In this memorable excerpt from the play, Caliban, the island’s native inhabitant, speaks to the shipwrecked sailors and urges them not to fear the strange noises of the island. Critics often point to the extraordinary beauty and lyricism of Caliban’s speech, noting the irony that Shakespeare gives some of the play’s most poetic language to the character other Europeans in the play consider “savage” or “primitive.” Through Caliban’s vivid imagery and emotional sensitivity, Shakespeare challenges assumptions about civilization, humanity, and who is capable of wisdom and imagination.

In this poem by Robert Browning, Caliban contemplates the role of god while meandering in the mud. With respect to Setebos, Caliban considers his deity as powerful and cruel, touching on themes of religion and the human condition, conveying a perspective contrasting his brutish nature with the god he imagines. 

Influenced by Derek Walcott's poem "The Schooner Flight," Malcolm Friend's poem "Caliban Theory" revolves around the pain of being a fragmented child as a manifestation of the Caribbean diaspora. The speaker in this poem conveys the disparate parts of one's self that linger across time and place. Similar to Walcott's poem, Friend's speaker asks:

           "who am i?

            either i’m nobody or

            i’m all of the nations

            or i am no nation or i’m a

            singular, ephemeral nation—"

In literature, Caliban, an enslaved, monstrous native of the island in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, serves as a symbol of the "other," the dispossessed, and often as an emblem of uprooting and marginalization via colonialism. In this poem by Iorek, the speaker finds the words of Caliban on a weathered stone suggesting the folly of men and their fall to crude appeals.