It was announced last month that Derek Walcott had won the T S Eliot Poetry Prize for 2010. He won from a shortlist of some of the very best poets writing in English including his fellow Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. At the time, Al Creighton wrote a lovely piece on Walcott and the book of poems which won him the prize, White Egrets. Walcott is eighty but the marvellous art and craft of his poetry remains unstaled by age, an inspiration to all those who love beauty in the written word.
Recently I re-read for the umpteenth time one of Derek Walcott’s earlier books, The Star-Apple Kingdom. It is filled with great beauty. It always catches my imagination with the sudden shock of absolute truth. It has become one of my essential books.
I always worry over writing anything about great poetry. As Ezra Pound wrote about Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems: “When a writer’s matter is stated so entirely right and with such clarity there is no place left for the explaining critic.”
I do not think that comment is simply one poet kicking the critic out of the way of another poet. I think it is stating something essential about good poetry as a whole and about the best poetry most of all. There is so much clarity and truth in the best poetry that it silences commentary or at least renders it superfluous. Read over so many passages in this marvellous book, consider the whole of The Sea Is History for instance, and I think you can see what Ezra Pound meant.
I would never venture to ‘explain’ Derek Walcott or any great poet. It simply is that the hair rises on the nape of the neck, as A E Housman said it might, and you know the beauty of the poetry.
Franz Kafka said in a letter to his deeply loved mistress, “Words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners.” Yet poets are always seeking to achieve the purest heights and mine the deepest gold. Kafka’s phrase seemed far from truth as I re-read The Star-Apple Kingdom, such an important, sure, grace-filled step in Derek Walcott’s long and marvellously determined journey to achieve Everest and El Dorado in his poetry before he dies.
In an interview, Helen Vendler, poetry critic of the New Yorker, once said that she wished people thought of poetry as more natural. She went on to say:
“It is one of the immemorial expressive forms. That is, every culture has had its poetry. Therefore, it seems something that recurs all the time, in every culture, absolutely natural to human beings, male and female alike, absolutely irrepressible. There doesn’t seem to be cultures that don’t have it, from the earliest oral poetry all the way down to the complicated modern written poetry. So it seems to me it shouldn’t seem something remote or different. It is absolutely a natural form of human expression, as natural as building houses or as natural as dancing.”
It is an appropriate passage since it seems to me Walcott’s poetry has gradually over the years become more and more natural, refined closer and closer to the vital, pure ore of genuine, almost vernacular, everyday speech.
Of course, there has always been the flash of natural, unforced descriptive power in Walcott’s poetry from the very start when he was just a teenager. But, at first, there was a derivative veneer – echoes of Eliot and Dylan Thomas and Yeats – which I recall slightly spoiled for me the rhythm and the sense. Even then the straightforward beauty of individual lines and groups of lines jutted up like granite through soft earth. But the shape and sharpness of the mountain range was not yet fully defined along all its length. It very soon was, for sure. I think it was in In A Green Night that I first remember hearing the full power of his own natural beat. I thought of Robert Frost – “The living part of a poem is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation” – yet Walcott is not Frost at all, of course, not even if you add gold Caribbean colours to Frost and put star-songs in Frost’s quiet voice. But the beat of natural conversation in Walcott’s poetry gradually became clearer. Another Life confirmed it. And The Star-Apple Kingdom is filled with mastery of his own voice, a cadence like a heart-beat so if you place your touching fingers on the breast of Caribbean man you can feel the throb and shiver of it there. In this book just read Fight with the Crew from one of Walcott’s very greatest poems The Schooner Flight and you will know it.
It is such a lovely book of poetry, sweet as a plum in the mouth, full of richness and island spice, putting a shine mark on any day I re-read it like a sun bolt coming through the shadows of northern clouds.
There is a spontaneity about Walcott’s poetry that is sharp as a cat springing on a bright bird. You can see it in line after line, phrase after phrase, in the The Star-Apple Kingdom. I love him for it. I don’t think an editor or friend could ever get him to change a word of his poetry. I think of Byron, in a letter to his publisher, Murray, who had made the mistake of asking Byron to mend or re-write some lines of his verse for public consumption: “I am like the tiger poesy – if I miss my first Spring – I go growling back to my Jungle – there is no second – I can’t correct.”
Derek Walcott is the best poet ever to have appeared in the West Indies. And in case that sounds parochial let me give the statement a universal gloss and say that Walcott is a great poet in the world whatever near or far horizon you may scan for that strange, compelling breed. And one knew that long, long before he was crowned with the Nobel or won the Eliot Prize.
His poetry long ago rose above the disheveled state of our petty Caricom politics, long ago left behind our endemic economic deterioration and social malaise, and lifted itself free from the quarrelsome ideologies and dissensions that twist our minds out of all sense and civility and compassion. There it is, soaring free as a hawk over a muddy shore, seeking its true, secure and unique place among the valuable and enduring works of man.
