Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott (born January 23, 1930, Castries, Saint Lucia—died March 17, 2017, Cap Estate) was a West Indian poet and playwright noted for works that explore the Caribbean cultural experience and the legacy of colonialism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, cited “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” He was the first Caribbean author to be awarded the prize.

Early life and education

Walcott’s father was a teacher and visual artist who died when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were very young. His mother was a teacher who ran the local Methodist school. Walcott was educated at the Roman Catholic St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He began writing poetry at an early age, later telling The Paris Review,

I grew up in a place in which if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. If you wanted to approximate that thunder or that power of speech, it couldn’t be done by a little modest voice in which you muttered something to someone else.

Among the writers who influenced him were Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and John Millington Synge. From their heightened language and dramatic poetic styles, Walcott developed a grand style of his own that mirrored his upbringing in a place “not inhibited by flourish.”

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Walcott taught at schools in Saint Lucia and Grenada and contributed articles and reviews to periodicals in Trinidad and Jamaica. Productions of his plays began in Saint Lucia in 1950, and he studied theater under José Quintero in New York City in 1958–59. He lived thereafter in Trinidad and the United States, teaching for part of the year at Boston University, where he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (1981). In the late 1950s Walcott and his twin brother founded the Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later the Trinidad Theatre Workshop) in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Poetry

Walcott was best known for his poetry, beginning with In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962). This book is typical of his early poetry in its celebration of the Caribbean landscape’s natural beauty. The verse in Selected Poems (1964), The Castaway (1965), and The Gulf (1969) is similarly lush in style and incantatory in mood as Walcott expresses his feelings of personal isolation, caught between his European cultural orientation and the Black folk cultures of his native Caribbean. Another Life (1973) is a book-length autobiographical poem.

In Sea Grapes (1976) and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Walcott uses a tenser, more economical style to examine the deep cultural divisions of language and race in the Caribbean. Sea Grapes includes the lyrical ode to self-acceptance “Love After Love,” which would become one of his most widely known poems.

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The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

The Fortunate Traveller (1981) and Midsummer (1984) explore Walcott’s own situation as a Black writer in America who has become increasingly estranged from his Caribbean homeland.

Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948–1984 was published in 1986. In his book-length poem Omeros (1990), he retells the dramas of Homer’s ancient Greek epics the Iliad and Odyssey in a 20th-century Caribbean setting, with a fisherman and a taxi driver serving as the heroes. Two years after its publication Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The poems in The Bounty (1997) are mostly devoted to Walcott’s Caribbean home and the death of his mother. In 2000 Walcott published Tiepolo’s Hound, a poetic biography of West Indian-born French painter Camille Pissarro with autobiographical references and reproductions of Walcott’s paintings. (The latter are mostly watercolors of island scenes. Influenced by his father, the poet began painting early on.) The book-length poem The Prodigal (2004), whose setting shifts between Europe and North America, explores the nature of identity and exile. Selected Poems, a collection of poetry from across Walcott’s career, appeared in 2007. Aging is a central theme in White Egrets (2010), a volume of new poems that won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Walcott’s last collection of new poems, Morning, Paramin, was published in 2016.

Plays and other works

Of Walcott’s approximately 30 plays, the best-known are the Obie Award-winning Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced 1967), a West Indian’s quest to claim his identity and his heritage; Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), based on a West Indian folktale about brothers who seek to overpower the Devil; and Pantomime (1978), an exploration of colonial relationships through the Robinson Crusoe story. The Odyssey: A Stage Version appeared in 1993. Like his poetry, many of Walcott’s plays make use of themes from Black folk culture in the Caribbean.

In 1998 Walcott collaborated with musician Paul Simon on the lyrics for the Broadway musical The Capeman, which was based on a 1959 murder case in New York City involving a Puerto Rican street gang. The venture was a critical and commercial failure.

The essays in Walcott’s book What the Twilight Says (1998) are literary criticism. They examine such subjects as the intersection of literature and politics and the art of translation.

Additional honors

Walcott’s many other honors include a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation (1981) and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (1988). He was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.