Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Derek Walcott

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To listen to their first series and all other close reading series from the London Review of Books, sign up to our close reading subscription, go to lrb.me/closereadings or click on the link in the description. Welcome to close readings, the latest in a series of conversations about modern poets who wrote in English, drawing on the rich collection of reviews, essays and other pieces to be found in the immense back archive of the London Review of Books. My name is Shama's Perry and I teach at the University of Oxford and I'm talking to Mark Ford, poet, critic and professor of English literature at University College London. And our subject today is the eminent Caribbean poets Derek Walcott. And Mark, being a Caribbean poet isn't just a description of Walcott, it's also his major theme, isn't it? Yes, he belongs to that generation of writers, including such as VS Nipole or Edward Brathwaite, who are writers looking to find ways of writing that deal with a history that is incredibly complicated in many ways, painful, difficult. And they're doing so in the language of the English and the English often. Also, the sources of the historical griefs which their works are exploring. So a poet such as Walcott is in a kind of complex, extremely interesting position and it's one which it takes him quite a long time to work out what kind of poet or indeed painter he was going to be. He started off wanting to be a painter, what kind of artist he was going to be. And that's one of the fascinations of his really enormous erver. I mean, it's thousands of pages of poetry. And he, from a young age, he was writing a poem or two poems a day from kind of ages of 10 or 11. So he was convinced from a very young age that he was going to be an artist of some kind. And poetry was the eventual choice. But it's certainly his particular historical situation is encoded in almost every poem he writes. So we should say something about his background, shouldn't we? He's born in 1930 in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. And the circumstances of his family are quite unusual, aren't they? In that St. Lucia is broughty speaking of French speaking and Catholic. But he grows up in a tiny English speaking Methodist community. Yes, and compounded by the fact that his father, who was called Warwick, was named after Shakespeare's county as he likes to gest on a number of occasions, died when he was only one. So he was brought up by his mother, who was a teacher, but supplemented her income as a seamstress. And they were anomalous in that sense of being a minority on the island. But I think it's worth pointing out that they were, if in the kind of class structures, they were sort of firmly middle class, that he went to extremely good schools and was well taught. And it was at these schools that he read English poetry and fell in love with it. And his enthusiasm for poets such as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Orden, Ezra Pound, W.B. Eates, great modernist writers, as well as the canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Wordsworth, is extremely present in almost everything he wrote in the first sort of 10 years of his poetic career throughout his 20s. His poetry is in many ways a, both a kind of homage to those poets and it's making use of their rhetorical techniques and is looking to find ways of using them in a way that is appropriate to his very different cultural situation to that of such as Eliot or Orden. So to an extent he's an interesting example of international, the reach of international modernism in the kind of 1940s and the ways in which a poet who is on the periphery of modernism, which is happening in Europe and America, is absorbing those idioms and trying to adapt them and make use of them in ways that are meaningful to him and to his readership. And he often talks, doesn't he, in interviews and in essays about Caribbean poetry or the Caribbean imagination or almost being something that he has to invent from scratch, that there's nothing there as it were as an innate literary tradition to inherit. You have to kind of invent or create or concoct a literary tradition of your own from the resources that are at hand. This is what he calls in one of his essays, the kind of the prodigious ambition that characterizes his own useful writing. Yes, and so there are advantages to his situation which has got to flip the coin slightly and he identifies with poets such as Walt Whitman, Pablo Naruda, Cesar Vallejo and the New World writers. I mean, that's important to say that while Walt is very sensitive to the ways in which kind of European poetry can be seen as complicit with imperialism. He's also interested in writers that he groups under the term "ademic" New World writers whose work is a rejection of the legacy of imperialism. I think Walt Whitman is probably the kind of the founding father, if I can use that term in relation to this tradition and he in song of myself is creating an idiom that's defiantly different from that of mid 19th century English poetry. And Waltcott is kind of following in that tradition, is identifying with that tradition. And the great advantage of feeling yourself an "ademic" or "New World poet" is that you feel that you are naming things for the first time. That's why they use the term "ademic" for it, that that kind of prodigious ambition derives from a sense that all is to play for and what is there to lose. And Waltcott is perhaps slightly different from such as Whitman or Naruda in being unashamed about making use of the various poets whose work he read and loved. Hopkins is another one. There's something of the riot of Hopkins's energies and descriptive exuberance in Waltcott's "Urvert" in general. And the fact that he is redeploying this material or these idioms and trying to express his own reality, the reality of growing up in St. Nusia, makes for a kind of really fascinating kind of project which he embarks on. So his prodigious ambition expresses itself