Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott, ed. Edward Baugh (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN-10 0-374-26066-4, ISBN-13 978-0-374-26066-8, 307 pp)

Derek Walcott, by Edward Baugh (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55358-X, ISBN-13 978-0-521-55358-2, 254 pp)

Not long after the University of the West Indies was founded, Professor Philip Sherlock, vice-principal of University College, was travelling through Bog Walk in Jamaica. As he admired the view, he turned to his colleague Kenneth Croston, the university’s first professor of English, and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Croston, an Englishman, replied: “It’s like a meaner sort of Wye Valley.” A bright young undergraduate named Derek Walcott was listening to this conversation, and he understood instinctively the assumptions behind this faint praise. Many years later, at a reading of “The Star Apple Kingdom”, the poet remembered for his Trinidadian audience how much the Englishman’s tone had annoyed him. At the time, it had felt as though “the Jamaican landscape [could] break its ass trying but it would never quite achieve the effort required . . .[it should] have shrunk itself, tipped its hat, and said: ‘Sorry, Professor Croston, that is the best we could do today.’”

Luckily, Walcott had some ideas about how to help the landscape do better. At first, he tried to work it up in paint, to turn it into something that could be felt along the heart and in the blood, but quite soon he realised he would never attain the natural grace of his friend and rival Dunstan St Omer, the Gregorias of Another Life. Instead, he would “brave new waters” in the “antique hoax” of poetry and confront men like Professor Croston on the ground they knew best. He would take a literary tradition they treated as their own, and show them what it might mean to compose lines about Tintern Abbey in a Caribbean setting. While doing that, he would show them how West Indians might mimetically “reverse” some of history’s nightmare, by cultivating a genius for deep play within their wounded legacies. He would weave a new and beautiful tapestry out of the poetry of Eliot, Pound, and Dylan Thomas, and then move on to Auden, Spender, MacNeice, and Yeats; he would almost single-handedly create a new kind of Caribbean drama. Then, once all that was out of the way, he would tackle Homer.

Early in the new century, having accomplished most of these ambitions, Walcott was showing the New Yorker magazine’s Hilton Als around St Lucia. Als was there to profile a man “writing a poetry of the Caribbean”. As they drove around the island, “Walcott pointed out the handmade signs dotting the hamlets we passed through. Many of the signs . . . had perfectly rendered black faces — some with red lips — floating around the calligraphy. Walcott said, ‘Look at the beauty of that. And then you think of someone like Vidia [Naipaul] saying that there is no culture down here. That we are primitive. That we make nothing. Crap! Well, there it is. Take a look.’”

The gulf between Sherlock’s quiet question and the Nobel Laureate’s boisterous imperative is one gauge of the distance which Walcott has travelled, and the extent to which. . .

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