Walcott in Verse
WALSH, PATRICK J.
Walcott in Verse Perceiving the world in a formal setting. by Patrick J. Walsh Derek Walcott is a passionate poet. Passion is a word much misused today. It means to suffer in love and to...
...That discontent is part of the beat and spirit of poetry...
...It is a noble attempt to make an epic out of a local row, but in our age, the difficulties for an epic are Derek Walcott, 2005 insurmountable...
...Though domiciled as a professor at Boston University, Walcott is not part of academia's debilitating consensus: The greatest horrors in my teaching life occurred when young students have repeated what other teachers have told them: "this thing has too much melody," "this thing has too much rhythm," "you should not use rhyme," and so on...
...Christianity defines man as a "homo viator," believing humankind to be on a journey through the temporal world toward eternal salvation...
...It is an apt description of Walcott's poetry...
...And in Walcott's poetry, nature is often praying: "Aves of Ocean," "Benediction of trees saying their beads the bamboos bent over their pews," "Hail heron and gull full of grace...
...Tiepolo's Hound is a sojourn of artistic vision...
...Walcott's poetry struggles toward faith...
...I don't know on what basis this is founded...
...It may take a devious route but its basic nostalgia and homesickness are for that language, that beat...
...at the same time he is deeply inside because of his thorough reading and love of English poetry, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible...
...His whole body of work is an attempt to come to terms with identity and exile...
...In Omeros, Walcott alludes to this: Courage was out of fashion Just as Faith had gone out from every hymn...
...He insists that you cannot be an artist without the discipline of thought, and that discipline of thought for the poet lies in the meaning of words and structure of language...
...All English verse," he says, "makes an agonized effort to return to the pentameter...
...His power comes from this peculiar vantage point of insider/outsider and in this he resembles Irish writers, his fellow postcolonials, and their double vision of belonging—yet not belonging...
...Epics come out of a civilization united in shared beliefs anchored in the eternal...
...Though sorrow claimed him for awhile, Walcott is a poet of hope in "that line of light that shines from the other shore," and Walcott the prodigal son returns home to St...
...I mean, I don't know any other culture in the history of the world that has ever said to anybody—that poetry has too much melody...
...There is more than me...
...These longings take on epic proportion in Omeros (1990) and in his two most recent books, Tiepolo's Hound (2000) and The Prodigal (2004...
...I think when a democracy gets overassertive it becomes fascist...
...They were the niggers of Europe...
...Lucia in 1930, Walcott offers a unique perspective as he lives both inside and outside the tradition of English literature...
...Omeros, Greek for Homer, is a Caribbean epic of two fishermen, and Achilles and Hector's Trojan war over a woman named Helen...
...there is more than what's immediate and temporal...
...Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992, Walcott is a poet distinguished not only for his intelligence and honesty, but also for his fidelity to traditional form and meter...
...It turns authoritarian in its insistence on freedom...
...The poet seeking identity in Europe finds that her museums demean him to the status of "Island boy," while Europe itself is in a process of disintegration...
...I'm reminded of another postcolo-nial poet, Patrick Kavanagh, another islander who, after much suffering in Dublin for telling the truth, also came to safe harbor: And you must go inland and be Lost in compassion's ecstasy Where suffering soars in Summer air The millstone has become a star...
...Selected Poems is a well-chosen miscellany from Walcott's 11 books of poetry...
...Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms Shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's Desire to enclose the loved one in its arms...
...Till every Frame held bending smoke and the raw noise of industry...
...Born in St...
...In his introduction, Edward Baugh suggests that "Walcott advanced the idea that one learns better about God from the teachings of nature...
...And the poet holds faith in poetry...
...It means to suffer in love and to persevere...
...Walcott comes to the realization that "Man is a small island who contains cisterns of sorrow...
...Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts...
...Yet Omeros has many beautiful passages of poetry shoring up the ruin of civilization...
...An age the size of a cloud over a wood erased all myth: slow intellectual doubt diminished awe...
...A piety comes through: O thou my Zero, is an impossible prayer, Utter extinction is still a doubtful conceit...
...For Walcott, "Poetry is a divine discontent that says there is something more than this...
...Lucia, named after the saint of light and vision...
...Though we pray to nothing, nothing cannot be there...
...Walcott is not an advocate of free verse: Like Auden, he thinks it "a sign of awful manners," and urges his students to study the great poets of the past, not the stuff printed in the pages of the New Yorker...
...He is outside the tradition because he is a postcolonial...
...I've always felt some kind of intimacy with Irish poets," he writes, "because one realizes that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean...
Vol. 12 • August 2007 • No. 45
