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
landscape surprise natural
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
stronger vases granted
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
passion mirrors
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
black-history elements language
… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…
inspiring doors mirrors
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.
morning falling-in-love fate
For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
cities culture made
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
heart wine mirrors
Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
writing average poetry
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
travel inspire
I read; I travel; I become
imagination special language
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
summer prose lemons
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
became commercial cultural human ideal port spain walker
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.