The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest

Book excerpt: This first extended study of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) defines the book as the culmination of the poetry and poetic of the Caribbean writer and Nobel Prize winner. In this long poem, Walcott achieves three goals pursued throughout his career: to develop an original Caribbean aesthetic; to meld the modes of poetry and prose; and to formulate the Bildung of the island-artist in terms of an ‘autobiographical’ narrative. The analysis provides an aesthetic and cultural evaluation of the poem, in terms both of the Western poetic tradition to which it refers through its rich intertextuality and of its significance as a postcolonial milestone. The commentary locates Walcott in an aesthetic tradition running from Emerson through the American Pragmatists to modernist poets; describes his experimental use of certain central narrative strategies in his semi-autobiographical long poems, which is compared to those of another, openly admired, bilingual writer, Vladimir Nabokov; explores Walcott’s revision of the epic mode and of the genre of autobiography; delineates his unfolding of a post-Romantic internalization of the poet’s Arthurian quest; and discusses his complex treatment of the multi-layered metaphor of light as major evidence of the maturity of his style and poetic, with their conscious cross-fertilization between the literary cultures of Europe and the Caribbean. An appendix to this study contains the transcriptions of various ‘Walcott events’ that took place in Italy in the summers of 2000 and 2001, including a creative writing seminar, a press conference, and readings. This extensive material opens a window onto Walcott’s gifts as a teacher, to his stringent yet passionate commitment to the art of poetry, and to the ways in which he and his students grapple with the challenges of literary translation.