Derek Walcott Quotes
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Minor writers think style is all.
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There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.
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For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
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I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
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I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
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I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
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I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
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The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
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As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
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I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
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I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
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I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
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My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.
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I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.
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Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
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The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.
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Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
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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.
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You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.
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I try to forget what happiness was,and when that don't work, I study the stars.
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What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
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Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
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The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.
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That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.