Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCCis a Saint Lucia poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros, which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain,...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 January 1930
across art artist cultured direction gentlemen image individual keeping means money sponsors supportive university
This image of us as being art supportive and very cultured is false, ... The money that we have now that is keeping this place going has come from Canada-the University of Toronto. When you come across sponsors like these gentlemen we have today, what it does for the individual artist is enormous. It means that we can feel that there is some direction to our lives.
knows
He's just dominant. He knows how to play.
carry kevin knew point
We knew there was a point when Kevin would come through and carry us.
heart wine mirrors
Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. 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. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
black-history elements language
… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…
stronger vases granted
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
style likes gestures
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.
landscape surprise natural
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
sugar ruins landscape
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
time memories plot
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
shadow metaphor
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
heart mirrors letters
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
white fire owl
Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna
horse stars block
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.