poem states a purpose
and preoccupation; the recognition that something has been lost, but the inability to
recover that elusive thing. Throughout the poem, Walcott depicts the nearly indescribable
poverty in the Caribbean through lush imagery. The speaker of the poem repeatedly calls
attention to the nebulous quality of what he feels and the poverty-stricken people about
whom he speaks, Something inside is laid wide like a wound. The poet recognizes that
something is missing and that the Caribbean people have lost their life, religion, and
culture. The deep amnesiac blow prevents the Caribbean people from recovering a
history that has resisted re-telling.
Walcotts poetry also examined the role of poetry through a continuing
examination of the relation of life to art. Much of his poetry reflects the tensions between
his role as an educator at a mainland institution and as a poet from a small island nation.
But even before Walcott began spending most of the year away from the West Indies, his
experience as transient international poet, called to read and lecture around the world, had
supplied his poetry with images of painful departures and the guilty homecomings. In the
title poem of Sea Grapes, for instance, Odysseus is portrayed as a divided man, who
finds himself both a husband going home and an adulterer unable to forget his trespasses.
Walcotts works from the 1980s explore the "bitter sweet pleasures of exile"
experienced when one has become estranged from his beloved homeland, when one has
become divided between "North" and "South" (the subdivisions of The Fortunate
Traveller) and between "Hear and Elsewhere" (The Arkansas Testament). While these
works deal with general themes such as injustice, racism, hatred, oppression, and
isolation, they continually return to inner-divisions of an exile and increasingly to the role
of art in mending these tares. Midsummer is important in this regard, for its lyrics
record a year in the life of the poet, as he returns to the Caribbean from the United States
in search of childhood memories and travels throughout region, recording its sense of
community from the perspective of an outsider. Despite his feelings of loss and his
increasing awareness of cruelty in the world, the poet finds not only the strength to
endure but also some reassurance in artistic vision, in the English and patois languages he
loves, and in masterpieces of modern art.
The Nobel committee singled out a work of poetry when it selected him as
laureate in 1992. Omeros (modern Greek for Homer) is Walcotts most ambitious work
to date, a book-length poem that places his beloved West Indies in the role of the ancient
bards Cyclades. This retelling of the Odyssey is not inhabited by gods and heroic
warriors, but by simple Caribbean fishermen, whose Greek names register their hybrid
identities. And though it is composed in terza rima and organized by rhyme and meter,
Omeros is not an epic in any traditional sense. Rather than describing a single quest, the
shape-shifting narrator, who appears in Homeric guise at several points in the poem,
recounts a number journeys into the hidden corners of colonial history. The success of
Omeros validates the substance of Walcotts entire oeuvre, for here are the themes that
have consistently preoccupied the poet: the beauty of his island home, the burden of a

colonial legacy, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in
addressing these concerns.
Since winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott has continued to write prolifically,
producing a new epic poem, The Bounty, in 1992 and, more recently, a collection of
poems entitled Tiepolos Hounds, which examines the life and art of impressionist
painter Camille Pissarro. In these works, he continues to explore the complex legacy of
colonialism with a poetic vision that recognizes the range of traditions comprising his
beloved West Indies, and with a poetic voice that harmonizes the discord between the
English canon and his native dialect.
It is important to understand how Walcotts personal background influenced his
artistic perspective and his quest for a Caribbean aesthetic. He fills his verse with
ruminations on the nature of memory and the creative imagination, the history, politics
and landscape of the West Indies, his own life and loves, and his enduring awareness of
time and death.