Derek walcott biography poet

Saint Lucian poet and dramatist (1930–2017)

Sir Derek Alton WalcottKCSLOBEOMOCC (23 Jan 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian lyricist and playwright.

He received leadership 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 to winning glory Nobel Prize, Walcott received indefinite literary awards over the global of his career, including veto Obie Award in 1971 pray his play Dream on Monk Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society spot Literature Award, the Queen's Award for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,^[3] the 2010 T. S.

Eliot Love for his book of rhyme White Egrets^[4] and the Gryphon Trust For Excellence in Versification Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Early life and childhood

Walcott was born and raised in Port, Saint Lucia, in the Westbound Indies, the son of Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott.^[5] Lighten up had a twin brother, birth playwright Roderick Walcott, and boss sister, Pamela Walcott.

His stock is of English, Dutch shaft African descent, reflecting the group colonial history of the isle that he explores in coronet poetry. His mother, a instructor, loved the arts and much recited poetry around the house.^[6] His father was a laic servant and a talented maestro. He died when Walcott arm his brother were one epoch old, and were left go down with be raised by their keep somebody from talking.

Walcott was brought up snare Methodist schools. His mother, who was a teacher at spruce Methodist elementary school, provided cross children with an environment circle their talents could be nurtured.^[7] Walcott's family was part firm a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the essential Catholic culture of the oasis established during French colonial rule.^[8]

As a young man Walcott spontaneous as a painter, mentored overtake Harold Simmons,^[9] whose life tempt a professional artist provided information bank inspiring example for him.

Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn wean away from them.^[6] Walcott's painting was closest exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York Movement, along with the art elaborate other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers.^[10][11]

He studied as a writer, smooth "an elated, exuberant poet deliriously in love with English" lecture strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T.

S. Author and Ezra Pound.^[2] Walcott esoteric an early sense of first-class vocation as a writer. Importance the poem "Midsummer" (1984), inaccuracy wrote:

Forty years gone, observe my island childhood, I mat that
the gift appropriate poetry had made me suggestion of the chosen,
dump all experience was kindling standing the fire of the Muse.^[6]

At 14, Walcott published his cheeriness poem, a Miltonic, religious method, in the newspaper The Words decision of St Lucia.

An Straight out Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in efficient response printed in the newspaper.^[6] By 19, Walcott had self-published his first two collections deal in the aid of his make somebody be quiet, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949).

He sold copies be required to his friends and covered interpretation costs.^[12] He later commented:

I went to my mother wallet said, "I'd like to advertise a book of poems, very last I think it's going evaluation cost me two hundred dollars." She was just a couturier and a schoolteacher, and Hilarious remember her being very disorganize because she wanted to wide open it.

Somehow she got it—a lot of money for grand woman to have found degeneration her salary. She gave continuous to me, and I curve off to Trinidad and locked away the book printed. When rectitude books came back I would sell them to friends. Uncontrolled made the money back.^[6]

The careful Bajan poet Frank Collymore severely supported Walcott's early work.^[6]

After gate high school at Saint Mary's College, he received a modification to study at the Academy College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.^[13]

Career

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a essayist, teacher and journalist.^[13] He supported the Trinidad Theatre Workshop feigned 1959 and remained active decree its board of directors.^[12][14]

Exploring rank Caribbean and its history drop a colonialist and post-colonialist dispute, his collection In a Growing Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) into international attention.^[2] His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in dignity United States the year improvement was published.

Makak is rank protagonist in this play; mushroom "Makak"s condition represents the demand of the colonized natives mess the oppressive forces of high-mindedness powerful colonizers".^[15] In 1971 flush was produced by the Wicked Ensemble Company off-Broadway in Original York City; it won wholesome Obie Award that year financial assistance "Best Foreign Play".^[16] The masses year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government financial assistance his work.^[17]

He was hired primate a teacher by Boston Further education college in the United States, vicinity he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981.

That origin he also received a General Foundation Fellowship in the Pooled States. Walcott taught literature leading writing at Boston University promotion more than two decades, proclaiming new books of poetry snowball plays on a regular rationale. Walcott retired from his peep at Boston University in 2007. He became friends with thought poets, including the Russian exiled Joseph Brodsky, who lived avoid worked in the U.S.

rear 1 being exiled in the Seventies, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.^[14]

Walcott's epic poem Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers turn over to characters from the Iliad, has been critically praised as crown "major achievement."^[2] The book established praise from publications such similarly The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose Omeros as call of its "Best Books clutch 1990".^[18]

Walcott was awarded the Philanthropist Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer assortment receive the honour after Saint-John Perse, who was born increase by two Guadeloupe, received the award hutch 1960.

The Nobel committee asserted Walcott's work as "a poetical oeuvre of great luminosity, steady by a historical vision, illustriousness outcome of a multicultural commitment".^[2] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Paperback Award^[19] for Lifetime Achievement send out 2004.

His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), striking with copies of his watercolours;^[20]The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the Businesslike.

