Derek Alton Walcott, OBE
OCCThe Order of the Caribbean Community is an award given toThe award was initiated at the Eighth Conference of Heads of State and Governments of CARICOM in 1987 and began bestowal in 1992. Decisions as to award are taken by the Advisory Committee for the Order of the Caribbean CommunityThe Insignia...
(born 23 January 1930) is a
Saint LuciaSaint Lucia is an island country in the eastern Caribbean Sea on the boundary with the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the Lesser Antilles, it is located north/northeast of the island of Saint Vincent, northwest of Barbados and south of Martinique. It covers a land area of 620 km2 and has an...
n poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the
T. S. Eliot PrizeThe T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...
in 2011 for
White Egrets.
["TS Eliot prize goes to Derek Walcott for 'moving and technically flawless' work". Guardian 24 January 2011] His works include the Homeric epic
Omeros.
Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries”.
Early life
Walcott was born and raised in
CastriesCastries , population 10,634, aggl. 37,963 , is the capital city of Saint Lucia, a country in the Caribbean. The district with the same name had a population of 61,341 in 2001-05-22, and stretches over an area of ....
,
Saint LuciaSaint Lucia is an island country in the eastern Caribbean Sea on the boundary with the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the Lesser Antilles, it is located north/northeast of the island of Saint Vincent, northwest of Barbados and south of Martinique. It covers a land area of 620 km2 and has an...
, in the West Indies with a twin brother, the future playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister. His mother, a teacher, had a love of the arts who would often recite poetry.
["Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37" by The Paris Review Winter 1986] His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at 31 from
mastoiditisMastoiditis is an infection of mastoid process, the portion of the temporal bone of the skull that is behind the ear which contains open, air-containing spaces. It is usually caused by untreated acute otitis media and used to be a leading cause of child mortality. With the development of...
.
The family came from a minority Methodist community, which felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island. As a young man he trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for Walcott. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and
GiorgioneGiorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
and sought to learn from them.
Walcott then studied as a writer, becoming “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
.
[Poetry Foundation profile] Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the Poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote
Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.
At 14, Walcott published his first poem in
The Voice of St Lucia, a
MiltonicJohn Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, religious poem. In the newspaper, an English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous.
By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections,
25 Poems (1948) and
Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), which he distributed himself.
[Academy of American poets profile] He commented "I went to my mother and said, 'I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it’s going to cost me two hundred dollars.' She was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back."
Influential Barbadian poet
Frank CollymoreFrank Appleton Collymore MBE was a famous Barbadian author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was "Barbadian Man of the Arts"....
critically supported Walcott's early work.
Career
With a scholarship he studied at the
University of the West IndiesThe University of the West Indies , is an autonomous regional institution supported by and serving 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica,...
in
Kingston, JamaicaKingston is the capital and largest city of Jamaica, located on the southeastern coast of the island. It faces a natural harbour protected by the Palisadoes, a long sand spit which connects the town of Port Royal and the Norman Manley International Airport to the rest of the island...
[British Council Profile] then moved to Trinidad in 1953, becoming a critic, teacher and journalist.
Walcott founded the
Trinidad Theatre WorkshopTrinidad Theatre Workshop was founded by 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott in 1959. In its inaugural season, the Workshop presented The Blacks by Jean Genet, Eric Roach's Belle Fanto, and The Road by Wole Soyinka...
in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection
In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) saw him gain an international public profile.
He founded the
Boston Playwrights' TheatreFounded in 1981 by poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, Boston Playwrights' Theatre is an award-winning small professional theatre dedicated to promoting the writing and production of new plays in Boston, Massachusetts....
at
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
in 1981. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University, retiring in 2007. His later collections include
Tiepolo’s Hound (2000),
The Prodigal (2004) and
White Egrets (2010), which was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the first Caribbean writer to receive the honor. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”
In 2009, he began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the
University of AlbertaThe University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...
. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the
University of EssexThe University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...
.
Controversies
In 1981 Walcott was accused of sexual harassment of a freshman student at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, and reached a settlement in 1996 over a sexual harassment allegation at
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
. In 2009, Walcott became a leading candidate for the position of
Oxford Professor of PoetryThe chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford is an unusual academic appointment, now held for a term of five years, and chosen through an election open to all members of Convocation, namely, all graduates and current academics of the university; in 2010, on-line voting was allowed....
but withdrew his candidacy after a whispering campaign raised the profile of earlier sexual harassment allegations. No new information about the well-publicised 1996 case came to light at this time. The position was awarded to
Ruth PadelRuth Sophia Padel is a British poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She also writes non-fiction and more recently fiction, broadcasts on wildlife, poetry and literature for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and is Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute,...
, but she resigned after only nine days when her involvement in the smear campaign against Walcott was revealed. Padel's comportment in the affair was roundly criticized by a number of respected poets in a letter of support addressed to Walcott and published in the
Times Literary Supplement.
Themes
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
YeatsW. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...
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".
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".
Walcott has published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the
Trinidad Theatre WorkshopTrinidad Theatre Workshop was founded by 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott in 1959. In its inaugural season, the Workshop presented The Blacks by Jean Genet, Eric Roach's Belle Fanto, and The Road by Wole Soyinka...
, and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them deal, either directly or indirectly, with the liminal status of the West Indies in the postcolonial period. Much of his poetry also seeks to explore the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy. 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, and the problems presented by 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". Discussions of epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as
Ti-Jean and his Brothers. In the play, 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, and as such is unable to be synthesized and thus is inapplicable to his existence as colonised person.