in a couple of privately printed volumes of poetry. Doesn't it? He has a distinguished career as a student at university. He settled in Trinidad for a time and found a theatre workshop. We're not going to say very much about, indeed, anything much about his plays today. But it's important to keep in mind, isn't it, that he was a playwright all his life as well. And certain aspects of that kind of dramatic or self-dramatizing sort of quality sometimes gets into his verse perhaps. But then I suppose the first publication that we need to notice is in 1962 where he publishes a sort of collection of his earlier works under the title "In a Green Night", which is published by Cape in the UK and Farah Strauss and Juru in the States. So this is actually a real moment of arrival on the publishing scene, isn't it? Yes, he's 32 by this stage and of his mum very gamely, he put up the money for his first volumes. So they were kind of underwritten by her. And he did in fact make break even on them. So he sold them all to his friends. And but it's not until publication of "In the Green Night" in 1962 that he gets going. And the first poem from that is "Is one a far cry from Africa, the first one that we're going to kind of consider, is interesting in the way in which it raises the dilemmas that I've been talking about for the post-colonial poet as "Who should he identify with?" And in this case the poem he's talking about the "Mal-Mal" insurrection in Kenya in the late 1950s. And he's on the one hand excited by that, on the other quite appalled by the violence in it. And he is pondering his own responses to what was one of the many independence movements spreading around the world. So yes, I mean in terms of situating warcotts early poetry, it's taking place in the context of the twilight of the British Empire. And he's always keen to explore the ways in which Empire projects itself and then how the legacy of Empire is experienced by post-independence societies. And in this one he thinks about where he should play himself and he comes up with "The End of the World" Well, it's a kind of classic, well, Cotty and Way of Exploring it by a kind of ambivalence. He writes in this poem of how he has cursed the drunken officer of British rule, how choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love, betray them both or give back what they give. So it's got that kind of very eloquent balance between and that kind of punning on what giving back means is giving back somehow violent or is giving back taking the English tongue and converting it to post-colonial purposes and then giving it back the empire writing back, so to speak, to use some Russian phrase. So I think that that walk got realized in the poem's collector in this volume that that was his subject, but what is so interesting is that for him it didn't involve wholesale rejection of the poetry that he'd loved, but a reangling of them so that he could express what he wanted to express. And it kind of unashamed use in poems, particularly one also included in the Green Knight called Ruins of a Great House, a very Yatesian topic, and it's a rather Yatesian poem, isn't it? It is a Yatesian poem, especially perhaps in that sense of rhetorical swagger that you get in many of Yates' greatest poems, an invocation of great names, although invoked in Warcoz poem in a much more shady and shadowy way than often in Yates. I thought next of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh Drake and Sestral Murderers and Poets, more perplexed in memory now by every ulcerous crime. That conjunction of murderers and poets is very telling and began very characteristic, isn't it? Yes, I mean, Yates can be seen as the first postcolonial poet or as a postcolonial poet. It's not so quite interesting ways. And his example was very important to Warcoz, but he never attacked Edmund Spencer, for instance, who advocated the kind of destruction of the Irish by starvation, our listeners may know, as ancestral murderers and poets. And yet he goes on in memory now by every ulcerous crime, the world's green age then was a rotting lime. So the idea of the early, early the new world, even back then there's no kind of mythical golden age as we used to be taught at school, and the Elizabethan explorers, as they were known, gallantly discovering new worlds. These are kind of pirates. And he's also very conscious always of the middle passage of how the Atlantic is not only the sight of exploration, but is of the slave trade whose stench became the charnel galleons text. The rock remains with us, the men are gone. But as dead ash is lifted in a wind that fans the blackening ember of the mind, my eyes burned from the ash and prose of Dunn. He's talking about John Dunn there. So I suppose what we want to get over is how very, very literary Warcoz is, isn't it? That he was working within the literary tradition. However much he is kind of reangling it, or turning it upside down to denounce people such as Walter Raleigh who is still taught on English courses and is kind of present in the national imagination and exposing them as murderers as well as poets. And that immersion in an English literary tradition and Elizabethan tradition creates a very surprising turn in this poem, doesn't it? The great house that's ruined is presumably the house of empire that is falling to pieces. An Albion is condemned for much of the poem, but then there's this very interesting move towards the end of the poem where Warcoz recognizes that Albion once was also colonized that this historical process of colonization and subjection is a kind of perennial recurrent historical phenomenon. And the poem ends in a very striking way, not on a note of outrage, although the poem does certainly just contain justified outrage, but in a note of compassion, he says, all in compassion ends so differently from what the heart arranged and then quotes from Dunn's famous sermon, "No Man is an Island" entire of itself. So it's a very striking moment in Warcoz imagination, I think, isn't it to begin by recognizing terrible distance and gulfs between peoples and between