Rei Terada

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
<rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

 

Most North American critics and reviewers have come to see Derek Walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, “natural, worldly, and accomplished” (Vendler, 26).¹ Yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of Walcott’s work–its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency–has obstructed consideration of Walcott’s place in the postmodern era. Enthusiastic critics usually discuss Walcott as a “literary” poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.² Indeed, the surface of Walcott’s language does not seem postmodern. Yet Walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement–a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.³ The vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with Walcott’s poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.⁴ His readers most often argue that Walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.⁵ By this logic, rhetoric and content in Walcott’s poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. Other readers, meanwhile, believe that Walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.⁶

 

The difficulty in categorizing Walcott’s poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. While most of postmodernism’s would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in Walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. If Walcott’s poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that Walcott’s poetic contradicts itself (and thus that Walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from “ordinary” language are inadequate. Indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. It usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. The expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric–precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow.

 

Walcott avoids separating “poetic” from “ordinary” language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. The poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. Indeed, James Dickey complains that Walcott seems at times unable “to state, or see, things without allegory” (8). Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. He also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. Although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative–“allegorical” in de Man’s sense–and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post- modernity. Walcott’s turns of thought here do infact resemble de Man’s. In Allegories of Reading de Man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath “equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself” (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that “Poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (17). Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. The overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an Ashbery or a Palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. Walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric.

 

Although Walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity of “poetic” rhetoric–often because revaluation of the poet’s own work itself becomes a theme. “The Light of the World” The Arkansas Testament, 48-51), a wonderful example of tt’s late style, is more nearly Walcott’s ars poetica than any other single lyric. “The Light of the World” also considers the problems I’ve been discussing–the poet’s inevitable social and linguistic displacement and the relation of poetic to nonpoetic language–more completely than any other single lyric. The poem once again addresses Walcott’s persistent fear–expressed as early as “Homecoming: Anse la Raye” (1970; The Gulf, 84-86)–that poetry may be tragically removed from popular language (and indeed, from material life). But while Walcott more often deliberates this fear in terms of the poet’s social separation from his culture–by virtue of linguistic choice, or of his public’s literacy–“The Light of the World” assumes that poetry is based upon figuration, and inquires whether poetry’s reliance upon figuration divorces it from other linguistic forms.

 

The poem’s aim to revaluate Walcott’s poetic is transparent, since Another Life, which first comprehensively narrates Walcott’s choice of vocation, turns upon its title phrase: “Gregorias, listen, lit / we were the light of the world!”⁷ Indeed, “another life” metamorphoses, in that volume, into “another light”: “another light / in the unheard, creaking axle . . . / in the fire-coloured hole eating the woods” (12.III.13-14, 17). In Another Life these phrases, “the light of the world,” “lux mundi,” “another light,” signify the passion, med by mortality, which drives both desire and creativity. In the course of the poem Walcott’s protagonist learns to sublimate passion into art which acknowledges its own origins in anxiety and ephemerality. Gregorias’ “crude wooden star, / its light compounded” by the “mortal glow” consuming it (23.IV.22-23), symbolizes such art in Another Life. “The Light of the World” even more explicitly represents Walcott’s art as a combination of transience and transport. Here the poet is a “transient” or tourist in his own culture, and the entire poem literally takes place in a “transport,” or van, between Castries and Gros Ilet. Although Walcott has not altered his own position regarding the value of these qualities, “The Light of the World” now asks whether reliance on figuration severs the poet from the community and the communal language with which he would most like to share transport.

