Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Walcott
Born	Derek Alton Walcott 23 1, 1930
Birthplace	Castries, Colony of Saint Lucia, British Windward Islands
Died	Template:Death date and age Cap Estate, Gros-Islet, Saint Lucia
Nationality	Saint Lucian
Occupation	Poet, playwright, professor
Known for	Omeros (1990), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), White Egrets (2010)
Children	3
Awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (1992), T. S. Eliot Prize (2010), MacArthur Fellowship

Derek Alton Walcott (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism, and the complexities of living and writing in the crosscurrents of two civilizations. Born in the small Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Walcott rose to become one of the most celebrated English-language poets of the twentieth century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His body of work, spanning more than five decades, explored the postcolonial Caribbean experience while drawing upon the traditions of European literature and the oral and folk cultures of the West Indies. His Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990) is considered by many critics as his major achievement, a sweeping narrative that reimagines the classical epics in a Caribbean setting. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Walcott received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an Obie Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and numerous other honors. He died on 17 March 2017 at his home in Saint Lucia at the age of 87.

Early Life

Derek Alton Walcott was born on 23 January 1930 in Castries, the capital of Saint Lucia, then a colony within the British Windward Islands. He was one of twin boys; his brother, Roderick Walcott, also became a playwright. The twins were of mixed racial heritage — of African, Dutch, and English descent — a background that would profoundly shape Walcott's sense of identity and become a central theme throughout his literary career. Their father, Warwick Walcott, was a civil servant and a watercolourist who also wrote poetry; he died when the twins were still infants. Their mother, Alix, was a schoolteacher who ran the local Methodist school and was an important early influence on both sons' intellectual development.

Growing up in Saint Lucia, Walcott was immersed in a complex linguistic environment. The island's population was predominantly Creole-speaking, with a French-based patois as the common language of daily life, while English served as the language of education, government, and literary culture. As a Methodist in a predominantly Roman Catholic society, Walcott occupied a minority position on the island, which contributed to a sense of dual consciousness that permeated his later writing. The lush tropical landscape of Saint Lucia — its beaches, volcanic peaks, and the rhythms of fishing villages — became foundational imagery in his poetry throughout his life.

Walcott began writing poetry at a remarkably young age. At the age of fourteen, he published his first poem in a local newspaper, and by nineteen, he had self-published his first collection, 25 Poems (1948), borrowing two hundred dollars to print it and then selling copies on the streets of Castries. This early act of literary self-determination was characteristic of Walcott's ambition and independence. A second collection, Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), followed shortly thereafter. These early works already displayed the influences that would define his career: the English literary tradition — particularly the Metaphysical poets and the modernists — combined with the Caribbean landscape and vernacular speech.

Education

Walcott attended St. Mary's College in Saint Lucia before receiving a scholarship to the University of the West Indies (then the University College of the West Indies) in Kingston, Jamaica, where he studied English, French, and Latin. His time at university in Jamaica exposed him to a broader Caribbean intellectual community and deepened his engagement with both European and Caribbean literary traditions. The education he received — steeped in the Western canon — became both a resource and a source of tension in his work, as he grappled throughout his career with the legacies of colonialism embedded in the English language and its literary forms.

Career

Early Writing and Theatre in the Caribbean

After completing his studies, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a journalist, theatre critic, and arts reviewer while continuing to write poetry and drama. In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, an ensemble company that became a critical institution in the development of Caribbean theatre. Walcott served as the company's director for nearly two decades, writing and staging productions that drew on Caribbean folk traditions, dance, music, and storytelling alongside Western dramatic forms.

His play Dream on Monkey Mountain, written in 1967 and first produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, became one of his most acclaimed dramatic works. The play explores themes of colonialism, racial identity, and the search for selfhood in the Caribbean context. It won the Obie Award for a Distinguished Foreign Play in 1971 when it was produced Off-Broadway in New York, establishing Walcott's international reputation as a dramatist as well as a poet. Other notable plays from this period include Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), which drew on Saint Lucian folklore, and The Sea at Dauphin (1954), a drama of Caribbean fishing life that showed the influence of J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea.

