Volume 29, Number 3 · March 4, 1982
Poet of Two Worlds
By Helen Vendler
The Fortunate Traveller
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 99 pp., $11.95
Derek Walcott is a poet, now over fifty, whose voice was for a long time a derivative one. His subject was not derivative: it was the black colonial predicament (Walcott comes from St. Lucia). But there was an often unhappy disjunction between his explosive subject, as yet relatively new in English poetry, and his harmonious pentameters, his lyrical allusions, his stately rhymes, his Yeatsian meditations. I first met his work in an anthology that had reprinted his 'Ruins of a Great House,' a poem now several decades old:
Review, 3037 words
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