A prolific quarter-century of work was shaped by recurrent patterns of departure, wandering, and return -in his life as well as in his poetry -and a powerful preoccupation with the visual imagery of the sea, beginning with Castaway and Other Poems (1965), in which he establishes an imaginative topography (e.g., of "seas and coasts as white pages"), and a repertory of myths, themes, and motifs (e.g., of "words like migrating birds") for the titular exile, a repertory that recurs in later volumes. Of a Caribbean ex-colonial in the twilight of empire. These volumes established the qualities usually identified with his verse: virtuosity in traditional, particularly European literary forms enthusiasm for allegory and classical allusion -for which he is both praised and criticized and the struggle within himself over the cruel history and layered cultural legacy of Africa and Europe reflected in the Caribbean landscape, which some critics have interpreted as the divided consciousness Walcott debuted internationally as a poet with In a Green Night: Poems 1948 –1960 (1962), followed shortly thereafter by Selected Poems (1964). He continues to work as a dramatist, contributing a libretto for the Paul Simon Broadway musical Capeman (1997), and is still more likely to be identified by a West Indian audience as a playwright. ![]() After a brief stay in the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow, Walcott returned to Trinidad in 1959 to become the founding director of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The Sea at Dauphin (1954), Ione (1957), and Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958) are usually cited among the most noteworthy, along with his most celebrated dramatic work, Dream on Monkey Mountain (an Obie Award winner), which he began in the late 1950s but did not produce until 1967 in Toronto. His first theater piece, Henri Cristophe (1950), a historical play about the tyrant-liberator of Haiti, was followed by a series of well-received folk-dramas in verse. The decade of the 1950s, however, marked his emergence as a playwright-director in Trinidad. His literary career began in 1948 with his first book of verse, 25 Poems (1948), followed not long thereafter by Epitaph for the Young, XII Cantos (1949), and Poems (1951), all privately published in the Caribbean. ![]() Mary's College in his native Saint Lucia, he continued his education at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He regards his beginnings as an artist, therefore, as a natural and direct inheritance: "I feel that I have continued where my father left off." After completing his studies at St. He grew up in a house he describes as haunted by the absence of a father who had died quite young, because all around the drawing room were his father's watercolors. He and his twin brother Roderick were born in Castries, Saint Lucia, a small island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies. ![]() The poet, playwright, and essayist Derek Walcott is the son of Warwick Walcott, a civil servant and skilled painter in watercolor who also wrote verse, and Alix Walcott, a schoolteacher who took part in amateur theater.
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