Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCCis a Saint Lucia poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros, which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain,...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 January 1930
art thinking soul
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
memories body bamboo
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
art church village
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
shadow metaphor
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
voice addresses doe
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
children men doubt
What are men? Children who doubt.
trying serious worthwhile
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
We read, we travel, we become.
matter scream happens
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
sugar ruins landscape
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
time memories plot
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
moving islands vocabulary
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
style likes gestures
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.
life language changing-your-life
To change your language you must change your life.