Ironically, although Walcott has openly dismissed the theoretical "schools" of criticism (Richard Smith, "A Conversation with Derek Walcott," 1991), the hypothetical barriers and gulfs transcended in his works made fertile ground for the myriad poststructural isms currently popular in academe. This should come as no surprise. Through the accident of birth and inclination of will, Walcott found the philosophical questions of origins, identity, and meaning (which may be matters of abstract speculation for some writers) to be elemental terms of colonial existence. Out of the detritus of Old World domination, Walcott derived themes that transcend ethnicity, geography and time.
Derek Alton Walcott was born 23 January 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia, to Warwick and Alix Walcott. Warwick Walcott was a civil servant, poet, and visual artist who died of complications following an ear infection when he was thirty-five, leaving daughter Pamela, aged three, along with twin sons Derek and Roderick, barely one year old. Their mother was a schoolteacher who encouraged her children's early education and love for reading; she was also involved in a community cultural group and got her sons involved in local theater. Roderick, along with his brother, was to become a well-known playwright. Derek Walcott published his first poem at fourteen and his first book five years later (25 Poems, 1949); the play he calls his first, Henri Chrutophe, was staged in 1950.
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