By Michael Derek Roberts
One of the Caribbean’s great literary giants of the 20th century has died. St. Lucia born, Sir Derek Walcott, passed away on March 17 after a prolonged illness. The renowned, world-famous poet and playwright, who received the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, was 87-years-old. According to unconfirmed reports Walcott was hospitalized for some time with an undisclosed illness, and only recently returned to his him Castries, St. Lucia after being discharged.
Over the course of his long, illustrious and checkered career in academia Walcott won many awards for his literary works including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play “Dream on Monkey Mountain”, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry “White Egrets” and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Sir Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in St Lucia. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, had a strong and profound influence on all of Walcott’s life and works. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of African slaves.
His father was a Bohemian watercolorist, died when he and his twin brother, Roderick, were very young children. His mother, a schoolteacher, ran the town’s Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary’s College in St. Lucia and at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica, Walcott moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, “In a Green Night” (1962).
In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop that produced many of his early works.
For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he taught literature and creative writing. Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. He was knighted in 2016 and was amongst three St Lucians to receive the knight and Dame Commander.
Walcott studied as a writer, becoming “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem in the newspaper, The
Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs. He later commented:
“I went to my mother and said, ‘I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it’s going to cost me two hundred dollars.’ She was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back.”
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC
was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. He was the second St. Lucian to have won the Nobel Prize, following Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the award for economics in 1979. The Swedish Academy of Letters praised Walcott by saying: “In him, West Indian culture has found its great poets.” Concluding that Sir Derek Walcott works demonstrated a mix of “historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment and a “melodious and sensitive style.”
He will be missed.
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