The poetic voice of the Caribbean that demanded to be heard

Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St Lucia. He was 87.

Walcott’s expansive universe revolved around a tiny sun, the island of St Lucia. Its opulent vegetation, blinding white beaches and tangled multicultural heritage inspired, in its most famous literary son, an ambitious body of work that seemingly embraced every poetic form, from the short lyric to the epic.

With the publication of the collection In a Green Night in 1962, critics and poets, Robert Lowell among them, leapt to recognise a powerful new voice in Caribbean literature and to praise the sheer musicality of Walcott’s verse, the immediacy of its visual images, its profound sense of place.

He had first attracted attention on St Lucia with a book of poems that he published himself as a teenager. Early on, he showed a remarkable ear for the music of English — heard in the poets whose work he absorbed in his Anglocentric education and on the lips of his fellow St Lucians — and a painter’s eye for the particulars of the local landscape: its beaches and 

clouds; its turtles, crabs and tropical fish; the sparkling expanse of the Caribbean.

In the poem Islands, from the collection In a Green Night, he wrote:

I seek, As climate seeks its style, to write Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, Cold as the curled wave, ordinary. As a tumbler of island water.

He told The Economist in 1990: “The sea is always present. It’s always visible. All the roads lead to it. I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. And if you say in patois, ‘The boats are coming back,’ the beat of that line, its metrical space, has to do with the sound and rhythm of the sea itself.”

There was nothing shy about Walcott’s poetic voice. It demanded to be heard, in all its sensuous immediacy and historical complexity. “I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style,” he told The Paris Review in 1985. “I grew up in a place in which if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. If you wanted to approximate that thunder or that power of speech, it couldn’t be done by a little modest voice in which you muttered something to someone else.”

Walcott’s art developed and expanded in works like The Castaway, The Gulf  and Another Life, a 4,000-line enquiry into his life and surroundings, published in 1973. The Caribbean poet George Lamming called it “the history of an imagination.”

Walcott quickly won recognition as one of the finest poets writing in English and as an enormously ambitious artist — ambitious for himself, his art and his people.

He had a sense of the Caribbean’s grandeur that inspired him to write Omeros, a transposed Homeric epic of more than 300 pages, published in 1990, with humble fishermen and a taxi driver standing in for the heroes of ancient Greece.

Two years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The prize committee cited him for “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

It continued: “In his literary works Walcott has laid a course for his own cultural environment, but through them he speaks to each and every one of us. In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet.”

As a poet, Walcott plumbed the paradoxes of identity intrinsic to his situation. He was a mixed-race poet living on a British-ruled island whose people spoke French-based Creole or English.

In A Far Cry From Africa, included in In a Green Night — his first poetry collection to be published outside St Lucia — he wrote:

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed 

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930, in Castries, a port city on the island of St Lucia. His father, Warwick, a schoolteacher and watercolorist, died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his schoolteacher mother, the former Alix Maarlin.

Both his parents, like many St Lucians, were the products of racially mixed marriages. Derek was raised as a Methodist, which made him an exception on St Lucia, a largely Roman Catholic island, and at his Catholic secondary school, St Mary’s College.

His education was Anglocentric and thoroughly traditional. “I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance,” he wrote in the essay The Muse of History. “Forget the snow and daffodils. They were real, more real than the heat and oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory.”

©2017 The New York Times News Service