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Derek Walcott: Life and Works
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Derek Walcott's Life and Works : A Critical Study
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UNIT- 2 DEREK
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WALCOTT - I
Structure
Objectives
St. Lucia
Derek Walcott
2.2.1 Poet
2.2.2 Painter
2.2.3 Dramatist
Crusoe's Journal
2.3.1 Literary SourceIPost-colonial Re-source
2.3.2 The Text
2.3.3 Analysis
2.3.4 Mimicry
Names
2.4.1 A New World and a New Language
2.4.2 The Text
2.4.3 Analysis
2.4.4 Nommo
Let Us Sum Up
Questions
Suggested Readings
The main objectives of this unit are (a) to provide information about Derek Walcott's
life and work as a poet, painter, dramatist and essayist, (b) to look at a representative
selection of his poetry till 1980. The major themes and concerns of Walcott's poetry
will be indicated through a detailed analysis of each of the poems included in this
unit. You can begin by reading the poem and looking up the difficult words in the
glossary accompanying it. Then read the poem along with its analysis. Finally think
about how the poems reflect various aspects of Caribbean culture, what stance the
poet has towards it, and how it is similar to or different from the poets discussed in
the previous unit.
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2.1 ST. LUCIA
, Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of St. Lucia which is a member of the Eastern Derek Walcott-I
Caribbean Association formed after the collapse of the West Indian Federation in
1962. The island is on the Windward side of the Caribbean basin along with
Grenada, Martinique, St. Vincent, Grenadines and Domipica. In the 1500s and 1600s
Britain and France fought for control over these islands. The culture of St. Lucia
reflects the duality of the colonial powers that contended for it for over 160 years. In
1804 the English acquired control but the French left their mark on the language and
customs of the island which had a populat~onof mainly Africans or part-Africans.
The French influence is also visible in Roman Catholicism which is still the principal
religion ofthe island. Most of the St. Lucian population is bilingual or even
trilingual but more comfortable in French creole than in any other language. Walcott
is of African and English parentage and has called his boyhood "schizophrenic." In
an interview with Robert Hamner he said, "I have not only a dual racial personality
I
but a dual linguistic personality. My real language, and tonally my basic language, is
patois." Walcott's poetry reveals the interpenetration of languages: French creole,
English creole, English and even European languages like Latin. As has been
observed by commentators on Walcott's language, there are small examples of "West
Indian vocabulary" placed in "a Standard English setting." Walcott has written about
his "illegitimacy" in the West Indian tradition in his essay "What the Twilight Says:
An Overture" ("WTS"). Here he calls himself "this neither proud nor ashamed
bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian" ( I 0). His poetry reflects this hybridity both at
I the level of language as well as identity. The title of his poem on St. Lucia is "Sainte
Lucie," the creolization indicating the exploration of language thematized in it.
Similarly one of his early poems "A Far Cry from Africa" expresses this theme of an
hybrid identity:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this African and the English tongue I love?
(Collected Poems, hereafter CP, 18)
When I discuss Walcott's poetry I will point out further elaborations on the theme of
hybridity, a much discussed concept in post-colonial theory. One of these is the
feeling of dis-location experienced by the individual who feels a sense of rootlessness
in the culture of hislher origin. Walcott was born in St. Lucia, received "a sound
colonial education" there, studied and worked in Jamaica and Trinidad for some time,
but since the 1970s he has been teaching in the United States. However, the
Caribbean and St. Lucia in particular continues to impress on his creative
imagination. In his epic poem, Omeros (1990), modelled on Homer's Odyssey, he
presents St. Lucia as "the Helen of the West Indies" because thirteen battles were
fought for its control by rival colonial powers. And yet the poet feels a sense of
dissociation from his island when he returns there. This is expressed in "The Light of
the World" in which he represents St. Lucia by mcans of female figures. but as he
passes from the town to the hotel he says it is full of "transients" like himself. St.
