Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Occupation	Poet, playwright, academic
Nationality	Saint Lucia
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature
Children	Peter Walcott, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Anna Walcott-Hardy
Signature	File:Firma-Derek-Walcott.png

Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC (born January 23, 1930 - March 17, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, academic, and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992^[1] and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2011.^[2] His works include the epic poem Omeros.^[3] Robert Graves wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries.^[4]

Life[]

Youth[]

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, with a twin brother and a sister. His mother, a teacher, had a love of the arts who would often recite poetry.^[5] His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at 31 from mastoiditis.^[5]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 Cezanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them.^[5]

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. Eliot and Ezra Pound.^[3] 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.^[5]

At 14, Walcott published his first poem in The Voice of St Lucia, a Miltonic, religious poem. In the newspaper, an English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous.^[5] 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.^[6] 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." ^[5] Influential Barbadian poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.^[5]

Career[]

With a scholarship he studied at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica ^[7] then moved to Trinidad in 1953, becoming a critic, teacher and journalist.^[7] Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.^[6] 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.^[3]He founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University, retiring in 2007. His later collections include Tiepoloâ€™s Hound (2000),^[8]The Prodigal (2004) and White Egrets (2010), which was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize.^[3] ^[7]

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 â€œa poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.â€ ^[3] In 2009, he began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.^[9]

Controversies[]

Walcott was accused in 1981 of sexual harassment of a freshman student at Harvard University,^[10] and reached a settlement in 1996 over a sexual harassment allegation at Boston University.^[11] In 2009, Walcott became a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry 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.^[12] The position was awarded to Ruth Padel, 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.^[13]

Death[]

Walcott died at his home in St. Lucia on 17 March 2017.^[14] He was 87.

Writing[]

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 seenâ€¦ the â€œIâ€ not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, itâ€™s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' Thatâ€™s always there. Itâ€™s a benediction, a transference. Itâ€™s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature".^[5] 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 youâ€™re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity".^[5]

Walcott has published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 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 Walcottt 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 Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson." ^[5] Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Carbibbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.^[5] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he works with the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe 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." ^[5]

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 Omeros, 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 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.^[15]

Walcott's mentor Joseph Brodsky 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." ^[6] A close friend of the Russian Brodsky and the Irish Heaney, 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 Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.^[5]

Recognition[]

1969 Cholmondeley Award
1971 Obie Award for Dream on Monkey Mountain
1972 OBE ^[16]
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 ^[2]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

25 Poems. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948.
Epitaph for the Young: XII cantos. Bridgetown, Barbados: Barbados Advocate, 1949.
Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Kingston City Printery, 1953.
In a Green Night: Poems. London: Cape, 1962
- published as In a Green Night: Poems, 1948-1960. London: Cape, 1969.
Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964.
The Castaway, and other poems. London: Cape, 1965.
The Gulf, and other poems. London: Cape, 1969.
- published with selections from The Castaway as The Gulf: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1970.
Another Life (long poem). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973.
Hammer. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1982.
Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1976.
Selected Verse. London: Heinemann, 1976.
The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979.
The Fortunate Traveller. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1981.
Selected Poetry (selected, annotated, and introduced by Wayne Brown). London: Heinemann, 1981; revised edition, 1993.
The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1983.
Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1984.
Collected Poems, 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986.
The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.
Omeros (epic). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1990.
Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1990.
Poems, 1965-1980. London: Cape, 1992.
Derek Walcott: Selected poems. London: Longman, 1993.
The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1997.
Tiepolo's Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000.
The Prodigal (long poem). New York: Farrar, Straus, 2004.
Selected Poems (edited, selected, & with introduction by Edward Baugh). New York: Farrar, Straus 2007.
White Egrets. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2010.
The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013 (edited by Glyn Maxwell). New York: Farrar, Straus, 2014.^[17]

Plays[]

Henri Christophe: A chronicle in seven scenes. Bridgetown, Barbados: Barbados Advocate, 1950.
Harry Dernier: A play for radio production. Bridgetown, Barbados: Barbados Advocate, 1952.
The Wine of the Country. Mona, Jamaica: University College of the West Indies, 1953.
The Sea at Dauphin: A play in one act. Mona, Jamaica: Extra-Mural Department, University College of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica), 1954, also included in Dream on Monkey Mountain and other plays (see below).
Ione: A alay with music. Mona, Jamaica: University College of the West Indies, 1957.
Ti-Jean and His Brothers, included in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (see below).
Malcauchon; or, The Six in the Rain (sometimes transliterated as "Malcochon") one-act. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: Extra-Mural Department, University of West Indies, 1966; also included in Dream on Monkey Mountain, and other plays (see below).
Dream on Monkey Mountain, included in Dream on Monkey Mountain and other plays (also see below).
Dream on Monkey Mountain, and other plays (contains Dream on Monkey Mountain, The Sea at Dauphin,Malcauchon; or, The Six in the Rain, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, and the essay "What the Twilight Says: An overture"). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1970.
The Joker of Seville (musical); included in The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two plays (see below).
O Babylon!, included in The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two plays (see below).
Remembrance, included in Remembrance & Pantomime: Two plays (see below).
Pantomime , included in Remembrance & Pantomime: Two plays (see below).
The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1978.
Remembrance & Pantomime: Two plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980.
Beef, No Chicken, included in Three Plays (see below).
Three Plays (contains The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, and A Branch of the Blue Nile). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986.
The Odyssey: A stage version. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1993.
(With Paul Simon) The Capeman: A musical. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998.
The Haitian Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2002.

