Derek Walcott, the poet awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, was born in 1930 in Castries, the capital of Saint Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles. Since 1981, he taught creative writing at Brown University in Providence, USA.
Poetry and theater are, for the author, artistic expressions that contain a deeply meaningful and significant message.
Walcott expresses with singular vigor the sense of deprivation of their own history, peculiar to Caribbean people of African descent, drawing from the English literary tradition while preserving indigenous and Spanish contributions. This can be seen in the image of the abandoned castaway, in “The Castaway and Other Poems” (1965); later in “The Gulf and Other Poems” (1969), and all the way to the epic poem “Omeros” (1990), where the reference to Homer facilitates the vision of a historical and geographical landscape that unifies the present and the past.
