It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott has been writing and publishing poems since the 1940s. His work seems so immortally young. I remember when I was a schoolboy reading in the magazine BIM the poems ‘As John to Patmos’ and ‘A City’s Death by Fire,’ written when he was still in his teens, and knew – as I knew it also when I saw Frank Worrell late cut Lance Pierre at the Queens Park Oval – that here was genius.
As John to Patmos, in each love- leaping air,
O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear
What I swear now, as John did:
To praise love long, the living and the brown dead.
Over the years which have since cascaded through all our histories he has created for us a special poetic domain, “independent of the tradition he inherited, yet not altogether orphaned from it.” He belongs to us and to the world through his absolute mastery of words which has increased and increased and increased – the singing lines emerging, as it was said of Mozart’s music, as if an artery was cut and the flow of the life-blood could not be stopped.
Derek Walcott, from small St Lucia, has become a towering figure in world literature. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel Laureate, once called him the best poet writing in English. There was awed acclaim, world-wide, for his full-length narrative poem Omeros, “filtering all sorts of titanic sorrows through a limpid and ferocious intellect” – and he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Walcott himself said of Omeros, “I wrote it primarily for the Caribbean. For me it was an act of gratitude for St Lucia, the people, the weather, the life I have lived there.” Thus, as it has always been, genius finds universality locally in lives and places remote from any mainstream or central points of history.
What will he do next to astonish us even in his eighties? His latest book White