Lucia's history, language and culture are constituents of the structure of feeling
which informs Derek Walcott's multigeneric creativity. It is to the various aspects of
this that I will now draw your attention.
2.2 DEREK WALCOTT
2.2.1 Poet
When Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 the Swedish
Academy made a special mention of his epic poem Omeros. Regarded as his
magnun? opus this poem transposes Homeric characters to a St. Lucian setting to
make the epic reflect Caribbean reality. Walcott has never been reticent ahout
, Caribbean Poetry acknowledging that the major influences on his poetic career have been European
and American .4mong the poets he most enjoys reading are Philip Larkin, Ted
Hughes and t;dward Thomas, He admits to have written poems in the manner of
Eliot and Auden at the beginning of his poetic career. That his acknowledgement of
influence might lead to the charge of imitation or non-originality is a danger Walcott
is well aware of. His self-confidence in such acknowledgements stems from what he
calls a "tribal accent." He believes that people in many of the erstwhile colonies who
"grow up speaking the English language" experience no "alienation" from it and
hence their clairn that the langitage belongs to them is justified. Imitation arises only
when these speakers forget their "tribal accent" and try to speak in imitation of the
accent of the original tongue. To this end he has never thought of himself as an
English writer but has let native rhythms permeate his work so that it is not one
particular writer which has influenced him but rather "Literature" in general (Brown
and Johnson, 176-77). Walcott's early poetry is full of echoes from canonical texts
of European lierature. This is especially evident in collections like In A Green Night
( 1962) where the title poem refers to Mawell, The Castaway and Other Poems
(1 965) and The Gzrlf(1970). In his later poetry the work of New World poets like St.
John Perse from Gaudelope, Aime Cesaire from Martinique and Pablo Neruda from
Chile is often acknowledged as providing poetic models. Walcott's friendship with
contemporary poets like Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell and Ted
Hughes has also played a part in his poetic development. Through Brodsky he links
himself to the Russian poet Mandelstam and through Lowell to the idea of America
evinced in his later poetry.
I point out all these varied influences to counter Walcott's appropriation as an
English poet in recent critical scholarship on the one hand and his dismissal on
grounds of r~noriginalityon the other. Like T.S. Eliot's idea of tradition and the
individual talent, Walcott's formulations about a poetic tradition emphasise its
continuity: '"The new poet enters a flux and withdraws, as the weaver continues the
pattern, hand to hand and mouth to mouth, as the rock-pile convict passes the sledge"
("The Muse of History," henceforth "MH). This last comparison between the poet
and the convict links the exercise of the poetic craft to the idea of a continuity of
enforced labour. The way Walcott perceives poetry it becomes a laborious exercise
with the poet being chained to his craft much like a convict. Given the history of
slavery and enforced labour in the Caribbean this seems to me a particalarly apt
metaphor for describing his postcolonial poetics.
2.2.2 Painter
Walcott's artistic development has been strongly imprinted by his father's work as a
painter. Although Warwick Walcott died when Walcott was an infant, he left behind
water colour paintings which, in the author's own words, "gave me a kind of impetus
and a strong sense of cotltiliuity. I felt that what had been cut off in him somehow
was an extension that I was continuing." For a long time Walcott veered between
painting and poetry. He has continued painting over the years and has had important
resationships with the painters Harry Simmons and Dunstan St. Omer, a childhood
friend, to whom some of his poems are dedicated. In Chapter 9 of Another LSfe
Walcott speaks of abandoning his painterly ambitions for poetry:
I hoped that both disciplines might
by painful accretion cohere
and finally ignite,
but T lived in a different gift,
its element metaphor.
Nevertheless, as Rei Terada has observed, his poetry "often considers the arts'
interrelations" and his poems "quietly merge the verbal with the visual" (I 19). The
evanescence of both painting and poetry is a theme often expressed in his work. It is
from his interest in the visual arts that the landscape descriptions in his poetry draw
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