Lyric memoir: aging poetically in the poems of Derek Walcott

Abstract

In this paper, I will look at a group of Derek Walcott's poems especially from the period of Sea Grapes, which explore new and dramatic relationships, oddly, between light and speed, pace and painting, to represent the formation of histories otherwise unseen. These poems include “Dark August,” “Endings,” “To Return to the Trees,” and many others. Walcott’s long studied works in poststructuralist, postcolonial and new historicist terms suggest at the same time a painter’s and poet’s fascination with the “grey” areas, those shades caught between light and dark that pace history differently, reposition the need for teleologically driven legacies. This angle of history in his work has been rarely studied.