Writing about Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott warns against the way biography imposes plot, incident, symmetry, on inarticulate feelings and gestures, losing the reality. “On Robert Lowell” (1984) offers remembrances of Lowell as a mentor, fellow poet, and friend in contrast to the biographer's reduction of Lowell to a story of failed marriages and times of madness. Yet, in selecting certain moments, ranging from his first meeting with Lowell in Trinidad to telling of Lowell's death in a taxi when returning to New York, Walcott is himself constructing a history, although of the kind found in Pasternak's autobiography, moments of memory presented nonchronologically.

This is the method of a modernist poet writing prose. It is best to read this book of republished essays on the model of the Lowell essay, a crafted prose poem in which the parts imply more than they say. The ordering of essays in the book is similar to Walcott's methods of building a sequence of poems or his assembling a new volume of poetry; the sections are arranged subtly to pick up echoes and distant harmonies of their motifs. The movement back and forth, tensions between, and simultaneous presence of a modernist aestheticism and issues of decolonization propel the book.

The presentation, title, and arrangement of contents of a Walcott book have by now become conventional. The painting reproduced here on the cover belongs to his Boston period and ironically contrasts the tropically colored jackets of a row of books inside his study with the snow outside the window. The contrast is unfortunately less striking than intended because of the brown paper used for the dust jacket. “What the Twilight Says,” the first essay in [What the Twilight Says,] was originally the introduction to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970) in which the twilight signifies the sun going down on the British Empire, the end of an era. Here it has an additional elegiac significance—a record of the concerns, friendships, and major positions taken during the era when Walcott and Caribbean literature established a place on the world's cultural map.

“What the Twilight Says” belongs to a time when Walcott was trying to establish a world-class theater company in Trinidad, a director's theater, a Port of Spain version of Brecht's Berlin Ensemble. Walcott was director, playwright, and scene designer, and he expected improbably that he and others would live on the profits. “Twilight” is beautifully written poetic prose, continually changing time and place, circling around various themes, obscurely personal, even opaque, the opposite of V. S. Naipaul's transparency and directness. Walcott's essay is a reply to what Naipaul had been saying about the West Indies—that nothing of value was created or was likely to be created. It concerns Walcott's own attempt to create something of value, but tells it in such a way that most readers will have little idea that Walcott is alluding to twenty years of building drama companies on three islands, and that the essay was written during a time when he had angrily resigned from his Trinidad Theatre Workshop yet was leading it on a tour to several islands. On St. Lucia he returned to places important to his youth, mentioned in the essay and in his magnificent autobiographical poem Another Life, on which he was working at the time.

What the Twilight Says begins with three discussions of Caribbean culture and art, followed by the second part which is comprised of essays on individual writers and by a third part consisting of a short story, the only one Walcott has published. “The Muse of History” (1974) asserts a Whitmanesque Adamic new start to replace the burden of history, especially dreams of avenging slavery and returning to Africa. The Caribbean sea ever changes and brings the world's cultures together to a region where all races are castaways needing to start again. In the Nobel-prize lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1993), itself a small book of epiphanies, Walcott looks back with pride on such a vision and acknowledges what it missed—the culture of the Asian Indians. It concludes with Walcott's Wordsworthian “joy when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture” and memories of himself as a child writing, in an exercise book, “framed stanzas that might contain the light of the hills on an island blest by obscurity, cherishing our insignificance.”

These essays are meant to be read as autobiography. They are related to his poems and plays and are concerned with some of Walcott's influences (Hemingway), friendships (Lowell, Brodsky), his goals and themes, and obsessions (Naipaul). The essays on Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Les Murray, and Robert Frost are notable for Walcott's concern with the significance of craft in the development of each poet. They can seem obvious, even inflated, but come powerfully alive when Walcott discusses the poetic line, use of compound words, tone, pitch, diction, pronunciation, and caesura. Consider some examples: 1) Of Frost's “Something there is that doesn't love a wall” Walcott proclaims: “That rapid elision or slur of the second half of the line is as monumental a breakthrough for American verse as any experiment by Williams or Cummings. It dislocates the pivot of traditional scansion.” 2) “Larkin continued to rely on the given beat of the pentametrical line throughout his career. He shadowed it with hesitations, coarsened it with casual expletives, and compacted it with hyphens … to the point where a hyphenated image, with its aural-visual fusion, was powerful enough to contain a minipoem in itself.” 3) “The hyphenated image is not colloquial, but Larkin's achievement is to make it sound as if it were, as if such phrasing could slip into talk.”

Such poet talk may seem far from West Indian concerns, but it was such mastery and innovation that Walcott needed before he could find his own voice as a Caribbean poet. In “A Letter to Chamoiseau,” a review of Texaco, Walcott is divided between his admiration for the novel and his distrust of the Parisian rhetoric and theories behind it. French Caribbean patois is different, difficult for him to speak correctly. This leads to “Café Martinique: A Story” in which a St. Lucian author argues with his Martinican double, a fit conclusion for a poet's book with its densely packed expressions, subtle associations, and winding structure.