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Essay on Derek Walcott
In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) confirmed the promise of Derek Walcott's earlier volumes of verse, and its variety of themes spanned many of the concerns that were to recur in his subsequent work--death, love, transience, the loss of religious faith, the commitment to the Word of Art, his love of the islands, his deep sense of place, the grim legacies of West Indian history, his concern for "the black, the despairing, the poor" (p. 33), the violence of man. But, in spite of the accomplished technique and ringing eloquence, the collection as a whole remains more promise than fulfilment. The truly adult poet is, however, already making his presence felt, in the extent, for example, to which "A Careful Passion," which records the end of a dangerous love affair, differs from the other love poems in the book, which, for all their bittersweet eloquence, remain essentially at the level of the decorative-nostalgic.
The development which took place between In a Green Night and The Castaway and Other Poems (1965) can be illustrated by reference to the treatment of landscape in the two collections. In the first, landscape is predominately benign and pastoral, marking the poet's simple identification with a loved place. The second collection modifies and complicates the paradisal vision by an unflinching acknowledgment of the inhospitable and problematic aspects of Caribbean landscape and climate, these in turn providing telling metaphors for a bleak, unromantic scrutiny of self and society.
In his next book of poetry, Another Life (1973), Walcott looks back across the gulf of years in an attempt to "fix" and define, as much as to celebrate the other, lost life of his childhood and youth in St. Lucia. At the same time, he is concerned to show how the man he is, grew out of the youth he was.................
