SOURCE: Mason, David. “Derek Walcott: Poet of the New World.” I Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 29, no. 3 (spring 1986): 269-75.

In the following essay, Mason explores the geographic expansion of Walcott's “literary territory” from the Caribbean roots of his earliest writings to North American and Mediterranean settings.

Although Helen Vendler has called Derek Walcott a “Poet of Two Worlds,”¹ it may be more accurate to call him a poet of the New World, a world which has absorbed the old and is still faced with its own lack of definition. His formal proclivities help him bridge old and new writing styles, and, increasingly, his work is shaped by a history of self-exile and divorce, a continuous breaking down of the structures in which complacency breeds. He is one of a handful of modern poets who root themselves in tradition, yet become reliable witnesses to modern life...