Word: walcott
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...nobody suggested after the announcement was made that Walcott had won * the laurel, worth $1.2 million, on charity. He has long been regarded as one of the finest living poets in English, an accolade made even more impressive by the struggles Walcott underwent to earn...
Both of his parents were schoolteachers, although his father died when Walcott was only one, and the house in St. Lucia that he, his twin brother and older sister grew up in was filled with books. But the allure of the English language, and of the English poetry recited aloud in his classrooms, came tempered with a sense of exclusion from white British culture, the resentment felt by a subject of an alien, occupying power. In one of his early poems, he pondered his faraway African heritage and asked...
...tension between these divided loyalties animates nearly all of Walcott's poetry. Rather than seeing his position as impossible -- a poet on the margins of two mutually exclusive cultures -- Walcott adopted this dilemma as one of his principal subjects. In this respect, much of his work is self-conscious; the point of contact between language and experience is, of necessity, the presiding poet, and the more difficult this contact is, the more visible the poet's struggle becomes...
...Walcott never whines or indulges in unseemly confessions; he is, in fact, inordinately harsh with himself. Sometimes he claims his material is beyond or beneath the power of his art. In Gros-Ilet, he describes a small, desolate island village and concludes, "This is not the grape-purple Aegean. / There is no wine here, no cheese, the almonds are green, / the sea grapes bitter, the language is that of slaves." At other times, he is worried that his devotion to the English language has severed him from the people of his childhood. The Light of the World portrays the visiting...
...Such moments revivify nostalgia in the original, classical Greek sense: nostos (return) plus algos (pain). For years Walcott has divided his calendar equally between Boston, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University, and a residence in Trinidad, a base for his frequent travels elsewhere in the Caribbean. This regular shuttling between two worlds has kept his poetry balanced between heartless skill and artless passion. The speakers of Walcott's poems are half strangers wherever they find themselves, not because they want to be but because they have no choice. In The Lighthouse, an island vendor approaches...