Derek Walcott

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Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist from the West Indies, Derek Alton Walcott (born 1930) used a synthesis of Caribbean dialects and English to explore the richness and conflicts of the complex cultural heritage of his homeland.

Derek Alton Walcott was born in Casties, St. Lucia, West Indies, on January 23, 1930. The son of a civil servant and a teacher, he was of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage. He received a B.A. from St. Mary's College, St. Lucia, in 1953 and attended the University of the West Indies at Kingston, Jamaica. A Rockefeller fellowship brought him to the United States in 1957; he studied under the American stage director Jose Quintero, returned to the islands in 1959 to found the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He taught in St. Lucia, Grenada, and Jamaica and at many American universities: Boston, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, and Yale.

Walcott was married to dancer Norline Metivier and had three children by previous marriages. Unlike fellow West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul, he kept a home in Trinidad and was a familiar and revered figure in his homeland. Walcott received a five-year "genius" grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981.

Central to both Walcott's drama and his poetry is an exhilarating tension between two disparate cultural traditions, the Caribbean and the European. Sometimes the two idioms jostle uncomfortably; yet upon occasion they combine with stunning effect to form a brilliant synthesis.

Walcott observed: "My society loves rhetoric, performance, panache, melodrama, carnival, dressing up, playing roles. Thank God I was born in it… ." In his dramatic works, this vivacious island culture, with its historical roots and its political subtexts, takes precedence. Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (1950), his first play, explores the popular story of a 19th-century slave who became king of Haiti. Another early play, The Sea at Dauphin (1953), experiments with French/English island patois, transforming it into a powerful poetic tool. Dream on Monkey Mountain (Obie Award winner, 1971) illustrates the way the dreams of a poor charcoal vendor, however flawed and quixotic, help preserve tribal memories within the sterile colonial world. O, Babylon (1974) employs interludes of dance, along with a contemporary score by Galt McDermott, to recount events in a small Rastafarian community during the 1966 visit of Haile Selassie.

In all these dramas, Walcott struggled to be true to his roots without sacrificing literary virtuosity. He was eager to incorporate native elements, "chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables," into his dramas;" to write powerfully … without writing down … so that the large emotions could be taken in by a fisherman or a guy on the street"; "to get something clean and simple into my plays … something Caribbean"; and to achieve a balance "between defiance and translation." The central character of Remembrance (1979), a retired schoolteacher of Port of Spain who loses one son to a revolution, another to the "slower death" of art, may reflect his powerful, if conflicting, loyalties.

While Walcott's plays were often commended for their colorful performances, they tended to meet resistance from more stringent critics. Pantomime (1978), which examines the ambiguous relationship between a Tobagan innkeeper and his servant, is one example. Though Walter Goodman found it "fresh and funny … filled with thoughtful insights," Frank Rich downgraded the play for lacking the "esthetic rigor" of Walcott's poetry.

This poetry is, indeed, extraordinary - complex, powerful, almost Elizabethan in its delight in form, its flamboyant eloquence and lush imagery. From the beginning - his first poem was published in a local newspaper when he was 14 - Walcott sought inspiration among great poets of the English language; Shakespeare, Marvell, Auden, Eliot, Lowell. Nevertheless, Caribbean rhythms, themes, and idioms inevitably find their way into the verse - through vivid dialect personae like Shabine, the sailor in The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), often regarded as the poet's alter-ego; in the perennially anguished voice of a "divided child," "schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles," that lurks beneath the cosmopolitan surface.

Walcott's range as a poet was remarkably varied and generous. Another Life (1973), a sweeping, open-hearted narrative, can be ranked among the best verse autobiographies in the language. The exuberant ten-poem sequence The Star-Apple Kingdom, which consolidated Walcott's stature as a major poet, features multiple narrative voices tracing the arc of the Caribbean archipelago through space and time, with near-epic scope.

In The Fortunate Traveller (1981) the poet chronicled provocative journeys of self-discovery through New England and the American South to Dachau and other places that illuminate his sense of himself as artist and man. The 54 separate poems in Midsummer (1984), a diary in verse, offer a year's worth of meditations on approaching middle age, divided linguistic allegiances and the consolations of art. The Arkansas Testament (1987) contains a stunning love sequence, along with the powerful title work, a further exploration of the poet's role as racial and cultural exile. This poignant, accomplished volume shows the poet working at the height of his powers.

