Walcott Biography

Derek Walcott was born on the island of St. Lucia, then a British colony, in 1930. His father, who had been a civil servant and a watercolorist, died when Walcott was one year old, leaving him and his siblings to be brought up by his schoolteacher mother. From an early age, Walcott was drawn to both painting and poetry and credits some excellent teachers for nourishing his interests, the earliest of whom was Harold Simmons, under whose direction Walcott began to seriously study painting. While his painting remained important to him throughout his life, literature laid a greater claim on him. In an interview he noted that “I’m content to be a moderately good watercolourist. But I’m not content to be a moderately good poet” (CDW 102). Of poetry and the influence of his solidly British education, he recalls that “I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from estrangement” (What the Twilight Says 28). In 1950, he received a scholarship to study at the University of the West Indies in Jamacia and after graduation spent time teaching in both Jamacia and the neighboring island of Grenada. After receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1958 to study drama in the U.S., Walcott settled on the island of Trinidad, where, in 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he directed for the next seventeen years. While primarily known as poet, Walcott was also a successful playwright and dramaturg (his play Dream on Monkey Mountain received an Obie Award for the most distinguished off-Broadway play in 1971). In addition to the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, he later founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981. He has expressed surprise that more poets aren’t also writing drama and has talked about the relationship between poetry and drama stating that “the feel of the play is very like a large poem. . . . They both have the same kind of chording” (CW 92).  

He published his first three collections of poetry beginning at age eighteen by borrowing the money from his mother to have them locally printed. He then sold the books himself and was able to repay the loan. Walcott’s first collection of poetry printed by an established publisher and one that garnered more widespread attention was In a Green Night (1962). In it, readers see him clearly establishing some of the tensions that would characterize much of his subsequent work. In the widely anthologized “A Far Cry from Africa,” the speaker asks,

                                                         how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give? (PDW 27-28)

This sense of conflicting loyalties, of a mixed heritage, of being an outsider who resists the too-easy categorizations of race and history, would later get one of its fullest representations in the voice of Shabine, the mixed-race poet narrator of his long poem “The Schooner Flight” from his 1979 book The Star Apple Kingdom:

I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (PDW 238)

This acute awareness of, and struggle against, the legacy of history and the expectations of the present are not surprising given the period of great transition in the Caribbean that Walcott witnessed. During the 1960s and 1970s most of the islands, including St. Lucia, gained independence, and Walcott’s work grapples with the results of this. He evokes the complexity of his personal situation and that of the region, the post-colonial Caribbean. The poet Joseph Brodsky describes Walcott’s stance this way:

Whether accepted or rejected, the colonial heritage remains a mesmerizing presence in the West Indies. Walcott seeks to break its spell neither by plunging “into incoherence of nostalgia” for a nonexistent past nor by finding for himself a niche in the culture of departed masters . . . . He acts out of the belief that language is greater than its masters or its servants, that poetry, being its supreme version, is therefore an instrument of self-betterment for both; i.e., that it is a way to gain an identity superior to the confines of class, race, and ego.

As the poet Edward Hirsch says, “Walcott is ultimately a poet of affirmations, a writer who believes that the task of art is to transcend history and rename the world. (Hirsch “nobody …”313).

In the books that following In a Green Night, The Castaway (1965) and The Gulf (1969), Edward Baugh sees Walcott “turn[ing] a harsher, more critical gaze on life, on his socio-historical environment and on himself” (47). For example, in the poems “Crusoe’s Journal” and “Crusoe’s Island” from The Castaway, Walcott uses the figure or Robinson Crusoe to represent “variously isolation, disconnection, loss and, at the same time, the clarity of vision allowed by distance, as well as resourcefulness, creativity and the capacity to endure” (Baugh 48).

This processing of the fresh world around him through a consciousness that resists history and its categories perhaps contributes to the strong lyricism in his work. He has said that for him “poetry always is moving to a condition of song” (CDW 30). He has speculated that this sensibility comes to him partly from the Calypso culture and believes that at some level the poet is performing for his audience the way a Calypso singer is (CDW 59). Even in his long narrative works like “The Schooner Flight” and Omeros (1990) what often strikes the reader is the lyric beauty of his lines that both set and propel the narrative. Thus the opening lines of “The Schooner Flight” do more than provide narrative exposition; they also create a music and mood evocative of the speaker’s inner state:

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees. (PDW 237)

In passages like this Walcott suggests how to leave behind limiting, socially constructed narratives and  find through music and imagery  a more satisfactory, complex way of engaging with the world around him.

Looking Inward, Branching Outward

In Another Life (1973), Walcott made his first sustained foray into what would later become characteristic of his work, the long narrative poem. Another Life has been described as a verse autobiographical novel. So he begins with an image of the sea as a book—a telling one in a work where autobiography is entwined with geography:

Verandas, where the pages of the sea

are a book left open by an absent master

in the middle of another life—

I begin here again,

begin until this ocean’s

a shut book, and, like a bulb

the white moon’s filaments wane. (PDW 122)

As with his other works Another Life explores the sense of an artist variously estranged from and longing to connect with his original place, his original culture—but on his own terms. One writer describes it as a “poem that examines the important roles of poetry, memory, and historical consciousness in bridging the distances within the postcolonial psyche” (Scholarblogs).

Following Another Life, came a series of lyric collections, each wrestling with these issues from a different perspective. During this middle period of his career some of his finest books were published, including The Star Apple Kingdom (1979) and Midsummer (1984). It was during this period that Walcott also received increasing international recognition for his work. He was made an Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979, awarded a MacArthur Fellow Award in 1981, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1988. While he had previously taught at a number of American universities as a visiting professor (e.g., Columbia, Harvard), beginning in 1981, he was appointed to a position at Boston University, where he would remain until retiring in 2007. It was during this time that he also befriended other major poets whose work would influence his own—poets such as, the American Robert Lowell, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was teaching at Harvard, and the Russian exile poet Joseph Brodsky who also taught at a number of schools. (Like Walcott, Heaney and Brodsky would both be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—Brodsky in 1987, Heaney in 1995.)

In 1990, Walcott published what many critics consider his greatest work, Omeros. At one level this poem reframes Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in terms of the modern Caribbean, recounting the rivalry between a fisherman named Achille and a taxi driver named Hector who vie for the love of a housemaid Helen. But the poem is much more complex than that. Walcott, too, as the narrator, appears, and while the Caribbean setting can be seen as a counterpart to Homer’s Aegean, the poem also includes a dream journey by Achille to Africa and the narrator’s journey to the American Southwest to witness a Sioux ghost dance. Walcott has discussed whether or not the poem might properly be considered an epic, acknowledging that “the design of it is,” but explaining that it also has features that make it different from the epic (qtd. in Baugh 186). Edward Baugh calls the poem  “a narrative poem with novelistic features,” and sees it as part of the continued development of Walcott’s interest in genre and as a continued exploration of themes of estrangement and reconciliation (Baugh 185).

It was shortly following the publication of Omeros that Walcott’s writing received its highest recognition when in 1992 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy described as a body of work “of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” (Nobel Walcott Facts). The Noble Committee described Omeros as a work of “incomparable ambitiousness, in which Walcott weaves his many strands into a whole. Its weft is a rich one, deriving from the poet’s wide-ranging contacts with literature, history and reality” (Nobel Press Release). In his address to the Academy, Walcott reiterates the importance for a writer from the Antilles (the Caribbean) to transcend the constraints and myopia of what he calls the “sigh of History” (with a capital H): “Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.” He sees his position as one in which for the writer “[t]here is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when . . .[he] finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn” (Walcott Lecture).