Walcott's treatment of the Caribbean was always passionate but unsentimental. In the 1950s, he studied in New York and founded a theater in Trinidad's Port-of-Spain, a Caribbean capital he mentioned with great warmth during his Nobel lecture in 1992. Lucia to immerse himself in literature at Jamaica's University College of the West Indies. At 20, his play "Henri Christophe" was produced by an arts guild he co-founded. About four years later, while still in his teens, he self-published a collection of 25 poems.
In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect," he wrote.Įarly on, he struggled with questions of race and his passion for British poetry, describing it as a "wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to escape." But he overcame that inner struggle, writing: "Once we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black."Īt the age of 14, he published his first work, a 44-line poem called "1944," in a local newspaper. "Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles that being poor, we already had the theater of our lives. Lucia, then a sleepy outpost of the British empire. Walcott once described straddling "two worlds" during his childhood in St. With this prodigious ambition one began." If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. In his autobiographical essay, "What the Twilight Says," he wrote: "Both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery. His mother, Alix, instilled the love of language in her children, often reciting Shakespeare and reading aloud other classics of English literature. 23, 1930 to a Methodist schoolteacher mother and a civil servant father, an aspiring artist who died when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were babies. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets." It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. "The English language is nobody's special property. "I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer," he once said during a 1985 interview published in The Paris Review. Walcott himself proudly celebrated his role as a Caribbean writer. to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man." Soviet exile poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1987, once complained that some critics relegated Walcott to regional status because of "an unwillingness. He compared his feeling for poetry to a religious avocation.
With passions ranging from watercolor painting to teaching to theater, Walcott's work was widely praised for its depth and bold use of metaphor, and its mix of sensuousness and technical prowess. His dazzling, painterly work earned him a reputation as one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century. Walcott, who was of African, Dutch and English ancestry, said his writing reflected the "very rich and complicated experience" of life in the Caribbean. "In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet," said the Swedish academy in awarding the $1.2 million prize to Walcott. In selecting Walcott, the academy cited the great luminosity" of his writings including the 1990 "Omeros," a 64-chapter Caribbean epic it praised as "majestic." The prolific and versatile poet received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1992 after being shortlisted for the honor for many years. Lucia and details would be announced shortly. "Derek Alton Walcott, poet, playwright, and painter died peacefully today, Friday 17th March, 2017, at his home in Cap Estate, Saint Lucia," read a statement the family released later in the morning. Walcott died early Friday at his home in the eastern Caribbean nation of St. Lucia: Derek Walcott, a Nobel-prize winning poet known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean and became the region's most internationally famous writer, has died on the island of St.
0 kommentar(er)
