By contrast, only two of the poem's eight sections include recognizably Caribbean details, and these are stereotypical palm trees, sand, and surf. From such beginnings Brathwaite grows toward trilogies that pursue Eliot's interest in complex rhythms of structure, in the architectural possibilities (and problems) involved in making large poems of free-standing lyrics. Brathwaite himself has written that "The only 'European influence' I can detect and will acknowledge is that of T. S. Eliot. The tone, the cadence, and above all the
organization of my long poems ... owe a great deal to him" (quoted by Gordon Rohlehr in
Pathfinder, 1981).
Perhaps more importantly Brathwaite drew inspiration from a side of Eliot almost forgotten: the jazz poet, the explorer of the whole gamut of American voices and their rhythms, whose phonograph recordings of his work inspired Caribbean poets to shape their own speech into poetry. That model stands behind Brathwaite's early interest in recording his own work, often with musical accompaniment. His performance of his first trilogy, The Arrivants (1973), was released commercially between 1969 and 1973, and his criticism often reverts to the subject of preserving the voice in written verse. What a jazzman does with the old standards is for Brathwaite also a model for what the West Indian poet, indeed any postcolonial poet, can do with standard English.
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