In the following essay, Wieland explores recurring allusions to mythological and fictional themes and characters in Walcott's body of work.

In the following essay, Ramazani traces the theme of postcolonial Afro-Caribbean cultural identity in Walcott's Omeros.

In the following essay, Okpewho examines Walcott's themes of journey, voyage, and cultural identity within the context of African Caribbean literary discourse.

In the following essay, Hamner offers a critical analysis of Walcott's epic poem Omeros, focusing particular attention on the role of the character Philoctetes.

In the following essay, Thieme analyzes the recurring motif of the Robinson Crusoe archetype in Walcott's poetry.

In the following essay, Lock discusses the problematic aesthetic representation of the female subject in Western literary tradition and in Walcott's evocation of Helen in Omeros.

In the following essay, Lock presents an analysis of the depiction of women in the language and structure of Walcott's Omeros.

In the following interview, Walcott discusses his formative experiences and cultural influences on Saint Lucia, his views on the development and multicultural atmosphere of the Caribbean, his work as a playwright, his interest in film, and his approach to the composition and teaching of poetry.

In the following interview, conducted in January 1995 with poet and journalist Rose Styron, Walcott discusses the influences of multiculturalism on the creation and appreciation of literature.

In the essay below, Peters analyzes Walcott's depiction of madness in his characters as a response to the clash between European, African, and New World cultures.

In the following essay, Bensen examines the centrality of painting and imagery in Walcott's Midsummer.

In the following essay, Fiet provides an overview of Walcott's plays from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, stressing their use of theatrical metaphors and settings.

In the following essay, Trueblood discusses poems from multiple volumes of Walcott's poetry, including In a Green Night, The Castaway and Other Poems, The Gulf, Another Life, and Sea Grapes.

In the essay below, Fox traces the theme of dreams and the imagination in Dream on Monkey Mountain.

In the following essay, Brown offers an overview of Walcott's poetry, tracing the theme of “the New World” that appears throughout his work.

In the following essay, Breslow provides an overview of Walcott's literary accomplishments and his cross-cultural preoccupations with history, Western culture and myth, postcolonial Caribbean identity, and the legacy of racism.

In the following review, Kirsch evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Bounty, complimenting Walcott for addressing “the largest themes without self-consciousness or hesitation.”

In the essay below, Hamner surveys the development of Walcott's drama through O Babylon! He underscores the playwright's assimilation of diverse cultural and theatrical influences in his works.

In the following essay, Thieme provides an overview of the critical reaction to Walcott's work over a period of five decades, including a discussion of notable publications that have contributed to the critical study of Walcott's oeuvre.

The following interview focuses on influences on Walcott's literary career including Caribbean history, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the language of Shakespeare.

In the following review, Kirsch provides an overview of Walcott's life and writing through a discussion of Bruce King's biography, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, and offers a positive assessment of Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound.

In the following review, Benfey offers a mixed assessment of Omeros, finding shortcomings in the volume's ineffective “imaginative journeys” and unusual metrical patterns.

In the following essay, Mason explores the geographic expansion of Walcott's “literary territory” from the Caribbean roots of his earliest writings to North American and Mediterranean settings.

In the following essay, Salkey discusses recurring themes of light, harmony, and completeness in Walcott's poetry.

In the following review, Alvarez offers a positive assessment of Tiepolo's Hound.

[The] study of Walcott's career as a dramatist must begin with the play he regards as his first, Henri Christophe—and it is written in verse. (p. 52) The plot unfolds in Haiti and concerns black characters for the most part but there is little besides to mark the play as West Indian. A quotation from Hamlet and one from Richard III, heading respectively each of the two parts of the play, are in keeping with the language Walcott puts into the mouths of illiterate ex-slaves…. The major pr...

In the following review, Sanger offers a generally favorable assessment of The Bounty, though notes flaws in what he sees as Walcott's empty phrasing and forced rhyme schemes.

In the following review of The Bounty, Sansom criticizes Walcott's tendency toward poetic ostentation, verbosity, and excessive exultation.

In the following interview, Walcott discusses his views on the cultural legacy of the British Commonwealth and defends its continuing importance as a source of shared identity and political ideals.

The following interview focuses on Walcott's epic poem, Omeros.

In the following excerpt, Gundy compliments Walcott's prose in What the Twilight Says, praising the work's “sharp and stimulating analyses.”

