Poetry Criticism | Walcott, Derek - Robert Bensen (essay date spring 1986)

Robert Bensen (essay date spring 1986)

SOURCE: Bensen, Robert. “The Painter as Poet: Derek Walcott's Midsummer.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 29, no. 3 (spring 1986): 259-68.

[In the following essay, Bensen examines the centrality of painting and imagery in Walcott's Midsummer.]

An island of obsessive beauty, a people impoverished but rich in their cultural heritage from Africa and Europe, and a lifetime to celebrate them in art: these gifts had been given the young Derek Walcott, who swore with his friend Dunstan St. Omer not to leave St. Lucia before they had put the island on canvas and in words—every ravine, inlet, mangrove swamp and hill track.¹

Walcott had been drawn to art early by being “more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray,” as Malraux wrote of Giotto. Walcott used Malraux's anecdote as an epigraph in...

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