Prospectus

The West Indian poet Derek Walcott opens his book-length autobiographical poem Another Life with these lines, his poetic eye focused, not inward towards himself or his island home, but outward toward the immense, ageless, organic Caribbean Sea. Walcott envisions the ocean as a recurrent metaphor in multiple, complex forms: a ceaseless, natural agent of change; a dark, impenetrable mirror; a fruitful, nurturing lover; an open, inviting blank texture. In each of these images, Walcott evokes the sea as a universal metaphor for his own poetic consciousness and vision, forever striving for a voice as complex, natural, and powerful as this mysterious ocean.

The necessity for a poetic voice as formidable and mythic as the sea may indeed arise, as most critics have observed, from the multiple fragmentations of Walcott's postcolonial self. However, his prophetic vision of the poetic act is not shaped simply by the oppression of history. Rather, Walcott casts his journey as a poet as a quest for a new language and a new voice, beyond a simple reversal of history or reordering of his heritage. His New World vision seeks to make a "bonfire" of his own history, as he seeks to create a self unconfined by his conflicting heritages of British, African, and West Indian influence. My dissertation will examine this quest for new selfhood and a poetics corresponding to Walcott's displaced postcolonial consciousness. This dissertation will concentrate on the early poetry and essays, following a chronological poetic quest from 25 Years (1949), his first book of verse, up to Midsummer(1984), the body of work culminating in Collected Poems, 1948-1984. It is my contention that Walcott sees the psychological displacement of postcolonial identity, not as an historical situation, but as a necessary poetic muse. Thus, he seeks a poetic practice which is an ongoing attempt to explore that instability of consciousness, rather than to define a stable identity-- be it termed "West Indian," "Caribbean," or "New World." His mind "more restless than the sea," Walcott's poetic vision is a quest, then, not simply to articulate a lamentation of his own anachronistic and displaced self, but to erase that sense of wrongness with waves of new language lapping against the infinitely shifting shores of the self. As the crashing waves he views from the promontory of his veranda on the sea daily wash away the memory of yesterday's coastline, continually changing the shape of his island, his poetic lines ebb and flow against the dynamic boundaries of his identity.

In his most often quoted lines, Walcott proclaims himself in Another Life a "prodigy of the wrong age and color" and a "monster" produced by the "dream of reason." We must look then to Caribbean geography, culture, and history, not as the "monster" itself or as a way to marginalize this poetic voice, but more accurately as a context for understanding this voice, as a "blank page" into which he will write "another life." Though Walcott does not seek nor recognize definitive boundaries for his postcolonial persona, he accepts his historical position as a place to begin, a "verandah" from which to view his life and his world.

The basic crux of any informed interpretation of Walcott's work requires an understanding of the complexity of the geographical, historical, and cultural juxtapositions of his origins. Regardless of ideology or purpose, most critics have agreed that it is impossible to approach Walcott as a Caribbean writer and to interpret his life's work without considering the geographical perspective of his native home, the small island of St. Lucia. In her review of Walcott's Collected Poems, the American poet Rita Dove states:

To get a hint of the complexity of the West Indian identity crisis, first look at a map. Register the distances between islands... and imagine the small towns trying to imitate suburban America, the capital cities wishing they were Washington or at least Havana; imagine the tiny communities separated by distances we find insignificant but they experience as absolute. Then look at a history book: the waves of conquests from Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain; the African slave trade, the influx of cheap peasant labor from India and China. Imagine the Babel of languages, the frictions arising from different religions, eating habits, body gestures. Above all, imagine the northwestern hemisphere leaning its weight on the rest of the world, telling them that their ways are primitive, shameful, wrong, and must be changed. (54)

This perspective highlights the major dynamics of language, location, and history and the subsequent problems of identity which confront a West Indian writer like Walcott. However, rather than using poetry as an artistic medium to voice these identity problems, he makes use of the identity problems as a metaphoric means of articulating his poetics.

Walcott's recognition of the power of this awkward muse of displaced identity arises from his modernistic sense of necessary poetic ambivalence. His muse is continually one of exile, the poetic act an odysseyan journey through the waste land of his own history. Paula Burnett, in her introduction to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, observes that the unique location of the Caribbean, "at the meeting point between three continents-- Europe, Africa, and America-- and between three poetic traditions-- the British, the West African, and the North American, " transforms its poets and writers into "philosophers for the modern world" in their urge to form a cohesive identity, to turn "negatives into positives" and to assert "a cultural self without the denial of that assertion to others." Walcott's transformation of those "negatives" does not seek, though, to locate a "positive" response in a stable cultural self, but fabricates a positive act out of the exploration of instability.

