Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott

Walcott at an honorary dinner in Amsterdam, 20 May 2008
Born:	January 23 1930(1930-01-23) Castries, Saint Lucia
Died:	17 March 2017 (aged 87) Cap Estate, Gros-Islet, Saint Lucia
Occupation(s):	Poet, playwright, professor
Nationality:	Saint Lucian
Literary genre:	Poetry and plays
Literary movement:	Postcolonialism

Sir Derek Alton Walcott KCSL OBE OCC (January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. Walcott was a Caribbean poet who expressed both his spiritual and colonial roots in his writing. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the acclaimed Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990). He spent his later career teaching in Western universities where he was accused of sexual harassment. Walcott and the accuser settled the claim.

Early life

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, the son of Alix (Maarlin) 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. He died when Walcott and his brother were one year old, leaving them to be raised by their mother. Walcott was educated in Methodist schools. His mother, who was a teacher at a Methodist elementary school, provided her children with an environment where their talents could be nurtured. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.

As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided him with an inspiring example. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them. Walcott's painting, along with the art of other writers, was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers.

Training as a Writer

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" (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.

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 19, Walcott had self-published his first two collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends to cover 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 Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.

After attending high school at Saint Mary's College, he received a scholarship to study at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

Personal life

In 1954 Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, and they had a son, the St. Lucian painter Peter Walcott. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959. Walcott married a second time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked as an almoner in a hospital. Together they had two daughters, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976. In 1976, Walcott married for a third time, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993. His companion until his death was Sigrid Nama, a former art gallery owner.

Walcott was also known for his passion for traveling to countries around the world. He split his time between New York, Boston, and St. Lucia, and incorporated the influences of different locations into his pieces of work.

Career

Walcott at VIII Festival Internacional, 1992

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.ref name=Pucher/> 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 (1962) attracted international attention. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. Makak is the protagonist in this play. "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." The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.

He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theater 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. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.

Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair in Creative Writimy 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.

Writing

Wall poem "Omeros" in Leiden

Wall poem "Midsummer, Tobago" in The Hague

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

Omeros

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from The Iliad. Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself. It has been critically praised as his "major achievement." The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose Omeros as one of its "Best Books of 1990."

Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa on a slave ship that is headed for the Americas. In Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.

Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.

In this epic, Walcott speaks in favor of unique Caribbean cultures and traditions to challenge the modernity that existed after colonialism.

Later poetry

His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors; The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Playwriting

He published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theater 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.

Themes

Spirituality

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." 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."

Colonial legacy

In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture," discussing art and theater in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as 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 to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the colonizer; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonized 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 influence. In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), 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."

Criticism

Robert Graves praised Walcott's, claiming that he "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries." Joseph Brodsky also thought highly of his work. "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." Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience."

The poetry critic William Logan critiqued Walcott's work in a New York Times book review of Walcott's Selected Poems. While he praised Walcott's writing in Sea Grapes and The Arkansas Testament, Logan had mostly negative things to say about Walcott's poetry, calling Omeros "clumsy" and Another Life "pretentious." Logan concluded with: "No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered."

Most reviews of Walcott's work are more positive. For instance, in The New Yorker review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, Adam Kirsch had high praise for Walcott's oeuvre, describing his style in the following manner:

By combining the grammar of vision with the freedom of metaphor, Walcott produces a beautiful style that is also a philosophical style. People perceive the world on dual channels, Walcott’s verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, and each is constantly seeping into the other. The result is a state of perpetual magical thinking, a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get up and start talking.

Kirsch calls Another Life Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes the painterly qualities of Walcott's imagery from his earliest work through to later books such as Tiepolo's Hound. Kirsch also explores the post-colonial politics in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence." Kirsch calls the early poem "A Far Cry from Africa" a turning point in Walcott's development as a poet. Like Logan, Kirsch is critical of Omeros, which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain over its entirety. Although Omeros is the volume of Walcott's that usually receives the most critical praise, Kirsch believes Midsummer to be his best book.

His poetry, as spoken performance, appears briefly in the sampled sounds in the music album of the group Dreadzone. Their track entitled "Captain Dread" from the album Second Light incorporates the fourth verse of Walcott's 1990 poem "The Schooner Flight".

