Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Derek Walcott (2003) (303p) [Inua].pdf

Derek Walcott (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – February, 2003
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 294 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (February 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791073955
ISBN-13: 978-0791073957


A collection of critical essays discuss the works of the Trinidadian author.


Editor’s Note:
My Introduction centers upon Derek Walcott’s recent long poem, Tiepolo’s Hound, which I read as a parable of Walcott’s problematic relation to poetic tradition.
The Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, renders a gracious tribute to Walcott’s volume, The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), particularly commending the long poem, “The Schooner Flight,” while Calvin Bedient assays a somewhat lower place to The Fortunate Travellers (1981).
Helen Vendler, in the essay reprinted here with which I am most in agreement, shows how vulnerable Walcott is to the influence of stronger precursors: W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, and Auden. Joseph Brodsky however praises Walcott’s poetry as “Adamic,” and insists he is neither a traditionalist nor a modernist.
In a very generous overview, Peter Balakian finds in Walcott an eminence akin to such poets as Yeats, Rilke, and Neruda, after which Rita Dove praises Walcott’s “wise artistry.”
Stewart Brown usefully examines Walcott’s apprentice verse, and emerges unbothered by Walcott’s eclecticism in absorbing such contemporaries as Robert Lowell and Brodsky, even in much later work.
We move to Walcott’s plays with David Mikics, who in a very adroit essay, exploits the Magical Realism he feels allies Walcott to the great Cuban novelist, Alejo Carpentier.
Omeros, Walcott’s epic, is lauded by Gregson Davis for not being shadowed by Homer, after which Paula Burnett returns us to Walcott’s dramas, which she sees as being comparable to the best of Brecht.
In an excellent essay, Jahan Ramazani considers Omeros as the exemplar of an authentic “postcolonial poetics of affliction,” while Paul Breslin centers upon Another Life, a poetic autobiography which he judges to be a narrative experiment of considerable power.
In this volume’s final essay, Wes Davis attempts to contextualize Walcott in the nuances of West Indian History.