persons, but then in the end to recognize something more like a common predicament? - Yes, it was an interesting maneuver, perhaps borrowed from the opening of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Marlow says, this too is one of the dark places on the earth and we'll call the Roman legions arriving there. And Warcoz says that Albion too was once a colony like ours. So in a way, you could see it as a way of excusing England that it was primitive in inverted commas and barbaric in inverted commas before the Romans got there. And something of that analogy is one that modernism plays out on the back of Conrad's opening part of darkness. Yes, so Albion too was once a colony like ours, a piece of the continent apart of the main, quoting from John Dunn, "Nook Shoton." He can't leave it alone, "Nook Shoton" from Henry V, so that the kind of Shakespearean language is present even at this moment. And he's creating a comparison between, yes, England before the Romans and Caribbean colonies as they were then and looking for a way of negotiating some kind of relationship, which is meaningful and that works. I think that is, that what strikes me as one of the most interesting aspects of Warcoz's verse career is his pragmatism. He's always looking for something that will work. And that's why Robinson Crusoe becomes one of his heroes, or Robinson Crusoe on Friday along with Prospero and Caliban become the dominant inherited templates for post-colonial writers looking to renegotiate their relationship to the imperial center. And Robinson Crusoe, he writes a number of poems, "Cruso's Journal, Cruso's Island." And there's a whole mass of poems about Robinson Crusoe. I'm thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's Crusoe in England as well. But Crusoe has a particular resonance for Warcoz because he is a kind of the Adamic figure, the first creation of the Adamic figure in the 18th century novel who is adjusting to a new world and is coming up with ways of creating an umbrella and so on. So is to keep the sun off. And to an extent that Warcoz sees himself as following in his footsteps. That sort of resourcefulness, you mean, that kind of can do kind of spirit that seeks to make the best of the situation or the circumstances in which it finds it so. - Totally, absolutely totally. And it Crusoe's Journal, who makes explicit the connection he talks about how the defoe via Crusoe writes, "Have you intellect appraises, objects, surely, even the bare necessities of style are turned to use like those plain iron tools he salvages from shipwreck hewing a prose as odorous as raw wood to the ads?" Out of such timbers came our first book, our profane Genesis, whose Adam speaks that prose, which blessing some C. Rock startled itself with poetry, surprise and so on. So kind of Crusoe has suggested a way in which you can appreciate or respond to the new world landscape in a way which is pragmatic and convert style to something which serves the purpose and when he's commensurate with Caribbean reality as Warcoz experienced it. - The Crusoe figure in the poems comes across as being very isolated, and obviously Crusoe is isolated for the first part at least of defo's novel. And that idea of the lonely soul in Habitig a universe with God and Adam and Canaan and these vast or mythological presences in it, that's something that features in a lot of Warcoz poetry in a way which might tempt you to think of him as in some sense as a religious poet, would you agree? - Well, yeah, he grew up a Methodist and I don't think he ever sort of denounced or renounced his beliefs. And I think that ties in with his notion of the epic as well. Obviously the great Christian epic, paradise lost which also is Milton is also a writer named checked by Warcoz on a number of occasions. But he is also looking at it through the lens actually in this poem of Wallace Stevens somewhat surprisingly. He talks of that the poetry is relating to a green world one without metaphors. So I think he's going to school on the ways in which American modernism, such as that of Stevens in particular rejected certain aspects of its European inheritance and it moved away from the metaphors inherited. And that gives you this this Adamic vision of the green world. It's a very Stephen Zune world one without metaphors that part of the process for the postcolonial poet or the post-imperial or the anti-imperial poet is to undo or call into question the metaphors which have worked in the in the emp for the imperial forces undo those or reconfigure them in such a way that they serve your purpose. rather than their purpose. - Yes, and it's interesting, isn't it, the way that Warcoff ends this poem on a slightly surprising note as well, in that he, as it were, weaves into the poem scepticism about the claim that Cruso's "Ademic World" is a pure and green one, ending all of us yearn for those fantasies of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase, when the clear voice startled itself, saying, "Water heaven Christ, hoarding such heresies as God's loneliness moves in his smallest creatures." It's a wonderful ending to the poem, but it's also very striking, as it were, for the moral vision of the poem, isn't it, conceding at this late stage that these states of innocence the poem has been imagining are actually just fantasies. They may be necessary fantasies, as Stevens might call them necessary fictions, but they remain, they remain fictive, they're not historical realities. - Yes, there was always that kind of hard-headed aspect in Warcoff, which he writes a great piece, a prose piece called "What the Twilight Says" in which he talks about how he walks through the slums of "Saint Lucia" at "Twilight" and they look very picturesque, and how beautiful they are, and he thinks, yes, at "Twilight" everything looks beautiful, but he's also aware that they contain real suffering. So he's often modulating between the disparating reality and poverty of "Saint Lucia" or other Caribbean countries that he lived in during his 20s, and this grand ambition, which somehow wants to convert that, or