SOURCE: King, Bruce. Review of What the Twilight Says, by Derek Walcott. Sewanee Review 107, no. 1 (winter 1999): xxv-xxvii.

In the following positive review, King praises Walcott's essays in What the Twilight Says.

Writing about Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott warns against the way biography imposes plot, incident, symmetry, on inarticulate feelings and gestures, losing the reality. “On Robert Lowell” (1984) offers remembrances of Lowell as a mentor, fellow poet, and friend in contrast to the biographer's reduction of Lowell to a story of failed marriages and times of madness. Yet, in selecting certain moments, ranging from his first meeting with Lowell in Trinidad to telling of Lowell's death in a taxi when returning to New York, Walcott is himself constructing a history, although of the kind found in Pasternak's autobiography, moments of memory presented nonchronologically.

This is the method of a modernist poet writing prose. It is best to read this...