Localizing the Aesthetic Search: Walcott’s Caribbean Poetics in Abandoning Dead Metaphors

Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott's Poetry, Patricia Ismond. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. ISBN 976-640-107-1

Patricia Ismond's study of what she terms the "Caribbean phase" of the poetry of 1992 Nobel laureate Derek Walcott is, fittingly, another accolade for the poet's artistic genius and contribution to the articulation of a Caribbean national culture and identity. Unlike some recent studies of Walcott's work, which tend toward theoretical approaches that are essentially totalizing and which, in subtle and overt ways, seek to minimize and de-emphasize cultural distinctions, Ismond's project is deliberately ideological and nationalistic. In the act of claiming a regional icon who has been variously appropriated (especially among "metropolitan critics" as an "international," "federated," and even "American" poet), she explores the extent to which Walcott's current world stature is grounded in and informed by issues of Caribbean identity and self-definition. Drawing her title from Walcott's votive insistence in "The Castaway" and elsewhere in his work to "abandon dead metaphors," Ismond argues that Walcott's theoretical pronouncements during the early phase of his literary career signal the superstructure of a Caribbean aesthetic that is echoed and amplified in his later work outside the region. Hence, her overarching claim that what the mature Walcott eventually achieves is inspired and conditioned by decidedly Caribcentric impulses.

Ismond posits that Walcott's "Caribbean phase," from his first published volume, 25 Poems (1948), to The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979),¹ comprises a discrete category with an integrity of its own, a foundational category that certainly yields insight into the formative aspects of the poet's craft. Ismond's theorizing about Walcott's poetic development during this phase is heavily dependent on the poetics of place. The Caribbean is selectively read as the locus of alternative values in the dialectical encounter between the Old World and the New. She cogently asserts that this formative phase of the poet's work is the "place where he pursues the revolutionary effort native to his purpose as a writer of colonial origin to arrive at maturity of definition self and identity" (p. 2). She repeatedly uses the term "revolutionary effort" to underscore her thesis that meanings and definitions arising from this phase are foundational to the total Walcott and to the nature of the syncretism he later espouses. Like Edward Baugh, Ismond argues that Walcott perceives, in the metaphoric art of language, a greater reality than that found in the phenomenal world, namely the imagination itself. This use of language is the repository of a culture's dominant mode of intelligence and the vehicle through which a tradition may emerge.

Her insistence on the centrality of place as a deterministic influence on Walcott's aesthetic formation underpins her concomitant repudiation of current postmodern and postcolonial readings of the poet's work. Her position is congruent with the cultural theorizing of many other Caribbean intellectuals. She insists that Walcott's "revolutionary effort" is a counterdiscourse of an alternative and liberating order of values and meanings generated by the crucible of Caribbean place (landscape) and time (history). In Walcott's "metaphoric enterprise," the argument goes, landscape functions as an artifact that generates fresh metaphors, countering and refuting the values of older ones and answering to indigenous needs and realities (p. 55). It is driven by a strong urge to find a regenerative route out of negation and the crisis of an oppressive nihilism. At points, Ismond's argument seems an apology for Walcott's much-discussed penchant for overt mimicry of the style and themes of other poets in his early career. For instance, she casts his appropriation of the style of the Metaphysical poets as part of the process of metaphoric substitution. She makes a credible claim that "all his borrowings cited [at this stage] are metaphoric formulations, ideas and perceptions, coded in...