[The Fortunate Traveller] shows that a poet can deal in an illuminating way with … [the] problems of personal identity, aesthetic choice, and political commitment. (p. 12)

[Walcott's] travelling is not altogether fortunate. Imagine Robert Frost spending half of his time in Kuwait, teaching oil-rich Arabs. Or William Butler Yeats wintering in Mexico, giving workshops at an artists' colony. But Walcott's life as a commuter poet does at least dramatize the other ways in which he is a go-between, shuttling from one culture to another. He is a black man who writes for a largely white audience. He is "an islander and a colonial" who both resents and admires the language he must work in. He is in no official or acknowledged way the heir of Keats, Browning, Hopkins, or Yeats; his native culture is after all the victim, not the inheritor, of an expansionist and exploitative European empire. Yet...