Derek Walcott and the Poetics of "Transport"

Most North American critics and reviewers have come to see Derek Walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, “natural, worldly, and accomplished” (Vendler, 26).¹ Yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of Walcott’s work—its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency—has obstructed consideration of Walcott’s place in the postmodern era. Enthusiastic critics usually discuss Walcott as a “literary” poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.² Indeed, the surface of Walcott’s language does not seem postmodern. Yet Walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement—a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.³ The vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with Walcott’s poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.⁴ His readers most often argue that Walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.⁵ By this logic, rhetoric and content in Walcott’s poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. Other readers, meanwhile, believe that Walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.⁶

The difficulty in categorizing Walcott’s poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. While most of postmodernism’s would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in Walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. If Walcott’s poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that Walcott’s poetic contradicts itself (and thus that Walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from “ordinary” language are inadequate. Indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. It usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. The expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric—precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow.

Walcott avoids separating “poetic” from “ordinary” language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. The poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. Indeed, James Dickey complains that Walcott seems at times unable “to state, or see, things without allegory” (8). Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. He also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. Although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative—“allegorical” in de Man’s sense—and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post- modernity. Walcott’s turns of thought here do infact resemble de Man’s. In Allegories of Reading de Man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath “equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself” (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that “Poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (17). Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. The overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an Ashbery or a Palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. Walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric.

Although Walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity...