The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott
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.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
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.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
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.
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.
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
When you're young, influences count.
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.
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'
For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.
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.
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.
I feel blessed that I was gifted.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
Minor writers think style is all.
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
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.
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.
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
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.
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.
I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.
There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.
After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get.
My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.
I don't think there is any such thing as a black writer or a white writer. Ultimately, there is someone whom one reads.
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often.
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.
My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.
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.
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.
I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
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.
