Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Walcott, Derek (Vol. 160) - Stephen Breslow (review date winter 1994)

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Stephen Breslow (review date winter 1994)

SOURCE: Breslow, Stephen. Review of The Odyssey, by Derek Walcott. World Literature Today 68, no. 1 (winter 1994): 199–200.

[In the following positive review, Breslow praises Walcott's stage adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.]

Only a talent as prodigious as that of Derek Walcott (who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature) should attempt a project as ambitious as rendering Homer's Odyssey into a stage version. Walcott's lifelong immersion in Greek and Latin literary classics, his continual borrowing and interweaving of classical references and themes in his poetry, and his own Odyssean epic poem Omeros, published in 1990, have eminently prepared him for [Odyssey,] this most current work. Some pragmatists might argue well that a staged version of this play made from an epic would be doomed because of the large and unwieldy number of characters and sets employed; yet I...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John Lucas (review date 2 February 1990)
   2. John Lucas (review date 5 October 1990)
   3. Christopher Benfey (review date 29 October 1990)
   4. Nicholas Everett (review date 11 July 1991)
   5. Sven Birkerts (review date February 1993)
   6. Stephen Breslow (essay date spring 1993)
   7. Stephen Breslow (review date winter 1994)
   8. Derek Walcott and Marina Benjamin (interview date 21 July 1995)
   9. John Bayley (review date 27 March 1997)
   10. Jahan Ramazani (essay date May 1997)
   11. Derek Walcott and Rose Styron (interview date May–June 1997)
   12. Bill Greenwell (review date 15 August 1997)
   13. Phoebe Pettingell (review date 8 September 1997)
   14. Richard Sanger (review date 19 September 1997)
   15. Ian Sansom (review date 11 December 1997)
   16. Adam Kirsch (review date 15 December 1997)
   17. Bruce King (review date winter 1998)
   18. Richard Tillinghast (review date winter 1998)
   19. John Thieme (essay date 1999)
   20. Bruce King (review date winter 1999)
   21. Ronny Noor (review date spring 1999)
   22. Iain Bamforth (review date 1 October 1999)
   23. Jeff Gundy (review date spring 2000)
   24. Judith Kitchen (review date spring 2000)
   25. Charles Lock (essay date spring 2000)
   26. A. Alvarez (review date 11 May 2000)
   27. Adam Kirsch (review date 15 September 2000)
   28. Jim Hannan (review date autumn 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Derek Walcott