Through the span of his work, this instability and ambivalence continually calls into question the functions of language and place in the formation of identity. His earliest works explore the interrogatory foundations of his quest, culminating in Another Life, the most complete effort in articulating his artistic sensibility. Beyond that effort, Walcott's work from Sea Grapes to Midsummer approaches a postmodern, almost existential sense of this poetic vision, achieving an acceptance of restlessness and rootlessness rather than a found language and place. Like Stephen Daedalus, Walcott never fully awakens from the nightmare of history. Like his adopted figure of Robinson Crusoe, he finds that the truly displaced can never recover a home, but must engage in a simulation of self-discovery.

For the West Indian writer, the Caribbean Sea functions as a vast, complex metaphor for identity, its unfathomable depth masqueraded by its continually shifting, reflective surface. Walcott makes great use of the philosophical concepts of simulation, assimilation, and reflection, inscribed within the extended metaphors of light, glass, and mirroring. The immense visual aspect of Walcott's work (inspired by his early interest in painting as well as a writing) suggests this dual/duel urge between the allure of the surface and the desire to penetrate or interpret that surface. That is, Walcott seeks to compose on the surface of the page a new language, a new beginning, while accepting the contradiction that this "newness" is inevitably illusory, hiding an vast depth of history, experience, and conflicts. The Caribbean Sea has taught him, though, that all beginnings are illusionary and secondary. As the crashing waves continually alter the shore line, Walcott turns this simultaneously destructive and creative natural force into a cycle of language, each wave, each line, churning with the undertow of his disparate ancestral tongues. In considering the effect of the natural environment on Caribbean consciousness, Walcott states,

To me there are always images of erasure in the Caribbean-- in the surf which continually wipes the sand clean, in the fact that those huge clouds change so quickly. There is a continual sense of motion in the Caribbean- caused by the sea and the feeling that one is almost traveling through water and not stationary. ("The Art" 74)

This Caribbean consciousness then forms the basis for a poetic consciousness. Ultimately, Walcott's poetics are a means of negotiating this motion through emptiness, in search of a new self, another life.

II. Rationale:

Derek Walcott's Nobel recognition has solidified his literary position as a poet in the Western World, but even the flurry of essays reaching for appraisal and interpretation following that prize have not provided close, critical scrutiny of his poetics. He has been the subject of many articles, but few full-length critical works. In the one recent critical text focusing solely on Walcott's poetry, Rei Terada admits having jumped ahead in the critical progression, providing a specialized study when few general critical overviews have been published; he suggests in his introduction, "Perhaps if we hold our breath, following books on Walcott will lay the groundwork for this one."(7) In some ways, I see my work as "groundwork" for that text and other potential approaches, given the opportunity to eventually publish this work.

There have been several dissertations covering Derek Walcott's work in the past decade, though most of them consider Walcott as part of a larger collection of regional authors or, conversely, compare his work to major Western writers in an attempt to bring this author out of the margins and into the fold of the canon. Walcott is not simply in the margins, though; in some ways, he is still completely off the page. The practice of many critics approaching his work is to provide some kind of entry point for the Western critic, and my approach certainly is no different. We have the choice of either stressing Walcott's similarities or asserting his difference from our canon.

June Bobb's 1992 CUNY Graduate School dissertation approaches Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite through that latter sense, exploring these West Indian poets' search for history in African heritage. My work differs significantly, first, by promising a more intense, focused study on Walcott alone, and second, by suggesting a difference in theoretical understanding of Walcott's quest for identity. The main idea Bobb proposes in her work is that the body of poetry produced by these writers exhibits the possibility of recovering a lost history, of reconnecting with a lost heritage. I suggest that the major tension in Walcott's poetic life is the impossibilityof such a recovery. Bobb sees Walcott's work as unifying his fragmented self, while I see his poetry as continuing to explore fragmentation.

The scope of the work I have proposed includes Walcott's early work up through the publication of Collected Poems. It is this body of work which exhibits the self as its major subject. Collected Poems has become a strong demarcation point in Walcott's poetic career, engendering the greatest critical evaluation, bringing his work to the forefront of Western audiences, and laying the foundation for his Nobel Prize. His work after this point, including The Arkansas Testament and the book-length poem, Omeros, represent a shift in poetic subject from self to nation. Omeros has emerged as major poetic contribution and commands a full-length study of its own. I intend my work in this dissertation to provide a necessary context for any subsequent studies of Omeros or Walcott's work to come. The complexity of Omeros I feel would demand a shift in focus, while my primary objective here is sketching the growth of the poetics which lead to the later work.

