title poem, or a traditional sonnet sequence, such as in “Tales of the Islands,” which combines subtle metrical music with exuberant energy. He can chant like Dylan Thomas (“A City’s Death by Fire”), be as astringent as W. H. Auden (“A Country Club Romance”), or indulge in Creole language (“Parang”). Like Andrew Marvell, whose Metaphysical poetry was an influential model for the early Walcott, he is caught between the pull of passion and his awareness of its futility.

The Castaway, and Other Poems

In The Castaway, and Other Poems, Walcott’s focus on the artist’s role becomes more overt, as he describes the poet as the archetypal artist-in-exile, thus a castaway, symbolizing also West Indians in general as historical discard from other cultures. He perceives the poet, paradoxically, as both the detached observer of society and its centrally located, living emblem. Walcott adopts the protean Robinson Crusoe image for this purpose, dramatizing him as Adam, Columbus, Daniel Defoe, even God, as the first inhabitant of a second Paradise, as discoverer and ruler of the world he has made. He insists on a complex relationship between the creative, exploring artist and a largely imperceptive community that tends to isolate and ignore him, yet that the poet nonetheless persists in representing. Sometimes he finds art inadequate in trying to order inchoate life, as in “Crusoe’s Island”: “Art is profane and pagan,/ The most it has revealed/ Is what a crippled Vulcan/ Beat on Achilles’ shield.”

The Gulf, and Other Poems

The next collection, The Gulf, and Other Poems, deepens the theme of isolation, with the poet extending his sense of alienation to the world of the 1960’s: John Kennedy’s and Che Guevara’s killings (“The Gulf” and “Che,” respectively), racial violence in the United States (“Blues”), the Vietnam War (“Postcards”), the civil war in Nigeria (“Negatives”). The gulf, then, is everywhere, with divisions mocking people’s best efforts at unity, intimacy, order, harmony, and happiness. Despite his disappointments, Walcott employs the gulf image ambivalently. To be sure, it encompasses the moral wasteland that the world has largely become; more optimistically, however, it stands for a healing awareness of separateness whereby the castaway, Crusoe-like artist understands his identity and place in the world. In the last analysis, Walcott insists, it is the poet’s art that endures: “some mind must squat down howling in your dust,/ some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish,/ someone must write your poems.” The poet’s apartness does not, then, result in his total alienation—he still commits his art to the world’s experiences.

Another Life and Sea Grapes

In Another Life, Walcott avoids self-centered egotism as he mythologizes his island life, reimagining the Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) in the context of his own land and culture and using the odyssey motif to sustain this long poem. He even envisages his islanders as Homeric archetypes (Ajax, Cassandra, Helen, and others), engaged in an intense quest for their national identity. The poet’s journey becomes a microcosm of the West Indian’s, indeed the New World’s, search for wholeness, acceptance, and fulfillment. As the young Walcott is taught by Gregorias, the peasant-painter-pal, he develops his talent—though for letters rather than the visual arts—within the context of an artistic tradition that articulates the dreams and needs of his people. He ends the superbly sustained narrative by celebrating both the painter’s and the poet’s mission: “Gregorias, listen, lit,/ we were the light of the world!/ We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world/ with Adam’s task of giving things their names.”

Sea Grapes is a quieter, more austere book than Another Life, a calm after the storm, with many of its poems elegiac, elegant, sparely constructed, and sad. The prevailing mood of the volume is one of middle-age acceptance, maturation, and resignation: “why does my gift already look over its shoulder/ for a shadow to fill the door/ and pass this very page into eclipse?” (“Preparing for Exile”). Again, Walcott rehearses the tensions of his divided heritage as a West Indian trying to accommodate his African instincts to the formalities and calculations of European modes. In the title poem he equates himself to the sea-wandering Odysseus, longing for Nausicaa while duty-bound for his home and family, torn between obsession and responsibility, and poignantly concludes, “The classics can console. But not enough.” A five-part, long work, “Sainte Lucie,” is a psalm to St. Lucia, mixing French Creole with English, vernacular speech with stately diction.

