Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott (Castries, January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright and visual artist, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Trajectory

His experience growing up on an isolated volcanic island, a former Spanish colony had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. His grandmothers had been descendants of slaves. His father, a bohemian watercolor painter, died when Derek and his twin brother Roderick were a few years old. His mother moved to the town where the Methodist school was. After studying at St. Mary's College on his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. At the same time he continued writing poetry and at the age of 18, he debuted with 25 Poems and later published his second collection of poems, Epitaph for the Young (1949), with the subtitle XII Cantos in homage to Ezra Pound. He moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theater and art critic.In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop which produced many of his early works. As a poet his consecration came with the collection of poems, Green Night (1962).

In his formation, the English classics such as John Milton, John Donne and the rest of the metaphysicians and the playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare, the Americans Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and also T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas were of fundamental importance.

He was hired as a professor by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theater in 1981. He also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that year. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, regularly publishing new books of poetry and plays and retiring in 2007. He befriended other poets, including Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the United States, after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irish Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.

Little by little, he became one of the fundamental voices of Caribbean poetry and his Collected Poems 1948-1984 (1986) was acclaimed by critics and readers.

In 1990 the epic poem Omeros was published, which caused a great impact, was translated into many languages and is considered one of the basic poetic works of contemporary literature. After the repercussion of the publication of Omeros, in 1992 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 2009, Walcott began a three-year stay at the University of Alberta as poet-in-residence. He was also Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex between 2010 and 2013.

Subsequent to being a Nobel Prize winner, he received many literary accolades during the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Work

Omeros in Leiden

His work is intensely related to the symbolism of myths and its relationship with culture, however; it was developed independently of the schools of magical realism that were emerging at the same time in South America and Europe. He is especially known for his epic poem Omeros, (1990) considered Walcott's best work, an allusive story, and rewritten from Homeric history and lore, about the lore of a voyage across the Caribbean Sea and further to Africa, New England, the American West, Canada, and London (with abundant references to the Greek islands).

Midsummer, Tobago in The Hague

Walcott has published over twenty dramas, most of which have been staged by the Trinidad Theater Workshop, as well as on a large number of other stages. Many deal with the liminality of the East Indies during the post-colonial period. Some recurring themes in his works are epistemology, ontology, economics, politics, and the social.

His work presents a great verbal, visual and conceptual richness that reflects the customs, tensions and history of a colonized region. In it, the Amerindian, European (particularly English and Dutch) and African contributions are evident, which are for the author the basis of the cultural wealth of the Caribbean; Within this context, it is worth highlighting the importance for the author of the symbolism of myths and their relationship with culture.

Walcott works with the poetic tradition in the English language, with the classics and with modern poets. His poetry is characterized by the plasticity of the images and the moral force of the discourse. From the formal point of view, he emphasizes rhythm and a very elaborate metric that achieve elegant poetry and a high intellectual level.

Walcott is the author of a vast body of work that includes more than fifteen books of poetry and over thirty plays. His texts include Another Life (1973), The Kingdom of the Alligator (1979), The Arkansas Testament (1987) and, in 1990 his main text, Omeros, an epic poem based on the Odyssey.

Dream on Monkey Mountain 1970 is the most famous of his plays.

In 2006 he received the Grinzane Cavour Award.

Omeros

Walcott's epic poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely reflects and refers to Homer and some of the main characters in The Iliad. Some of the main characters in the poem include the island's fishermen Achilles and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the maid Helen, the blind Seven Seas (symbolically representing Homer), and the author himself..

Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of Saint Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott lived and taught at the time of the poem's composition). The character of Achilles imagines a journey from Africa on a slave ship headed for the Americas. Also, in the fifth part of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his experiences touring various cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.

Composed in a variant of the terza rhyme, the work explores the themes that run through Walcott's work: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a postcolonial world.

Omeros has been critically praised "as Walcotts greatest achievement". The book received acclaim from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which named Omeros one of its "Best Books of 1990".

Critical Appreciation

Walcott's work has received praise from great poets, including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "wields English with a deeper understanding of its inner magic than most, if not all, of his contemporaries,' and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: 'For nearly forty years his throbbing, relentless lines washed over the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems.'

