SOURCE: Thieme, John. “The Poet as Castaway.” In Derek Walcott, pp. 77-100. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Thieme analyzes the recurring motif of the Robinson Crusoe archetype in Walcott's poetry.

While Walcott's plays from Ti-Jean and His Brothers onwards demonstrate an increasing engagement with folk forms and community values, his poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s remains very much that of an individual, isolated observer. Such a figure is the central protagonist in his next collection, The Castaway (1965), where three poems, ‘The Castaway’, ‘Crusoe's Journal’ and ‘Crusoe's Island’, are focused on the character that gives the volume its title, while others are filtered through a persona who is also cast away in the sense that he seems to see life as an onlooker. Whether in the Caribbean:

In our treacherous seasonless climate's dry heat or muggy heat or rain I'm measuring winter by this...