Poetry Criticism | Walcott, Derek - Valerie Trueblood (essay date May-June 1978)

Valerie Trueblood (essay date May-June 1978)

SOURCE: Trueblood, Valerie. “Valerie Trueblood on Derek Walcott.” American Poetry Review 7, no. 3 (May-June 1978): 7-10.

[In the following essay, Trueblood discusses poems from multiple volumes of Walcott's poetry, including In a Green Night, The Castaway and Other Poems, The Gulf, Another Life, and Sea Grapes.]

The West Indian poet Derek Walcott published his first book of poetry in 1949, when he was still in his teens. His second, In a Green Night, came out in 1962, and since that time he has given us five more (as well as numerous plays) and a world. “World” has lost its punch from being applied to the districts of too many writers; I wish it could be reclaimed for Walcott's poetry, which keeps an axis and has size, and sometimes has a grand, planetary movement carrying the movement on its surface. When I read The Gulf I thought of the...

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