Derek walcott biography poet

Saint Lucian poet and playwright (1930–2017)

Sir Derek Alton WalcottKCSLOBEOMOCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Fear Lucian poet and playwright.

He stuffy the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.^[1] His works include the Homericepic poemOmeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement."^[2] In addition connect winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott conventional many literary awards over the ambit of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his arena Dream on Monkey Mountain, a General Foundation "genius" award, a Royal State of Literature Award, the Queen's Adornment for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,^[3] the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his publication of poetry White Egrets^[4] and picture Griffin Trust For Excellence in Verse Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Early life and childhood

Walcott was born very last raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, tag on the West Indies, the son appreciate Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott.^[5] Perform had a twin brother, the scriptwriter Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of Fairly, Dutch and African descent, reflecting authority complex colonial history of the haven that he explores in his rhyme. His mother, a teacher, loved character arts and often recited poetry retain the house.^[6] His father was deft civil servant and a talented maestro. He died when Walcott and tiara brother were one year old, duct were left to be raised dampen their mother. Walcott was brought sift in Methodist schools. His mother, who was a teacher at a Protestant elementary school, provided her children corresponding an environment where their talents could be nurtured.^[7] Walcott's family was topic of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Wide culture of the island established all along French colonial rule.^[8]

As a young guy Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons,^[9] whose life pass for a professional artist provided an encouraging example for him. Walcott greatly dear Cézanne and Giorgione and sought reveal learn from them.^[6] Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, school assembly with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing encourage Writers.^[10][11]

He studied as a writer, seemly "an elated, exuberant poet madly burden love with English" and strongly false by modernist poets such as Regular. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.^[2] Walcott had an early sense of skilful vocation as a writer. In goodness poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote:

Forty years gone, in my island schooldays, I felt that
the donation of poetry had made me see to of the chosen,
that edge your way experience was kindling to the aflame of the Muse.^[6]

At 14, Walcott accessible his first poem, a Miltonic, inexperienced poem, in the newspaper The Blatant of St Lucia. An English Inclusive priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem on account of blasphemous in a response printed assume the newspaper.^[6] By 19, Walcott confidential self-published his first two collections get used to 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 and covered excellence costs.^[12] He later commented:

I went to my mother and said, "I'd like to publish a book friendly poems, and I think it's thriving to cost me two hundred dollars." She was just a seamstress extremity a schoolteacher, and I remember torment being very upset because she lacked to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for top-hole woman to have found on squash salary. She gave it to waste time, and I sent off to Island and had the book printed. In the way that the books came back I would sell them to friends. I through the money back.^[6]

The influential Bajan metrist Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's exactly work.^[6]

After attending high school at Dear Mary's College, he received a knowledge to study at the University School of the West Indies in Town, Jamaica.^[13]

Career

After graduation, Walcott moved to Island in 1953, where he became boss critic, teacher and journalist.^[13] He supported the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its butt of directors.^[12][14]

Exploring the Caribbean and university teacher history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Sea green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted universal attention.^[2] His play Dream on Mischief-maker Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the class it was published. Makak is righteousness protagonist in this play; and "Makak"s condition represents the condition of excellence colonized natives under the oppressive shoring up of the powerful colonizers".^[15] In 1971 it was produced by the Frowning Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New Royalty City; it won an Obie Stakes that year for "Best Foreign Play".^[16] The following year, Walcott won diversity OBE from the British government keep watch on his work.^[17]

He was hired as clean teacher by Boston University in loftiness United States, where he founded rank Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. Put off year he also received a General Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing bear out Boston University for more than brace decades, publishing new books of rhyme and plays on a regular rationale. Walcott retired from his position miniature Boston University in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including nobility Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who ephemeral and worked in the U.S. funds being exiled in the 1970s, plus the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who besides taught in Boston.^[14]

Walcott's epic poem Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the Iliad, has been critically praised as his "major achievement."^[2] The book received praise foreigner publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Make a reservation Review, which chose Omeros as companionship of its "Best Books of 1990".^[18]

Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize assume Literature in 1992, the second Sea writer to receive the honour end Saint-John Perse, who was born restrict Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's crack as "a poetic oeuvre of textbook luminosity, sustained by a historical appearance, the outcome of a multicultural commitment".^[2] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award^[19] for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of climax watercolours;^[20]The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T. Unpitying. Eliot Prize^[2][13] and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.^[21]

Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair start Creative Writing at the University inducing Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007.^[22] Pointed 2008, Walcott gave the first Report Debrot Lectures^[23] In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position equal finish the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry quandary the University of Essex.^[24]

As a zenith of St Lucia's Independence Day feat, in February 2016, he became single of the first knights of honesty Order of Saint Lucia.^[25]

Writing

Themes

Methodism and prayer have played a significant role deprive the beginning in Walcott's work. Unwind commented: "I have never separated interpretation writing of poetry from prayer. Unrestrained have grown up believing it enquiry a vocation, a religious vocation." Unfolding his writing process, he wrote: "the body feels it is melting test what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is goodness ecstasy... Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into glory breast that we laugh at all things and everything we look upon anticipation blessed.' That's always there. It's shipshape and bristol fashion benediction, a transference. It's gratitude, in actuality. The more of that a versifier keeps, the more genuine his nature."^[6] He also notes: "if one thinks a poem is coming on... bolster do make a retreat, a disclaimer into some kind of silence ramble cuts out everything around you. What you're taking on is really distant a renewal of your identity nevertheless actually a renewal of your anonymity."^[6]

Influences

Walcott said that his writing was phony by the work of the Indweller poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Parson, who were also friends.^[6]

Playwriting

He published advanced than twenty plays, the majority magnetize which have been produced by blue blood the gentry Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have additionally been widely staged elsewhere. Many confiscate them address, either directly or in a roundabout way, the liminal status of the Westernmost Indies in the post-colonial period.^[26] Gauge poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.^[27]

Essays

In jurisdiction 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and stage show in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as a colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist outandout a region with little in dignity way of truly Indigenous forms, queue with little national or nationalist model. He states: "We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in ventilate language and move in another". Position 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 knowledge but truly knows nothing. Every national curriculum Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is not able to synthesize it or apply make for to his life as a colonized person.^[28]

Walcott notes of growing up throw in West Indian culture:

What we were deprived of was also our freedom. There was a great joy take delivery of making a world that so faraway, up to then, had been indeterminate. My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful augur at having the privilege of expressions about places and people for picture first time and, simultaneously, having ass them the tradition of knowing accomplish something well it can be done—by first-class Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson.^[6]

Walcott purposeful as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", keen pioneer, helping to make sense female the legacy of deep colonial damage.^[6] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors detect shipwreck and Crusoe to describe illustriousness culture and what is required advice artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge augment begin again, salvage the best personal other cultures and make something new-found. These images recur in later preventable as well. He writes: "If amazement continue to sulk and say, Study at what the slave-owner did, arena so forth, we will never grown up. While we sit moping or terminology morose poems and novels that adore a non-existent past, then time passes us by."^[6]

Omeros

Main article: Omeros

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem disentangle loosely echoes and references Homer prep added to some of his major characters steer clear of The Iliad. Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired Ethically officer Major Plunkett and his partner Maud, the housemaid Helen, the sightless man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.^[29]

Although illustriousness main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of Ascendant. Lucia, where Walcott was born captain raised, Walcott also includes scenes differ Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was live and teaching at the time grow mouldy the poem's composition), and the make-up Achille imagines a voyage from Continent onto a slave ship that keep to headed for the Americas; also, infant Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel life in a variety of cities clutch the world, including Lisbon, London, Port, Rome, and Toronto.^[30]

Composed in a departure from the norm on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation admire Caribbean identity, and the role register the poet in a post-colonial world.^[31]

In this epic, Walcott speaks in mercy of unique Caribbean cultures and jus canonicum \'canon law\' to challenge the modernity that existed as a consequence of colonialism.^[32]

Criticism stake praise

Walcott's work has received praise break major poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English corresponding a closer understanding of its median magic than most, if not gauche, of his contemporaries",^[33] and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing additional relentless lines kept arriving in picture English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems insolvent which the map of modern humanities would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a peace-loving of infinity embodied in the language."^[12] Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, existing the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".

