The West Indian poet Derek Walcott published his first book of poetry in 1949, when he was still in his teens. His second, In a Green Night, came out in 1962, and since that time he has given us five more (as well as numerous plays) and a world. "World" has lost its punch from being applied to the districts of too many writers; I wish it could be reclaimed for Walcott's poetry, which keeps an axis and has size, and sometimes has a grand, planetary movement carrying the movement on its surface. When I read The Gulf I thought of the three-year-old next door who called the white end-papers of his book "sky". This very largeness, of subject and of feeling, has seemed a flaw to some critics, and it is true that Walcott's poems run the risk of the impersonal and the rhetorical. It seems to me they defeat these enemies and in doing so many of them move up and away from the common run of poems and close to the best ones.
Of course, affinity with the best can be seen as a flaw, when much poetry is code, or tender hallooing to the self. Walcott is a balanced, meditative poet; he regards, thinks, looks for resolution, blames angrily but specifically, and does not single himself out as the last sane man in bedlam, nor yet as the most burdened, the prisoner or the victim. First and last he praises. He makes his reader work, but what we find out is something more than how complex he is….
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