III. Chapter Summaries:

Chapter One: "Nothing was Created:" The Landscape of Eden and The Role of the Postcolonial Writer

This initial chapter will sketch the literary and critical landscape of Walcott's Caribbean origins, both chronologically and theoretically, outlining key issues and tendencies and building a complex foundation for an informed discussion of Walcott. Chronologically, Walcott's career neatly parallels the movement of the region from the end of political colonialism into the struggle for a prosperous independence and collective consciousness. Also parallel to Walcott's career is the general emergence of an independent literary tradition in the West Indies. The post-World War II era unearthed long-simmering national identity crises in many colonized regions. In fact, the artistic response in the last half of the 20^th century has been more of an eruption than an emergence. Alongside the political upheaval was a flourishing, if somewhat disjointed, outpouring of language and cultural arts as a declaration of autonomy, leading up to real, political independence for many West Indian islands by the 1960's and continuing beyond as each nation, each island, and each self struggled to retain that autonomy.

But upon what foundation was the newly recognized independent Caribbean writer to build? The first major Western recognition came to the novelists, writers like George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, and V.S. Naipul, who brought the voice of the British novel tradition to the subject of the West Indian native and emigrant. This imported literary form promised a literate audience as well as bestowing a sign of emergence into dominant Western culture. To attempt to speak to or through the indigenous West Indian tongue would not generate the critical or political attention desired as a means of finding a voice and a place on the map. Many emulated the British forms as the only realistic and practical choice.

In discussing his own allegiance to the British legacy in history, culture, and art, the novelist V.S. Naipul explains in The Middle Passage, "history was built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." In many ways, the entire West Indian literary tradition since that era may be seen as a response to that single statement. Many writers and artists have attempted to retrace and reconstruct an authentic West Indian legacy, built upon the recovery of long-suppressed African symbols, myths, practices, and voices. Walcott's immediate response, one in line with his artistic sense of privileged ambivalence, was to simply accept that statement at face value. The "nothing" that was created becomes a muse in itself, a fluid, organic space like the sea into which the New World artist is free to write new languages and new identities.

The past decade has a seen an eruption of its own in the attention of the Western academy to the literatures emerging from regions affected by the complex history of colonialism. Thus, this chapter will also build a theoretical context in the field of postcolonial criticism. Many contemporary writers who are the subject of "postcolonial" studies question the advantage of such a categorization, wishing to avoid a seemingly "forced" marginalization through such labeling. In addition, most critical studies of postcolonial writing begin with this very problem of labeling. Rather than seeking to discard or simply ignore this marginalized identity in order to homogenize with mainstream studies of British and American literature, many scholars use the terminological conundrum as a catalyst for altering the terms and issues by which we anthologize and canonize authors. It is just this ambiguous position which provides the opportunity for interrogating the claims to supremacy of what we may call First World literature. In interrogating the position of these voices within the Western canon, a major distinction must be drawn between the hyphenated "post-colonial" qualification, which specifies ideology and literature after the colonial era, and the more accepted complexity of "postcolonial" which is defined by many critics as referring to all literature produced in response to the effects of colonial history, whether produced in the midst of that history or in its wake.

This chapter seeks to trace these progressions and the separate strains of response to the political and cultural independence movement particularly in the Caribbean. The theoretical basis will consider voices from the region as well as major critical texts of the Western academy. In building a foundation of perspectives for Caribbean writers, I will provide a strong context for a critical reading of Walcott's invaluable poetic contribution to the formation of a Caribbean identity and voice.

Chapter Two: "Oh God, where is our home?:" The Quest for the Quest in Walcott's Early Poetry and Essays

A central thesis of much postcolonial criticism is that the two most crucial issues for identity, language and place, are intrinsically connected. This is especially true for West Indian writers such as Walcott who begin their careers not in literal exile, but in linguistic exile. They write oftheir own land, but through the imported, imperial language. In the words of Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin,

[these] writers were not forced to adapt to a different landscape and climate, but had their own ancient and sophisticated responses to them marginalized by the world-view which was implicated in the acquisition of English. Whether English actually supplanted the writer's mother tongue or simply offered an alternative medium which guaranteed a wider readership, its use caused a disjunction between the apprehensions of, and communication about, the world. (25)

In order to acquire the language of power, then, one that will find an audience, Caribbean writers composing in English thereby suffer psychological displacement; they become strangers in their own land.

This chapter focuses on Walcott's quest for a poetics from his earliest published work up to The Gulf (1970). From the beginning, Walcott explored this sense of exile, seeking an identity not with his national or regional community but within an Adamic tradition of poet-as-exile. In a new world, this poet seeks to create new language to express a new faith. Many of his earliest publications, his critical essays as well as his poetry, articulate key questions and issues for the artist wrestling from conception in a foreign medium, forever conscious of his own "strangeness." Rather than protesting this positioning, Walcott's poetry articulates an initial embracing of isolation, with an expressed faith in this emptiness as leading towards a greater artistic truth. In poems like "The Harbour," he proclaims a wariness of falling prey to the "antique hoaxes, old lies" of history and memory. Walcott's vision simply cannot trust them.

