The great poet of the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, passed away at home on his native island of St. Lucia on March 17. It is hard to summarize his achievement. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, most notably Omeros (1990), which transplants the Trojan War to the Caribbean fishing world and helped deliver him the Nobel Prize in 1992. He wrote dozens of plays, too, often directing them himself, and he composed important essays about colonialism and identity before these became trendy subjects. He founded theater companies and taught poetry at Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and, for many years, Boston University.
I attended his classes at BU for a semester in 2001. A few months before, he had given a poetry reading at a college in Monterey, California, and I dared to introduce myself afterward. We talked for a few minutes and discovered we shared some contrarian views on the state of American poetry. He suggested I sit in on his classes back east, and I immediately took up the invitation. And so I found myself commuting from California to the Charles River that year, excited to savor the wisdom of a distinguished master.
The first day of class was a surprise. I found my way across campus to the room listed in the schedule, expecting a studious lecture hall with fifty students who shared my eagerness. But the room turned out to be a tiny, nondescript space with only nine students waiting inside. Professor Walcott ambled in without ceremony, set down his papers, smiled, and began reading a poem by Edward Thomas.