to use that poverty, and to transfigure that poverty into an opportunity, this prestigious ambition, and he calls poems collections, the bounty, the prodigal, and so on, that prodigious ambition, which can convert these things into opportunities, rather than be depressed by them. And that's a buoyancy which drives his language, I think, throughout his career, there's a kind of irrepressible metaphorical exuberance, which has drawn criticism from a range of critics as diverse as Evan Bowland, and I think Helen Vendler possibly, or she criticises him for being too much an imitator of other poets, but I think that imitatiostrand in his work can be made sense of in a post-colonial context, as relating to, you know, "Hommie Babbers, no-shin of imitation is central for the post-colonial writer who is, as a tool to be deployed against the Empire." - And Crusoe as a figure, I mean, just to say one last thing about him, Crusoe as a figure works for Warcraft brilliantly well because he embodies a sort of ambivalence. Is that right? He, on the one hand, he has got this freshness of perception because he's seeing things that he has never seen before and trying to make a new language for the circumstances he finds himself in. But on the other hand, because of the history with Friday, he is also a paradigmatic of colonialism, isn't he? That's the other great use that Crusoe has within the English literary imagination. He is a colonizer. So he's at once exactly what Warcraft is deploying but at the same time paradoxically representing an imaginative virtue that Warcraft celebrates. - Yes, it's the balance between curse and profit, isn't it? As in the kind of, you know, the Calabank quote, "You taught me language and my profit on it is, I know how to curse." So to what extent, and that goes back to the first point that we're looking at, that the betraying and the giving back, how much should the poet be offering profit in the language and how much should he be offering curse or how to fuse the two? And I think that's what Warcraft's mature work goes on to do. But central to that was an understanding of his own life and that sort of leads on to his grand poje de late 1960s, from 1965 to 1972. He was writing this enormously long autobiographical verse poem, called "Another Life", which you can relate to something like the prelude quite kind of straightforwardly. It is Warcraft attempting to understand his own situation, what kind of poet he is in the same way in which Wordsworth is doing in the prelude. And it generates much good, very good writing. I would say it is to break through volume, though it's perhaps somewhat overlooked in his ear. But I think Ian Sandsome is right to see that as the moment in which Warcraft really hits his stride and is able to present himself and all the fellow sound Lucians, somewhat in the manner of Dylan Thomas is under milk wood. I always think that there is a kind of, he loved Dylan Thomas and Dylan Thomas was kind of drunk on words. But in both, there is this tremendous curiosity about what other people in the town, the grocery let, or castries in Santa Lucia are like. And a determination to capture them, represent them, to give an account of their lives, which is similar, I think, what Joyce is doing in Dublin as or Ulysses as well. The part of the post-colonial epic project is to describe what has not been described from that particular perspective before in the language, which has been imposed on the people's living in those lands. - Yes, in a very particular way, it's a sort of celebration of the provincial, isn't it? Or a transformation of the provincial into the central. - Yes. - As he says himself at one point in the poem, provincialism loves the pseudo-epic, which is presumably what he's writing. Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic. So if these heroes have been given a stature, disproportionate to their cramped lives, remember that I beheld them at knee height, and that their thunderous exchanges rumbled like gods about another life, which wonderful lines, which sort of wander in and mock heroic and then wander out into something more like genuine heroic. And that interest in, as it were, the provincial scale of life as having a kind of unexpected epic potential, that's the great discovery, really, of another life, don't you think? - Yes, and not to be ashamed of these switches of register, from what kind of high-flown mode to a quite more pathetic or less high-flown mode, and that that's all part of the rich tapestry of the kind of Warkottian pageant. And in that one, he goes on to say, I saw as through the glass of some provincial gallery, the hieratic objects, which my father loved, the stuffed, dark, nightingale of Keats. I was a really telling moment, isn't it, to think of, Warwick Warkott, having a nightingale, 'cause he loves Keats' own nightingale so much. And he talks about romantic taxidermy and so on. So I think it's an acceptance of that provinciality and an unembarastness about it. I think that is the kind of the crucial ways in which the traffic between the provinces and the center is made possible in Warkott, who then we should say goes on to become one of the most central poets of his generation, the kind of in the super elite, premier league band, there with Shamas Hini, another poet who's negotiating a post-colonial legacy, Les Murray, can also be construed in those terms. Joseph Brodsky, who's obviously escaping from Soviet Union, they were the big four when I was kind of reading poetry in the '70s and '80s and '90s. They kind of dominated the kind of the poetry circuit as the kind of the superstars. So it is interesting that they all come from positions that can be construed as in opposition to centers of power and that their poetry can all be read as in the post-colonial kind of context that we are outlining for Warkott. So there was a great appetite in the poetry world in general for this kind of exploration of the legacy of empire. - And I suppose before moving on, we should also say that if Warkott was criticized for what Stephen Brodsky and his peaks and the