With friends he started a school newspaper there in the late 1940s and wrote a column himself on jazz--a lifelong interest that has affected both the substance and the technique of his poetry. Several poems of his appeared in that paper, the
Harrisonian, in 1949 and 1950. His first major publication was in
Bim, the pioneering literary journal Frank Collymore had been publishing in Barbados since 1942.
Bim was respected and read throughout the West Indies; George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, A. J. Seymour, and Derek Walcott, among others, had published work in its pages by 1950, when Brathwaite's "Shadow Suite" was published (soon to be followed in
Bim by "Fantasie in Blue and Silver," a sequence first printed in the
Harrisonian).
"Shadow Suite" is typical of Brathwaite's early poetry. Most of his earliest work is in sequences of eight or ten lyrics, often quite different in form but integrated by diction or theme. The overwhelming influence in these poems is T. S. Eliot. In the case of "Shadow Suite," the shadows themselves, the High Church liturgical diction and decor, even the cats, all seem to come from Eliot.
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