Walcott's other popular poems include "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), "Codicil" (1965), "Sainte Lucie" (1976), "The Schooner Flight" (1979), and "North and South" (1981). Collected Poems (1948-1984) (1986) provides an excellent selection of his work.

Walcott's epic-length Omeros, which echoed the Iliad and the Odyssey was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1990. Omeros took up the classic themes of abandonment and wandering, but it also revealed Walcott's love for his native Caribbean. During an interview, Walcott once described the fondness he had for his native homeland surrounded by the sea: "nobody wishes to escape the geography that forms you. In my case it is the sea, it is islands, I cannot stay too long away from the sea."

In 1992 Walcott received the Nobel Prize in literature. His verse play The Odyssey was produced on stage in New York and London in 1993. His love of grand themes continued with the publication of a collection of poems titled The Bounty (June 1997). In Bounty Walcott used his poetic talents to eulogize the beauty of his native land. Walcott's contributions to West Indian drama and poetry were immense. He created a world-class theater ensemble in a post-colonial environment and used his poetic skills to describe the culture and beauty of his Caribbean.

Further Reading

James Altas' article in the The New York Times Magazine, "Derek Walcott: Poet of Two Worlds," (May 23, 1982) gives a lively, balanced picture of the poet. Essays in the New York Review of Books by Helen Vendler (March 4, 1982) and Joseph Brodsky (November 10, 1983) are provocative, yet fair. Robert D. Hamner's Derek Walcott (1981) and Irma Goldstraw's Derek Walcott: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works (1984) are quite useful as well. The poet's revealing essay "What the Twilight Says" appears in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970). Rei Terada's Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Micicry (Northeastern University Press, 1992) is recommended. A collection of critical perspecitves on the works of Walcott was edited by lifelong friend Robert Hammer: Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcot (Critical Perspective No. 26; Passeggiata Press, 1993).

poet; playwright

Personal Information

Born Derek Alton Walcott, January 23, 1930, on Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies; immigrated to United States, late 1950s; son of Warwick (a civil servant and teacher) and Alix (a teacher) Walcott; married Fay Moston, 1954 (divorced, 1959); married Margaret Ruth Maillard, 1962 (divorced); married Norline Metivier (actress and dancer; divorced); children: one son, three daughters.
Education: University of the West Indies, B.A., 1953.

Career

Poet and playwright. Teacher at St. Mary's College, Castries, 1947-50 and 1954, Grenada Boys' Secondary School, St. George's, 1953-54, and at Jamaica College, Kingston, 1955. Feature writer, 1960-62, and drama critic, 1963-68, for Trinidad Guardian (Port-of- Spain, Trinidad); feature writer for Public Opinion (Kingston), 1956-57. Co-founder of St. Lucia Arts Guild, 1950, and Basement Theatre, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; founding director of Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later Trinidad Theatre Workshop), 1959-76; Boston University, assistant professor of creative writing, 1981, visiting professor, 1985--. Visiting professor at Columbia University, 1981, and Harvard University, 1982 and 1987. Also lecturer at Rutgers University and Yale University.

Life's Work

Caribbean poet Derek Walcott is the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature, one the world's most prestigious awards. Walcott won the prize on the strength of his many works of poetry and his plays about island life in a post-colonial era. He is the first native Caribbean writer ever to win a Nobel for literature. His poetry confronts his own mixed ethnic legacy--Walcott is of African, Dutch, and English descent--as well as the multi-ethnic character of the West Indies in general. In the 1981 biography Derek Walcott, Robert D. Hamner wrote: "Nurtured on oral tales of gods, devils, and cunning tricksters passed down by generations of slaves, Walcott should retell folk stories; and he does. On the other hand, since he has an affinity for and is educated in Western classics, he should retell the traditional themes of European experience; and he does. As inheritor of two vitally rich cultures, he utilizes one, then the other, and finally creates out of the two his own personal style."

Walcott's central preoccupation has concerned the union between two racial and social strains that has produced the unique Caribbean culture. He has worked from the "schizophrenic" point of view of an islander raised to respect and appreciate the culture of an enslaving colonial force. Hamner noted that Walcott "is a living example of the divided loyalties and hatreds that keep his society suspended between two worlds." Likewise, New Yorker correspondent Jervis Anderson claimed that in ancestry and cultural heritage, Walcott "epitomized the composite New World culture in the Caribbean--roughly half black and half white--and he had no desire to elevate one component above the other. The two were reconciled in his view of himself as an artist and a 'divided child.'" In one of his best-known poems, Walcott perhaps spoke for himself when he wrote: "I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, / ... I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were born January 23, 1930, in Castries, a colonial town on the small eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia. At the time of Walcott's birth, St. Lucia was part of the British protectorate, but its past as a French colony was evident in the Creole dialect and religious practice of its citizens. Both of Walcott's parents were schoolteachers. His father died when Walcott was only a year old, but his mother compensated for the loss by nurturing her two sons' love of reading and study. She surrounded her children with English literary classics, recited Shakespeare to them, and encouraged them to appreciate poetry and drama.