The Star-Apple Kingdom

The Star-Apple Kingdom is a lyrical celebration, studded with vivid images. Its most ambitious poem, “The Schooner Flight,” features a seaman-poet, Shabine, a fleeing castaway from his island; Shabine is clearly a Walcott double, with “Dutch, nigger and English” in him so that “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Shabine’s ordeal is the allegory of Everyman. He loves his wife and children but also desires the beautiful Maria Concepcion. Like Odysseus, he encounters terrors and defeats them; unlike Odysseus, he often runs away from his duties rather than toward them. He does manage to escape a web of corruption and betrayal, however, and matures into a waterfront Isaiah whose vision embraces his people’s history, learning to appreciate nature’s simplicities, “satisfied/ if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.”

The protagonist of “The Star-Apple Kingdom” is more sophisticated, satirical, and astute than Shabine, with his reflections more acerbic and cerebral. The poem begins as he peruses a photograph album dating from the Victorian era, featuring such subjects as “Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.” Then he ponders the miseries of blacks excluded from the joys of the plantation aristocracy, “their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream.” A dream possesses him. In it he plunges into a nightmare procession of Caribbean injustices, both during and after the rule of colonialism. Awakening at dawn, he feels rejuvenated and serene. His eye falls on an elderly, black cleaning woman who now represents to him his people’s strength and endurance, with a “creak of light” evoking the possibility of a better future for both her and them.

The Fortunate Traveller

In The Fortunate Traveller, Walcott largely removes his pulsating sensibility from his home turf, focusing on New England, Manhattan, the American South, Chicago, London, Wales, and Greece. In “Old New England” he apprentices himself to the American vernacular, sounding somewhat like Robert Lowell in such statements as “Old Glories flail/ the crosses of green farm boys back from ’Nam.” Yet no one can successfully assume a new idiom overnight, and Walcott’s pentameters usually retain their British, Yeatsian cadences: “The crest of our conviction grows as loud/ as the spring oaks, rooted and reassured/ that God is meek but keeps a whistling sword.”

Some of Walcott’s many virtues are evident in this collection: He is deeply intelligent, keeps enlarging his range of styles and reach of subjects, has a fertile imagination, and often commands precise, sonorous eloquence. In “Hurucan,” he compellingly summons the god of hurricanes, “havoc, reminder, ancestor,” who stands allegorically for the world’s oppressors. In “The Hotel Normandie Pool,” he masters both his social topic and personal memories. At the pool Walcott imagines a fellow exile, Ovid, banished from Rome to a Black Sea port, facing the rigors of a harsher climate yet continuing to compose his verses, epitomizing the predicament of an educated colonial poet writing in the language of an empire.

The book’s best poem is its last, “The Season of Phantasmal Peace.” It begins at twilight, as migrating birds lift up the net of the shadows of the earth, causing a “passage of phantasmal light/ that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.” These singers unify the earth’s various dialects and feel “something brighter than pity” for creatures that remain below, wingless, in their dark holes and houses. The birds close the poem by undertaking an act of brief charity, lifting their net above betrayals, follies, and furies. The poem thereby lifts whatever darkness exists for an instant of peace, constituting a transcendent surge of song beyond the implied darkness of the world’s wars and hatreds.

Midsummer

Midsummer is a gathering of fifty-four poems, a number that corresponded to Walcott’s age when the book was published. These lyric poems give the sense of their author noting his preoccupations during the course of a year. He equates midsummer with boredom, stasis, middle age, midcareer, and the harsh glare of self-examination, as he tries to fix the particular tone and texture of his inner life from one summer to the next. He turns ethnographer, chronicling hotel and motel life in Rome, Warwickshire, New York, Boston, and Chicago. Two-thirds of the sequence is set, however, in the tropics of Central America and his Caribbean islands.

As always, Walcott is nowhere comfortably at home. In the West Indies, he sees that “our houses are one step from the gutter,” with “the doors themselves usually no wider than coffins.” Once more, he plays Odysseus-in-exile: “And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,/ that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide.” Writing to a friend in Rome, he contrasts its ancient heritage with the Caribbean area’s sand-weighted corals, its catacombs with “silver legions of mackerel.” In Boston, he mocks the stale air of cobblestoned streets and Transcendentalist tradition, feeling self-consciously black amid New England’s white spires, harbors, and filling stations, with pedestrians, moving like “pale fishes,” staring at him as though he were a “black porpoise.”

