DEREK WALCOTT: CONTEXT POINTS
The notes below are taken from individual analyses of Walcott poems, but they also pertain to
the context of Walcott and his poetry in general. This is a revision sheet which will help you to
connect the dots between the different poems and understand the deeper idea that underpin his
writing. Note that some context points are more specific to the particular poem, whereas others
are about Walcott’s own ideas and beliefs in general, so be careful with which ones you choose
to use in your own essay writing.
“Forest of Europe”
Osip Mandelstam - a Russian Soviet poet and essayist who was imprisoned by the
Soviet government in 1930, under Joseph Stalin’s rule. He was born in Poland into a
Polish-Jewish family under the Russian Empire, and his family relocated to St
Petersburg, Russia, soon after his birth. Politically, at first, he supported the Bolsheviks
and the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s; his poetry was populist - for the people -
and actively opposed elitist beliefs. However, once the Bolsheviks gained power they
started forcing all art forms to be adapted to their own political ends, and Mandelstam
resisted this. In 1922 he published the collection Tristia, which champions the individual
over the collective, suggesting that his political sympathies had changed drastically to
no longer support the comradeship and reverence for government proposed by the
Russian Communist State. This led to him being rejected even by other Russian artists
and poets, most of whom had been coerced into aligning their work with the Communist
cause. In the 1930s, he became a specific target of the Communists and when he
released a satirical and critical poem in 1933 entitled ‘Stalin Epigram’ for a private
audience, he was arrested and tortured. His friend and supporter Nikolay Bukharin, a
man prominent in Stalin’s Russia, managed to prevent Mandelstam from being
executed, and instead, he was exiled to the Ural Mountains. His exile ended in 1937 but
when he traveled back to Moscow, he found that the state had seized his former home.
His health took a turn for the worse, and then he was arrested again whilst recovering in
a sanatorium. He was sent to the Gulag and died in 1938 after being imprisoned in
forced labor camps.
Neva - a river that runs across Northwestern Russia, through St Petersburg - the former
capital of Russia. The line that is repeated in the poem - ‘the rustling of ruble notes by
the lemon Neva’ perhaps refers to government corruption and money exchanging hands
by the bank of the river. The adjective ‘lemon’ also is arguably a reference to pollution
,and corruption, since the Neva once had a thriving ecosystem around it, but that was
destroyed with industrialization.
Cossacks - are a group of East Slavic people (mostly Southern Russian and Ukrainian
Orthodox Christians), who have a reputation for military might and horsemanship,
though modern Cossacks do not have as fearsome a reputation as their antecedents.
Gulag Archipelago - a non-fiction text by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
about life in the Gulag, Soviet forced labor camps that were set up for prison inmates.
The text is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own exile and imprisonment. It exemplifies the
oppression of the Soviet regime, taking the form of a ‘literary investigation’, constructing
a story through a series of reports, interviews, statements, diary entries, and
documents. In Russia, the Gulag and the atrocities that its prisoners faced was
considered a taboo subject until the 1980s, despite the text being published in 1973,
and other writers also speaking out against the horrors they had experienced when
imprisoned by the Soviet Union.
Trail of Tears - the Trail of Tears is the name given to the forced relocations that the
Five Tribes (the Native American Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole
nations) were made to take between the 1830s and 1850s. Around 60,000 Native
Americans were removed by the US government from their homelands in the Southern
US and forced to march for several weeks to the Indian Territory, Oklahoma. The
journey was tough, and many died from starvation and sickness along the way.
“Ebb”
Like many of Walcott’s other poems, “Ebb” concerns itself with the environment and
therefore elaborates on nature and observes its decline in the face of industrialization
and greed. There is little mention of a human protagonist and instead, the palette of
nature takes center-stage.
Industrial Revolution - from the 1750s onwards, the Western world underwent a
significant change in the infrastructure of its towns and cities; people migrated from
living and working rurally on farms and crafts to living in cramped, overcrowded
conditions and working in factories that mass produced goods using newly developed
machines. This shift was echoed in the wider world and today the effects of the
industrial revolution can be seen globally. The shoreline ‘littered with rainbow muck, the
afterbirth of industry’ shows the detrimental effect that humans and industrialisation
, have upon nature, as in order to produce and consume goods, byproducts such as
plastic waste and oils are created, and thus the beauty and diversity of the world’s
oceans are destroyed.
The Caribbean - Walcott was born in the West Indies, and much of his poetry explores
how it feels to be in that environment - therefore, when picturing the imagery of the
poem we should view a tropical / Caribbean setting.
Imagism - Imagism is a modernist poetry technique that developed in the early 1900s
as a response to advances in technology, such as the development of photography and
film. It attempts to capture impressions of the world using a series of snapshots or
vignette-like images. Walcott is heavily influenced by modernism, and especially the
poet’s TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, who are credited with developing and popularizing
imagism. This genre of poetry also heavily reinforces the central themes of the poem -
namely the way technological progress influences our experience as humans on the
planet and differentiates us from other animals and elements of nature.
Imagism is a type of poetry that focuses on imagery and imitating in writing the way in
which we view images through photography and film in the modern world.
“Oddjob, a Bull Terrier”
The poem was first published in 1976, in Walcott’s collection entitled ‘Sea Grapes’.
Walcott was 46 years old at the time - a middle-aged man who had experienced some
significant moments of loss and grief at this point in his life. His father died when he was
only 30 years old and Walcott himself was very young, so in some ways, he was
accustomed to loss from an early age. Yet, here he shows the difficulty of expressing
words that properly capture how he feels about the loss of his dog - a bull terrier, a
breed that looks a little fierce but is known for its loyalty and companionship. He
concludes that it is impossible to put the feelings into words, but at the same time, the
silence is more respectful anyway, as it shows the deepest expression of love - a kind of
expression that only comes out when a person experiences a great loss in their lives,
which is an indication of their great capacity for love and the dearness and importance
of the person or pet that has been lost.
Critic Valerie Trueblood in 1978. said that the poem “Oddjob, A Bull Terrier” “is in a
special English tradition of animal poems: we think of Hardy’s poem to his cat.”
She noted how the poem appeared near the end of his collection, in a “serious” position
that meant it was intended to be read deeply and seriously. She observes further that