In those days Castries was a picturesque town with large, ornate Victorian homes nestled among bright tropical gardens. Anderson noted that, as a youth, Walcott spent little time admiring the displays of affluence in the city. "His attention was drawn more strongly to the shanties of the poor, in Castries and elsewhere on the island, occupied by fascinating characters, some of whom later appeared in his book-length autobiographical poem, 'Another Life,'" Anderson commented. "Beyond the sociology of the land, young Walcott's imagination was transfixed by the sea: its sounds; its fishermen and schooner men; its far horizon of limits and possibilities; the dangerous seductions of its calm and stormy moods; its record of local drownings; its legends of shipwreck and isolation." This youthful fascination with St. Lucia's seafaring class would one day be translated into powerful poetry in the Homeric tradition. Walcott told the New Yorker: "Islands are great places to live in because the sea is close and there is the elemental feeling of things that are bigger than you are."

In school, Walcott learned English as a second language and became captivated by the works of Great Britain's best poets. At the same time he was well aware that England was the seat of the colonial rule that encouraged slavery during previous centuries. He therefore approached the European canon with an ambivalent attitude that would remain with him--and shape his own writings--through the decades to come.

"Walcott's growth into a free-spirited artist clashed on occasion with the island's religious establishment, and around the age of nineteen he began thinking of leaving St. Lucia," Anderson reported. Walcott rebelled against the rigid Catholicism of his homeland and sought a more congenial atmosphere for continued studies elsewhere. In 1950 he departed for the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. The institution had only been established for a few years, but already it was "a virtual laboratory of regional integration," to quote Anderson. Islanders from all parts of the Caribbean descended on the University of the West Indies, and their close association helped to forge a sense of regionwide community. In the New Yorker, Walcott described Jamaica as "amazingly exciting. There was good theatre, good Jamaican painters, fine galleries, gifted poets and prose writers, most of whom I came to know very well."

Walcott lost little time in making his own contribution to Caribbean arts. His first play, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle, was written and produced in St. Lucia while he was still an undergraduate. Another piece, Henri Dernier, played on radio in 1950. He also began to publish poetry, art criticism, and essays in periodicals such as the Trinidad Guardian and Jamaica's Public Opinion. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1953, he returned to St. Lucia to teach at St. Mary's College, the high school he had attended.

By 1954 Walcott was spending substantial time in Trinidad. His plays The Sea at Dauphin and Ione premiered there in the mid-fifties, and he became deeply involved with the establishment of a resident theater project on the island. In 1957 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study theater arts in New York City. There he worked with Off-Broadway directors and companies, appropriating the skills he would need to establish a repertory group in Trinidad. "The New York experience was an unhappy one for Walcott," claimed Anderson. "He felt terribly alone in the city, an alien in its racial and theatrical communities--repelled, almost, by its segregated sensibilities. Neither Broadway nor Off-Broadway seemed the right model for the kind of theatre he had envisioned for the West Indies."

Walcott returned to Trinidad and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in the capital city of Port of Spain. The group performed some of Walcott's plays and others that explored the myths, rituals, and superstitions of West Indian folk life. The workshop eventually folded, but Walcott found an audience for his plays in New York City at the Off-Broadway Public Theatre. There, in 1971, his most famous drama, Dream on Monkey Mountain, drew enthusiastic reviews and an Obie Award as best foreign play of the year.

Poetry drew more and more of the writer's energies as the 1960s began. At first he published primarily in magazines, but in 1962 his verse came to the attention of editors at the British publisher Jonathan Cape. Cape released Walcott's first major collection, In a Green Night, in 1962. The volume was well received; in fact, poet Robert Lowell was so impressed that he visited Trinidad to meet Walcott. "I remember sitting on the living-room floor while Lowell showed me some of the poems he was working on," Walcott told the New Yorker. "I was so flattered to hear this great writer asking me what I thought of his work. When he returned to New York, he called up Roger Straus and urged him to sign me on as a new writer. I've been with [publisher Farrar, Straus] ever since."