Unable to resolve his dilemma of perpetual uprooting, Walcott is graceful enough to parody his wanderings among cultures and his position as a prodigal son who cannot arrive at any home or rest. In “LI,” he tells himself, half-mockingly, “You were distressed by your habitat, you shall not find peace/ till you and your origins reconcile; your jaw must droop/ and your knuckles scrape the ground of your native place.”

In poem 27, Walcott sardonically describes the American impact on the West Indies, such as a chain-link fence separating a beach from a baseball field. “White, eager Cessnas” dot an airstrip in St. Thomas; fences separate villas and their beaches from illegal immigrants; “bulldozers jerk/ and gouge out a hill, but we all know that the dust/ is industrial and must be suffered.” Even a pelican “coasts, with its engine off.” No wonder that he feels “the fealty changing under my foot.”

Collected Poems, 1948-1984

In 1986, Walcott’s American publisher issued his Collected Poems, 1948-1984, a massive 516-page tome that includes selections from all of his previous books and the entirety of Another Life. Critical reception was largely laudatory, particularly welcoming Walcott’s lyrical gifts, the extraordinary variety of his styles and settings, the sensuous eloquence and freshness of his language, the intensity of his tone, and his talent for uniting power with delicacy. Some reviewers, however, complained of inflated rhetoric, a penchant for grandiose clichés, diction that is overly ornamental, and a tendency to propagandize at the expense of authentic feeling.

The Arkansas Testament

Walcott resumes his doomed search for a homeland in The Arkansas Testament. In the work’s first section, “Here,” he again inspects the society of his native island but finds only incomplete connections, fragmented friendships. In the moving “The Light of the World,” set in a minibus in St. Lucia, the speaker segues from social intimacy to abandonment. He leaves the vehicle, concluding, “They went on in their transport, they left me on earth./ . . . / There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them but this thing I have called ’The Light of the World.’” The “light” is Walcott’s talent for writing—to which his fellow passengers are largely oblivious.

In the “Elsewhere” section, the poet searches for fulfillment in other countries, praying “that the City may be just/ and humankind be kind.” In the title poem, consisting of twenty-four segments of sixteen lines each, the speaker wanders from a motel in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to an all-night cafeteria, then returns to his motel, noting the exploitation of black Americans and calling the American flag “the stripes and the scars.” His conclusion is, as usual with Walcott, bleak: “Bless . . . / these stains I cannot remove/ from the self-soiled heart.”

Images of dislocation and disharmony pervade the book, inducing a melancholy mood. Walcott refers to the Sphinx, to sirens and satyrs—all of them half-human, half-animal. Doors are unhinged, telephone calls are unanswered, poetry goes unread; justice and mercy are usually unmet. The Arkansas Testament is a musical chant mourning the world’s many woes.

Omeros

Omeros is a colossal modern epic, Walcott’s most ambitious achievement, which universalizes his persistent themes of displacement, isolation, exploitation, estrangement, exile, and self-division. He merges the island chain of his Caribbean with the Mediterranean island chain now called Greece, where the Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) are conventionally attributed to an Achaean bard, Homer, whose name is Omeros in modern Greek form. Omeros/Homer makes several appearances in the poem, most frequently as Seven Seas, a poor, blind fisherman, but also as an African tribal singer and as a London bargeman, thus helping to internationalize this narrative of more than eight thousand lines.

The links between the ancient Greeks and modern Antilleans are plausible enough: Both societies were and are seafaring, and both inhabit islands rife with legends, ghosts, and natural spirits. Walcott takes an audacious gamble when he assumes that the Caribbean patois, with its linguistic uncertainties, is capable of occasionally declaiming in classically patterned verse; he uses three-line stanzas in a salute to Dante’s terza rima. He safeguards his venture, however, by minimizing the Creole argot and having most of the action related by a patently autobiographical, polished narrator: a displaced poet living in Boston and Toronto, visiting the Great Plains and the sites of American Civil War battles and encountering Omeros in both London and St. Lucia.