LRB calls lushness in his earlier works. By the time we get to another life, the verses become much more chased and controlled and driven by a kind of a narrative interest and even in some ways drawing upon some rhythms that aren't unlike prose. And also in its subject matter, it's not only these characters, but also an interest in objects, isn't it, in the things, in the paraphernalia of ordinary life, which make you remember that he had toied with the idea of being a painter at one stage. I'm thinking of lines describing the objects of his childhood like this radiance of sharing extends to the simplest objects, to a favorite hammer, a paintbrush, a toothless gum, sunken old shoe, and the list goes on after that. And then he turns and says in a very beautiful moment, addressing his mother, "Your house sang softly of balance, of the rightness of placed things." And this new interest in things is a great step forward in his poetry, don't you think? - Yes, I think America has a kind of crucial role in the formation of Warkott as a poet, and particularly the work of Robert Lowell was extremely influential on his work of the 1960s, and Lowell's life's study. studies, which has exactly that kind of attention to detail and that kind of ability to make the domestic property that has been remembered by the poet who has value for the poet somehow part of the domestic scenario that the poet is turning into life studies. I think that becomes very much the way that Warcock finds out of the imitation of Thomas and Yates and Orden and Co, that the confessional poets are particularly low although, and he knew and they met each other a number of times in the 60s and there's ways in which you can compare a poem like The Cast Away with Sylvia Plath's aerial and you can think, well, both of these poems are very inflected by low alien cadences in completely different ways and it makes you understand how useful the low alien template was for poets as different from each other as Warcock and Sylvia Plath. And indeed, Heaney in the 1970s is also learning a lot from from from from low, isn't he? Yeah. So by the 1980s then the early 1980s he has what he's I suppose is most life-changing appointment which is to a chair, I guess it was a chair in creative writing, wasn't at Boston University. So he's in the same kind of neck of the words as Heaney who was picked up a professorship at Harvard and as you were saying, Brodsky is the other kind of member of the group who's also in New England around this time and he starts writing lots of poems about his travels, doesn't he? He has one of his books called The Fortune at Traveler and these are almost like sort of postcard poems from an itinerant kind of poetic superstar on his travels. They are a lot of them express a delight in finally seeing these things which he's only heard about going to Venice for the first time, going to Normandy or there's one called the Normandy and so on, going to all these London in particular, going to these places for the first time, seeing them and somehow then being able to kind of come to terms with them. So the the travelogue mode is different for such as as Walcott in that it is a it is him somehow seeing in the flesh all the all the great monuments or paintings which he'd seen only in reproduction. There's a many much of another life is taken up with how important to him the work of such as Chimabue was or Jotto that these kind of Italian primitive religious painters were exactly the kind of painters whom he wanted to imitate and he sees them in books and he shares these with a friend of his and they make paintings out of these European paintings which they've only seen in books and lo and behold from the 80s onwards Walcott is in the position to see them in the real thing. So there is a tremendous delight and exuberance and just aesthetic pleasure for him in responding to these places and then being able to include them in his poetic texture they can be somewhat overwhelming at times. I think that Walcott's idioms which we've are very various but that they're sometimes not as tightly bound together into related with each other in a meaningful way as they are in the long poems. My own favorite poems of Walcott's are the really long ones and other life and Omeros which came out in 1990 and was cited by the Nobel Prize Committee in 1992 as kind of central to Walcott's Erver and it's his great achievement and I would probably agree with that that Omeros which is is a enormously long poem over 300 pages does include much really terrifically vivid and interesting writing as well as being his fullest working out of the kind of call it the Atlantic dilemma how the Caribbean poet deals with the Atlantic inheritance from Europe as well as his Atlantic contemporaries in America. I think American poets contemporary American poets a much more influence on Walcott than any contemporary British poets poets such as Larkin or Hughes had on him. It was such as Lowell in particular who offered him a new way of writing. Now we should try and convey something of the nature of Omeros. It's a very difficult poem to characterize isn't it? In one way it's a rewriting of Homeric narrative within the context of the Caribbean so in a way it's sort of doing what Joyce does in Ulysses taking you know Homeric narrative, narrative shapes and reimagining them within a new and historically contemporary context but it also has other things going on in it too doesn't it? And the whole narrative shape of the poem is much less clear than that summary that I've just stumbled through might imply. Yes there are I mean there are overarching narratives which one can make sense of and I think there's a terrific piece on it in the LRB by Nick Everett from 1991. A really incisive review which explores it in terms of allegory and I think that really makes a lot of sense that if you don't you think of it as an epic in that it's which Ezra Pound defined as a poem including history. Well yes the poem includes a lot of history but it's all happening through this shifting allegorical set of metaphors which structure the