The emptiness, the "blank page," is an opportunity for Walcott. His consciousness and identity adrift, his journey is aimed not towards a discovery of the self necessarily, but a discovery of its relation to poetic technique. The schizophrenic complexity of his narrative voice privileges a discourse not of reaction but of creation. The images and lessons of history are often dark and disturbing in these earlier works while poetic language provides some restoration of faith in its ability to alleviate grief through fresh, original perspectives. Like the sea and the surf, this new language is natural, continuous, and formidable in its shifting of consciousness. In "The Castaway," this voice seeks to "abandon dead metaphors" in order to become "Godlike," igniting a linguistic universe from the bonfire of his conflicting origins.

As an exploration of artistic philosophy, this early period covers a transformation of Walcott's poetic vision from initial idealism in the poem as creative act to an acceptance of its limitations as a healing force for the exiled artist. In one of Walcott's major figurative models, the Crusoe in his narrative creates an Eden, then despairs to share it. As such, the poetic engenders a reflection of that initial isolation, a "mirroring" which does not resolve exile so much as give it a voice. Though there are strong expressions of faith early on, Walcott must reconsider art's ability to save him from his own displacement. In his poetry, art doesn't save; it cries out.

This revised consciousness, though, forms the basis for a poetics which then seeks to transcend this isolation through a meditation on the practice of the reflective act of art. Through the articulation of this quest, Walcott sees the possibility of looking behind the conflicting mask of the exile and locating the image of the poet. The fictional Crusoe with whom he identifies is not so much the narrating Crusoe as the narrated Crusoe in the journal, the simulation of that narrator in language. This linguistic reflection recognizes the "gulf" between object and image, actively seeking and exploring that detachment. Ultimately, Walcott seeks to create an artistic space or distance to see things anew, to reflect on his divided and liberated place in the world, apart from the anchor of allegiances to land or race.

Chapter Three: "The Engine of The Sea:" Cycles of Consciousness in Another Life

In the body of work considered here as an exploration of fragmented identity, Another Life is Walcott's posited center. Having explored his poetic landscapes in the earlier works, he strives in this work for a more structurally unified statement on the self. Informed by his own artistic experience as well as by the relationships with his artistic mentors and peers, this quasi-mythic autobiographical narrative outlines the shapes of his reflection in the image of his art, his words. Walcott proposes one dramatic statement as an effort to exercise his poetic ideals and concedes in the beginning the almost inexhaustible challenge of making a dramatic poetic statement until the moon's glow dims on this book and this vision like the stage lights fading to black.

By positioning this work as a whole, organic expression of the self, one statement with a beginning and ending, Walcott bears the tragic roles of historian and ethnographer like a yoke. Searching from the beginning of this work for the possibilities of making a new world through language, his speaker is haunted, from almost the first waves of verse, by the weight of detail. Drawing on an epic tradition of catalogue, much of the work is a meditation on the rightness of "placed things." Sketching the "stars of [his] mythology," he tests his own faith in the poetic art as the supreme savior. In "Homage to Gregorias," the dialogue between verbal and visual art finds its roots in the addiction to freedom in the young artist, but in the act of recording that freedom there is already a melancholy, a recognition of the limitations and fragmentations of that freedom.

Again, this work is a secondary vision of the visionary, looking back on the poet looking forward. This mirroring engenders an awareness of the irrationality, the madness of art. As a reconsideration of his poetic purpose, Walcott sees the act of language as focusing outside the frame of visual art, striving for the ungraspable, in attempting to form a vision that is original, beyond the "anxiety" of reflections and influences. Though there is an ironic acceptance of the limitations of originality, the work as a whole is an homage to the "gift" of this life quest. When religion and culture may be turned into tourist industries, his poetic faith becomes the greater, more significant force.

In following the chronology of this life and this quest, Walcott also reconsiders the impact of Western culture on the fragmentation of his poetic voice. Like the cruise liner on the horizon, America and the West loom over his world like "unreal cities." In his multiple attempts to criss-cross the "estranging sea," both geographically and psychologically, he voices an almost reluctant acceptance of race and power and his postcolonial positioning. The cataloguing of his origins, his landscape, becomes then not an homage or monument to history but an effort to come to terms with his ironic life, "to know how the vise/ of horizon tightens/ the throat." The work that began again in an effort to construct a vision beyond this fragmented world ends with another shifting in consciousness. Though the journey towards his poetic home may be ongoing, Walcott appears to recognize that this home lies forever on the infinitely distant horizon.