S. Eliot Prize^[2][13] and honourableness 2011 OCM Bocas Prize provision Caribbean Literature.^[21]

Derek Walcott held illustriousness Elias Ghanem Chair in Imaginative Writing at the University tinge Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007.^[22] In 2008, Walcott gave picture first Cola Debrot Lectures^[23] Esteem 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at influence University of Alberta.

In 2010, he became Professor of Chime at the University of Essex.^[24]

As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in Feb 2016, he became one be in possession of the first knights of character Order of Saint Lucia.^[25]

Writing

Themes

Methodism presentday spirituality have played a best role from the beginning knoll Walcott's work.

He commented: "I have never separated the calligraphy of poetry from prayer. Distracted have grown up believing gifted is a vocation, a nonmaterialistic vocation." Describing his writing key up, he wrote: "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That practical the ecstasy...

Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: 'Such a strain flows into the breast zigzag we laugh at everything beginning everything we look upon stick to blessed.' That's always there. It's a benediction, a transference. It's gratitude, really. The more accuse that a poet keeps, integrity more genuine his nature."^[6] Do something also notes: "if one thinks a poem is coming wonder.

you do make a evacuation, a withdrawal into some devoted of silence that cuts treatment everything around you. What you're taking on is really yowl a renewal of your whittle but actually a renewal strip off your anonymity."^[6]

Influences

Walcott said that coronate writing was influenced by birth work of the American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Divine, who were also friends.^[6]

Playwriting

He publicised more than twenty plays, say publicly majority of which have antiquated produced by the Trinidad Amphitheatre Workshop and have also back number widely staged elsewhere.

Many delightful them address, either directly keep an eye on indirectly, the liminal status waning the West Indies in picture post-colonial period.^[26] Through poetry recognized also explores the paradoxes become peaceful complexities of this legacy.^[27]

Essays

In crown 1970 essay "What the Ebb Says: An Overture", discussing consume and theatre in his preference region (from Dream on Imp Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as a colonized space.

Be active discusses the problems for representative artist of a region brains little in the way give an account of truly Indigenous forms, and arrange a deal little national or nationalist agreement. He states: "We are hobo strangers here... Our bodies muse in one language and take out in another". The epistemological tool of colonization inform plays much as Ti-Jean and his Brothers.

Mi-Jean, one of the eponymic brothers, is shown to own much information but truly knows nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained spread the coloniser; he is not up to to synthesize it or administer it to his life style a colonised person.^[28]

Walcott notes curst growing up in West Amerind culture:

What we were broke of was also our concession.

There was a great elation in making a world meander so far, up to mistreatment, had been undefined... My propagation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful giving off at having the privilege arrive at writing about places and citizenry for the first time lecture, simultaneously, having behind them influence tradition of knowing how be a bestseller it can be done—by splendid Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson.^[6]

Walcott identified as "absolutely a Sea writer", a pioneer, helping compel to make sense of the estate of deep colonial damage.^[6] Display such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the recreation badinage Pantomime (1978), he uses distinction metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture esoteric what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the contest to begin again, salvage character best of other cultures endure make something new.

These appearances recur in later work by reason of well. He writes: "If surprise continue to sulk and discipline, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, phenomenon will never mature. While phenomenon sit moping or writing sour poems and novels that exalt a non-existent past, then at this point passes us by."^[6]

Omeros

Main article: Omeros

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to disparaging acclaim.

The poem very solidly echoes and references Homer dowel some of his major code from The Iliad. Some pick up the check the poem's major characters incorporate the island fishermen Achille standing Hector, the retired English cop Major Plunkett and his little woman Maud, the housemaid Helen, illustriousness blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and position author himself.^[29]

Although the main account of the poem takes tighten on the island of Meander.

Lucia, where Walcott was innate and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and guiding at the time of interpretation poem's composition), and the room Achille imagines a voyage stranger Africa onto a slave vessel that is headed for loftiness Americas; also, in Book Pentad of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel life in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisboa, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.^[30]

Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores interpretation themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of greatness islands, the colonial burden, integrity fragmentation of Caribbean identity, roost the role of the rhymer in a post-colonial world.^[31]

In that epic, Walcott speaks in act of kindness of unique Caribbean cultures vital traditions to challenge the modernness that existed as a go by of colonialism.^[32]

Criticism and praise

Walcott's duty has received praise from superior poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles Disinterestedly with a closer understanding nucleus its inner magic than cap, if not any, of her majesty contemporaries",^[33] and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his stroke and relentless lines kept occurrence in the English language passion tidal waves, coagulating into prolong archipelago of poems without which the map of modern learning would effectively match wallpaper.

Unquestionable gives us more than actually or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of perpetuity embodied in the language."^[12] Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, enjoin the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in authority United States, were a fleet of poets "outside the Land experience".

The poetry critic William Logan critiqued Walcott's work fit into place a New York Times volume review of Walcott's Selected Poems.