During these years in Trinidad, Walcott published several significant poetry collections that steadily built his reputation. In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962), published by Jonathan Cape in London, was his first internationally distributed collection and brought him to the attention of critics and readers outside the Caribbean. The volume showcased his formal mastery — his command of metre, rhyme, and the sonnet form — while articulating a distinctly Caribbean sensibility. Subsequent collections, including The Castaway (1965) and The Gulf (1969), continued to explore the tensions between Caribbean and European identity, the beauty and harshness of island life, and the role of the poet in a postcolonial society.

International Recognition and Academic Career

By the 1970s, Walcott had begun to divide his time between the Caribbean and the United States, where he held teaching positions at several universities. He eventually joined the faculty of Boston University, where he taught literature and creative writing for many years and became an influential mentor to generations of younger poets and writers. Rachel DeWoskin, one of his former graduate students at Boston University, later recalled his rigorous and demanding teaching style, his insistence on close reading and formal precision, and the profound impact he had on his students' understanding of poetry as a craft.

Walcott's poetry collections continued to appear with regularity and increasing critical acclaim throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Another Life (1973), a book-length autobiographical poem, traced his artistic development in Saint Lucia and was widely praised for its lyrical intensity and narrative ambition. Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Midsummer (1984), and The Arkansas Testament (1987) further consolidated his standing as one of the foremost poets writing in English.

His poetry during this period engaged with an expanding range of subjects — the relationship between the Americas and Europe, the experience of exile and travel, the history of slavery and its afterlives, the natural world, and the act of artistic creation itself. Throughout, Walcott maintained his commitment to formal craft and his belief that the English language, despite its colonial associations, could be a vehicle for authentic Caribbean expression.

Omeros and the Nobel Prize

In 1990, Walcott published Omeros, a book-length poem of more than three hundred pages that is widely considered his masterwork. Drawing on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the poem reimagines the classical epics in the setting of a Saint Lucian fishing village, with characters named Achille, Hector, Helen, and Philoctete whose lives and struggles echo and transform their Homeric counterparts. The poem ranges across time and geography — from the Caribbean to Africa, Europe, and North America — weaving together themes of history, displacement, love, suffering, and the quest for home. Critics praised the poem for its ambition, its linguistic richness, and its capacity to honour both the Western literary tradition and the lived experience of Caribbean people.

Two years after the publication of Omeros, Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The Swedish Academy cited his "poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." Walcott was the first Caribbean-born writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the award brought both increased global attention to his work and heightened recognition for Caribbean literature as a whole.

In his Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm, Walcott reflected on the relationship between Caribbean culture and the fragmented traditions from which it was assembled — African, European, Asian, and indigenous — arguing that the Caribbean poet's task was not to lament these fragments but to create new art from them. The lecture, titled "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory," became one of the most frequently cited statements of Walcott's poetics and cultural philosophy.

Later Career

Following the Nobel Prize, Walcott continued to write and publish prolifically. His later poetry collections included The Bounty (1997), Tiepolo's Hound (2000) — a meditation on the visual arts that reflected Walcott's lifelong interest in painting — and The Prodigal (2004). He also continued to write for the theatre, and in 1997 he collaborated with the American songwriter Paul Simon on The Capeman, a Broadway musical based on the true story of a Puerto Rican gang member in 1950s New York. The production, despite the stature of its creators, received poor reviews and closed after a short run.

In 2009, Walcott was nominated for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry, one of the most prestigious poetry appointments in the English-speaking world. However, his candidacy was withdrawn after allegations of past sexual harassment were circulated among Oxford faculty, an episode that generated significant controversy. The allegations, which had first surfaced in the 1980s and 1990s involving students, continued to be a subject of debate and scrutiny in the years that followed.

