Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented, "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." He describes the experience of the poet: "The body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature".[6]
He notes that "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity".[6]
West Indies as colonized space.
In his 1970 essay, "What the Twilight Says: An Overture," discussing art and theatre in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Absolutely a Caribbean writer",
Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.[6] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes, "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."[
Walcott's work weaves together a variety of forms, including the folk tale, morality play, allegory, fable and ritual featuring emblematic and mythological characters. His epic book-length poem Omeros (1990), is an allusive, loose reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey within the Caribbean and beyond to Africa, New England, the American West, Canada, and London, with frequent reference to the Greek Islands. His odysseys are not the realm of gods or warriors, but are peopled by everyday folk. Composed in terza rima and organized by rhyme and meter, the work explores the themes that run through Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in salving the rents among them.[
1992 Nobel Prize in Literature
2008 Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex
2011 T. S. Eliot Prize (for poetry collection White Egrets)[4]
List of works
Poetry collections
1948 25 Poems
1949 Epitaph for the Young: Xll Cantos
1951 Poems
1962 In a Green Night: Poems 1948—60
1964 Selected Poems
1965 The Castaway and Other Poems
1969 The Gulf and Other Poems
1973 Another Life
1976 Sea Grapes
1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom
1981 Selected Poetry
1981 The Fortunate Traveller
1983 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden
1984 Midsummer
1986 Collected Poems, 1948-1984
1987 "Central America"
1987 The Arkansas Testament
1990 Omeros
1997 The Bounty
2000 Tiepolo's Hound, includes Walcott's watercolors
2004 The Prodigal
2007 Selected Poems (Edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh)
2010 White Egrets
Omeros
Omeros is a 1990 epic poem by Caribbean writer Derek Walcott. Many consider it his finest work. "The girl who typed it was saying, 'This is going to win the Nobel prize,' " Walcott was later to remarkHe did, in 1992.
Overview
The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros (Homer in Greek) it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
The narrative of Omeros is multilayered. Walcott focuses on no single character; rather, many critics have taken the "hero" of Omeros to be the island of St. Lucia itself.
The narrative draws heavily on the legacy of the Homeric epics; Book One even opens with an invocation of the Greek poet, who is likened to the blind character, Seven Seas. However, while many characters within the epic derive their appellations from Homeric characters, this is the only absolute correlation; the themes are Homeric in inspiration, but the story does not imitatively follow the plot of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Achille has been identified as Achilles, but also as Menalaus and Odysseus. Hector has been connected to Paris and Agamemnon, Plunkett to Priam, Nestor, and even Paris. Helen is Helen, but also possibly Cassandra, and Ma Killman, Patroclus and Andromache (whose Greek name means "battle" and "man"). The story can be divided into three main threads, all of which are introduced in Book One of the poem.
The first follows the rivalry of the Homerically-named Achille and Hector over their love for Helen. Considerable attention is paid to Philoctete, an injured fisherman inspired by Homer's and Sophocles' Philoctetes.
The second is the interwoven story of Sergeant Major Plunkett and his Irish wife Maud, who live on the island and must reconcile themselves to the history of British colonization of St. Lucia.The final thread is the tale of the poet-narrator, who comments on the action of the poem and partakes in many trans-Atlantic journeys and wanderings himself.
The poem is ambitious in scope. Walcott draws on Homer, Virgil, and also Dante (the form of the poem is reminiscent of the Dante-invented terza rima). Themes presented in this poem include nostalgia, colonialism, historiography, homecoming, paternity, poetry, and love. If any theme binds the characters together, it is a universal human desire for communion with the past.
Walcott has been praised for his rich and inventive use of language in Omeros.
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.
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