Crossing Couplets: Making Form the Matter of Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

A review of the scholarship on Derek Walcott's poetry indicates that critics pay most of their attention to prominent thematic issues that recur throughout Walcott's forty years of poetic output. ¹ These themes include exchanges between Europe and the Caribbean, the power inherent in language and naming, the artist as exile and voice of a people, the role of culture in contemporary life, and the place of history in Caribbean writing and society. ² But Walcott has also always been a poet highly conscious of form, of the British literary tradition, and of his own role in reshaping form and tradition to express forcefully his position as a poet writing simultaneously from the edges of colonial society, and from one of the diverse and dynamic centers of postcolonialism. ³ In his book-length poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000),Walcott explicitly turns to the couplet as a matter of form and content, as a force that helps him cross the boundaries that might separate his continuing engagement with historical and social themes from his dedication to literary and artistic traditions. Walcott, that is, revives, and revises, the couplet as a form that mediates his commitment to art as an expression of social and historical conditions, and of individual desires, beliefs, and experiences. In Tiepolo's Hound form does not act to preserve literary or cultural tradition. Instead Walcott returns to the couplet, and transforms it, as a way to invest traditional literary form with a sensibility of crossing and fluidity that characterizes the Caribbean. Walcott's particular construction of the couplet in this poem, and his related exploitation of rhyme, present new possibilities in postcolonial aesthetics and expand the boundaries of postcolonial writing.

In the often ideologically and politically inflected reception of writing from the Caribbean in particular, and from the postcolonial world more generally, the imperatives of social consciousness frequently clash with the claims both of literary formalism and a humanism that invests literature with universal values and assumptions. ⁴ At times Walcott's advocates emphasize his literary humanism and his affinities with the universality associated with Commonwealth literature, and suggest that Walcott, confronted by the traumas of colonialism and the failed promises of postcolonial politics, seeks refuge in art that distances itself from its historical conditions. ⁵ Paul Breslin writes, "In the late twentieth century, when most poets see the connection between the imagination and public realm as historical and cultural, Walcott insists on an older view in which the poet participates in the public realm by turning away from it, by opposing to 'History' the visionary imagination" (NN 200). Breslin, who does attend in his study of Walcott to such issues as race, nationalism, and federalism in the Caribbean, refines these comments when he remarks that, if Walcott sees "personal experience" and the social as "disjunct," he makes it "the work of poetry to bring them together," but this formulation still presupposes that art can function outside the influence of the social (NN 201).

While Breslin lauds Walcott for purportedly extricating his poetry from the political context often associated with postcolonial writing, other critics fault Walcott for this same tendency. In a far from socially conscious review of Tiepolo's Hound, John Kinsella has the temerity to conclude: "It would be nice to see more rage and less quiet. Stillness and poise and grace centre the European eye—a more persistent paranoid vision might better reveal the deep obfuscations and abstractions that inform the great wrongs of colonial history, the evils of false social contracts. Walcott knows this well." ⁶ Such criticism, which evokes a model of resistance literature that cannot adequately account for the multiplicity of contemporary Anglophone world literatures, implies an unsavory set of parameters within which authentically "postcolonial" writers ought to confine themselves. Contrary to Breslin's and Kinsella's evident inclinations to separate the highly literary—imagination (with its indebtedness to Romanticism), balance, the...