Walcott, Derek

❮  Poetry & Prose  ❮  Books / People

Derek Walcott, St. Lucia, 1994; photograph by Inge Morath
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
I’d rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don’t really care about.

In terms of public interest and the greater good, a duet of works by Walcott, for study purposes only:

📘 “Collected Poems 1948-1984”
— Initially, many were self-published (Editable PDF).
📘 “Omeros”
— A take on Homer (Editable PDF).

On Omeros. . .

This is how Homer’s myths became universal and durable, treating the big themes: birth and death, loyalty and betrayal, loss and questing, victory and defeat, love and hatred. For centuries, writers have retold them for their own times and places. Derek Walcott’s Omeros treats all of these, but superimposes others: exile and identity, exploitation and resistance

In other words:

Omeros is an epic poem by Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott, first published in 1990. The work is divided into seven “books” containing a total of sixty-four chapters. Many critics view Omeros as Walcott’s “major achievement.”[1] Soon after its publication in 1990, it received praise from publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, the latter of which chose the book as one of its “Best Books of 1990” and called it “one of Mr. Walcott’s finest poetic works.”[2] The book also won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1991. In 1992, Walcott was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Nobel committee member who presented the award, Professor Kjell Espmark, singled out Walcott’s most recent achievement at the time, Omeros, recognizing the book as a “major work”.[3] Walcott painted the cover for the book, which depicts some of his main characters at sea together in a boat. In 2004, the critic Hilton Als of The New Yorker called the book “Walcott’s masterpiece” and characterized the poem as “the perfect marriage of Walcott’s classicism and his nativism”.

REFERENCES

Walcott, D. (1986). Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Walcott, D. (1990). Omeros. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux

Derek-Walcott's--Books
— “The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.”

READING LIST ETC.

WRITERS POETS
PHILOSOPHERS PSYCHOLOGISTS 

POLITICAL FIGURES
BOOKS OF FICTIONNON-FICTION BOOKS 

I was dead, deader than dead because, I was still alive.
Ways of Escape ~
“I was dead, deader than dead because, I was still alive.”
The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. Moreover, it has never been out of print.
The Prophet ~
“If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.”

The Essential Rumi, by Rumi ~ e.g. ~ “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
The Essential Rumi ~
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
   . 

Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French writer, philosopher and political activist. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
The Second Sex
1984
1984
Delta of Venus
Delta of Venus
A Room of one's own
A Room of One’s Own
War and Peace
Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist (one Bernard Marx). In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number five on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th c.
Brave New World
Beloved is a 1987 novel by the late American writer Toni Morrison. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and, in a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times, it was ranked the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. The work, set after the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Garner was subsequently captured and decided to kill her infant daughter rather than have her taken into slavery.
Beloved
Moby~Dick

The Grapes of Wrath

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