Word: walcott
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Derek Walcott is honored for his luminous language...
This is a specific statement about a concrete emotion -- Walcott rarely generalizes or resorts to abstractions -- and yet it echoes well beyond its given point of utterance. At their most intense, Walcott's 10 volumes of poetry convey all the strangeness and exotica of island life -- of poor, forgotten people surrounded by water on a margin of the earth -- and make the whole spectacle as familiar as the view across the street...
...misguided to praise poets for their subjects. Many of them, like Walcott, had little choice in the matter. What poets do with their inheritances means everything. And Walcott's language has evolved from his early, rather stilted imitations of English poets into an instrument of marvelous flexibility: capable of grand, sweeping imagery but also of harsh interruptions and interjections, slang, pidgin and Creole patois and subtle Caribbean syncopations. The combined effect is a verbal radiance, of scenes illuminated by "a moon so bright / you can read palms...
...native-born Caribbean author had never won the Nobel Prize in Literature -- until last week, when the Swedish Academy bestowed the $1.2 million laurel on poet Derek Walcott. The choice had some of the earmarks of political correctness: of mixed ancestry (African, Dutch, English), Walcott was born 62 years ago on St. Lucia in what was then the British West Indies...
...implication is misleading. Walcott, who teaches at Boston University, has long been regarded as one of the finest living poets in English; he adapted his colonial overseers' language to non-English subjects and unfamiliar landscapes. His 10 volumes of poetry -- especially the epic- scale Omeros (1990) -- give an exotic tropical world the rhythms of universality. (See related story on page...