In 2013 Dutch filmmaker Ida Does released Poetry is an Island, a feature documentary film about Walcott's life and the ever-present influence of his birthplace of St Lucia.

Allegations of sexual harassment

In 1982, a Harvard sophomore accused Walcott of sexual harassment in September 1981. She alleged that after she refused a sexual advance from him, she was given the only C in the class. In 1996 a student at Boston University sued Walcott for sexual harassment and "offensive sexual physical contact". The two reached a settlement.

In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of the accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.

When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, this aroused their interest in the university decisions. Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases.Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned. Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and some journalists attributed the criticism of her to misogyny and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumor.

Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furor. Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story was about sex and power. Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.

Death

Walcott's grave on Morne Fortune

Walcott died at his home in Cap Estate, St. Lucia, on March 17, 2017. He was 87. He was given a state funeral on Saturday, March 25, with a service at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Castries and burial at Morne Fortune.

Legacy

Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honor after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, 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." He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

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.

As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, he became one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia.

Memorials

In 1993, a public square and park located in central Castries, Saint Lucia, was named Derek Walcott Square. A documentary film, Poetry Is an Island: Derek Walcott, by filmmaker Ida Does, was produced to honor him and his legacy in 2013.

The Saint Lucia National Trust acquired Walcott's childhood home at 17 Chaussée Road, Castries, in November 2015, renovating it before opening it to the public as Walcott House in January 2016.

In January 2020 the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia announced that Walcott's books on Caribbean Literature and poetry have been donated to its Library.

Awards and honors

• 1969: Cholmondeley Award
• 1971: Obie Award for Best Foreign Play (for Dream on Monkey Mountain)
• 1972: Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• 1981: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ("genius award")
• 1988: Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
• 1990: Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize
• 1990: W. H. Smith Literary Award (for poetry Omeros)
• 1992: Nobel Prize in Literature
• 2004: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement
• 2008: Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex
• 2011: T. S. Eliot Prize (for poetry collection White Egrets)
• 2011: OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (for White Egrets)
• 2015: Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award
• 2016: Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia

List of works

Poetry collections

• 1948: 25 Poems
• 1949: Epitaph for the Young: Xll Cantos
• 1951: Poems
• 1962: In a Green Night: Poems 1948—60
• 1964: Selected Poems
• 1965: The Castaway and Other Poems
• 1969: The Gulf and Other Poems
• 1973: Another Life
• 1976: Sea Grapes
• 1979: The Star-Apple Kingdom
• 1981: Selected Poetry
• 1981: The Fortunate Traveller
• 1983: The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden
• 1984: Midsummer
• 1986: Collected Poems, 1948–1984, featuring "Love After Love"
• 1987: The Arkansas Testament
• 1990: Omeros
• 1997: The Bounty
• 2000: Tiepolo's Hound, includes Walcott's watercolors
• 2004: The Prodigal
• 2007: Selected Poems (edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh)
• 2010: White Egrets
• 2014: The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013
• 2016: Morning, Paramin (illustrated by Peter Doig)

Plays

• 1950: Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes
• 1952: Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production
• 1953: Wine of the Country
• 1954: The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act
• 1957: Ione
• 1958: Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama
• 1958: Ti-Jean and His Brothers
• 1966: Malcochon: or, Six in the Rain
• 1967: Dream on Monkey Mountain
• 1970: In a Fine Castle
• 1974: The Joker of Seville
• 1974: The Charlatan
• 1976: O Babylon!
• 1977: Remembrance
• 1978: Pantomime
• 1980: The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two Plays
• 1982: The Isle Is Full of Noises
• 1984: The Haitian Earth
• 1986: Three Plays: The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, and A Branch of the Blue Nile
• 1991: Steel
• 1993: Odyssey: A Stage Version
• 1997: The Capeman (book and lyrics, both in collaboration with Paul Simon)
• 2002: Walker and The Ghost Dance
• 2011: Moon-Child
• 2014: O Starry Starry Night