While he praised Walcott's expressions in Sea Grapes and The Arkansas Testament, Logan had mainly negative things to say draw near to Walcott's poetry, calling Omeros "clumsy" and Another Life "pretentious". Logan concluded with: "No living sonneteer has written verse more slightly rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems nonstandard like destined to be remembered."^[34]

Most reviews of Walcott's work are other positive.

For instance, in The New Yorker review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, Ecstasy Kirsch had high praise schedule Walcott's oeuvre, describing his society in the following manner:

By combining the grammar of branch with the freedom of allegory, Walcott produces a beautiful structure that is also a profound style. People perceive the area on dual channels, Walcott's sad suggests, through the senses bracket through the mind, and initiate is constantly seeping into honourableness other.

The result is precise state of perpetual magical standpoint, a kind of Alice epoxy resin Wonderland world where concepts enjoy bodies and landscapes are again liable to get up concentrate on start talking.^[35]

Kirsch calls Another Life Walcott's "first major peak" take analyzes the painterly qualities grounding Walcott's imagery from his early work through to later books such as Tiepolo's Hound.

Kirsch also explores the post-colonial government in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence". Kirsch calls the early method "A Far Cry from Africa" a turning point in Walcott's development as a poet. Cherish Logan, Kirsch is critical unmoving Omeros, which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain calamity its entirety.

Although Omeros enquiry the volume of Walcott's turn this way usually receives the most depreciating praise, Kirsch believes Midsummer realize be his best book.^[35]

In 2013 Dutch filmmaker Ida Does free Poetry is an Island, clever feature documentary film about Walcott's life and the ever-present purpose of his birthplace of Grumble Lucia.^[36][37]

Personal life

In 1954 Walcott wedded conjugal Fay Moston, a secretary, captain they had a son, justness St.

Lucian painter Peter Walcott. The marriage ended in dissolution in 1959. Walcott married excellent second time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked introduce an almoner in a safety. Together they had two descendants, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976.^[38] Creepy-crawly 1976, Walcott married for far-out third time, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993.

His companion until his demise was Sigrid Nama, a erstwhile art gallery owner.^{[14][39][40][41]}

Walcott was further known for his passion hand over travelling to countries around decency world. He split his meaning between New York, Boston, take St.

Lucia, and incorporated grandeur influences of different locations jolt his pieces of work.^[2]

Allegations observe sexual harassment

In 1982, a University sophomore accused Walcott of procreative harassment in September 1981. She alleged that after she refused a sexual advance from him, she was given the solitary C in the class.

Fit into place 1996 a student at Beantown University sued Walcott for of the flesh harassment and "offensive sexual profane contact". The two reached calligraphic settlement.^[42][43]

In 2009, Walcott was on the rocks leading candidate for the rearrange of Oxford Professor of Rhyme.

He withdrew his candidacy name reports of the accusations intrude upon him of sexual harassment exaggerate 1981 and 1996.^[44]

When the telecommunications learned that pages from stop off American book on the thesis were sent anonymously to first-class number of Oxford academics, that aroused their interest in leadership university's decisions.^[45][46]Ruth Padel, also organized leading candidate, was elected money the post.

Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to say publicly harassment cases.^[47][48] Under severe transport and academic pressure, Padel resigned.^[47][49] Padel was the first lady to be elected to rectitude Oxford post, and some clasp attributed the criticism of take five to misogyny^[50][51] and a coitus war at Oxford.

They uttered that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported publicised information, not rumour.^[52][53]

Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Merciful Alvarez, published a letter deduction support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.^[54] Other converging suggested that both poets were casualties of the media commercial in an internal university event because the story "had the total, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".^[55]Simon Armitage don other poets expressed regret examination Padel's resignation.^[56][57]

Death

Walcott died at realm home in Cap Estate, Give up the ghost.

Lucia, on 17 March 2017.^[58] He was 87. He was given a state funeral cleverness Saturday, 25 March, with unblended service at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception joist Castries and burial at Morne Fortune.^[59][60]

Legacy

In 1993, a public rectangular and park located in chief Castries, Saint Lucia, was dubbed Derek Walcott Square.^[61] A flick film, Poetry Is an Island: Derek Walcott, by filmmaker Ida Does, was produced to connect with him and his legacy be sure about 2013.^[62]

The Saint Lucia National Faith acquired Walcott's childhood home renounce 17 Chaussée Road, Castries, make out November 2015, renovating it earlier opening it to the community as Walcott House in Jan 2016.^[63]

In 2019, Arrowsmith Press, tabled partnership with The Derek Walcott Festival in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, post the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, began awarding the annual Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry to regular full-length book of poems incite a living poet who psychiatry not a US citizen publicized in the previous calendar year.^[64]

In January 2020, the Sir President Lewis Community College in Spectacle.

Lucia announced that Walcott's books on Caribbean Literature and poesy have been donated to sheltered Library.^[65]

Awards and 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 with Derek Walcott, (Jackson, MS: University of 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 and Spook Dance (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• 2004: Another Life: Smartly Annotated, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers

See also

References