poem. There's things like the Seaswift, this bird which has a kind of cruciform shape which I think perhaps again alludes to the kind of religious element in in War Cots imagination and this Seaswift is a kind of supernatural being who transport a keel who is based obviously on the Greek hero Achilles transports him back through time to Africa at the time of when slaves were being gathered on the coast of Africa so you get this horrifying section the beginning of book three in which 15 slaves are captured and chained and are then sent off to the off to the Caribbean. This is a keel fighting his ancestors and it's meeting his father and it's a version of the descent into the underworld yeah and the meeting with ancestors in the underworld that you get in the a neared and the odyssey so he makes use of anything that comes to hand from from the Homeric world as much as he wants to without any botheredness about how it means in a larger sense just to create this series of analogies because on one level what the poem is about is exercising this habit of creating analogies between Caribbean life or Antilian life and a gene life between the life of Omaros and that of Homer so on one level he is taking as far as possible in a kind of like a kind of medical treatment in which you do as much Homeric stuff as possible to get the Homeric stuff out of your system and I think the poem is I think as as Nick Everett points out a therapeutic epic in the way in which song of myself is a therapeutic epic in that it allows walk out to step free of this European inheritance and to feel comfortable with his sand delusion inheritance so the stakes are very high and it is extremely expansive and he takes his time about it expanding each aspect of the narrative with which kind of as it catches his attention yes Everett pieces terrifically go absolutely right and I agree with you that he's very sharp on the way that the poem at once recognizes the bad things that are the inheritance of a colonized people but then it also works in a way which isn't at all starry-eyed or falsely optimistic but works to find ways in which those hurts those damage those bits of damage might be cured or at least accommodated and I think that's a very fine perception which captures a lot of the feeling of especially the later books of the poem the later chapters of the poem there's an interesting character in it isn't they're called major plunkit who is a retired soldier an expat a wounded veteran of world war two who's become a pig farmer and a lot of the of the poem is imagining plunkit as it were trying to understand the history of the of the island in whose colonial history he's played a minor but nevertheless kind of representative part as a as a figure of British imperialism yes and he gets invot very interested in the actual history of the wars fought between the English and the French over the Isle de Saint-Lusia and it was called Helen because it was fought over so much by the English and the French it was called Helen and that ties in with the thematic interests of the poem in the first two books you've got these characters a keel and hector who are both in love with a woman called Helen and that is refracted through this battle between the English and French for the Helen de Saint-Lusia and that is a kind of Iliad bit the first two books are the Iliad book bit of the poem and then you get the wanderings of a keel to Africa in this dream vision sequence in which he meets his father and which is related to the Odyssey and also you get the narrator who is obviously walk out himself wandering around the world and also figuring himself as heartbroken the poem is written on the back of the end of his third marriage to Noli Metaver and there's a sense in which his own psychological state is also being reflected in the poem. So it's a lyric poem about a lost love as well as an epic poem about Achilles and Hector, so to speak, as well as about the post-colonial situation and how the colonial wars were fought. So it really is multi-angled. Is it a real kaleidoscope of a poem? And you can feel a bit lost in it. But I found that Nick Everett piece gave me a really good understanding of the actual narrative arc. And in the last two books, you have a warcott returning to Santa Lucia, or the narrator returning to Santa Lucia. You have Hector dying in a car crash, Achilles actually marrying Helen or getting together with Helen who is carrying Hector's child. You get a character called Philok Tect who's based on hermetic Philip Titi's who was wounded by a snake bite. He's suffering from a gash on his shin and that is cured by a seed which has been brought by this sea swift from Africa and dropped into the vegetation of Santa Lucia, grows into a plant and there's a woman called Mark Kilman who is a kind of simple figure. Again, it's a kind of typical transposition of a hermetic character into Warcott's world and she is able to heal Philok Tect with this plant. So it's about healing as well as it is about a kind of diagnosis of all the problems that bedevil the history of a Caribbean island. And by the end of it, what we're confronted with is the evils of tourism. So tourism is the great threat by the end. And this is, I suppose, his way where it's a dilemma that Warcott can't solve and he misses the poverty, the picturesque poverty which he felt was good for his poetry of the old days. On the other hand, there's the kind of tourist, the tourist dollar which raises the living standards but also introduces unpleasant trashy hotels and American tourists who are crass and know nothing about the culture where they're spending their holidays. That sort of movement towards something more hopeful or something more reconciliation within the world of the poem is important isn't it because otherwise the organizing idea of the poem which is that history repeats itself which is a view that Warcott expresses in quite a few poems of the 1990s. Candle to a kind of VS Nipole type political pessimism something that Blake Morrison writes about in his LRB piece, One Warcott that you often in Warcott have a