 

The poet is first inspired to think of the title phrase when he sees a beautiful woman sitting in the “transport” with him:

 

          Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo
          and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
          I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
          streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
          you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights
          silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,
          something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
          wore no jewelry. . . .
             . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
          and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
          When she looked at me, then away from me politely,
          because any staring at strangers is impolite,
          it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's
          Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging
          whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,
          the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's,
          but gradually even that was going in the dusk,
          except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,
          and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the
                                                    world! (48)

 

Although the poet perceives her at first as an individual woman, “the” beauty–“the beauty was humming the choruses quietly”–in the next moment he begins trying ways of seeing her as art, manipulating her image in a series of framings and figurations: “If this were a portrait . . . . the head was nothing else but heraldic . . . . like a statue, like a black Delacroix’s / Liberty Leading The People . . . the carved ebony mouth.” At the end of this sequence of figures, the poet finally addresses her as Beauty itself. The unnamed woman is now named “Beauty” with a capital B, and seems completely assimilated to the poet’s conception of her. Indeed, Walcott’s deepening aesthetic possession of the woman coincides with the gradual disappearance of her physical self in deepening darkness. In the moment before she becomes Beauty, nothing remains but a “profile” and a highlight. It is entirely possible that in the moment Walcott apotheosizes her, she completely disappears. Beauty may be “the light of the world,” but the apotheosizing capacity of Walcott’s own language is firmly associated with darkness.

 

Although in his address Walcott’s comparison attains to metaphor–the woman is Beauty–the similes leading up to this transfiguration had been conscious of the tension between the individual woman and Beauty: “if this were a portrait”; “you’d leave the highlights”; “she looked at me, then away from me politely”; “I’d have put in an earring, / . . . but she / wore no jewelry” (italics mine). Walcott’s conjunction in “the heft of her torso solid, and a woman’s,” marks an uneasy nexus of formal strength with individual vulnerability, and of solidity with femininity (the sense of straining double consciousness, of near-paradox, is even stronger in an earlier version⁸ where Walcott writes, “solid, but a woman’s”). Yet the woman’s individual vulnerability, her mortality–“even that [solidity] was going in the dusk”–itself reminds the poet of art. Another Life had celebrated precisely that art which allows one to perceive its temporality, its “going in the dusk.” Even though the poet apprehends the woman’s apartness (“she wore no jewelry”), he still can’t completely distinguish, at least on temporal grounds, between her mortal, breathing beauty and his own also fragile idea of Beauty. On the other hand, if he cannot hold on to the distinction between the two, neither can he grasp their identity. His momentary metaphorization of her slips at the very moment at which it is apparently achieved. He names her “O Beauty,” but only in “thought,” in darkness, and in the ambivalent rhetorical figure of (de Manian) prosopopoeia. Even the triumphant moment of her naming requires its highly conventional capitalization of “Beauty” and interjection of “O” in order to ensure its recognition as poetic triumph. The presence of the beholder intrudes between the reader and the ostensible triumph, and between the reader and the object supposedly completely beheld. In the next moment it is no longer enough that the woman be Beauty. Beauty itself needs renaming by a further figure, “the light of the world,” and disappears into this figurative excess. In later references the woman is once again only “the woman by the window,” “her beauty.”

 

Walcott’s correlation between the poet’s expanding transport and expanding darkness magnifies the connotations of “transience.” The poet passes from town to a hotel “full of transients like [him]self” (51),⁹ and at the same time voyages from life toward death. If this protagonist is a tourist, however, we are all tourists, since this is “the town / where [he] was born and grew up” (49). As tourist, he travels through a society itself transient: St. Lucia, since it is now so “full of transients,” may not last much longer in its present form. Walcott represents St. Lucia at large by means of the female figures in “The Light of the World,” just as he calls the Antillean population by a series of female names in “Sainte Lucie” Collected Poems 1948-1984, 309-323). Luce, of course, means “light,” and Beauty in the poem is also tied to light. The woman in the transport therefore represents St. Lucia, which for Walcott coincides with Beauty. Walcott underscores the fragile temporal development of St. Lucia by depicting a series of women at various stages of life, moving from “the beauty” to “drunk women on pavements” and a thought of his mother, “her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk” (49).¹⁰ These secondary women seem even more exposed, more obviously mortal than “the beauty.” These elegiac thoughts further give rise to a reminiscence of the Castries market in Walcott’s childhood, in which the poet-figure of a lamplighter prominently appears: “wandering gas lanterns hung on poles at street corners . . . the lamplighter climbed, / hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another” (49). In the earlier draft, Walcott accents the fragility of the lamplighter’s art–“the light . . . was poised to be lit / on the one hand, and on the next to go out,” like that of the “fireflies” which act as “guides” later in the poem.¹¹ Finally, the transport’s forward motion gives the sensation (as in Bishop’s “The Moose” or Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”) that everyone inside the transport is being carried toward death: “The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot. / I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time.”