Chapter Four: "After Eden...:" The Exiled Visionary in Sea Grapes and The Star-Apple Kingdom

After Another Life, after the recognition of infinite horizons for the self and the poet, Walcott once again sets out on his poetic journey. The following volumes, Sea Grapes and Star-Apple Kingdom, retain Walcott's focus on West Indian language and place, but after the dramatic statement of Another Life, there is a necessary movement here into a poetic middle-age. Walcott searches in these works for a renewed sense of the relationship between his poetry and his age, in both sense of that term. In Sea Grapes, Walcott is divided between the invitations of wisdom involved in crossing gulfs and horizons and his allegiance to the perspective of exile which dominates his voice. In these poems, his voice explores a more intense West Indian idiom, perhaps warding off a permanent gulf. "Come back to me, my language," he prays. His vision here seeks a greater connection to his original gift of place while expressing a more melancholy acceptance of his displacement. In some ways, these poems are an effort to unlearn that gift, that vision, as he contemplates a retreat from his odysseyan ego. Images and metaphors are increasingly more fluid, as he moves not so much towards taking root as in "sinking in" slowly as the surf sink into the sand.

The Star-Apple Kingdom begins with a familiar trope, the speaker setting forth on a sea-faring retreat, another defection in the wake of Walcott's resistance to stability. Though, the temptress in "the Schooner Flight" is the dark, mysterious Maria Concepcion, it is the poem that conveys him forward on this particular voyage. Having proclaimed a sense of love and belonging, a connectivity with the island and the sea, the coast as well as the surf, he attempts to re-define that love. He loves his home "as the drowned sailor loves the sea." The lights that guided him, the stars and the moon, now figure as absences, "nail-holes" in the universe. Though he asserts that he has "no nation, but the imagination," this statement is more self-flagellant than declarative. Walcott continues to identify with the sea and with the necessary exile of his life as an artist, but he reminds us in "Forest of Europe," his homage to Joseph Brodsky, that "there is no harder prison than writing verse."

The maturity Walcott faces here, perhaps paradoxically, leads him back to a Wordsworthian sense of lost purity in his vision. But amidst the invasions of American influence, failed revolutions, broken loves, and bitter betrayals, there still exist traces of faith, "shards of ancient pastoral," which allow him to continue his journey, "to crack the day open and begin his egg" ("The Star-Apple Kingdom").

Chapter Five: "An Empty Chair:" Abdication in The Fortunate Traveler and Midsummer

Having to continually accept a "necessary exile" has provided much fruit for Walcott in his poetic restlessness, but this journey has proved quite taxing. This chapter considers the way many of the poems in these two collections focus on the practical and spiritual exhaustion involved in his continuous migration between "north and south." As his audience and perspective have widened with his growing recognition in the Western academy, he sees new opportunities to expand his voice, to take on the tongue of Northern America. But there is a sense that these visions are somewhat doomed, that sometimes he is "tired of words" ("North and South"). The United States represents a new muse and landscape in these works, but Walcott fears this audience will not readily accept a man "with only one climate."

The Fortunate Traveler takes an already displaced persona on more complex journeys through art and images, evoking questions of loyalty and responsibility to language and place. His place in Northern America and his response to the culture and perspective of the USA also call into question his sense of culture and rendering. In "the Man Who Loved Islands," a kind of mock film proposal, he envisions James Coburn as a contemplative poet. But this will not do, the speaker reckons, because popular taste requires "action" not contemplation. Though the surface narrative of this poem defines a familiar duality between high and low in cultural tastes, the problem facing the imaginary Coburn is the problem facing Walcott here. He is a hero at rest, a poet without a plot. In his continuing exploration of poetic purpose, he turns to the sarcasm of "The Spoiler's return," but aligns this voice not within a nationalistic sense of Caribbeanness, but with a humanistic tradition of cultural satire traced through Pope and Juvenal. As his focus begins to shift to the world at a large he explores the meaning of the poet's place once again. In "Hotel Normandie," he observes that "time cuts down on the length/ man can endure his own reflection."

The untitled blank verse poems collected in Midsummer sketch the motions of a consciousness struggling against detachment. Having "seen the world," Walcott must now find a way to reconcile it, to consider the function of poetry not simply within the wonders of the Caribbean, but within a world forum which has witnessed the Holocaust. Like many late 20^th Century writers, Walcott must now face an existential crisis. The "restlessness" of his mind is no longer simply a problem of personal identity but humanistic identity. This detachment occurs not simply between the self and the world, but between the self and his own reflection. The encroaching danger of the artist's indifference to his subject materializes in his "aging lines" (on his face as well as the page; XXV) and in the "empty chair echoing the emptiness" (XX) which is now the only reflection of paradise he can grasp.

