Since the death of Robert Lowell, there has been no poet writing in English who combines vernacular and the grand manner so successfully as Derek Walcott…. What Shakespeare did without any strain, modern poets like Lowell, Walcott, and Neruda do with heroic effort, and the resulting styles are not always as easy to follow as these poets with a passion to communicate must have hoped. In the first and longest of the poems in [The Star-Apple Kingdom], for example, Walcott uses a device that doesn't work—speaking through the tongue of a protagonist whose bad grammar (in dialect) is a jarring counterpoint to his high-flown rhetoric…. [In] the rest of the poems there is no such tonal switching, no gap between brutal content and stylistic sublimity, as Walcott unfurls his anti-colonialist flag….

Selden Rodman, "Books in Brief: 'The Star-Apple Kingdom'," in National Review (© National Review, Inc., 1979; 150 East 35th...