sense of things going round and round and the same barrel. And I think that one of the great things about Omoross is the way that, and as I say in this entirely unsentimental way, it sort of glimpses a way out of that of that trap, of that sense in which history becomes a kind of imprisonment. Yes, I think though it exudes a kind of confidence in his own poetic equipment which I think is probably the new aspect of it that he's written very roughly in Turtsorema. So it's got this dantestkin sort of feel to it and you also have ghost figures like there's a very moving passage when he meets his father Warwick towards the end of book one and Warwick who died when he was, as I said when when Derek was only one, he died of an ear infection and this gives rise to a sort of a nice joke over there kind of shared love of Shakespeare. This is Warwick speaking. I was raised in this obscure Caribbean port where my bastard father christened me for his Shire Warwick, the Bard's County, but never felt part of the foreign machinery known as literature. I preferred verse to fame, but I wrote with the heart of an amateur. It's that will you inherit. I died on his birthday one April. Your mother sowed her own costume as Porsche, then that disease like Hamlet's Old Man's spread from an infected ear. I believe the parallel has brought you some peace, death imitating art A. That's obviously in one way it looks like a dante pastiche, but it's something that again, the heenie does a great deal of it in station Island, but no not pastiche, it's just making use of dante for this particular rather moving interaction between the ghost of his father and his son. That section ends. What was Warwick doing, transplanting Warwick 's structure. I saw him patented in shade, the leaves in his hair, the vines of the loosened body, the swifts blown seed, and that that sea swift just kind of crop up again and again as a kind of structuring, well, an allegorical element as in a medieval painting you might say, denoting a particular theme. So the huge patterning of the poem, it can kind of be mapped as his vast allegorical patterning with moments which are very moving and affecting particularly when he's dealing with his own inheritance and his father. So as we've been conveying, I'm sure a poem of extraordinary sophistication and yet a poem that also has within it a great attraction, a great reverence for what it calls at one point, green simplities. Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere, cherish our island for its green simplities. And I suppose it's the green simplities that are under threat by the tourist industry. And that sense of a kind of a saving simplicity that is away from all the sophistications that European tradition has come to represent is what he turns to at the end when he asks in a wonderful rhetorical question, "Why not see Helen as the sun saw her with no Homeric shadow, swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone as fresh as the sea wind? Why make the smoke a door?" And so this attempt to imagine an entirely fresh perception that isn't laden with any of the baggage of an imposed Western consciousness. Is something that haunts the poem quite a lot, doesn't it? Yes, and when Philok Titt is cured, he makes explicit use of the Adam imagery. So she through Adam a towel and the yard was Eden and it's light to the first days. So that fantasy of a return to innocence. But of course you can only kind of gesture towards the kind of post-Homeric world through the Homeric language. So in a sense it's a slight of hand that Warcott never does give up writing, a very literary European inflected prose that makes use of all the rhythms of such as kind of Wordsworth and 19th century poetry that it's never straits that far from the traditions in which he was brought up. But it's able to articulate what it will be like to move beyond those. And in that sense it is a bit like Stevens. Stevens says we should live without these metaphors, but we can't actually do that. All we can say is yes, wouldn't that be great and agree with the ideal of living in this fresh green world where the yard was Eden and so on. But it's literary effectiveness, it's nevertheless, becomes particularly powerful. I find the opening scene actually when he imagines all the kind of the crucial moment is when they chop down the trees to create their canoes and that's the kind of originary moment of epic is a brilliant sort of transposition of the epic moment in which the nation is founded and it's founded by creating boats that go to sea. So the CNIS which is encoded in the name Omeros and he actually talks about that in the May bit is the sea bit as the sea bit in the sea is a strong an image as the sea swift as the sort of as the dominant scenario or kind of tapestry in which the whole thing takes place. Yes, and be sure to have said generally that of all his subjects, the one that I think he finds most compelling is the sea. I mean that's the importance of being an island driller is absolutely at the top of his mind, isn't it? I mean we saw him being a one by done talking about no man is an island. Well you are an island in Volkart and it's good because you're surrounded by this sort of sense of oceanic consciousness which flows in and out and around and in this endless and infinite way and shapes a lot of his most extraordinary extended similes. Yes, I think he's brilliant at lyrical evocations of the sea and the impact of the waves on the shore but those are always or they're not always but then they're the historical awareness of the sea as part of the Atlantic Triangle which sends slaves to the Caribbean and then sugar up to New England and then back to Liverpool and then down to the west coast of Africa again. So the sea is kind of historically conjugated as well as lyrically celebrated over and over in Volkart. Now we've been saying that his home ground really is long poems, the idea of length, of extendiveness and possibly extending forever and ever. The last line of that poem when he left the beach the sea was still going on You feel that the poem actually