SOURCE: Hamner, Robert D. “Philoctete's Wound.” In Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott's Omeros, pp. 33-58. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Hamner offers a critical analysis of Walcott's epic poem Omeros, focusing particular attention on the role of the character Philoctetes.

Despite the explicit parallels and allusions linking Omeros with its numerous epic predecessors, Walcott insists on more than one occasion that he deliberately resists writing a traditional “heroic poem.” This position may be traced at least as far back as “What the Twilight Says,” his introduction to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, wherein he asserts, “The last thing which the poor needed was the idealization of their poverty.” Walcott is too traditional to undertake an anti-epic, yet his authorial intrusions and variations on conventional epic devices in Omeros interrogate conventional expectations. Anticipating publication early in 1990, Walcott informs interviewer J. P. White...