Derek Walcott

Major Influences

English-language literary tradition; French; Spanish; Latin; French-lexicon Creole; English-lexicon Creole; Caribbean landscape and topography; Painting;
Theatre 

Original Greek and Latin Source(s)

Homer (via translations and literary heritage); Horace; Ovid; Virgil

Mediating Sources

Dante; Modernists (Joyce, Eliot, Pound); Yeats; Joseph Brodsky

Associations with Literary Period/Movements

 Walcott’s associations range over the literary histories and geographies of Anglophone (British, Caribbean, Irish, North American); Caribbean; Central and Eastern European.; Western European. Often read through a postcolonial critical lens, his work resists appropriation to any one theoretical or conceptual frame (see his comments in Walcott, D., 1998, What the Twilight Says (essays), New York: Farrar Straus).

General Comment:

Educated at St. Mary’s College, Castries, St Lucia 1941-7 (curriculum included Latin) and the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

First poem published in local paper at the age of 14; trained as a painter; co-founder of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop 1950; founded Boston Playwrights Theater 1981. Author of many plays.

Taught at St Mary’s College, Castries; Grenada Boys Secondary School, Jamaica College, Kingston and at Boston, Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers and Yale universities.

Nobel Laureate for Literature, 1992 Nobel lecture published as : Walcott, D., 1993, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory: the Nobel Lecture, New York: Farrar Straus.

For Biographical information, see http://www.nobelprize.org.nobel-prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-bio.html (last accessed 12/10/14)