Yet Walcott notes of the Caribbean "what we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a
DefoeDaniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
, a Dickens, a Richardson."
Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Carbibbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.
In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play
Pantomime (1978), he works with the metaphors of shipwreck and
CrusoeRobinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
to describe the position of rebuilding after colonialism and slavery: the freedom to re-begin and the challenge of it. 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 folktale, morality play, allegory, fable and ritual featuring emblematic and mythological characters. His epic book length poem
OmerosOmeros is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott. Many consider it his finest work.-Overview:The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.The narrative of Omeros is multilayered...
, is an allusive, loose reworking of
HomerIn the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
ic 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 rimaTerza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.-Form:Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D...
and organized by rhyme and meter, the work echos 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.
Walcott's friend
Joseph BrodskyIosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...
commented: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."
A close friend of the Russian Brodsky and the Irish
HeaneySeamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, Walcott noted that the three of them were a band of poets "outside the American experience". Walcott's writing was also influenced by the work of friends
Robert LowellRobert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
and
Elizabeth BishopElizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
.
Awards and honours
- 1969 Cholmondeley Award
- 1971 Obie Award for Dream on Monkey Mountain
- 1972 OBE
- 1981 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship OBIE ("genius award")
- 1988 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
- 1990 Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize
- 1990 WH Smith Literary Award for Omeros
- 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature
- 2008 Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex
- 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for White Egrets
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 The Arkansas Testament
- 1990 Omeros
Omeros is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott. Many consider it his finest work.-Overview:The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.The narrative of Omeros is multilayered...
- 1997 The Bounty
- 2000 Tiepolo's Hound
- 2004 The Prodigal
- 2007 Selected Poems (Edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh
Edward Alston Cecil Baugh is a Jamaican poet and scholar, recognised as an authority on the work of Derek Walcott.He was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and began writing poetry at Titchfield High School...
)
- 2010 White Egrets
Plays
- (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes
Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes is a play by Derek Walcott. It was first published in 1950.It is an historical play about king Henri Christophe of Haiti, from 1804 to 1820....
- (1951) Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production
- (1953) Wine of the Country
- (1954) The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act
- (1957) Ione
- (1958) Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama
- (1958) Ti-Jean and His Brothers
- (1966) Malcochon: or, Six in the Rain
- (1967) Dream on Monkey Mountain
Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play by Derek Walcott. It was first published in 1967....
- (1970) In a Fine Castle
- (1974) The Joker of Seville
- (1974) The Charlatan
- (1976) O Babylon!
- (1977) Remembrance
- (1978) Pantomime (Walcott play)
- (1980) The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two Plays
- (1982) The Isle Is Full of Noises
- (1986) Three Plays The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken
Beef, No Chicken is a two-act play by Caribbean playwright Derek Walcott, written in 1981. The play is set in the Trinidadian town of Couva...
, and A Branch of the Blue Nile)
- (1991) Steel
- (1993) Odyssey: A Stage Version
- (1997) The Capeman
The Capeman is a musical play written by Paul Simon and Derek Walcott based on the life of Salvador Agrón. The play opened at the Marquis Theatre in 1998 to poor reviews and had an initial run of only 68 performances....
(lyrics, in collaboration with Paul SimonPaul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.Simon is best known for his success, beginning in 1965, as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached number one on the US singles...
)
- (2002) Walker and The Ghost Dance
Other books
- (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, Barbados Advocate (Barbados)
- (1990) The Poet in the Theatre, Poetry Book Society (London)
- (1993) The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory Farrar, Straus (New York)
- (1996) Conversations with Derek Walcott, University of Mississippi (Jackson, MS)
- (1996) (With J Brodsky and S Heaney) Homage to Robert Frost Farrar, Straus (New York)
- (1998) What the Twilight Says (essays), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
- (2002) Walker and Ghost Dance, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
- (2004) Another Life: Fully Annotated, Lynne Rienner Publishers (Boulder, CO)
Further reading
- Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.
- Baugh, Edward, Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision: Another Life. London: Longman, 1978.
- Baugh, Edward, Derek Walcott. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
- Breslin, Paul. Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U. Chicago, 2001. ISBN 0-226-07426-9
- Brown, Stewart, ed., The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, PA.: Dufour, 1991; Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992.
- Burnett, Paula, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
- Gazzoni, Andrea, Epica dell'arcipelago. Il racconto della tribù, Derek Walcott, "Omeros". Firenze: Le Lettere, 2009. ISBN 88-6087-288-X
- Hamner, Robert D., Ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1993. ISBN 0-89410-142-0
- Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott. Updated Edition. Twayne's World Authors Series. TWAS 600. New York: Twayne, 1993.
- Heaney, Seamus, ‘The Murmur of Malvern’, in The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, pp. 23–29.
- King, Bruce, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: ‘Not Only a Playwright But a Company’: The Trinidad Theatre Workshop 1959-1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
- King, Bruce, Derek Walcott, A Caribbean Life. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
- Lennard, John
John Lennard is Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, and a freelance academic and writer.-Biography:...
, 'Derek Walcott' in Jay Parini, ed., World Writers in English. 2 vols, New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004, II.721–46.
- Parker, Michael and Roger Starkey, Eds. New Casebooks: Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995. ISBN 0-333-60801-1
- Sinnewe, Dirk, Divided to the Vein? Derek Walcott’s Drama and the Formation of Cultural Identities. Saarbrücken: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001 [Reihe Saarbrücker Beiträge 17]. ISBN 3-8260-2073-1
- Terada, Rei, Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
- Thieme, John, Derek Walcott. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.
- Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, 1970. ISBN 0-374-50860-7
Profiles
Articles and interviews