The examination of the drama of his own life against that of his community and region has been one of Walcott's main themes. His individual experience has become part, if not necessarily typical, of what it means to be West Indian. (pp. 119-20)
[Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos, an early volume published in Barbados,] is in an experimental modern style. The epiclike twelve divisions of Epitaph, the parallels and contrasts of a West Indian life with the classical past, are indebted to James Joyce's Ulysses. There are echoes of T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. The emphasis on late adolescence and early manhood, in which maturation is seen as a condition of feverish dying, had been made popular by Thomas. While immature in both theme and craft, Epitaph is an attempt to move beyond the fragments of lyric poetry to a larger structure shaped around the inner life of the author. The speaker's voyage through life is that of a modern Ulysses, a West Indian who, no matter how much he makes use of European myth, is conscious of problems of ethnic identity and colour…. Alongside the concern with problems of young love in a multiracial society, and the attempt to master the idiom of European elite culture, an ironic awareness of falsity emerges…. The burden of Walcott's poetry will be to explore his dual inheritance, especially in the various forms it is found within the New World. (p. 120)
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