What is Derek Walcott most famous for?
They say I am most famous for 'Omeros,' that great, sprawling epic that tried to stitch together Homer and the fishermen of my islands, to find the echoes of ancient Troy in the salt-sprayed harbours of the Caribbean. It’s a chronicle of lineage, of belonging, or perhaps the very struggle for it. But what truly animates me, what has always been my subject, is this archipelago itself—its layered histories, the ghosts of empire clinging to the sugarcane fields, the languages that mingle like the currents. I am a poet of the Caribbean, not a postcolonial poet; the sea, after all, speaks the same language around the world, a language of ceaseless motion and memory.
Ask Derek Walcott the follow-up →