KemetLeads
Derek Walcott
He gave a Caribbean island the scale of Homer, in an English that carries creole inside it.
The rise
Born in Castries on 23 January 1930, a Methodist on a Catholic island, son of a schoolteacher and of a civil servant who died when he was one, he published his first poem at fourteen and printed 25 Poems at eighteen on money his mother found. A scholarship took him to the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica.
What they did
He moved to Trinidad in 1953 and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, a professional company for Caribbean actors and writers; Dream on Monkey Mountain won an Obie in 1971. Omeros (1990) set fishermen named Achille, Hector and Helen in terza rima on his own coast, and the Nobel followed in 1992. He taught at Boston University for more than two decades.
The full picture
In 1982 a Harvard sophomore said he propositioned her and graded her down; Harvard found the complaint had merit, admonished him by letter to Boston University and changed her grade. A student there sued in 1996 and settled. In 2009 pages on both cases were mailed anonymously to Oxford and he withdrew from the poetry chair.
Why it matters
He took the Western canon on its own ground from an island of under 200,000 people, and built the company and the readership that let other Caribbean writers do the same.
“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.”