Derek Walcott Infosite

 

 

Derek Walcott Quotes

 

• This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

• Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

• We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

• Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

• Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

• A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

• The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

• The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

• Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

• If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

• Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

• The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

 

 

Derek Walcott Bibliography

Verse

1948 - 25 Poems.
1949 - Epitaph for the Young. Xll Cantos.
1951 - Poems.
1964 - Selected Poems.
1965 - The Castaway and Other Poems.
1969 - The Gulf and Other Poems.
1973 - Another Life.
1976 - Sea Grapes.
1979 - The Star-Apple Kingdom.
1981 - Selected Poetry. Ed. by Wayne Brown.
1981 - The Fortunate Traveller.
1983 - The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott, and the Art of Romare Bearden.
1984 - Midsummer.
1987 - The Arkansas Testament.
1990 - Omeros.
1997 - The Bounty.
2000 - Tiepolo's Hound.
2004 - The Prodigal.
2007 - Selected Poems / edited by Edward Baugh.

 Drama

1952 - Harry Dernier.
1970 - Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays.
1978 - The Joker of Seville & O Babylon!.
1980 - Remembrance & Pantomine : Two Plays.
1986 - Three Plays.
1993 - The Odyssey : a Stage Version.
2002 - The Haitian Trilogy.
2002 - Walker and The Ghost Dance.

Essays

1993 - The Antilles : Fragments of Epic Memory : the Nobel lecture.
1998 - What the Twilight Says : Essays.
 

 

Useful Links:

Derek Walcott 

Derek Walcott The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992 

Derek Walcott  

Derek Walcott 

Love After Love