By the setting of the final decade of the twentieth century, Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) had advanced to be regarded as the world’s best poet. He was the Caribbean’s greatest poet-playwright. He came to be called many things: the Homer of the West Indies, its most exceptional dramatist, a universal humanist. We are witnessing not the end of just another life, not of a man, but the end of an era, of a whole age in West Indian and world literature.
Sir Derek Walcott was knighted as the final crown, the power and the glory of a career that started as early as 1948, and whose conquests along the way included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and literary prizes, almost fittingly, for his last book of poetry, White Egrets (2010).