SOURCE: Hirsch, Edward. “Poetry: Derek Walcott.” Wilson Quarterly 21 (autumn 1997): 109-11.

In the following essay, Hirsch offers a positive assessment of Walcott's career as a poet and playwright.

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn,” Derek Walcott said in his Nobel Prize lecture for 1992. That force of exultation and celebration of luck, along with a sense of benediction and obligation, a continuous effort of memory and excavation, and a “frightening duty” to “a fresh language and a fresh people,” have defined Walcott's work for the past 50 years. He has always been a poet of great verbal resources and skills engaged in a complex struggle to render his native Caribbean culture: the New World—not Eden but a successor...