Aviya Kushner, who is the poetry editor for Neworld Renaissance Magazine, earned an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied under Walcott, among others. In the following essay, Kushner analyzes "A Far Cry from Africa" as the speaker's quest self-description.

Island boy. That's how Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott often describes himself, in both his poems and his conversation. However, that simple self-portrait can be misleading. At best, it's only part of the story of a man whose wanderings have produced rich, skillful, multilayered poems that draw on the poetic tradition of many nations, ranging from modern England, Russia, and Spain to ancient Greece.

Of course, the island bit has some truth to it. Walcott is a major English-language writer who was born—and still lives, for part of the year—in the multilingual Caribbean. His accent and warm manners are from the...