Chapter Six: "Drifted from Anchorage:" The Fluidity of Walcott and His Place within the Critical Seascape

This final chapter will consider the connection of several strains of critical thought to the poetics which Walcott explores throughout these works. Of central concern, certainly, is the great body of postcolonial criticism produced in the past 20 years. Like the artists and writers themselves, postcolonial critics have a made a strong effort to expand the scope of their work, not wishing to marginalize the relevance of their critical viewpoint to what has traditionally been called "World" or even "Third World" literature. Rather than being a geographical or historical limitation, the term "postcolonial" has been applied to any creative act which places the tensions between colonized and colonizer at its forefront. This perspective can perhaps mediate the historical paradox in Walcott's reception. He has been marginalized on both fronts in a sense: he is not a part of the Western Canon because of his island origins, yet his poetry has been criticized by West Indian audiences as being too "British." It is this very contradiction, though, which makes him a preeminent and ultimately representative postcolonial writer.

Beyond the national boundaries which are historically the base of postcolonialism, the cultural boundaries explored by Walcott as a descendent of white and black ancestors also provide strong multicultural underpinnings in his voice. The racial issues inscribed in his image of himself as a "monster" provide a connection with the tensions explored by Afro-American authors. Many critics have already explored these tensions in all of the Americas under the rubric of "New World Africans." In addition, there are critical cross-overs between the West Indies and African literature in English that provide similar critical contexts.

Walcott's professed influences lie in many canonical Western authors. Thus, much of his work retains and revisits the Modernism of Joyce and Eliot in its focus on the plight of the exiled artist. The urge of the writer to transcend nationalism, to become a citizen of the world, results in artistic forms which are multifarious in their allegiances to traditions. My dissertation also follows Walcott's poetics in its postmodern transformations, as his faith in the poetic act is called into question. This crisis may be read through a postmodern view of the fragmented ego or the poststructural view of the fragmented text.

IV. Research Foundations:

The body of critical work on Derek Walcott is surprisingly small, considering his world-wide recognition and his status as a Nobel Prize winner. Most of the important and influential critical writing has appeared as individual essays in periodicals and academic journals, much of it following the publication of Collected Poems, 1948-1984, assessing the body of work covered in this dissertation. A major collection of important criticism is the 1993 volume Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott (ed. Robert D. Hamner). In chronological order, these readings cover the entire span of his literary career, including Walcott's own most canonical essays on poetry, art, and West Indian identity, contemporary reviews of several of the volumes discussed here and academic criticism from the past decade. The criticism collected here includes a mixture of West Indian and Western response to his work. Hamner is also the author of Derek Walcott a bio-critical study sketching his literary career up through the 1970's. Stewart Brown's 1991 collection, The Art of Derek Walcott also contains a vast range of important critical writings, selected by Stewart Brown with the professed aim of positioning Walcott as a poet of the "International Hyperculture." Brown recognizes him as poet who "cultivates his ambiguities and complexities," exploring the contradictions and margins of his identity as an artistic philosophy. In this selection of essays, there is a general sense of the connection between his restlessness and his urge to create. Also included as background in this dissertation will be major essays and articles not yet collected in single volumes.

The one major book-length critical text on Walcott is Rei Terada's Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry (1991). Terada sees the practice of mimicry as an inherently "american" feature, reading the term "america" as signifying New World poetry. The term mimicry is also qualified not as mere imitation or borrowing, but as a complex practice of mirroring. This practice is grounded in a consideration of the tension between nature and culture, an inherently political and personal issue for the New World writer. Also present in Terada's perspective is the tension between the verbal and the visual aspects of Walcott's art. Admittedly, this is a fairly specialized study, taking a non-chronological postmodern approach to the work.

Widening the scope from Walcott to the field of West Indian literature yields a more fruitful body of criticism. While much of the earlier Western criticism of the regional work was either dismissive or merely appreciative rather than critical, it is the voices of other West Indian writers and critics which have provided the major contexts for understanding. Critical Issues in West Indian Literature (1984) argues for an aggressive regional criticism in response to increased Western attention to literature of the region. In its attempt to re-claim critical awareness of the consciousness of the West Indian writer, this selection of essays is, in itself, a search for a West Indian voice tracing myths, metaphors, and languages. Likewise, Edward Baugh's Critics on Caribbean Literature is an attempt to provide accessibility for Western critics, stressing the "youth" of the canon of West Indian literature while inviting close reading and "hard" criticism.

