Derek Walcott has always had, even in his rawest apprenticeship, a head for metaphor. From the merest pastiche, the occasional and wholly original metaphor would burst to signal a talent that would endure. This gift has been one of the chief constants in his development and in his adventures among various styles…. That gift has itself undergone some development. (pp. 47-8)
A few preliminary observations about Walcott are necessary to help establish a context for the discussion of metaphor in his poetry. The first may seem, initially at least, rather trivial. In his first major collection, In a Green Night …, there are only two poems in which he does not follow the old convention of beginning each line with a capital. In The Castaway … only seventeen of the thirty-three poems follow that convention, while in the latest book, The Gulf,… all the poems are in the new convention. These statistics indicate more than a readiness to be in line with typographical fashion. They indicate Walcott's general hankering after a kind of poetic plainness, after a simple, direct, "natural" style. His development in this pursuit of plainness can be seen in a comparison of In a Green Night with The Castaway and The Gulf….
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