Derek Walcott’s work explored the beauty of his Caribbean homeland and its brutal colonial history. The prolific, Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright died Friday at his home in St. Lucia. He was 87.
Walcott wrote dozens of books of poetry and plays, among them his epic poem Omeros and his Obie-winning drama, Dream on Monkey Mountain.
For most of his life, Walcott taught poetry at universities in the United States, England and Canada — but his work never strayed far from St. Lucia, the island in the West Indies where he was born.
In 1984, when he was teaching at Boston University, Walcott said that a book-length poem like Midsummer was a natural extension of the language all around him.
“You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena,” he said in an interview, “You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp. And that is going on still in all the languages of the Caribbean. So that you didn’t make yourself a poet — you entered a situation in which there was poetry.”