Tanya Stanley

Derek Walcott:  More Than a Poet

          After each reading of Derek Walcott’s poetry in class and outside of class, I sat back enthralled by his themes, his stanzas, his lines, and his words on each page.  My poetry presentation on Walcott’s “The Gulf” could have lasted half the class.  I spend the majority of my time in or near the gulf; for me, the gulf is a place to escape everyday stresses and to get back to nature.  I struggled with which aspects to explore and discuss during my presentation because I did not want to leave anything out.  Walcott has become my favorite poet—sorry, Wordsworth—and I cannot wait to discover more of his work.  Throughout the course, we read some of Walcott’s poems and each of them tied into the African, Caribbean, and Indian novels we were reading.  During our African quest, Cynthia read “A Far Cry from Africa.”  Talli read Walcott’s poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” and Matt read “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” during the journey through India.  I read “The Gulf” during our expedition through the Caribbean.  Walcott reflects his journeys of the world through his poetry. Before I continue my leisure turned analytical readings of his poetry, I want to learn what Walcott contributes to the literature scene beyond his poetry, and I want to learn about Walcott’s hybridity. 

While researching information on Walcott, I found an interview between Walcott and NEH Chairman William R. Ferris, “A Multiplicity of Voices:  A Conversation with Derek Walcott.”  Ferris begins his interview with Walcott by quoting Joseph Brodsky:  “The West Indies were discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott” (Interview).  Ferris asks Walcott to describe the Caribbean culture, and Walcott says the Caribbean culture is multiracial and it is traceable by the music and the language.  According to Walcott, the Caribbean voice is “the multiplicity of voices…Spanish, French, English, Portuguese” (Interview).  Walcott calls America a type of third empire—a commercial empire—that the Caribbean culture embraces.  I discovered Walcott’s ability to paint, his ability to bring the arts—literature and painting—together in a dialogue with one another:  “I think that knowing what color you’re going to use and having an idea of symmetry and structure and light from the practice of painting certainly helps craft verse” (Interview).  I also discovered at fourteen years old Walcott became a published poet, and two years later a published dramatist.  Walcott’s central theme in most of his works is the search for identity.  Walcott describes the search for his identity as a Saint Lucian and a West Indian:  “The experience, of course, comes from the political pattern of the Caribbean—colonialism to independence.  If you can equate adolescence to colonialism, and so forth, until you get to maturity and independence, then there’s a parallel” (Interview).  Even Walcott’s interview voice expresses an extreme and moving deepness of concepts through his choice of words.

Interview:  Derek Walcott

          Dr. Fajardo-Acosta describes Walcott works as “attempts to bring together and explore the continuities and ruptures between past and present, the classical and the postcolonial, the Western and the non-Western” (Fajardo).  Walcott studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, studied theatre under a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, won the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award in 1981, has taught at Harvard University and Boston University, and won the Nobel Prize in 1992 (Fajardo).  Walcott has several accomplishments, but I think one of his best accomplishments is finding his own identity in a place that is multiracial and multilingual. Fajardo-Acosta:  Derek Walcott Bio

Several online sites offer short biographies about Walcott and information about Walcott’s works.  I discovered Walcott had a twin brother, Roderick Aldon Walcott.  As a twin myself, I found this fact about Walcott quite interesting.  Not only did Walcott have to search for his identity as a St. Lucian and a West Indian, but he also probably struggled with separating himself from his twin.  Growing up with a twin can be fun, mischievous, and fatiguing simultaneously.  As twins grow older, they attempt to separate and find their own identity without the other twin.  Robert D. Hamner states that Walcott’s experiences with “classical literature and history—Greek, Roman, British—was vital and inspiring. That, together with the African slave-tales still current on the island, led him at an early age to admire both sides of his dual heritage” (Hamner).

Walcott Biography by Robert D. Hamner

Derek Walcott is a man of many facets.  Walcott is a poet, a dramatist, an artist, an essayist, a critic, a St. Lucian, a West Indian, a twin.  Walcott’s search for identity within his work stems from the several different components of his own life and search for identity for himself.  Walcott poetry is intriguing; even his comments during an interview create a yearning for the reader to read more.