 

At the same time that the transport functions as a sort of Charon’s ferry, however, “transport” is also a synonym for “metaphor,” whose etymology includes the notion of “carrying.” Moreover, it’s clear that Walcott means “metaphor” in its larger sense, to include all figuration, and accepts figuration as a defining feature of poetry–so that “metaphor” functions, as usual, as a figure for figuration. Then too, “transport” can mean “ecstasy,” which bears the connotation of sexual desire as well as of rapturous lyric inspiration. In other words, the poet’s desire for “the beauty” and his aspiration toward poetic and formal Beauty simultaneously carry him–and all kinds of “beauty” with him–toward equally simultaneous would-be possession and oblivion. The poem begins with an epigraph from Bob Marley, “Kaya now, got to have kaya now . . . For the rain is falling”; the earlier version shows that Walcott originally misheard Marley, believing, charmingly enough, that Marley was singing “Zion-ah, / I’ve got to have Zion- ah”–a rendering which magnifies the apocalyptic character of the transport. “Kaya” is marijuana, as it happens, but whether the desired object be marijuana or Zion, “kaya” functions tautologically here, simply as “the desired,” as whatever it is one has “got to have.” “Kaya” also functions, like poetic transport, as a vehicle toward the destination of simultaneous heightened elevation and oblivion. By this point Walcott has accomplished more than a delineation of concurrent desires. He has asked whether metaphorical transport, in its ecstasy, either leaves its supposed subjects behind to unecstatic life and death, or carries them to oblivion by sweeping them up with it. The potential conflict is particularly obvious and painful when the inspired poet’s subjects are St. Lucian, poor and, in this case, mostly female.

 

Yet another female figure enters the scene at this point–an old woman qualified by experience to speak for “her people,” whose voice alone the poet represents:

 

          An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief
          hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere,
          some distance off, was a heavier basket
          that she couldn't carry.  She was in a panic.
          She said to the driver: "Pas quittez moi a terre,"
          which is, in her patois: "Don't leave me stranded,"
          which is, in her history and that of her people:
          "Don't leave me on earth," or, by a shift of stress:
          "Don't leave me the earth" [for an inheritance];
          "Pas quittez moi a terre, Heavenly transport,
          Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it."
          The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows
          that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left
          on the earth, and would have to make out.
          Abandonment was something they had grown used to.
          And I had abandoned them, I knew that now. . . . (49-50)

 

Several things are surprising about Walcott’s development of this metaphor (this transport). First, a North American critical audience will probably associate “transport” with politically undesirable transcendence and forgetfulness. But the old woman believes transport is “Heavenly,” a relief from her burdens, and so begs to be transported-and-not- abandoned–even though “abandon” is itself a synonym for “transport” when both mean “rapture.” At the same time, “abandon[ment]” in the negative sense inevitably accompanies figuration, since writing–substituting figuration for presence–marks the site of perpetually abandoned presence. Walcott further highlights the constitutional ambivalence of these words in his self-reversing line about shadows “that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left.” The line remains ambiguous in at least three ways. Walcott’s reversal could indicate the passage of time: it at first seems that all the shadowy bodies of villagers (also “shades” crossing between worlds) outside the transport will fit in; after a while, it does not. In addition, the first half of this line is “literal” (the passengers will not be left behind because they will get in the transport), and the second half “figurative” (they will be “left behind” because the poet will abandon them emotionally and linguistically). But, third and finally, “would” can also suggest preference or volition: they wanted transport, they wanted to be left on the earth. And this is what everyone is likely to feel: we want the universal, we want the particular. In “The Light of the World” (as in “The Schooner Flight,” whose protagonist Shabine is “nobody or a nation”), Walcott maintains a fierce consciousness of both poles.

