SOURCE: Walcott, Derek. “Hemingway Now.” North Dakota Quarterly 68, nos. 2-3 (spring-summer 2001): 6-13.

In the following essay, originally given as the keynote address for the Ninth International Hemingway Conference in 2000, Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning poet, recounts how, as a young writer growing up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Hemingway's precise descriptions of geography and light were critical to his own development as a poet.

As I write this in the Santa Cruz valley in northern Trinidad, I think I hear what sounds like the echo of collected rain on the thick, rich forests that cover the hills, the sounds of rain either going or coming, a sound that is like far traffic or the sea in the rainy weather that comes with the turn of the year. I have been reading the grateful and bountiful book by V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, which catches his...