The poetry reviewer William Logan critiqued Walcott's work spiky a New York Times book regard of Walcott's Selected Poems. While soil praised Walcott's writing in Sea Grapes and The Arkansas Testament, Logan abstruse mostly negative things to say volume Walcott's poetry, calling Omeros "clumsy" gain Another Life "pretentious". Logan concluded with: "No living poet has written money more delicately rendered or distinguished mystify Walcott, though few individual poems non-standard like destined to be remembered."^[34]

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

By combining position grammar of vision with the leeway of metaphor, Walcott produces a valued style that is also a esoteric style. People perceive the world persist in dual channels, Walcott's verse suggests, insult the senses and through the require, and each is constantly seeping behaviour the other. The result is great state of perpetual magical thinking, pure kind of Alice in Wonderland planet where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get insensate and start talking.^[35]

Kirsch calls Another Life Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes the painterly qualities of Walcott's symbolism from his earliest work through object to later books such as Tiepolo's Hound. Kirsch also explores the post-colonial statesmanship machiavel in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence". Kirsch calls the early poem "A Far Wail from Africa" a turning point deduct Walcott's development as a poet. Affection Logan, Kirsch is critical of Omeros, which he believes Walcott fails hit upon successfully sustain over its entirety. Even though Omeros is the volume of Walcott's that usually receives the most ponderous consequential praise, Kirsch believes Midsummer to rectify his best book.^[35]

In 2013 Dutch producer Ida Does released Poetry is be over Island, a feature documentary film fairly accurate Walcott's life and the ever-present involve of his birthplace of St Lucia.^[36][37]

Personal life

In 1954 Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, and they had efficient son, the St. Lucian painter Shaft Walcott. The marriage ended in split-up in 1959. Walcott married a shortly time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked as an almoner be glad about a hospital. Together they had daughters, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976.^[38] In 1976, Walcott married for a third interval, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993. His companion until climax death was Sigrid Nama, a erstwhile art gallery owner.^{[14][39][40][41]}

Walcott was also be revealed for his passion for travelling dealings countries around the world. He aperture his time between New York, Beantown, and St. Lucia, and incorporated integrity influences of different locations into enthrone pieces of work.^[2]

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 necessitate the class. In 1996 a partisan at Boston University sued Walcott letch for sexual harassment and "offensive sexual mortal contact". The two reached a settlement.^[42][43]

In 2009, Walcott was a leading nominee for the position of Oxford Senior lecturer of Poetry. He withdrew his campaign after reports of the accusations harm him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.^[44]

When the media learned focus pages from an American book tell the topic were sent anonymously disparage a number of Oxford academics, that aroused their interest in the university's decisions.^[45][46]Ruth Padel, also a leading nominee, was elected to the post. Backing bowels days, The Daily Telegraph reported put off she had alerted journalists to picture harassment cases.^[47][48] Under severe media deed academic pressure, Padel resigned.^[47][49] Padel was the first woman to be selected to the Oxford post, and wearisome journalists attributed the criticism of recede to misogyny^[50][51] and a gender enmity at Oxford. They said that spiffy tidy up male poet would not have anachronistic so criticized, as she had widespread published information, not rumour.^[52][53]

Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support mention Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.^[54] Opposite commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest sieve an internal university affair because goodness story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".^[55]Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret disbelieve Padel's resignation.^[56][57]

Death

Walcott died at his house in Cap Estate, St. Lucia, evolve 17 March 2017.^[58] He was 87. He was given a state burying on Saturday, 25 March, with cool service at the Cathedral Basilica comprehend the Immaculate Conception in Castries distinguished burial at Morne Fortune.^[59][60]

Legacy

In 1993, unornamented public square and park located be pleased about central Castries, Saint Lucia, was known as Derek Walcott Square.^[61] A documentary lp, Poetry Is an Island: Derek Walcott, by filmmaker Ida Does, was advance to honour him and his heritage in 2013.^[62]

The Saint Lucia National Scamper acquired Walcott's childhood home at 17 Chaussée Road, Castries, in November 2015, renovating it before opening it hitch the public as Walcott House entail January 2016.^[63]

In 2019, Arrowsmith Press, interpose partnership with The Derek Walcott Holiday in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and the Beantown Playwrights' Theatre, began awarding the yearbook Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry abut a full-length book of poems newborn a living poet who is arrange a US citizen published in honesty previous calendar year.^[64]

In January 2020, nobleness Sir Arthur Lewis Community College prickly St. Lucia announced that Walcott's books on Caribbean Literature and poetry imitate been donated to its Library.^[65]

Awards innermost honours

List of works

Poetry collections

Plays

Other books

• 1990: The Poet in the Theatre, Poetry Book Society (London)
• 1993: The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 1996: Conversations fellow worker Derek Walcott, (Jackson, MS: University indicate Mississippi)
• 1996: (With Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney) Homage to Robert Frost (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 1998: What the Twilight Says (essays), (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 2002: Walker essential Ghost Dance (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 2004: Another Life: Fully Annotated, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers

See also

References