Top 77 Derek Walcott Quotes

That’s another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, ‘Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?’ And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one’s feelings.

The Chinese, the African, and the European – they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.

I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I’d gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.

I can’t tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.

A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, ‘I don’t ever want to have to write ‘It was great in Paris.” Because I don’t think, proportionately speaking, that one’s experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.

The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.

I don’t know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.

I have no curiosity. I’m an island boy.

The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.

My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.

Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean – and that’s wonderful.

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.

When you’re young, influences count.

The history of the world – by which, of course, we mean Europe – is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.

The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne – some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.

When I come to England, I don’t claim England; I don’t own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there’s still this distance: looking on at what I’m admiring, separate from what I am. And that’s OK.

Minor writers think style is all.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has – which is a serious problem – is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can’t act a myth.

I don’t think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that’s that big.

I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.

There’s always a need at a critical time for poetry.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was ’25 Poems.’ It cost 200 dollars.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer’s heaven.

My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.

Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, ‘How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?’

I don’t want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.

I feel blessed that I was gifted.

I think young writers ought to be heretical.

How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I don’t feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It’s good to have respect for a poet.

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It’s great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That’s OK, but it should be on the side. It’s not the ultimate thing.

There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets’ Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do – to write, particularly poetry.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

I made a vow that I wouldn’t be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, ‘You could be absorbed in it – it’s so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.’ Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.

Anybody great, we’re all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you’d still want to see it.

The myth of Naipaul… has long been a farce.

The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.

The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Howl,’ you can hear a cantor between the lines. It’s fully alive, and I think that’s what’s missing in modern poetry. It’s too dry and cerebral.

Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it’s like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.

I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.

I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I’ve been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.

As much as I like teaching and students, it’s a kind of rigor, a discipline, that’s against my body.

What I described in ‘Another Life’ – about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened – is a frequent experience in a younger writer.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.