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Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (2002) 319-325



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Review Essay

The Cultural Address of Derek Walcott

Paul Breslin
Northwestern University


Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Paula Burnett. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. xiii + 380. $55.00.
Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Bruce King. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 714. $39.95.

A Trip to the "Post" Office

When one considers that Derek Walcott has spent much of his time in the United States since 1980, received a Nobel Prize in 1992, and has given numerous readings and interviews, the degree to which his career remains terra incognita on the map of contemporary poetry should surprise us. Not that there haven't been books on his work, including Edward Baugh's monograph (1978) on the long poem Another Life, Robert Hamner's overview for the Twayne Authors Series (1981; updated 1993), and studies by Rei Terada (1992) and John Thieme (1999). There are also Hamner's 1997 contributions, a short book on Omeros and an anthology of Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott; Bruce King's 1995 history of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which Walcott founded in 1959 and led until his resignation in 1976; and collections of interviews (1996, ed. William Baer) and critical essays on his work (1991, ed. Stewart Brown). But if you look for Walcott's name in the index of recent studies of contemporary American poetry such as Vernon Shetley's After the Death of Poetry (1993) or James Longenbach's Modern Poetry after Modernism (1997), you won't find it. Nor will you have any luck if you look for him in the writing of critics more inclined toward the avant-garde, such as Marjorie Perloff or Charles Altieri (no index entry, for instance, in Altieri's Postmodernisms Now [1998]).

The assimilation of Walcott into a larger context, to the extent it has occurred at all, has taken place in Caribbean and postcolonial studies rather than in work on contemporary poetry in English. And yet, as Jahan Ramazani maintains in his incisive new book, The Hybrid Muse (2001), "the story of the globalization of English-language poetry remains [End Page 319] largely untold." 1 This, he argues, is because "postcolonial criticism is largely grounded in mimetic presuppositions about literature. But since poetry mediates experience through a language of exceptional figural and formal density, it is a less transparent medium by which to recuperate the history, politics, and sociology of postcolonial societies. . . ." 2 There have been good commentaries on Walcott, but the relations between his work and that of other contemporary poets have not been traced as thoughtfully as one might expect. The two books under review, each in its own way, can help us locate him on a map of contemporary poetry that does not banish "postcolonial" writing to some separate space.

If the work resembles the man, its location must be shifting and plural: he divides his time, after all, among Boston, New York, and St. Lucia, having lived also in Trinidad and Jamaica. In the preface to Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, Bruce King compares Walcott's life to "a work by [Marcel] Duchamp or perhaps an Italian Futurist, fractured, moving on various planes in different directions at once" (viii). King reconstructs this fractured narrative in far greater detail than any previous study. Until now, the best sources on Walcott's life have been the brief but well-informed summary in Baugh's book and a few of the poet's own essays. To the extent that a minute chronicle of the events and circumstances of Walcott's life, the audiences he was seeking, and the aesthetic and political arguments in which he engaged can provide insight into the writing itself, King's biography is indispensable—although the light it sheds still leaves much in shadow.

King's analogies to Duchamp and Italian Futurism would seem to place Walcott within the traditions of European (and by extension Anglo-American) modernism. And yet Terada, who to a greater degree than Walcott's other critics has tried to place him in relation to contemporary metropolitan poetics...

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