Much of the critical work recognizes the novel as the first major genre to emerge from the Caribbean, but genre parallels are drawn strongly in Lloyd Brown's West Indian Poetry (1984). This volume is important as an historical sketch of the development of the West Indian poetic voice in the 20^th century. Brown recognizes that, like the development of voice in the novel, there is a paradox in seeking a single national identity in writers from such a fragmented region. He suggests a complex view of the past so that the body of literature may not simply be read as the "offspring" of Western literature.

Like the creative writers, many critics have turned to African sources as the more applicable parallel. Gareth Griffiths explores the conundrum faced by Caribbean and African writers writing in the English language in Double Exile, the title referring to the double-edge irony of writers exiled by language from the landscapes they write about and exiled by landscape from the language they are using. Resolving these multiple exiles is the main challenge for the postcolonial and the West Indian writer. In the recent text Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, Frank Birbalsingh argues for a revised sense of history as a technique for the West Indian poet, a tool to use rather than a solid, stable ingredient. It is working against rather then within the "bondage"of history that Birbalsingh believes may result in a renewed "colonization in reverse."

This progressive reversal of colonization appears quite strongly in the metaphor of the "voice" as used by many critics of the poetry. Brathwaite's History of the Voice is a landmark statement on the development of a Caribbean "nation language." Likewise, J. Edward Chamberlin's Come Back to Me, My Language uses the Walcott quote of the title as a door to understanding the gradual progression of the voice. Chamberlin recognizes the poetic act as a gift from the poet to the people, giving new freedom and courage to the Caribbean tongue, presenting Walcott in particular as a verbal emancipationist for the region.

Of particular concern as well is Antonio Benitez-Rojo's The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and The Postmodern Perspective which argues for a "secondary" reading of the region, one that is necessary because of main obstacles the literature of the region poses for its audience in its inherent fragmentation, instability, and a sense of isolation. Benitez-Rojo draws on the views of Roland Barthes and the mathematical concept of Chaos theory that describes repeating patterns of instability. Attention to this repetition of disorder finds not so much results as processes. Like Walcott's quest, every repetition in writing or reading is interpreted as an expression of difference and "a step toward nothingness."

Widening the scope yet again, there are many major collections of postcolonial criticism as well as full-text considerations of this theoretical perspective. Elleke Boehmer's Colonial and Postcolonial Writing and Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back are both critical texts which, like Paula Burnett, redefine "postcolonial" as covering all literature affected by empire which makes an attempt to scrutinize the relationship of empire to individual. The Empire positions the two main complexities of language and place at the foreground for postcolonial literature and presents four main models of postcolonial criticism: 1)national or regional studies, 2) race-based studies across regions, 3) comparative studies between two or more regions, and 4) more universal comparative models.

In the general field of poetry and poetics, I intend to draw on a wide range of texts from formalist to poststructuralist models. Certainly, a work which will provide an important background is Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. Bloom's thesis, that poets create their own history through a "misreading" of their influences, will provide a discourse for interpreting Walcott's statement as a New World poet. Great poets, in Bloom's view, "appropriate" rather than idealize their sources. In tracing the psychological life-cycle of the poet, this work will also define a chronological context for reading Walcott's work.

In addition to traditional resources, I also plan to make steady and extensive use of electronic resources available over the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is rapidly becoming a fast and efficient medium for research, dissemination of materials, and general communication among the world-wide critical and literary community. Already well-known are resources like The English Server, designed by the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University as a resource for undergraduate and graduate studies in Languages and Literature. It has published humanities texts to readers online since 1990, offering over ten thousand texts in many disciplines. Quickly gaining recognition as the primary major resource for English Studies is The Voice of the Shuttle, designed by Prof. Alan Liu of the Department of English at The University of California in Santa Barbara. This site is continually updated, providing the most current guide to criticism and resources on the web. In the availability of literary texts on the Web, two major sites are Project Gutenberg from the University of Illinois and the Bartleby Project from Columbia University.

Of great promise is the forthcoming Postcolonial Literature website being designed by Prof. George Landow of Brown University. Prof. Landow has already contributed several useful resources like The Victorian Web. The Postcolonial site has been announced for early 1997 and promises to provide more specific links to list-servers, on-line journals, and electronic texts. There is only one current site devoted to Derek Walcott, containing one poem and an audio link. This particular site was published in connection with a reading series. The promise of the World Wide Web, though, is that all texts or "sites" are fluid and may be easily edited and updated. Therefore, it is crucial to be abreast of these developments.

Bibliography:

Primary Sources - Walcott's Poetry

Walcott, Derek. 25 Poems. Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate, 1949.