 

Further, if one believes that figuration is a specialized form of language which abandons the object world by its abstraction, it will confound one’s expectations that, as Walcott’s explication demonstrates, the “poetic” multiplicity of meanings in “transport” and “abandon” also occurs in the old woman’s speech. The old woman’s phrase is figurative to its core, as Walcott’s translation makes clear. “Pas quittez moi a terre” does not “denote” “Don’t leave me stranded.” Besides, “Don’t leave me stranded” is itself figurative, unless one’s friend is sailing away from the beach (as St. Lucia’s colonizers figuratively and literally did sail away). Translation begins by substituting supposed denotations, but can never end. Denotations, too, continually dissolve by mere “shift[s] of stress.” Likewise, poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but Walcott recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also “quarrelled for bread in the shops, / or quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling” (49).

 

Walcott, rather like Wordsworth, is now moved by his own reflection that he “had abandoned them . . . had left them on earth,” to feel “a great love that could bring [him] to tears” (50). In this ecstatic experience of agape, of course, we reach yet another connotation of “transport.” Contrary to what one hears about agape, the poet’s love actually denies him oneness with the people around him. Instead, it takes the form of “a pity” that makes him feel his own isolation the more, the more hyperconscious he grows of “their neighborliness, / their consideration.” His pity, in other words, pulls him both toward and away from them, following the two directions of language–“tearing him apart,” as we so Orphically say. The poet suffers further when, in accordance with its mission as an engine of time, even those people who fit into the transport begin getting off. Each departure enacts a miniature death, and too clearly foreshadows the poet’s own:

 

                                         I wanted the transport
          to continue forever, for no one to descend
          and say a goodnight in the beams of the lamps
          and take the crooked path up to the lit door,
          guided by fireflies; I wanted her beauty
          to come into the warmth of considerate wood,
          to the relieved rattling of enamel plates
          in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard,
          but I came to my stop.  Outside the Halcyon Hotel.
          The lounge would be full of transients like myself.
          Then I would walk with the surf up the beach.
          I got off the van without saying good night.
          Good night would be full of inexpressible love.
          They went on in their transport, they left me on earth. (51)

 

Another reversal occurs here, when, after having left his neighbors on earth through his language and his “transience” (his exile), his neighbors in turn leave the poet. One often encounters, in Walcott’s poetry, the idea that home can leave you. In the structurally similar “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” the narrator already feels like “a tourist.” “Hop[ing] it would mean something to declare / today, I am your poet, yours,” he finds no one to listen to such a declaration except throngs of children who want coins or nothing. Caught in the impasse of this “homecoming without home,” “You give them nothing. / Their curses melt in air” (85). In contrast, fishermen cast “draughts” of nets, “texts” which help the children more ably than the poet’s. The poet can give the children only words, “nothing” in the way of coins; they return him, in kind, words which are curses.

 

“The Light of the World” also features a mutual abandonment, the poet’s sense of pity and guilt, a confrontation between a “transient” and his people, and jealousy toward another artisan. Many critics, having cast Walcott in the role of “literary poet,” oppose him to the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite, a more “folkish” writer. In “The Light of the World,” Walcott compares himself to an apter and stronger competitor, Bob Marley. “Marley” is the poem’s first word; as the poem’s text stands under its epigraph from Marley’s “Kaya,” so Marley’s song–“rocking” (48), “thud-sobbing” (51), popular, choric, mnemonic– suffuses the whole transport. The “beauty was humming” Marley’s choruses, not Walcott’s; when the whole transport “hum[s] between / Gros-Ilet and the Market” (48), Marley’s song becomes indistinguishable from the motor which drives transport forward. This realization, as much as his confrontation with mortality, brings the poet “down to earth” (and leaves him there). The poet leaves his people on earth–that he could bear. What’s worse, he “le[aves] them to sing / Marley’s songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth” (51), and the thought that they so gladly sing the songs of a competitor drives him to tears. The pill Walcott swallows here is, then, at least as bitter as that in “Homecoming: Anse la Raye.”

