Walcott therefore, is a poet who has learned from the European tradition and perfected the complex experience of a West Indian a poet who developed a new critical idiom to adequate his subject matters. While it is indeed true that his early work reflects the voices of English poetry but if Walcott’s poetry at times appear to betray a native tradition, it also manifests a profound blending of European, American, Caribbean, African, classical and contemporary cultures. While critics in the new and old empires are often ambivalent about Walcott’s indebt to the Western literary tradition, his Caribbean contemporaries accuse him of adapting an imperial style. It is through this predicament he has harnessed to create a unique “creolized” style. Walcott’s poetry arises from this schizophrenic situation, from a struggle between two disparate cultural forces. He spent half his life in what he calls ‘the prehistoric Eden of his childhood’ and the other half teaching in the world’s newest empire-United States. English also became his poetical and hence political tongue, a tongue which had its roots in a far-flung empire.

Lucia when it was still a British colony, Walcott’s first language was a French-English patois but he received an English education. In the Nobel Laureate’s oeuvre we therefore witness the intense physical beauty of the Caribbean islands, the troubled relationship between his roots and colonial heritage, and the problems of a fragmented postcolonial identity.īorn on the Caribbean island of St. These relationships are major subjects in Walcott’s work and he identifies himself as a truly native Caribbean poet. Ajanta Dutt, in Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: Poets of the Americas cites Walcott’s friend and fellow-poet James Dickey who speaks of the poet’s troubled predicament: “Here he is, a twentieth-century man, living in the West Indies and in Boston, poised between the blue sea and its real fish, and the rockets and warheads, between a lapsed colonial culture and the industrial North, between Africa and the West, between slavery and intellectualism, between the native Caribbean tongue and the English learned from books, between the black and white of his own body, between the sound of the home ocean and the lure of European culture”. Walcott’s life and work has always been reflective of this complexity wherein they inhabit an intersection of variant cultural forces. When the Swedish Academy awarded poet and playwright Derek Walcott the Nobel Prize in 1992, they recognized his contribution to Caribbean literature as a brilliant response to the “complexity of his own situation”.

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