Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English
from c.1970 to the Present  

A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s Postcolonial Philology

Cashman Kerr Prince
McMaster University, Canada

The study of Derek Walcott is divided terrain, not unlike the confrontations of Classics and Caribbean life staged in his poetry.  Classicists concentrate on Omeros, Walcott’s 1990 epic, leaving the plays and lyric poems to scholars of postcolonial literature; yet Walcott’s oeuvre reads as a continuous engagement with Classical texts.  In Another Life, Walcott’s 1973 autobiographical poem, his schooling in Classics is an explicit theme:  “Boy! who is Ajax?” the schoolmaster asks (I.3).  The question introduces an “alphabet of the emaciated, . . . the stars of my mythology,” Ajax and Helen rubbing shoulders with the local characters Choiseul and Gaga.  Homer’s Troy comes to Walcott’s Caribbean Troy town; Old and New Worlds meet.  The result is a divided child, leading another life from his daily existence.

Walcott’s lyric poetry abounds with over-determined references to the Classical past.  To take one example, “Cul de Sac Valley” from the 1987 collection The Arkansas Testament contemplates the metapoetics of crafting a poem—within a highly crafted poem.  As the poet-narrator scrolls fragrant consonants “off my shaving plane,” he simultaneously acknowledges the inherent impossibility of making English of this Caribbean wood (and language).  In these meditations are Classical allusions to Homer, Theocritus, and Catullus (to name but three).  The attempt to unite the Classical literary past with daily Caribbean life is palpable; Walcott grapples with the division instilled by his schooling.  We observe Walcott’s task of expanding English to encompass his Caribbean province; for him this is a fruitful project.  In “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962) Walcott asks, “how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”  The answer, as attested by the poetic oeuvre, is not a divisive renunciation of either one.

In Walcott’s poetry these confrontations serve less as a sign of rupture than as an occasion for creation.  Greece and Rome, Troy and Pompeii, Homer and Propertius—all fuse with Walcott’s Caribbean province.  This is an instance of what Walcott describes as the Adamic covenant of naming; the result is not Bloom’s killing of a strong poetic father but a creative amalgamation.  Walcott’s poetry is marked by a skillful joining:  tradition molds with innovation to produce a new and inclusive poetics.  Focusing on Another Life and “Cul de Sac Valley,” I trace Walcott’s engagement with Classical poetry as he builds a poetic world from Mediterranean and Caribbean materials.