Walcott likens his squabbling, scrounging fishermen to the ancient Greeks and Trojans, and projects Homeric counterparts in his modern Caribbean Helen, Achille, Hector, Circe, and Philoctete. Helen works as a housemaid in the home of Major and Mrs. Plunkett. As in Greek mythology, she is beautiful, proud, lazy, shallow, selfish, and magnetically irresistible to men. When she is fired by Mrs. Plunkett, she goes to work (occasionally) as a waitress, exciting the libidos of two fishermen friends, Hector and Achille. Walcott likens her to Judith and Susannah, Circe and Calypso, with her body creating a stirring drama out of every appearance.

Walcott’s Hector differs drastically from Homer’s, who had an ideal marriage to Andromache and was the Trojans’ indispensable hero. This Hector abandons, at Helen’s behest, his dignified but poorly paying work as a fisherman for the degrading but more lucrative job of taxiing tourists, hustling passengers at the wharf and airport. Paralleling Homer, Achille kills Hector in a fight over Helen, she settles down with him, and they will be parents to her expected child—Hector is the father.

The poem’s focus expands further as it deals with Major Plunkett. At first he seems a stereotypical British colonial, with his “pensioned moustache” and Guinness-drinking taste. Walcott associates him, however, with not only the end of the Empire but also Montgomery’s World War II victories in the Middle Eastern desert, and further with American Caucasian settlers displacing the American Indians. Undertaking genealogical research, the major discovers an ancestor who took part in the victory of the British navy’s Admiral George Brydges Rodney over Admiral François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse’s French fleet, acquiring St. Lucia as part of the British West Indies.

Then there is Philoctete, a fisherman disabled by a festering sore on his thigh. The link with the Greek myth is evident. Philoctetes, listed as one of the Greek Helen’s many suitors, wanted to lead a flotilla of seven ships against Troy, but never reached it. Bitten on the foot by a snake on the island of Lemnos, he was ostracized by the other Achaean chieftains because the stench of his infected, rotting flesh nauseated them. Walcott’s Philoctete is wounded by a rusty anchor and is also abandoned by his fellows while Achille undertakes a journey to Africa.

In the end, Philoctete is cured by a native healer and rejoins the island’s fishing community. Yet the only cure Walcott offers is the palliative of his poem: “Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure,/ its radiant affliction.” Omeros holds much woe and desolation in its complex web, but Walcott’s epic is a magnificent feat of cultural interweaving.

The Bounty

Some critics have discerned in Walcott’s post-Nobel poetry a slow coming to acceptance of his colonial and colonized identity. The poems of The Bounty reflect not only the bounty of nature but also of the ship, H.M.S. Bounty, which first brought breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean islands. This fruit is a staple foodstuff, but the conjunction of a Pacific fruit and an African population only occurred as the result of European colonization and exploration. As always, abundance and oppression go ironically hand in hand. Perhaps as a result of winning the Nobel—certainly the archetypal mark of international acceptance—Walcott’s poems seem to show the poet more at peace with his colonial heritage. Being neither one thing nor another can create the permission to be anything and everything. The Carribean’s “lack of history,” which has so bedeviled Walcott at times, becomes a state of grace in which the evils of history can be overcome, or simply ignored.

Tiepolo’s Hound

Tiepolo’s Hound marks Walcott’s return to the autobiographical narrative poetic form. Walcott interweaves his own life with meditations on the life of Camille Pissarro, the Caribbean-born Sephardic Jew who emigrated to France and became a noted Impressionist painter. The poem revisits Walcott’s long-standing interest in the visual arts and is illustrated with several of the poet’s own paintings.

The poem is marked by shifts in direction and focus, although its uncertainties are justified by its underlying autobiographical core: Walcott’s wrestling with his own problems of cultural identity, which gives a tension both to his meditations on Pissarro and to the quest, driven by the intensity of his memory of a brush stroke representing a hound’s thigh in an eighteenth century Venetian painting—by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, or possibly by Paulo Veronese; the uncertainty is one of the driving forces of the poem—seen long ago in a museum.

