Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott (born January 23, 1930 – March 17 2017) was a West Indian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who wrote mainly in English. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

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Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
- Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176

"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962)

The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.

"The Schooner Flight" (1980)

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
- "Adios, Carenage," lines 40-44

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

Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
- "Love after Love"

Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
- "Love after Love"

Omeros

Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory
and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.
Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends
and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed
an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from'
But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail
moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race
unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before,
The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackrel over water
into trembling weeds

White Egrets

No masterpieces in huge frames to worship,
… and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue,
the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.

from interviews/conversations

for The Paris Review (1986)

with Edward Hirsch. collected in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (1988) and Conversations with Derek Walcott (1996)

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

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

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

collected in Conversations with Derek Walcott (1966 to 1993)

book edited by William Baer (1996)

you can't separate your growth from your soil. (1968)

I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)

I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship... I have always tried to keep my mind Gothic in its devotions to the concept of master and apprentice. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity. One's own voice is an anthology of all the sounds one has heard. As it is with children, so with poets. (1983)

I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally. (1983)

I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist. (1987)

People who are offering revenge, they are just an enemy. But when you offer peace and love, that infuriates people. And you get killed for that. That's why Christ is killed, that's why King is shot, that's why Gandhi is killed. The idea of a man believing in the universal brotherhood is totally unendurable to someone who would prefer to have that man talk about revenge. (1990)

The Caribbean creativity is phenomenal. It is an astonishing phenomenon. The kind of writing that has been produced in these islands is such elaborate work. It was inevitable historically and culturally. But it is still as astonishing. Now you're talking about writers of equality, of Jean Rhys, Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, V. S. Naipaul. And these people are different colors and different races. (1990)

Quotes about Derek Walcott

I love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi and the more formal work of Derek Walcott and Christian Wiman.
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interview (2020)

...a master wordsmith. These words are his, from his poem "The Schooner Flight":
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation...
Doesn't that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn. Much respect.
- Nalo Hopkinson, interview in Report From Planet Midnight (2012)

I like the magic that operates in many of Derek's plays, the lushness and the exquisite wordcraft of them, and the fact that he uses Creole and music.
- Nalo Hopkinson, 1999 interview collected in Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson edited by Isiah Lavender III

...no matter how you look at Walcott, Walcott is a major figure; he is a Miltonic figure, a Shakespearean figure, a Chaucer figure. He stands in Caribbean literature like those figures: Chaucer, maybe Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton-those major, major massive figures who have already covered generations of work. And others come along who have their own value, their own work, but these guys have always already done more than anybody else. You look into the past, they've already done the past; you look into the future, they've already done things in the future. So he's a significant poet because he is the major poet, in terms of form and style, concerns, themes, and so on. And I very much look to him for form and so on. In terms of the ideology and the content, as I say, I think there is certainly a difference, as I move more and more into Christian poetry. You couldn't really describe Walcott as a Christian poet - not in that strict sense of the term. Our concerns have been independence, how we deal with the politics of the situation and so on...He has done his work and I think those of us coming after have to do our own work. We can't repeat him. We should not. We should learn from him and move on.
- John Robert Lee Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets by Kwame Dawes (2000)

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