In the following conversation, conducted at the time of the New York production of Dream on Monkey Mountain, Walcott elucidates the play's themes and discusses the person who inspired the character Makak.

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 s...

In the following excerpt, Kitchen praises Walcott's elegance in Tiepolo's Hound, but finds the volume overly analytical and academic.

The title poem of [Derek Walcott's] second major collection, The Castaway …, portrays a lone man on a sand-bank looking out to sea for rescue. He is lost. The implications are pessimistic. Yet Walcott's progression has been towards greater self-discovery and achievement. It is this paradox that lies behind the work of the finest Caribbean poet writing in English today. From his earliest published work Walcott turned a critical eye on the predicament of the West Indian. We may find that ...

In the following essay, Shullenberger compares Walcott's epic poem Omeros to Homer's Iliad.

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 poet...

In the following review, Bamforth offers a generally positive assessment of What the Twilight Says.

In the following excerpt, Bayley offers a positive assessment of The Bounty, referring to Walcott as “a poet of singular honesty.”

[Derek Walcott's] voice was for a long time a derivative one. His subject was not derivative: it was the black colonial predicament…. But there was an often unhappy disjunction between his explosive subject, as yet relatively new in English poetry, and his harmonious pentameters, his lyrical allusions, his stately rhymes, his Yeatsian meditations. I first met his work in an anthology that had reprinted his "Ruins of a Great House."… It was clear that Walcott had been readi...

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�...

In the following excerpt, Tillinghast offers a generally positive assessment of The Bounty.

In the following positive review, King praises Walcott's essays in What the Twilight Says.

In the following essay, Hirsch offers a positive assessment of Walcott's career as a poet and playwright.

In the following review, Pettingell offers a positive assessment of The Bounty.

In the following review, Lucas offers a positive assessment of Walcott's Collected Poems, though expresses concerns about the quality of Walcott's later verse.

In this review of the NEC production, Riley describes Dream on Monkey Mountain as a "lush depiction of the many moods implicit in the ritual and realistic aspects of Caribbean Black life" but notes that at times the play does "falter under the weight of its voluminous dialogue."

In the following excerpt, Logan offers a negative assessment of Tiepolo's Hound, faulting Walcott's “absentminded descriptions” and “grammatical slips.”

Dream on Monkey Mountain received its New York debut on 14 March 1971 in a production by the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) at the St. Mark's Playhouse. In the following assessment of the premiere performance, Barnes calls the play a "richly flavored phantasmagoria" and stresses its poetic aspects.

Oliver declares Dream on Monkey Mountain a "masterpiece " and praises its "beauty, imagination, humor, and vigor."

Derek Walcott has both a seafarer's resourcefulness, appropriate to a West Indian, and a moralist's eye for character and commitment. In this powerful new book [The Star-Apple Kingdom] he mediates again the "ancient war between obsession and responsibility" or reflects on the current of history as it afflicts the forfeited beauty of his troubled Antillean world. "The sea is History," he says in one poem, and presents a panoply of Genesis and Exodus and Babylonian Ca...

In the following positive review, Breslow praises Walcott's stage adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.

In the following positive review, King praises Walcott's imagery and verse in The Bounty.

[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 ...

In the following review, Noor offers a positive assessment of What the Twilight Says, though expresses concern over Walcott's failure to challenge the vocabulary and prejudices of European imperialism.

In the following positive review, Hannan praises Tiepolo's Hound, complimenting Walcott's “calm and devastating clarity.”

In the following review, Greenwell offers a mixed assessment of The Bounty.

In the following evaluation of the New York staging of Dream on Monkey Mountain, Kerr judges the play wordy and slow.

If the most beautiful thing in the world is inherited wealth, Derek Walcott's poetry is rich. He has none of the self-made man's frugality. He is a natural with all the confidence of a capitalist: that words will never run short, that there will always be fresh pleasures, new colours. He is extravagant and his poems are beautifully illuminated. They make the mouth water…. We drink its vocables and become lightheaded, but we wake up without a hangover. His poems have an indestructible fl...

"That sail which leans on light, / tired of islands, / a schooner beating up the Caribbean // for home" [from Sea Grapes] indicates the extraordinary acuity of vision under Derek Walcott's control, an acuity that combines terrifying precision with fresh metaphorical invention…. Sight, our frailest sense, most easily detects the decay of the world…. To confront us with the seen, Walcott reveals the numinous force of the tawdry, the cheap, the broken-down. Everywhere his met...

