Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, perhaps best known for his play Pantomime (1978) - a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story as a scrutiny of colonialism - was a playwright, painter, poet, and teacher born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia in 1930.

Derek attended St. Mary’s College as a boy before moving to Jamaica to attend the University of the West Indies. At the age of just 14, he published his first poem in a local newspaper. During his time at university, Walcott would publish again, this time borrowing $200 to print his first collection: 25 Poems. After graduating, Walcott, despite being a trained painter, took up work as a teacher in his home country as well as nearby Grenada. At the time, he continued to publish his work, primarily now articles and reviews, in periodicals in Jamaica and Trinidad.

When the 1950s came around, Derek delved into playwriting. He first produced his works in Saint Lucia before, in 1958, moving to New York to study theater. While studying in New York, he split his time between Trinidad, Saint Lucia, and Boston, where he taught at the local University for part of the year. Teaching would always be a major part of Walcott’s professional life, later going on to teach at Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and Essex. Near the end of the decade in 1958, Derek wrote Ti-Jean and His Brothers, arguably one of his most appreciated pieces.

By 1962, Walcott had returned to publishing his poetry with In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 - an anthology that centered mainly around the natural beauty of his motherland. He would continue to publish from this point, with works such as Selected Poems, The Castaway, and The Gulf being printed throughout the remainder of the 1960s and Another Life, Sea Grapes, The Star-Apple Kingdom, and the Fortunate Traveller following that. Walcott’s poetry tended to focus on themes of isolation, language, power, and race and often shifted between Patois and English. This period was also where Walcott wrote another one of his most renown works: Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced 1967). In 1978, Pantomime was released and in 1990, Walcott published his retelling of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: Omeros. Two years later, he received a Nobel prize for literature.

In his later years, Walcott continued to build on his literary achievements. In 2000 he published Tiepolo’s Hound which included his own watercolor paintings as illustrations. His final work - White Egrets - was published in 2010. In 2017, Derek Walcott passed away.

The life and work of Derek Walcott is invaluable culturally. Arguably a literary prodigy, Walcott presented an entirely new and unique view of the world at a time of great ethnocentrism in the west and his importance cannot be overstated.

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