SOURCE: Sansom, Ian. “Fanfares.” London Review of Books (11 December 1997): 29.

In the following review of The Bounty, Sansom criticizes Walcott's tendency toward poetic ostentation, verbosity, and excessive exultation.

They call him Mister Bombastic: ‘Because he is well capable of rhetoric and flourish, he too often allows these two-edged gifts to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic stance’ (Eavan Boland); ‘I have found Walcott's extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the accusations stick.

Much of Walcott's early work—‘Prelude,’ for example, and ‘A Far Cry from Africa’—is like the early, glam Auden:

my life, too early...