 

But in “The Light of the World,” Walcott’s greater awareness of linguistic ambivalence and of tensions between universals and particulars far more precisely and gently renders a similar experience, without assuming a wishful intimacy or erasing difference. Walcott explores his own universalizing impulse most completely here. And in the end, the poem suggests that the “poetic” language of metaphor cannot be held apart from Marley’s language, from the old woman’s language, from all language. The poet faces insoluble problems of representation; and in a way, it doesn’t help that everyone who uses language faces these same problems and temptations. On the other hand, in the impossibility of controlling language and the inescapability of desiring to do so, as in the inescapability of death, we find a kind of community in poverty. The poem’s last stanza, which takes up after the poet has been “left on earth,” arrives like an extra gift, an unexpected bit of afterlife:

 

Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped.  A man
          shouted my name from the transport window.
          I walked up towards him.  He held out something.
          A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.
          He gave it to me.  I turned, hiding my tears.
          There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give
                                                            them
          but this thing I have called "The Light of the World." (51)

 

Again, as in “Anse la Raye,” the poet and his counterpart, representing his community, exchange virtually “nothing.” The man returns the cigarettes, while the poet turns speechless away: “There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them.” Walcott revises the Orpheus and Eurydice story here in a manner unflattering to the postmodern Orpheus.¹² This Orpheus cannot take his Eurydice home because he is mortal himself, has no particular powers against death, and besides, she doesn’t belong to him and never did. He is too overcome to look back and deliberately leaves without parting, having accomplished nothing. In fact he assumes the passive position, so that the mortals (who have their own transport and their own music) look back at him. Much of this diminishment already occurs in Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.,” in which Eurydice reacts to news of Orpheus’ failure by asking, “Who?” As de Man points out,

 

The genuine reversal takes place at the end of the poem, when Hermes turns away from the ascending movement that leads Orpheus back to the world of the living and instead follows Eurydice into a world of privation and nonbeing. On the level of poetic language, this renunciation corresponds to the loss of a primacy of meaning located within the referent and it allows for the new rhetoric of Rilke's "figure." (47)

 

In Walcott’s as in Rilke’s version of the story, the poet figure retains little power or tragic dignity.

 

Yet the two “nothings” the poet and the others in the transport exchange–unlike the “nothing” and “curses” in “Anse la Raye”–mean everything. This is how language works, conveying in spite of itself. The man’s gesture embodies all the warm “neighborliness,” “consideration,” and “polite partings” of his society which have moved the poet to write about it, and Walcott gives that society what he loves most, his lux mundi, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all “but” nothing, and even a repetition of abandonment. Walcott’s description of the poet’s diminished powers sounds characteristically postmodern, if we understand postmodernism as a folding back from Modernism’s totalizing ambitions. But notice that this diminishment does not free the poet from communal responsibilities, or from his aesthetic and sexual desires.

 

Poetic humility takes paradoxical forms. The more humbly the poet describes her or his own efforts, the greater she or he may believe poetry to be. In a way, Walcott’s recognition of the poet’s limitations makes his task even more ambitious, since it will be more difficult. Without the illusion of mastery over language, the poet still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and “truth”– which in “The Light of the World” means precisely recognizing the inescapability of rhetoric. Paradoxically, Walcott brings every poetic resource to bear upon the task of convincing us that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The performance is convincing–so convincing that it undoes its own point. Rhetoric here struggles to dismiss itself, and, predictably, cannot. Walcott’s last small “but” opens a floodgate through which poetic grandiosity and linguistic transcendence stream. Even by calling his poem “this thing,” he simultaneously metaphorizes and reifies it. By further calling “this thing” (already metaphorized by being called a thing) “The Light of the World,” Walcott enters the realm of undecidability. On the one hand, this last line is figurative and glorious: poems are, after all, the light of the world. On the other, it is merely literal and tautological. The title of the poem is, inarguably, “The Light of the World”; the phrase is a citation, referring us only to itself, and distances itself by its quotation marks from the notion of poetic glory. That is, since the title comprises a proper name, we cannot, as when Derrida writes of Ponge, “know with any peaceful certainty whether [it] designate[s] the name or the thing” (Derrida, 8). The reader cannot stand between these two interpretations to choose one. Neither can we decide whether “The Light of the World” actively produces and undoes these contradictions or whether these contradictions actively produce and undo it, for the process of disclosing the ubiquity of rhetoric also begins in self-knowledge and moves toward generalization, following the route of the universalizing impulse it queries. If Walcott’s interest in this particular query is postmodern, his postmodernity trails behind it Modernism’s tendency to universalize.