Other books

• 1990: The Poet in the Theatre (London, U.K.; Poetry Book Society, 1990)
• 1993: The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993, ISBN 978-0374105303)
• 1996: Conversations with Derek Walcott (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996, ISBN 978-0878058556)
• 1996: (With Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney) Homage to Robert Frost (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996, ISBN 978-0374172466)
• 1998: What the Twilight Says (essays) (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, ISBN 978-0374288419)
• 2002: Walker and Ghost Dance (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002, ISBN 978-0374528140)
• 2004: Another Life: Fully Annotated (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004, ISBN 978-0894108686)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Als, Hilton. "The Islander," The New Yorker, February 1, 2004. Retrieved August 19, 2023.
• Als, Hilton. "Derek Walcott – a mighty poet has fallen," The New Yorker, March 17, 2017. Retrieved August 19, 2023.
• Alvarez, Al, Alan Brownjohn, Carmen Bugan, David Constantine, Elizabeth Cook, Robert Conquest, Jonty Driver, Seamus Heaney, Jenny Joseph, Grevel Lindop, Patrick McGuinness, Lucy Newlyn, Bernard O'Donoghue, Michael Schmidt, Jon Stallworthy, Michael Suarez, Don Thomas, and Anthony Thwaite. "Oxford Professor of Poetry," The Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 2009, 6.
• Baral, Raj Kumar, and Heena Shrestha. "What is behind Myth and History in Derek Walcott's Omeros," Cogent Arts and Humanities 7(1) (2020).
• Bishop, Stan. "Walcott House Opens – Nobel Laureate Says He’s Thankful", The Voice, January 28, 2016. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Bixby, Patrick. "Derek Walcott", Emory University, Spring 2000. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Brown, Yasmin Alibhai. "A Male Poet Wouldn't Have Been Blamed for Rough Tactics," The Independent, May 25, 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Charles, Dee Lundy. "It's Past Time For Walcott's Poetry Island," St. Lucia Star, May 19, 2014. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Chidi, Sylvia Lovina. The Greatest Black Achievers in History. Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2004. ISBN 978-1291909333
• Dziech Billie Wright, and Linda Weiner. The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, 2nd ed. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0252061189
• Griffiths, Sian, and Jack Grimston. "Sex pest file gives Oxford poetry race a nasty edge," The Sunday Times, May 10, 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2023
• Grimes, William. "Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate of the Caribbean, Dies at 87," The New York Times, March 17, 2017. Retrieved August 19, 2023.
• Halford, Macy. "The Book Bench: Oxford's Gender Trouble," The New Yorker, May 25, 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Hamner, Robert D. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993. ISBN 978-0894101427
• Higgins, Charlotte. "TS Eliot prize goes to Derek Walcott for 'moving and technically flawless' work", The Guardian, January 24, 2011. Retrieved August 19, 2023.
• Hirsch, Edward. "Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37", The Paris Review (101) (Winter 1986). Retrieved August 19, 2023.
• Islam, Md. Manirul. "Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain: A Complicated Presentation of Postcolonial Condition of the West Indians," New Academia 8(2) (April 2019).
• Khan, Urmee, and Richard Eden. "Ruth-Padel-under-pressure-to-resign-Oxford-post-over-emails-about-rival-poet-Derek-Walcott.html," The Daily Telegraph, May 24, 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2021.
• Kirsch, Adam. "Full Fathom Five: Derek Walcott's Seascapes" The New Yorker, February 3, 2014. Retrieved September 21, 2021.
• Kursula, Geraldine. "List of awards to be given on Independence Day," St Lucia News, February 22, 2016. Retrieved September 20, 2023.
• Lefkowitz, Mary. "Bringing Him Back Alive," The New York Times, October 7, 1990. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Logan, William. "The Poet of Exile," The New York Times, April 8, 2007. Retrieved September 21, 2021.
• Luntta, Karl, and Nick Agate. The Rough Guide to St Lucia. London, U.K.: Rough Guides, 2003. ISBN 978-1858289168
• McCrum, Robert. "Who dares to follow in Ruth Padel's footsteps?" The Guardian, May 30, 2009. Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Morrison, James V. "Homer Travels to the Caribbean: Teaching Walcott's 'Omeros'," The Classical World 93(1) (January 1, 1999): 83–99.
• Nidhi, Mahajan. "Cultural Tensions and Hybrid Identities in Derek Walcott's Poetry," Inquiries Journal 7(9) (January 1, 2015). Retrieved September 21, 2023.
• Puchner, Martin, et al. (eds.). The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 4th ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. ISBN 978-0393265903
• Romero, Ivette, Franklin W. Knight, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds.). 'Does, Ida (1955– ), film director and journalist," in Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro–Latin American Biography. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0199935802
• Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. London, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2001. ISBN 978-01915844040
• The International Who's Who. East Sussex, U.K.: Psychology Press, 2003. ISBN 978-1857432176

