The Star Apple Kingdom

Most of the poems in this new collection follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with "The Schooner Flight," in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad, sailing northward to meet his fate, and ending with "The Star-Apple Kingdom," a long poem whose axis is the crucial attempt to establish a new social order in Jamaica without sacrificing democracy. Other poems speak through various personae: "Koenig of the River" marks the end of a saga of nineteenth-century exploration and conquest through the Conradian image of a missionary-soldier whose comrades have been lost at sea; "The Saddhu of Couva" describes the lament of an Indian priest for a fading spirituality; "Egypt, Tobago" places Mark Antony on a beach in the glare of afternoon. Two poems are dedicated to fellow poets--Josephy Brodsky and Robert Lowell. In The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott's precise and inventive imagery is enriched by frequent exploitation of the tonal aspects of dialect. He has absorbed into poetry the normal resources of fiction--to the point where fact crystallizes into metaphor. As John Thompson recently commented in The New York Review of Books: "Walcott writes now as a man who knows exactly what he is doing. His style is that of the best language of our period."

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Literature - Africa, grade: A, , course: BS Honors English literature - African poetry, language: English, abstract: This research work on Derek Walcott’s Poetry is Qualitative research which is descriptive in its literary form. Its objective is to portray the water imagery. The other aspects discussed in this research are the link between sea (water) and history. Walcott had a bitter experience with history. He is of the opinion that he was plucked from his roots and thrown away in West Indies because of which he suffered from identity crises. This research seeks to identify how Walcott self consciously uses water animals, water imagery and the significance of sea with its relationship with history in his collection of poems The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979).Walcott was an elated and enthusiastic poet passionately in love with English. He was one of the resilient diasporic Caribbean writers. Derek Walcott was born on a small island in St. Lucia in 1930 and spent almost whole of his life writing about the sea. This thesis is divided into four chapters. First chapter includes introduction to the topic of the thesis. The second chapter includes literature review. The third chapter deals with the relationship of sea and history while the fourth and the last chapter deals with the water imagery and how Walcott associates Sea and history with each other. This thesis tends to prove that Walcott relates sea and history and also he uses a lot of water imagery in in his collection of poems The Star Apple Kingdom.

The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.

A selection of the poetry of Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. The nature of memory and the creative imagination, the history, politics and landscape of the West Indies, Walcott's loves and marriages and his enduring awareness of time and death, are recurring themes.

John Thieme here provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginnings in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts--Caribbean, European and other--that have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for students and readers coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time.

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career "He gives us more than himself or ‘a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of the poet's storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like "In My Eighteenth Year," published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like "A Far Cry from Africa," which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one's very blood; his mature work, like "The Schooner Flight" from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender "Sixty Years After," from the 2010 collection White Egrets. Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one's own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott's friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

Derek Walcott was aptly described by Laurence Liberman in The Yale Review as "one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day." Sea Grapes deepens with this major poet's search for true images of the post-Adamic "new world"--especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott's rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets--Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda. On the publication of Selected Poems in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, "Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries." This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott's mastery. He is also the author of The Gulf, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, and Another Life.