Was Walcott criticized for his language?
Ah, the critics, they often hear a foreign tongue in my lines. Some felt I clung too tightly to the English language, that my embrace of its poetic traditions was a betrayal of my own roots. But language, for me, is a tool, a ship to navigate the vast ocean of experience. To master English was to equip myself with the means to articulate the very hybridity of my existence, to render the colours of the Caribbean, the rhythms of its people, the weight of its history, in a form that could carry it to the world. I was not adopting a master's tongue; I was claiming a legacy, making it my own.
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