Walcott, Derek - Lloyd W. Brown (essay date 1976)

Lloyd W. Brown (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: Brown, Lloyd W. “Caribbean Castaway New World Odyssey: Derek Walcott's Poetry.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 11, no. 2 (1976): 149-59.

[In the following essay, Brown offers an overview of Walcott's poetry, tracing the theme of “the New World” that appears throughout his work.]

In the poem ‘Elegy’ Derek Walcott offers a bleak image of the American Dream as New World nightmare:

Our hammock swung between Americas
we miss you, Liberty. Che's
bullet-riddled body falls,
and those who cried the Republic must first die
to be reborn are dead.(1)

This elegy on the democratic ideal in the New World as a whole is interwoven with an exposé of the essential falsities that have always been inherent in the rhetoric of idealism within the United States:

Still, every body wants to go to bed
with Miss America. And, if there's no bread,
let them eat cherry pie …
Some...

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