Walcott's 2010 collection White Egrets was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize, one of the most significant poetry prizes in the United Kingdom. The book, a sequence of meditations on aging, memory, love, and the Caribbean landscape, was praised by judges for its formal elegance and emotional depth. His final poetry collection, Morning, Paramin (2016), was published the year before his death.

Throughout his later years, Walcott divided his time between his home in Saint Lucia and his academic position at Boston University, from which he eventually retired. He also continued to paint — a practice he had maintained throughout his life — producing watercolours of Caribbean landscapes that were exhibited in galleries.

Personal Life

Walcott was married three times and had three children. He maintained deep connections to Saint Lucia throughout his life, returning regularly and eventually retiring there. His home in Cap Estate, in the northern part of the island, overlooked the sea that figured so prominently in his work.

Walcott's close friendships with other poets were a notable feature of his personal and intellectual life. He maintained a long and important friendship with the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, who was himself a Nobel laureate. The two poets shared a commitment to formal verse and a belief in the moral seriousness of poetry; Brodsky was among those who championed Walcott's work internationally. The poet Seamus Heaney, another Nobel laureate, was also a close friend and admirer of Walcott's work.

Walcott's career was not without controversy. Allegations of sexual harassment by former students surfaced on multiple occasions, beginning in the early 1980s. These allegations played a significant role in his withdrawal from consideration for the Oxford Professor of Poetry position in 2009 and continued to provoke discussion in literary circles, particularly after his death.

Recognition

Over the course of his career, Walcott accumulated a substantial number of awards and honours that reflected his stature in international letters. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 was the crowning recognition of his achievement, but it was preceded and followed by many other significant awards.

In 1971, his play Dream on Monkey Mountain received the Obie Award for a Distinguished Foreign Play. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the so-called "genius" grant), a Royal Society of Literature Award, and the Queen's Medal for Poetry. In 2010, his collection White Egrets won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. He received the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, recognising his contribution to the literature of the region.

In 2015, Walcott received the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award. He was also the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. He received honorary degrees from numerous universities and was awarded the Order of Merit (OM) by Queen Elizabeth II, one of the most exclusive honours in the Commonwealth. He was also appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia (KCSL) and received the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

The University of Oxford conferred an honorary degree upon Walcott in 2006. He also received an honorary degree from the University of Essex.

Legacy

Derek Walcott died on 17 March 2017, at his home in Cap Estate, Saint Lucia. He was 87 years old. His death was marked by tributes from across the literary world and from political leaders in the Caribbean and beyond. In Saint Lucia, he was given a state funeral, an honour befitting his status as the island's most celebrated cultural figure.

Walcott's legacy rests on his achievement in creating a body of poetry and drama that gave literary expression to the Caribbean experience with a power and sophistication recognised worldwide. His work demonstrated that the Caribbean — long marginalised in the literary imagination of the English-speaking world — could serve as the setting for poetry of the highest order, engaging with universal themes of identity, history, exile, love, and mortality. His insistence on the validity and beauty of Caribbean culture, while simultaneously engaging with the full breadth of the Western literary tradition, offered a model for postcolonial writers across the globe.

His poem "Love After Love," one of his most anthologised works, has continued to find new readers in the years since his death. The poem's message of self-acceptance and reconciliation has resonated with audiences far beyond the literary world, and it has been widely shared and discussed in contexts ranging from therapy to self-help literature.

As the writer and critic Hilton Als observed in his obituary for The New Yorker, Walcott's poetry possessed a rare combination of formal mastery and emotional generosity, rooted in the particular landscape and history of the Caribbean but speaking to the broader human condition. His influence on subsequent generations of Caribbean writers — and on the broader field of postcolonial literature — remains substantial, and his works continue to be studied in universities around the world.

The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which Walcott founded in 1959, remained an enduring institutional legacy of his commitment to Caribbean performing arts. His visual art — the watercolours he produced throughout his life — has also received increasing attention since his death, adding another dimension to the understanding of his creative vision.