Biography Essay

By the time In a Green Night first made its modest international appearance in 1962, Derek Walcott had already gained preeminence as a poet and playwright in the West Indies. Over the following decades he released a remarkable body of poetry and plays that garnered numerous awards (an O.B.E. in 1972, the MacArthur Foundation award in 1981, the Nobel Prize in literature in 1992) and the accolades of such peers as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, and Seamus Heaney. Current recognition notwithstanding, Walcott began his career balancing precariously between critical ethnic nationalists who found him inaccessible to his own people and the urbane cognoscenti who praised his immersion in canonical Western tradition. Refusing to accept this false dilemma (the folk or the academy), Walcott chose the more viable alternative of developing his own voice, beginning by adapting elements judiciously from all the cultural strands of his mulatto bloodlines. Ironically...