Further reading

• Abani, Chris. The myth of fingerprints: Signifying as displacement in Derek Walcott's “Omeros”. University of Southern California, PhD dissertation. 2006.
• Abodunrin, Femi. "The Muse of History: Derek Walcott and the Topos of {Un} naming in West Indian Writing." Journal of West Indian Literature 7(1) (1996): 54-77.
• Abdelkahhar Aldardeer Ahmed, Amany, "The Quest for a Cultural Identity in Derek Walcott's Another Life." 57(3) (2020): 101-146.
• Baer, William (ed.). Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. ISBN 978-0878058556
• Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 052155358X
• Breslin, Paul. Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 0226074269
• Brown, Stewart (ed.). The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1991. ISBN 9781854110275
• Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001. ISBN 978-0813018829
• Figueroa, John J. "Some subtleties of the isle: A commentary on certain aspects of Derek Walcott's sonnet sequence," Tales of the Islands (1976): 190-228.
• Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam, ND. New York, NY: Rodopi, 2001. ISBN 978-9042014664
• Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, "Special Issue on Derek Walcott. Includes Derek Walcott's "Epitaph for the Young" (1949), Agenda 39(1–3) (2002–03) republished here in its entirety.
• Goddard, Horace I. "Untangling the thematic threads: Derek Walcott's poetry," Kola 21(1) (2009): 120-131.
• Goddard, Horace I. "The Rediscovery of Ancestral Experience in Derek Walcott's Early Poetry," Kola 29(2) (2017): 24-40.
• Hamner, Robert D., Derek Walcott: Updated edition. Twayne's World Authors Series. New York, NY: Twayne, 1993. ISBN 978-0805743012
• Izevbaye, D.S. "The Exile and the Prodigal: Derek Walcott as West Indian Poet." Caribbean Quarterly 2691–20 (1980): 70-82.
• King, Bruce. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: "Not Only a Playwright But a Company": The Trinidad Theatre Workshop 1959–1993. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0198182580
• King, Bruce. Derek Walcott, A Caribbean Life. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0198711315
• Marks, Susan Jane. That terrible vowel, that I: autobiography and Derek Walcott's Another life. Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989.
• McConnell, Justine. Derek Walcott and the creation of a classical Caribbean. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. ISBN 978-1474291521
• Müller, Timo. "Forms of Exile: Experimental Self-Positioning in Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry," Atlantic Studies 13(4) (2016): 457–471.
• Sarkar, Nirjhar. "Existence as self-making in Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 14(2) (2018): 1–15.
• Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992. ISBN 978-1555531263
• Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0719042065

External links

All links retrieved January 29, 2024.

• British Council writers' profile, works listing, critical review
• Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
• Profile, poems audio and written, Poetry of American Poets
• Profile, interviews, articles, archive. Prague Writers' Festival
• Edward Hirsch, "Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37", The Paris Review, Winter 1986
• Lannan Foundation Reading and Conversation With Glyn Maxwell. November 2002 (audio).
• Biography available in Saint Lucians and the Order of CARICOM
• Appearance on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 9 June 1991
• "Derek Walcott wins OCM Bocas Prize" Trinidad Express Newspapers, April 30, 2011.
• "Derek Walcott 1930–2017," Poetry Foundation.
• "The Writer's Brush," CBS News, December 16, 2007.
• "World mourns" Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, March 18, 2017.
• "Honorary degrees 2006," University of Oxford.
• "Editors' Choice: The Best Books of 1990," The New York Times, December 2, 1990.
• "Walcott: Caribbean literary colossus," Barbados Today, February 25, 2016.
• "Derek Walcott," poets.org., February 4, 2014.
• "Derek Walcott has died," St. Lucia Times, March 17, 2017.
• "Donation Of Walcott Library To SALCC Library," January 30, 2020.
• "2015 – Derek Walcott," The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, June, 3 2015.
• "Derek Walcott – Biographical," Nobel Foundation.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)

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