Having found a congenial publisher, Walcott turned out numerous books of verse. His work was hailed for its expressive language--"an old-fashioned love of eloquence, an Elizabethan richness of words and a penchant for complicated, formal rhymes," to quote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Critics also commended Walcott for his brave exploration of the question of cultural ancestry. In the New York Review of Books, poet Joseph Brodsky called the Caribbean "the place discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott."

In the early 1970s Walcott began to spend part of the year in the United States, teaching creative writing at universities such as Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Farrar, Straus published volumes of his poetry regularly, including The Gulf (1970), Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Collected Poems (1986), The Arkansas Testament (1987), and Omeros (1990). In 1981 Walcott received a sizeable sum of money from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation--a no-strings-attached award that has come to be called the "genius grant."

In 1997, Walcott published a collection of poems entitled The Bounty. The opening (title) poem, an elegy to the author's mother elegy to the author's mother, is followed by a series of poems that evoke the island of St. Lucia. A later volume of poems, Tiepolo's Hound (2000), weaves together a biography of the Carribean-born painter Camille Pissarro with Walcott's own life story.

The New Yorker reported that Walcott was in the running for a Nobel prize for years before he received it. Walcott tried not to be distracted by the politics of the prize. "Look at some of the great writers who died without winning the Nobel Prize--[James] Joyce, [W. H.] Auden, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges," the author told the New Yorker. "Why should my chances be any better than theirs?... It got to the point where I learned to put the whole business out of my mind." Walcott kept busy writing and teaching at Boston University, where he began holding a part-time position in 1982.

The Nobel committee announced Walcott's selection on October 8, 1992. The date is doubly significant since 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean. From Sweden came the announcement that Walcott had been chosen for his "poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by historical vision" and his "multi-cultural commitment." In Walcott, the committee stated, "West Indian culture has found its great poet." Perhaps nowhere was the joy more visible than on St. Lucia, where the weekly newspaper in Castries devoted an entire 40-page issue to its native son.

The 1992 Nobel Prize for literature came with a cash award of $1.2 million. Its effects are far more lasting than mere dollars, however. Walcott's stature in the literary community is assured, and his opinions on everything from poetry to politics will be sought and valued. Most certainly, Walcott has earned the distinction--long held by some critics and fellow poets--of being among the very best writers in the English language. For his own part, Walcott accepted the acclaim with humility. His work, he told the New Yorker, "had already been written in the mouths of the Caribbean tribe. And I felt that I had been chosen, somehow, to give it voice. So the utterance was inevitable.... I was writing it for the island people from whom I come. In a sense, I saw it as a long thank-you note."

In 1993, Walcott published The Odyssey: A Stage Version, a play that intersperses the story of Odysseus' protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his home at Ithaca with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. The Capeman: A Musical (1998) was the joint work of singer/songwriter Paul Simon and Walcott. The play, based on actual events that occurred in Spanish Harlem in the 1950s, tells the story of a 16-year-old Puerto Rican boy sentenced to die in the electric chair. Also in 1998, Walcott returned his attention to his home land with a collection of essays about West Indian culture entitled What the Twilight Says. In 2001, Farrar, Straus brought out The Haitian Trilogy. In the book, three plays, Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours (originally commissioned in 1958), and The Haytian Earth, tell the story of the West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest, and rebellion.

Awards

Rockefeller grant, 1957, 1966, and fellowship, 1958; Jamaica Drama Festival prize, 1958, for Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama; Arts Advisory Council of Jamaica prize, 1960; Guinness Award, 1961, for "A Sea-Chantey"; Borestone Mountain poetry awards, 1964, for "Tarpon, " and 1977, for "Midsummer, England"; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, 1962; named fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1966; Heinemann Award, Royal Society of Literature, 1966, for The Castaway, and 1983, for The Fortunate Traveler; Cholmondeley Award, 1969, for The Gulf; Eugene O'Neill Foundation- Wesleyan University fellowship, 1969; Gold Hummingbird Medal, Order of the Humming Bird, Trinidad and Tobago, 1969 (one source says 1979); Obie Award, 1971, for Dream on Monkey Mountain; honorary doctorate of letters, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1973; O.B.E. (Officer, Order of British Empire), 1972; Jock Campbell/New Statesman Prize, 1974, for Another Life; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; named honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1979; American Poetry Review Award, 1979; International Writer's Prize, Welsh Arts Council, 1980; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant, 1981; Los Angeles Times Prize in poetry, 1986, for Collected Poems, 1948-1984; Queen Elizabeth II Gold Medal for Poetry, 1988; Nobel Prize for literature, 1992; St. Lucia Cross, 1993.

