Nobel-prize-winning poet Walcott captured essence of the Caribbean
CASTRIES, Saint Lucia — Derek Walcott, a Nobel-prize-winning poet known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean, has died on the island of St. Lucia. He was 87.
Walcott’s death in the eastern Caribbean nation was first confirmed early Friday by his son, Peter.
“Derek Alton Walcott, poet, playwright, and painter died peacefully today, Friday 17th March, 2017, at his home in Cap Estate, Saint Lucia,” read a family statement released later in the morning. It said the funeral would be held in St. Lucia and details would be announced shortly.
The prolific and versatile poet received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1992 after being shortlisted for the honour for many years. In selecting Walcott, the academy cited the great “luminosity” of his writings including 1990’s Omeros, a 64-chapter Caribbean epic it praised as “majestic.”
“In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet,” said the Swedish academy in awarding the $1.2-million prize to Walcott.
Walcott, who was of African, Dutch and English ancestry, said his writing reflected the “very rich and complicated experience” of life in the Caribbean. His dazzling, painterly work earned him a reputation as one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century.
With passions ranging from watercolour painting to teaching to theatre, Walcott’s work was widely praised for its depth and bold use of metaphor, and its mix of sensuousness and technical prowess. He compared his feeling for poetry to a religious avocation.
Soviet exile poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1987, once complained that some critics relegated Walcott to regional status because of “an unwillingness … to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man.”
Walcott himself celebrated his role as a Caribbean writer.
“I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer,” he once said during a 1985 interview published in The Paris Review. “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.”
Walcott was born in St. Lucia’s capital of Castries on Jan. 23, 1930, to a Methodist schoolteacher mother and a civil servant father, an aspiring artist who died when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were babies. His mother, Alix, instilled a love of language in her children, often reciting Shakespeare and reading aloud other classics of English literature.
Walcott once described straddling “two worlds” during his childhood in St. Lucia, then a sleepy outpost of the British empire.
“Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theatre of our lives. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood, one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect,” he wrote.