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.
— Derek Walcott
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
I think young writers ought to be heretical.
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
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.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
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.
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.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited.
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.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
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.