 

But in this too Walcott’s example is at least instructive and at most representative. Attempts to define postmodernism solely by its difference from Modernism themselves echo Modern self-definitions. It may be typical of postmodernism to lose itself in the perspectivism of which it is so fond. According to Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism asks us to see “Historical meaning . . . today,” for example, “as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional,” and at the same time “argues that, in fact, it has always been so” (67). If this is true, postmodernism can best be defined not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a set of attitudes or a grammar of rhetoric, but as inseparable from the propensity to read postmodernly. And if postmodern poetry characteristically inhabits and describes the circulation of these perspectives, Walcott’s metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary poet will be difficult to assail.

 

Notes

 

1. For some representative reviews, see also Calvin Bedient, “Derek Walcott, Contemporary” Parnassus 9 [1981], 31-44); Paul Breslin, “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott” TriQuarterly 68 [1987], 168-183); and Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation'” Parnassus 14 [1987], 49-76).

 

2. Vendler, for example, remarks that “Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, and Auden [follow] Yeats in Walcott’s ventriloquism” (23), and Sven Birkerts claims that “[Walcott] apprenticed himself to the English tradition and has never strayed far from the declamatory lyrical line. His mentors . . . include the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Lowell (who himself sought to incorporate that tradition into his work)” (31).

 

3. Linda Hutcheon notes that “On the level of representation . . . postmodern questioning overlaps with similarly pointed challenges by those working in, for example, postcolonial . . . contexts” (37), and that “Difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (5).

 

4. Both Vendler’s well-known review of The Fortunate Traveller and James Atlas’ New York Times Magazine story on Walcott, for example, are entitled “Poet of Two Worlds.”

 

5. For Bedient, for example, Walcott’s language in “Old New England,” a poem in part about Vietnam, “places him curiously inside the dream, insulated there, enjoying it” (33).

 

6. This last position is most often taken by Walcott’s fellow poets, especially Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney.

 

7. Another Life, 23.IV.11-12; also 12.III.21-22. I will refer to Another Life by chapter, section and line number.

 

8. Paris Review 101 (1986), 192.

 

9. Walcott had written “tourists like myself” in place of “transients” in the earlier draft of “Light.”

 

10. “[F]ading in the dying dusk” in the Paris Review.

 

11. Fireflies are among the favorite creatures in Walcott’s bestiary. He first mentions them in poetry in “Lampfall” The Castaway and Other Poems, 58-59), where they represent a fluctuating, delicate curiosity: “Like you, I preferred / The firefly’s starlike little / Lamp, mining, a question, / To the highway’s brightly multiplying beetles” (59). In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the Firefly “lights the tired woodsman home,” and annoys the Devil by his mercurial gaiety (when “The Firefly passes, dancing,” the Devil barks, “Get out of my way, you burning backside, I’m the prince of obscurity and I won’t brook interruption!” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 151]). In general, Walcott associates fireflies with the short-lived magic of words, whose meaning flashes on and off.

 

12. Walcott explicitly reworks the Orpheus-Eurydice story in his new musical, Steel (produced at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991). There, it is Eurydice (a schoolgirl) who instructs Orpheus (a steel band musician) not to look at her as they revisit their childhood neighborhood.

Works Cited

 

• Bedient, Calvin. “Derek Walcott: Contemporary.” Parnassus 9 (1981), 31-44.
• Birkerts, Sven. “Heir Apparent” [review of Midsummer], The New Republic 190 (1984), 31-33.
• De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
• Derrida, Jacques. Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• Dickey, James. “Worlds of a Cosmic Castaway” [review of Collected Poems 1948-1984]. New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1986, 8.
• Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
• Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1984.
• Vendler, Helen. “Poet Between Two Worlds” [review of The Fortunate Traveller], New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, 23-27.
• Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
• —. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.
• —. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
• —. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
• —. The Gulf and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
• —. “The Light of the World.” Paris Review 101 (1986), 192-95.