SOURCE: Trueblood, Valerie. “Valerie Trueblood on Derek Walcott.” American Poetry Review 7, no. 3 (May-June 1978): 7-10.

In the following essay, Trueblood discusses poems from multiple volumes of Walcott's poetry, including In a Green Night, The Castaway and Other Poems, The Gulf, Another Life, and Sea Grapes.

The West Indian poet Derek Walcott published his first book of poetry in 1949, when he was still in his teens. His second, In a Green Night, came out in 1962, and since that time he has given us five more (as well as numerous plays) and a world. “World” has lost its punch from being applied to the districts of too many writers; I wish it could be reclaimed for Walcott's poetry, which keeps an axis and has size, and sometimes has a grand, planetary movement carrying the movement on its surface. When I read The Gulf I thought of the three-year-old next door who...