Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright.
He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros, which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Early life and childhood

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, the son of Alix and Warwick Walcott. He had a twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His father was a civil servant and a talented painter, who died when Walcott and his brother were one year old.
The young Walcott attended a Methodist elementary school where his mother was head teacher, and she provided her children with an environment where their talents could be nurtured. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community. They felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule. Walcott's secondary school was the Catholic St. Mary's College.
As a young man, he trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them. Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers.
He 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. Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer", 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, a Miltonic, religious poem, in the newspaper The Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper. By the age of 19, Walcott had self-published his first two collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos. He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs.
He later 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.

The influential Barbadian poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.
After attending high school at Saint Mary's College, Walcott received a scholarship to study at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

Career

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained 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 attracted international attention. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. Makak is the protagonist in this play; and "Makak"s condition represents the condition of the colonized natives under the oppressive forces of the powerful colonizers". In 1971, it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play". In the United Kingdom's 1972 New Year Honours, Walcott was awarded an OBE for services to literature and drama in St. Lucia.
He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis. Walcott retired from his position at Boston University in 2007.
Through the years he had become friends with other poets, including the Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled in the 1970s; and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.
Walcott's epic poem Omeros, which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the Iliad, has been critically praised as his "major achievement." The book was praised by such publications as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose Omeros as one of its "Best Books of 1990".
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, and received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment", with the jury report praising him as the "Caribbean Homer". In 2004, he won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.
His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound, illustrated with copies of his watercolours; The Prodigal, and White Egrets, which received the T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007. In 2008, Walcott gave the first Cola Debrot Lectures In 2009, Walcott 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.
As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, Walcott was made one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia.

Writing

Themes

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." Describing his writing process, he wrote: "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy... Ultimately, it's what Yeats 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 also notes: "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."

Influences

Walcott said that his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.

Playwriting

He 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 address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.

Essays

In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region, Walcott reflects on the West Indies as a colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of 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". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information but truly knows nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:

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.

Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as "The Castaway" and in the play Pantomime, he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. 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."