Derek Walcott’s Poetics of Global Economy in Omeros

Abstract

Readers of world literature and postcolonial studies have become well attuned to the ways Derek Walcott (b. 1930) patterns the cross-cultural constitution of the Caribbean through his sustained conversation with Western literary inheritances, what he called in 1970 “the greatest bequest the Empire made” (Hamner 50). “We knew the literatures of empires, Greek, Roman, British, through their essential classics,” he recalls concerning his colonial education in his early essay “What the Twilight Says” (1970), “both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made” (What the Twilight 4). Across his career, Walcott challenges center-periphery models of literary affiliation, instead conceiving of the poetic tradition as a dynamic, open-ended process of world renewal. Nowhere is this more visible than in his monumental epic, Omeros (1990). Here, I examine the ways in which St. Lucia’s Nobel Laureate of Literature receives and re-invents the literary inheritances of the epic genre—and its loaded imperial connotations—to mediate his recurring preoccupations with poverty and neocolonialism in the Caribbean.