Quotes from Derek Walcott

Para atender mejor el oficio del verso/arrodíllate

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe . . . I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

To change your language you must change your life.

I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.

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.

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

I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.

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

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.

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.

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.

My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.

What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there's something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her.

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

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

I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.

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.

I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

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

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 feel blessed that I was gifted.

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.