It’s the birthday of Caribbean-born poet and playwright Derek Walcott (1930-2017), who won the Nobel in 1992 and whose work has been called “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” (Nobel committee).

(Anytime your work is described as an “oeuvre” instead of a mere collection, you know you’ve made it, baby, Nobel or not.)

Walcott was born in Castries, St. Lucia, in the West Indies, to mixed-race parents (English and West Indian); his work would always reflect his multiculturalism and both the beauty of the islands and the damage done by colonialism. Both parents were schoolteachers, but Walcott’s father died when he was very young. Walcott was raised Methodist and given a traditional English education at a Catholic secondary school. He started publishing his own poems while still a teenager, handing out his self-published first collection, 25 Poems, on street corners—so, kind of a busker. Walcott studied French, Latin, and Spanish at the University of the West Indies and began writing plays while there, eventually founding a theatre workshop on the island.

Walcott published a collection of poetry, In a Green Night, in 1962 that made his reputation abroad, and many more collections followed. By then he lived in Boston and New York as well as St. Lucia. His epic poem Omeros, published in 1990, is considered by many to be his masterpiece. In it, he retells the story of the Trojan War by setting it in the Caribbean and pulling in the vast and often tragic history of the islands. The poem is at once incredibly, well, epic and yet highly personal (I believe Walcott himself makes an appearance), and I am tempted to order a copy right now. Walcott was also a talented watercolorist and did the painting on the book’s cover himself.

Walcott was married and divorced three times, had three children, and had a twin brother who was also a playwright.

Chapter 1 of Omeros begins:

“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.”
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes…”

Have an epic Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.