Walcott was born and raised inCastries,Saint Lucia, in theWest Indies, the son of Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott.[5] He had a twin brother, the playwrightRoderick 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.[6] His father was acivil servant and a talented painter, who died when Walcott and his brother were one year old.[7][8]
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.[7] Walcott's family was part of a minorityMethodist community. They felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule. Walcott's secondary school was the CatholicSt. Mary's College.[9]
As a young man, he trained as a painter, mentored byHarold Simmons,[10] whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admiredCézanne andGiorgione and sought to learn from them.[6] Walcott's painting was later exhibited at theAnita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition namedThe Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers.[11][12]
He studied as a writer, becoming "an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English" and strongly influenced by modernist poets such asT. S. Eliot andEzra Pound.[2] 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.[6]
At 14, Walcott published his first poem, aMiltonic, religious poem, in the newspaperThe Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper.[6] 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 (1948) andEpitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs.[13]
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 toTrinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back.[6]
The influential Barbadian poetFrank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.[6]
Walcott at VIII Festival Internacional, 1992Derek Walcott reciting his poem "names"
After graduation, Walcott moved toTrinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.[14] He founded theTrinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its board of directors.[13][16]
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collectionIn a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted international attention.[2] His playDream 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; and "Makak"s condition represents the condition of the colonized natives under the oppressive forces of the powerful colonizers".[17] In 1971, it was produced by theNegro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won anObie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[18] In the United Kingdom's1972 New Year Honours, Walcott was awarded anOBE for services to literature and drama in St. Lucia.[19][20]
He was hired as a teacher byBoston University in the United States, where he founded theBoston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received aMacArthur 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 expatriateJoseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled in the 1970s; and the IrishmanSeamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.[16]
Walcott's epic poemOmeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from theIliad, has been critically praised as his "major achievement."[2] The book was praised by such publications asThe Washington Post andThe New York Times Book Review, which choseOmeros as one of its "Best Books of 1990".[21]
Walcott was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour afterSaint-John Perse, who was born inGuadeloupe, 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",[2] with the jury report praising him as the "Caribbean Homer".[22] In 2004, he won anAnisfield-Wolf Book Award[23] for Lifetime Achievement.
His later poetry collections includeTiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolours;[24]The Prodigal (2004), andWhite Egrets (2010), which received the T. S. Eliot Prize[2][14] and the 2011OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.[25]
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 avocation, 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 whatYeats 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."[6] 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."[6]
He published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by theTrinidad 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.[30] Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.[31]
In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (fromDream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), 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 trulyIndigenous 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 asTi-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.[32]
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 aDefoe, aDickens, aRichardson.[6]
Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.[6] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the playPantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck andCrusoe 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."[6]
Walcott's epic book-length poemOmeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and referencesHomer and some of his major characters fromThe 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.[33]
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 fromBrookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that is headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, includingLisbon, London,Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.[34]
Composed in a variation onterza 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.[35]
In this epic, Walcott speaks in favour of unique Caribbean cultures and traditions to challenge the modernity that existed as a consequence of colonialism.[36]
Walcott's work has received praise from major poets includingRobert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries",[37] andJoseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "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."[13] Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poetSeamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".
The poetry criticWilliam Logan critiqued Walcott's work in aNew York Times book review of Walcott'sSelected Poems. While he praised Walcott's writing inSea Grapes andThe Arkansas Testament, Logan had mostly negative things to say about Walcott's poetry, callingOmeros "clumsy" andAnother 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."[38]
Most reviews of Walcott's work are more positive. For instance, inThe New Yorker review ofThe 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 ofAlice in Wonderland world where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get up and start talking.[39]
Kirsch callsAnother Life Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes the painterly qualities of Walcott's imagery from his earliest work through to later books such asTiepolo'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 ofOmeros, which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain over its entirety. AlthoughOmeros is the volume of Walcott's that usually receives the most critical praise, Kirsch believesMidsummer to be his best book.[39]
In 2013 Dutch filmmaker Ida Does releasedPoetry is an Island, a feature documentary film about Walcott's life and the ever-present influence of his birthplace ofSt Lucia.[40][41]
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 analmoner in a hospital. Together they had two daughters,Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976.[42] 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.[16][43][44][45]
Walcott was known for his passion for traveling, visiting 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.[2]
In 1982, a Harvard sophomore accused Walcott ofsexual 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 physicalcontact". The two reached a settlement.[46][47]
In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position ofOxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of the accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.[48]
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's decisions.[49][50]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.[51][52] Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned.[51][53] Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and some journalists attributed the criticism of her tomisogyny[54][55] 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 rumour.[56][57]
Numerous respected poets, includingSeamus Heaney andAl Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott inThe Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.[58] Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".[59]Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.[60][61]
In 1993, a public square and park located in central Castries, Saint Lucia, was namedDerek Walcott Square.[65] A documentary film,Poetry Is an Island: Derek Walcott, by filmmakerIda Does, was produced to honour him and his legacy in 2013.[66]
TheSaint 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.[68]
In 2019, Arrowsmith Press, in partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, began awarding the annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry to a full-length book of poems by a living poet who is not a US citizen published in the previous calendar year.[69]
In January 2020, theSir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia announced that Walcott's books on Caribbean Literature and poetry have been donated to its Library.[70]
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^Morrison, James V. (1 January 1999). "Homer Travels to the Caribbean: Teaching Walcott's "Omeros"".The Classical World.93 (1):83–99.doi:10.2307/4352373.JSTOR4352373.
^Robert D. Hamner,"Introduction"Archived 10 October 2023 at theWayback Machine,Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott (Three Continents, 1993), Lynne Rienner, 1997, p. 1.
^Logan, William (8 April 2007)."The Poet of Exile".The New York Times.Archived from the original on 22 March 2017. Retrieved19 March 2017.
^abKirsch, Adam (3 February 2014)."Full Fathom Five".The New Yorker.Archived from the original on 19 March 2017. Retrieved18 March 2017.
^"2015 – Derek Walcott". Oakville, Ontario: The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. 3 June 2015.Archived from the original on 29 March 2017. Retrieved5 April 2017.
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