Derek Walcott's superb new collection ["The Star-Apple Kingdom"] is described by its publishers as an "odyssey," and justly. The book opens with a long narrative about a poor mulatto sailor in flight northward from Trinidad, closes with the title poem, which dramatizes revolutionary movements of mind and feeling in Jamaica, and includes several shorter pieces set in island villages in St. Croix and elsewhere. The only items remote from the Caribbean circuit are a salute to...

Mr. Walcott is a powerful writer, but many of his poems are trapped in the politics of feeling, knowing the representative fate they must sustain. It is enough for any poet that he is responsible for his own feeling; he answers to his scruple, his conscience, hard master. But Mr. Walcott's poems try to serve a second master, the predicament of his people. They tie themselves in historical chains, and then try to break loose. It is my impression that the poems [in The Gulf] are trying now to escape fr...

Walcott's treatment of the theme of death and the inscrutable ultimate power that governs the universe, and his moral statements on the tussle between the God-head and the Devil in us are various extensions of a central concern with the precariousness of the human condition. The dominant theme in The Sea at Dauphin is the perennial struggle between life and death. The theme recurs in a less obvious form in Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Malcauchon and Dream on Monkey Mountain. In each case Death is presen...

Derek Walcott has been alternating for some years between his native West Indies and America. Meanwhile he has produced a steady flow of fine discursive poems—Sea-Grapes and The Star-Apple Kingdom—set in the Caribbean and full of a growing sense of Walcott's search for a new identity. In [The Fortunate Traveller] he seems to have found it…. But, as the title suggests, his new-found freedom is double-edged. He can look back and 'think of Europe as a gutter of autumn leaves ...

[Derek Walcott] dedicates many of the poems in The Fortunate Traveller to, presumably, friends—from Joseph Brodsky to Susan Sontag—but his dedications have an unmistakable air of name-dropping, of bandying cultural credentials. The cultures Walcott evokes on his travels … are many and varied—geographically and historically—and the range of ostensible literary connections or devotions is great. Yet it is clear from the first poem, "Old New England", whose voic...

In "Cantina Music," [from The Fortunate Traveller] Derek Walcott warns that poor people—like poor nations—may turn to violence and that lack of opportunity is responsible…. Unfortunately for his message, Walcott's "Traveller" is not new art but a good example of tiresome "respected" poetry. Not that I disagree with what he says; but poetically, his voyage relies entirely on previous charts. There's no personal experiment or develop...

The Fortunate Traveller is an impressive collection that moves lucidly and at times brilliantly between abstract notions of power and responsibility and visual notations of landscape, cityscape and sea. But it is only the title poem that comprehensively escapes Walcott's rational grip: elsewhere one is too aware of him press-ganging images into the service of an idea. This is especially true of his poems about the United States, which have too many smartly appropriate similes…. The poems that ...

Derek Walcott is a Negro from the Caribbean, and most of his poems are related to this fact…. Mr. Walcott's Africa obsesses him, and in several fine poems [in "Selected Poems"] it undergoes a powerful and painful transmutation into symbolic ground, the better known for having never been seen. "How can I turn from Africa and live?" the poet asks, but live he does, walking through his Antillean world and speaking with anger and imagination of what he sees. One is left...

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'...

A retired Trinidadian teacher, Albert Jordan, in Port of Spain, is the hero of Derek Walcott's "Remembrance."… He is a sardonic, humorous old man, bored and fed up, an "anachronism" in independent Trinidad, his head (and heart) crammed with English poetry, and still grief-stricken at the death of his elder son in a riot years before, when a British policeman's gun went off accidentally. A black man unable to feel a part of the black world, Jordan is yet too w...

In the past decade, Derek Walcott has established himself as one of the very best English poets. The Star-Apple Kingdom enhances that reputation. Walcott's special strength … is in the narrative, which depends on an accumulation of effects. Shifting from island patois to burlap idiom to eloquent statement, Walcott follows the miracles of the Caribbean and other "forlorn stations," achieving a respect for and harmony with nature. Even when he means to be strident, as with his desc...

[Remembrance] is typical poet's theater. Using the hoary framing device of the interview, it has A. P. Jordan, an aging schoolteacher, relive episodes from his past. Most of these focus on two set-pieces (probably short stories by Walcott) about an untalented painter son and an interracial romance of Jordan's…. Despite an occasional felicitous turn of phrase, this is all choppy, fragmented going, lacking character development or true propulsive energy—it would do as well or bette...