When 'In a Green Night' appeared, Derek Walcott was at once recognized as a poet of importance. Robert Graves wrote that 'Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.' Charles Causly called him 'a new poet of imaginative energy and power', and P.N. Furbank spoke of his 'immense freshness and verve'. In this new book Walcott is again an interpreter between the Old World and the New. Making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery, he is mainly concerned with the themes of isolation, and the resolution of identity through lonliness. In some of the poems a Crusoe figure appears, and is seen as a second Adam, the bearer of an older culture and the first craftsman of the New World. Others are about America, especially New York, and that contrast of climate and cultures with which he is much concerned. It truly has been said of him, 'History has made him a citizen of the world.' Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. A graduate of the University College of the West Indies, he was in 1957 awarded a Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theatre. Two of his one-act plays have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Author
Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London. Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remained active with its Board of Directors until his death. He also founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981. In 2004, Walcott was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and had retired from teaching poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University by 2007. He continued to give readings and lectures throughout the world after retiring. He divided his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
