Walcott Biography
Although he embraces a cosmopolitanism in both his life and his work that is characteristic of many modern writers, at the core of his poetry is a deep-rooted sensibility nourished by his birthplace. That birthplace, of course, comes with its unique set of historical complexities, and Walcott is not unaware of what he calls “the sigh of history” (What the Twilight Says 68). Rather than succumbing to reductive stereotypes, however, Walcott sees the Caribbean as a place full of possibility, a quasi-Edenic spot where the Adamic poet can strike out on his own and by naming transmute his experience of the world into something new (CDW 54). As his biographer Edward Baugh writes, this attitude results in a “commitment to the idea of the Caribbean as home for Caribbean people, and to the idea of Caribbeanness as a viable condition for a distinctive, nurturing and sustainable culture. (Baugh 16). Throughout a distinguished career, one that included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Derek Walcott’s poetry consistently gave life to his places and created what fellow Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney calls a poetry that “comes . . . from the stored sensations of the actual” (Heaney 24).
Setting Out: The Sigh of History
I knew from childhood that I wanted to be a poet, and like any like any colonial child, I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance. (What the Twilight Says 63).
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.
“Walcott is ultimately a poet of affirmations, a writer who believes that the task of art is to transcend history and rename the world.
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).
poetry always is moving to a condition of song
Writing the World
In works following Omeros like Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) and The Prodigal (2004), Walcott continued with long narrative sequences. Tiepolo’s Hound tells the parallel story of the painter Pissarro and that of the narrator, Walcott, for whom painting had always been a vital element—in fact Tiepolo’s Hound is accompanied by reproductions of 160 of Walcott’s own paintings. In The Prodigal, Walcott’s speaker travels throughout the United States and Europe in sections called “There” and then in the last part of the book, the section entitled “Here,” returns to the Caribbean, to Trinidad and St. Lucia where again the region’s conflicted history, the natural world, and his own relationship to it become focal points. Thus, he writes,
From the salt brightness of my balcony
I look across to the abandoned fort;
no History left, just natural history,
as a cloud’s shadow subtilizes thought. (PDW 542)
The idea that “History” is overshadowed by “natural history” foregrounds the importance of the way ephemeral, fluid place can shape and impinge on the observer more than the staid, recorded “facts”’ of history. Still there is a conflict, a consciousness of that history and its potential to color the mind of those who have inherited it. Thus he writes later,
any man without a history stands in nettles
and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags,
does he, still a child, long for battles and castles
from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language
he will never inherit, but one in which he writes
"Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,"
his whole life a language awaiting translation? (PDW 544)
Walcott’s last book, White Egrets (2010), returns to shorter lyric forms and the elegiac themes. Many of the poems ranging from 12 to 16 lines have the impress of the sonnet beneath them. There are still the old concerns, for example, in poems like “Lost Empire,” where the assertion that “And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden./ Its victories were air, its dominions dirt” leads him to conclude:
at night, the stars
are far fishermen’s fires, not glittering cities,
Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,
but crab-hunters’ torches. This small place produces
nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers
on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens
a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us
merely receiving vessels of each day’s grace,
light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts. (Walcott: PDW582-583)
The bitter irony in the words “This small place produces/nothing” echoes the negative assessment of nineteenth-century travel writers like Anthony Trollope. But it is softened and subsumed by the addition of “beauty” and by the affirmation that we are “receiving vessels of each day’s grace.” Likewise, the book contains reminiscences and evocations of far-off places, Europe, the United States. In “London Afternoon” he reflects of the dreary, tawdriness of a London neighborhood with betting shops and pizza joints and wonders what “these narrow streets, begrimed with age” have
to do with that England on each page
of my fifth-form anthology, now that my mind's
an ageing sea remembering its lines,
the scent and symmetry of Wyatt, Surrey?
Spring grass and roiling clouds dapple a county
with lines like a rutted road stuck in the memory
of a skylark's unheard song, a bounty
pungent as clover, the creak of a country cart
in Constable or John Clare. Words clear the page
Like a burst of sparrows over a hedge (PDW 588-589)
Yet in spite of these larger, cultural issues, the overall focus of the book is more inward and personal throughout. In “Sixty years After,” Walcott has a chance encounter with an old love in an airport lounge. Now both older sitting in wheelchairs, they “sat there, crippled, hating/ time and the lie of general pleasantries.” The poem concludes,
those who knew us
knew we would never be together, at least, not walking.
Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us. (PDW 593)
Beneath all these poems, however, lies the deep influence of the Caribbean, its freshness always drawing him and insisting on the relationship between this place and the forces that shaped it and language itself. The final poem in the book, one of those almost-sonnets, captures this dynamic:
This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges
a headland with mountains appears brokenly
then is hidden again until what emerges
from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea
and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges,
its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road
threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges
of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed
into the widening harbour of a town with no noise,
its streets growing closer like print you can now read,
two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes,
as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes
white again and the book comes to a close. (PDW 606)
A poem like this resonates with much of what is distinctive in Walcott’s work—the transformative identification with place, place that is distilled into a language of its own making. It illuminates Joseph Brodsky’s observation that “[t]he real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical—their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.” With all its burdens of history, with all its conflict both personally for Walcott and at a societal level, what his poetry reminds of us so often is the way that art can speak of and speak through its surroundings. That through the voice of poetry the otherwise ineffable qualities of a society, a people, and a place are made manifest. Or as Walcott himself puts it, “At last, islands not written about but writing themselves!” (Walcott Lecture).
A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
Works Cited
Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. Cambridge University Press 2006
Brodsky, Joseph. “On Derek Walcott.” The New York Review of Books. November 10, 1983
CDW: Conversations With Derek Walcott. Ed. William Baer. University of Mississippi, Jackson. 1996
Hirsch, Edward. “Derek Walcott: Either Nobody—or a Nation.” The Georgia Review, Spring 1995, Vol. 49, 307-313.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Murmur of Malvern.” The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber and Faber 1988 23-29.
Nobel Press Release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/press-release/.
Nobel Walcott Facts: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/facts/.
Scholarblogs. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/walcott-derek/
Walcott, Derek. PDW The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014
Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998
Walcott Lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/