Non-fiction[]

Henri Christophe: A chronicle in seven scenes. Bridgetown, Barbados: Barbados Advocate (Bridgetown, Barbados), 1950.
Another Life: Fully annotated. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers
- reprinted with a critical essay and comprehensive notes by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh, 2004.
The Poet in the Theatre. London: Poetry Book Society, 1990.
The Antilles: Fragments of epic memory: The Nobel lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1993.
Conversations with Derek Walcott (edited by William Baer). Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1996.
Homage to Robert Frost (with Joseph Brodsky & Seamus Heaney). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1996.
What the Twilight Says (essays). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998.
Walker and Ghost Dance. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2002.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.^[18]

Play productions[]

Cry for a Leader, produced in St. Lucia, 1950.
Senza Alcum Sospetto (radio play), broadcast 1950, produced as Paolo and Francesca, in St. Lucia, 1951.
(And director) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes , first produced in Castries, West Indies, 1950; produced in London, England, 1952.
Robin and Andrea, published in Bim (Christ Church, Barados), 1950.
Three Assassins, produced in St. Lucia, West Indies, 1951.
The Price of Mercy, produced in St. Lucia, West Indies, 1951.
(And director) Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production, produced in Mona, Jamaica, 1952; radio play broadcast as Dernier, 1952.
(And director) The Wine of the Country, produced in Mona, Jamaica, 1956.
The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act, first produced in Mona, Jamaica, 1953; produced in Trinidad, 1954, London, England, 1960, New York, NY, 1978.
Crossroads, produced in Jamaica, 1954.
(And director) The Charlatan, Walcott directed first production in Mona, Jamaica, 1954; revised version with music by Fred Hope and Rupert Dennison produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1973; revised version with music by Galt MacDermot produced in Los Angeles, 1974; revised version produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1977.
Ione: A Play with Music , first produced in Kingston, 1957.
Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama, first produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1958.
(And director) Ti-Jean and His Brothers, first produced in Castries, St. Lucia, 1957; Walcott directed a revised version produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1958; produced in Hanover, NH, 1971; Walcott directed a production Off-Broadway at Delacorte Theatre, 1972; produced in London, 1986.
Malcauchon; or, The Six in the Rain (sometimes "Malcauchon" transliterated as "Malcochon"; one-act; first produced as Malcauchon in Castries, St. Lucia, 1959; produced as Six in the Rain, in London, England, 1960; produced Off-Broadway at St. Mark's Playhouse, 1969.
Jourmard; or, A Comedy till the Last Minute, first produced in St. Lucia, 1959; produced in New York, NY, 1962.
(And director) Batai (carnival show), produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1965.
(And director) Dream on Monkey Mountain, first produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1967; produced in Waterford, CT, 1969; and Off-Broadway at St. Mark's Playhouse, 1970.
(And director) Franklin: A Tale of the Islands, first produced in Georgetown, Guyana, 1969; Walcott directed a revised version produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1973.
(And director) In a Fine Castle, Walcott directed first production in Mona, Jamaica, 1970; produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1972.
The Joker of Seville (musical; music by Galt MacDermot); adaptation of the play by Tirso de Molina; first produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1974.
(And director) O Babylon! (music by Galt MacDermot); Walcott directed first production in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1976; produced in London, England, 1988.
(And director) Remembrance (three-act); Walcott directed first production in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, December, 1977; produced Off-Broadway at The Other Stage, 1979 ; and London, England, 1980.
The Snow Queen (television play), 1977.
Pantomime, first produced in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1978; produced London, England, 1979, Washington, DC, 1981, and Off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theater, 1986.
(And director) Marie Laveau (music by Galt MacDermot); first produced in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, 1979.
Beef, No Chicken, Walcott directed first production in New Haven, CT, 1982; produced in London, England, 1989.
The Isle Is Full of Noises, first produced at the John W. Huntington Theater, Hartford, CT, 1982.
Steel, first produced at the American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
(With Paul Simon) The Capeman: A Musical, produced on Broadway at the Marquis Theater, December, 1997.