could go on a bit more if it wanted to, but we should just mention perhaps that he was occasionally, not often, but occasionally capable of really beautiful short poems. And the one that I know you like is the poem "Tunorlene", which also picks up on the biographical circumstances that you were talking about that lie behind Omaros too with the failure of that marriage. I wondered if you could read a stat, a little poem. Yes, "Tunorlene". The beach will remain empty for more slaked coloured dawns of lines the surf continually erases with its sponge. And someone else will come from the still sleeping house, a coffee mug warming his palm, as my body once cupped yours to memorize this passage of a salt-sipping turn, like when some line on a page is loved and it's hard to turn. I should say that the turn in the third line from the end is the bird, a turn, and it's a verb to turn, so he's rhyming, turn and turn. And it again makes use of the sea, and it again makes use of what is "Walkots" favorite trope, a trope that occurs again and again in his poetry, in which metaphors from writing are applied to the landscape, and he is completely addicted to this particular trope. And for a time, you think, "Well, why is he doing that again?" And after considering it a bit, I thought, "Well, it's part of that prodigious bounty, that writing has what has liberated him to experience the landscape." So writing is part of the landscape in some fundamental way for his imagination. So in this rather, after the event poem in which he is accepting that he has lost this relationship and he's imagining Noreland with a new partner, he creates something rather lyrical out of it. And yes, I think that's one moment when his lyricism doesn't expand beyond the kind of framework as it so often does and kind of restrains itself to create a particularly unforgettable moment. So in 1992, he's awarded the Nobel Prize, something that you've already alluded to, and from the 1990s onwards, he is internationally a traveler. He lives a bit of the time in Greenwich Village, but is basically based again in St. Lucia. He continues to write all the themes that we've been talking about, continue to shape his poems, the volumes of poems that he produces. And there are some very good things in the later collections on these recurrent themes of identity and the ambivalence of inheritance and cultural inheritance. But I think we would agree that Omaros remains the high watermark of his writing life and the most sort of fully satisfying exploration of those recurrent themes. Yes, I mean, we should say also that Omaros, like his other long poems, is very, wonders a lot. You've got a large section in which he gets interested in the trail of tears of the Sue and Dakota Native American peoples. And you get, you think, well, what's that doing in a poem about St. Lucia? And so there's a kind of compendiousness, a capaciousness about Warlock, that the more the merrier, which has not always appealed to all critics. And a couple of the pieces in the LRB make note of that. But I think he does get back on form with his last, not back on form, but his last volume White Egritz, which was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a kind of belated attempt to honor Warlock in a country that perhaps hadn't honored him as much as America had, certainly. And he does offer some brilliant descriptions of London in particular, in Omaros, when a major plunk it goes there and complains how expensive it is. And you also get kind of get a vision of London as the centre of empire. And he talks of the barges on the Thames, chained to the Thames as our islands are. So the notion that he's expanding from the centre to think of all the ways in which the colonial properties of the empire are kind of chained to the centre of power. So it's really interesting writing about London itself. But White Egritz is mainly sonnets or versions of sonnets set around the world, a lot in Saint Lucia. And some of them are really terrific. Others don't quite hit the mark in my opinion, but some of them are wonderful. Well, why don't we end with the very last poem in that volume, in that sequence, published in 2010, this book, when Warlock was 80. And it's last poem, I think, is one of the highlights of the volume. It's a very beautifully cadence sort of all-tominal poem, which draws on lots of the things that we've been talking about today. It's island consciousness, isn't it? That's partly what the poem is about. Also about ancestry and also about the perpetuity of the sea. So lots and lots of things that moved Warlock throughout a very long writing life are all getting gathered together for one last time in this final poem, "Poo White Egritz." Yes, and I worth pointing out that it's 13 lines long. So in a sense, is his own take on the "Walkotty and Take on the Sonnet", it's missing its last line. But the sonnet was obviously the fundamental to the ways in which he experienced poetry. So here's it's paying one last homage to the traditions in which he grew up with a particular twist and it again makes use of metaphors drawn from writing to describe landscape. This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges, a headland with mountains appears brokenly, then is hidden again until what emerges from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea and the whole self-naming island. This ochre verges its shadow plunged valleys and a coiled road threading the fishing villages. The white silent surges of comas along the coast were a line of gulls has arrowed into the widening harbour of a town with no noise. Its streets growing closer like print you can now read. Two cruise ships, scooners, a tug, ancestral canoes as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes white again and the book comes to a close. This episode is from series two of modern-ish poets with Mark Ford and Shama's Perry. To listen to their first series and all other close reading series from the London Review of Books, sign up to our close reading subscription, go to lrb.me/closereadings or click on the link in the description.