Most reviews of Walcott's work are very positive. For example, in The New Yorker magazine in the article The Poetry of Derek Walcott, Adam Kirsch praised Walcott's work, describing his style as follows:

"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 in dual channels, Walcott's verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, each constantly filtering into the other. The result is a state of perpetual magical thinking, a kind of Alice in Wonderland world in which concepts have bodies and landscapes always able to get up and start talking."

The poet Andrés Sánchez Robayna says of his work: "The radical plasticity of his vision of the world could be observed from his first book, 25 Poems, in 1948, and it was confirmed in 1962 with the publication of his first great collection of poetry, In a Green Night (On a green night), a title from a verse by the English metaphysician Andrew Marvell in which this one speaks of the shining oranges of Bermuda as golden lamps in the green night of the tree (like golden lamps in a green night). Few images are more appropriate to symbolize a work poetry characterized by abundance, variety, the color of the cornucopia."

Martín López-Vega says of his style: "If something distinguishes Walcott it is his irrepressibly epic phrasing, which transforms any experience, however banal it may be, into a burst of intensity that envelops the reader, trapped in a poetry that appeals to the five senses as few authors have been capable of before. To the six senses, it would have to be said in reality, because to the multifaceted sensuality of his verse we must add his ability to appeal to our sense of history.& # 34;

Teju Cole says of his poetry: "It is poetry written with the hand of a painter, one patient brushstroke after another. Walcott's initial aspiration was to paint, to inhabit the "virginal world, never painted" of the Caribbean and dealing with the 'task of naming things' . He learned the rudiments of watercolor painting, which became the most serious of hobbies of the. Over the years, the covers of his books have showcased his deft and delicate pictorial representations of tropical country scenes. But the deepest and most significant exercise was poetry. He transferred to his poems the patient and cumulative sensitivity of a realist painter. His compositions are huge piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, frequently using consonant or assonance rhyme and large layers of adjectives that specify the outline of the noun. As models he usually cites painters rather than poets: Pissarro, Veronese, Cézanne, Manet, Gauguin and Millet circulate through the pages. And he welcomes the observed detail with the same passion with which a Flemish painter would. As he wrote in the poem "Midsummer," only half joking, "The Dutch blood in me is drawn in detail."

Main translated publications

• Dream on the mountain of the monkey (teatro, 1970).
• The mockery of Seville (1974). Get Keith Ellis. Madrid: Vaso Roto, 2014.
• Another life (1973). Bring Luis Ingelmo. Ed. bilingual. Barcelona: Gutenberg Galaxy, 2017.
• Black sea grapes on the dry-transparent wet earth (1976)
• The kingdom of the caimite (1979).
• The lucky traveler (1981). Bring Vincent Araguas. Madrid: Huerga and Fierro, 2003. ed. English-Spanish.
• Summer. Midsummer (1984). Bring Vincent Araguas. Madrid: Huerga and Fierro,1999, English-Spanish.
• The Will of Arkansas (1987). Trad. by Antonio Resines and Herminia Beviá. Madrid: Visor, 1994.
• Omeros (1990). Bring Ferran Estellés. Valencia: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim-IVEI, 1993, ed. English-Catalan. Trad. de José Luis Rivas: Barcelona: Circle of Readers, 1995, and Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002.
• Islands. Trad. by José Carlos Llop. Granada: Comares, 1993. Anthology; English-Spanish.
• The voice of the twilight. Bring Catalina Martínez Muñoz. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. Essay.
• The abundance. Get Jenaro Talens. Madrid: Visor, 2001.
• The odyssey. Get Jenaro Talens. Madrid: Visor, 2005.
• Selected Poems. Bring José Luis Rivas. Madrid: Vaso Roto, 2009.
• Poems. Trad. by José Carlos Llop. Granada: International Poetry Festival of Granada, 2010.
• White gazettes. Bring Luis Ingelmo. Ed. English-Spanish bilingual. Madrid: Bartleby, 2010.
• Full summer. Selected poetry. Bring José Luis Rivas. Madrid: Vaso Roto, 2012.
• The Light of the World. Bring Mariano Antolin Rato. Granada: Valparaiso, 2017.

Predecessor: Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize in Literature 1992

Successor: Toni Morrison