In a densely tangled passage late in the poem, the original vision of the hound, its revelation “so exact in its lucency” of art’s power, is the event that has led Walcott in his own development as an artist and has brought him to a point where he is both a Theseus searching through labyrinths for the Minotaur beast that is “history,” and the beast itself, “a beast// that was my fear, my self, my craft,/ not the white elegant wolfhound at the feast.” He continues: “If recognition was the grace I needed/ to elevate my race from its foul lair/ by prayer, by poetry, by couplets repeated/ over its carcase, I was both slain and slayer.”

Both recrimination and nostalgia threaten to surface in Tiepolo’s Hound as he describes his journey to Venice—the museum Europe to which he had been introduced in childhood by his father’s art books—to look for Veronese and Tiepolo, and struggles to reconcile his deep admiration for Pissarro with the feeling that Pissarro somehow betrayed his origins.

What resolves this emotional tangle, and makes the book finally a moving whole of which “Tiepolo’s hound” can be the triumphant concluding image, is the combination of Walcott’s homage to Pissarro’s persistence as an artist in France through experiences of alienation and recurrent self-doubt, and Walcott’s own poetic and painterly love of the Caribbean landscape that, in childhood, they shared. Walcott imagines Pissarro’s discovery that the monumental works of European tradition that he finds in the Louvre are not where he can find himself, and imagines his discovery of his own vision outside the museum, in the streets of Paris and the modern, secular, myth-erasing art of the nineteenth century, with its new understanding of light. Walcott’s account of Pissarro dwells especially on the years Pissarro spent in Pontoise, painting its landscapes and buildings again and again in changing lights and weathers, never getting it “right,” suffering poverty and repeated rejection by the academy, and always trying again.

The loose yet carefully structured poetic form Walcott uses is a satisfying medium for a meditative art that in some respects is an equivalent of Pissarro’s. Like Pissarro, he circles, comes back again and again to the same subjects, the same problems, the same images, though always with a difference. His fundamental verse form here is couplets, arranged so that the end sounds of one couplet rhyme, sometimes very loosely, with the end sounds of the next, a malleable ab ab form that lends itself to a discourse that makes distinctions, draws boundaries, only to let them blur again (as, for instance, with the similarities and differences between himself and Pissarro). The rhymes allow sharply pointed effects, linking “St. Thomas” and “Pontoise,” for example, and “Pissarro” and “sorrow,” but are usually less obtrusive. Walcott likens his couplets to Pissarro’s brush strokes; he also gets a flowing and sliding effect with syntactical slips and with words whose meanings point in two directions (Pissarro, newly in Pontoise, is “an immigrant/ prodigal with confirmations,” both the prodigal runaway from his native place and the artist prodigal with talent and discovery).

Loose forms and long, circling poems that evade tight narrative structure are liable to overinclusiveness, to long passages that lose poetic intensity, and Tiepolo’s Hound does not avoid these failings. The intensity of the moment, the moment of artistic revelation, however, is the center of the poem and the justification, paradoxically, of its meanderings:

. . . in the tints of Tiepolo’s sky,in the yellowing linen of a still life by Chardin,in that stroke of light that catches a hound’s thigh,the paint is all that counts, no guilt, no pardon,no history, but the sense of narrative timeannihilated in the devotion of the acolyte,as undeniable as instinct, the brushstroke’s rhymeand page and canvas know one empire only: light.

Light dominates Walcott’s Caribbean landscapes, and Tiepolo’s hound, metaphorically the inspiration for Walcott’s fiction of Pissarro, finally points him back to the black Caribbean hound that is “the mongrel’s heir,” an abandoned puppy: “we set it down in the village to survive/ like all my ancestry. The hound was here.” Coming near the end of the poem, this passage makes sense of the inconclusiveness of Walcott’s search for the Venetian painting that has haunted his memory; his pilgrimage has a conclusion after all in his return home and the voyage into self that the poem has created. In its last lines, the poet looks to the constellations, reformed by his book: “the round// of the charted stars, the Archer, aiming his bow,/ the Bear, and the studded collar of Tiepolo’s hound.”