---. Another Life. Washington: Three Continents, 1982.

---. The Castaway. London: Cape, 1969.

---. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, 1986

---. The Fortunate Traveler. New York, Farrar, 1980.

---. The Gulf. New York, Farrar, 1969.

---. In a Green Night. London: Cape, 1969.

---. Midsummer. London: Faber, 1984.

---. Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, 1976.

---. The Star-Apple Kingdom. London: Cape, 1980.

Primary Sources - Walcott's Essays and Interviews

Baugh, Edward. "Derek Walcott on West Indian Literature and Theatre." Interview. Jamaica Journal. V. 21 N. 2 May-July, 1988.

Montenegro, David. "An Interview with Derek Walcott." Partisan Review 57:2 (Spring 1990): 202-14.

Walcott, Derek. "The Art of Poetry." Interview. Hamner Critical Perspectives 65-86.

---. "The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?" Hamner Critical Perspectives 51-57.

---. "The Commonwealth: Pedestal or Pyre?" Interview. The New Statesman and Society. 21 July 1995: 30-31.

---. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: U. Press of Mississippi, 1996.

---. Derek Walcott in Caribbean Quarterly. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1992.

---. "Dreams and Colours." Caribbean Quarterly 38:4 (Dec 1992)

---. "The Figure of Crusoe." Hamner Critical Perspectives 33-40.

---. "Meanings." Hamner Critical Perspectives 45-50.

---. "The Muse of History." Baugh 38-44.

---. "Necessity of Negritude." Hamner Critical Perspectives 20-23.

---. "Society and The Artist." Hamner Critical Perspectives 15-17.

Secondary Sources

Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: Poetry and Poetics of Cesaire. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1981.

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---. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Baugh, Edward, ed. Critics on Caribbean Literature. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1978.

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---. "Ripening with Walcott." review. Caribbean Quarterly 23:2

---. "The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel With History." Tapia 7:9 (Feb. 27, 1977): 6+.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and The Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Durham: Duke U. Press, 1992.

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Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York, Oxford University Press, 1973.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford, 1995.

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Breiner, Laurence. "Lyric and Autobiography in West Indian Literature." Journal of West Indian Literature 3:1 (Jan 1989)

---. "Tradition, Society, and The Figure of The Poet." Caribbean Quarterly. V. 26 n. 1-2. Mar-June, 1980.

Brodsky, Joseph. "On Derek Walcott." New York Review of Books. 30.17 (10 Nov. 1983): 39-41.

---. "The Sound of The Tide." Less Than One: Selected Essays. Farrar, 1986.

Brown, Lloyd. West Indian Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1984.

Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1991.

---. " 'Between me and Thee Is a Great Gulf Fixed:' The Crusoe Presence in Walcott's early Poetry." Spaas and Simpson Robinson Crusoe 210-24.

Burnett, Paula. "Hegemony or Pluralism?: The Literary Prize and The Post-Colonial Project in the Caribbean." Commonwealth Essays and Studies 16:1 (Autumn 1993): 1-20.

---, ed. "Introduction." The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Penguin, 1986: xxiii-lxiv.

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Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford, 1988.

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Griffiths, Gareth. A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing Between Two Cultures. London: Boyars, 1978.

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---. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington D.C. Three Continents Press, 1993.

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---. "A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and The Uses of Colonial Mimicry." Contemporary Literature 35:4 (Winter 1994): 643-60.

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---. "Naming and Homecoming: Walcott's Poetry Since Another Life" ACLALS Bulletin 7:2 (1985): 27-38.

---. "Self-Portrait of an Island." Journal of West Indian Literature. v.1 n. 1. October 1988.

---. "The St. Lucian Background in Garth St. Omer and Derek Walcott." Caribbean Quarterly 28 (Mar-June 1982):

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---. "Gnarled Sour Grapes" review. Caribbean Review 7:4 (Oct-Dec 1978)

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---. The Music of What Happens. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1988.

---. "Poet of Two Worlds." The New York Review of Books. 4 March 1982.

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On-Line Resources

Bartleby Project. Columbia University, Dept. Of English. Available: http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/

Books in Chains. Scott Rettberg, University of Cincinnati, Department of English. Available: http://www.uc.edu/~RETTBESR/presentation.html

Derek Walcott Home Page. Available: http://hs1.hst.msu.edu/~cal/celeb/walcott.html

The English Server. Carnegie Mellon University, Dept. Of English. Available: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/cgi/search/eg.acgi

The Voice of The Shuttle. Prof. Alan Liu, U of Calif Santa Barbara, Dept. of English. Available: http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/

Web-Cite. Web-Cite Info Design, Inc. Available: http://www.web-cite.com