Works

Selected Writings

• Henri Christophe: A Chronicle (play), Advocate, 1950.
• The Sea at Dauphin (play), University College of the West Indies, 1954.
• Ione: A Play with Music, University College of the West Indies, 1957.
• In a Green Night (poetry; includes "A Far Cry from Africa"), J.
• Cape, 1962.
• Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus, 1964.
• The Gulf (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• Another Life (autobiographical poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1973.
• Sea Grapes (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1976.
• The Star-Apple Kingdom (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1979.
• The Fortunate Traveller (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1981.
• Collected Poems, 1948-1984, Farrar, Straus, 1986.
• The Arkansas Testament (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1987.
• Omeros (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1990.
• The Odyssey: A Stage VersionFarrar, Straus, 1993.
• The Bounty (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 1997.
• (With Paul Simon) The Capeman: A MusicalFarrar, Straus, 1998.
• What the Twilight Says (essays), Farrar, Straus, 1998.
• Tiepolo's Hound (poetry), Farrar, Straus, 2000.
• The Haitian Trilogy(includes Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth), Farrar, Straus, 2001.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers, Gale, 1989.
• Hamner, Robert D., Derek Walcott, Twayne, 1981.

Periodicals

• Ebony, February 1993, p. 46.
• Jet, October 26, 1992, p. 14; December 28, 1992, p. 24.
• Newsweek, October 19, 1992, p. 73.
• New Yorker, June 26, 1971, p. 30; December 21, 1992, p. 71.
• New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1982, p. 32.
• New York Review of Books, November 10, 1983, p. 39.
• New York Times, March 21, 1979; August 21, 1979; May 30, 1981; May 2, 1982; January 15, 1986; December 17, 1986.
• New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1964; October 11, 1970; May 6, 1973; October 31, 1976; May 13, 1979; January 3, 1982; April 8, 1984; February 2, 1986; December 20, 1987.
• Time, October 19, 1992, p. 65; April 5, 1993, p. 13.

— Anne Janette Johnson

Walcott, Derek, 1930-, West Indian dramatist and poet, b. Castries, St. Lucia, grad. Univ. College of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1954. His grandfathers were both white, one of English, the other of Dutch extraction; his grandmothers were both brown-skinned West Indians of African background. He has spent most of his life in various parts of the West Indies, including St. Thomas, Barbados, Grenada, and for a long period Trinidad, where he was a journalist and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Walcott's meticulously honed poems and evocative dramas exalt the English language while also using a rich mix of Latin, French, and patois. Skillfully fusing folk culture and oral tradition with the classical and avant-garde, he writes eloquently of the history, landscape, everyday life, and multiracial peoples of the islands. He also examines of his own African and European heritage, addressing personal conflicts, many of which arise from his mixed-race background.

Often focusing on West Indian folk traditions, Walcott's plays include Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), The Joker of Seville (1975), Remembrance: Pantomime (1980), A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986), The Odyssey (1992), and The Capeman (1997), a musical (and Broadway flop) written with Paul Simon. Walcott has proved to be a master of lyric, narrative, and epic poetry. His verse collections include the breakthrough In a Green Night (1962), which first brought him to international attention, and the autobiographical Another Life (1973) as well as Sea Grapes (1976), Midsummer (1984), The Bounty (1997), and the intensely personal poems of old age in White Egrets (2010). His epic poem Omeros (1990) echoes and reimagines Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as it examines the Caribbean's colonial past and complex present. Tiepolo's Hound (2001), in which he interweaves his own story with that of the St. Thomas-born painter Camille Pissarro, and The Prodigal (2004), the poet's memoir of journey and return and a meditation on fame and death, are also book-length narrative poems. Walcott is also a skilled realist painter, whose cover art and illustrations have sometimes accompanied his poetry. He lives in St. Lucia and the United States, where he has taught at several universities. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Bibliography

See his Selected Poems (ed. by E. Baugh, 2007); biography by B. A. King (2000); W. Baer, Conversations with Derek Walcott (1996); studies by N. Thomas (1980), R. Terada (1992), R. D. Hamner (1981, rev. ed. 1993; as ed., 1993), B. A. King (1995), and J. L. Espejo and J. M. P. Fernández, ed. (2001).

Quotes:

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

"I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars."

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

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