Walcott in Verse

Though domiciled as a professor at Boston University, Walcott is not part of academia’s debilitating consensus:

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. 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. It may take a devious route but its basic nostalgia and homesickness are for that language, that beat.” 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.

Born in St. Lucia in 1930, Walcott offers a unique perspective as he lives both inside and outside the tradition of English literature. He is outside the tradition because he is a postcolonial; 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 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.

“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. They were the niggers of Europe.”

Selected Poems is a well-chosen miscellany from Walcott’s 11 books of poetry. His whole body of work is an attempt to come to terms with identity and exile. These longings take on epic proportion in Omeros (1990) and in his two most recent books, Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) and The Prodigal (2004). Omeros, Greek for Homer, is a Caribbean epic of two fishermen, and Achilles and Hector’s Trojan war over a woman named Helen. It is a noble attempt to make an epic out of a local row, but in our age, the difficulties for an epic are insurmountable. Epics come out of a civilization united in shared beliefs anchored in the eternal.

In Omeros, Walcott alludes to this:

Yet Omeros has many beautiful passages of poetry shoring up the ruin of civilization. A piety comes through:

And the poet holds faith in poetry.

Tiepolo’s Hound is a sojourn of artistic vision. 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.

Walcott comes to the realization that “Man is a small island who contains cisterns of sorrow.” Christianity defines man as a “homo viator,” believing humankind to be on a journey through the temporal world toward eternal salvation. Walcott’s poetry struggles toward faith.

In his introduction, Edward Baugh suggests that “Walcott advanced the idea that one learns better about God from the teachings of nature.” 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.”

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. Lucia, named after the saint of light and vision.

I’m reminded of another postcolonial poet, Patrick Kavanagh, another islander who, after much suffering in Dublin for telling the truth, also came to safe harbor:

Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts.