Collected Poems 1948-1984 - Hardcover

Walcott, Derek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126267 ISBN 13: 9780374126261

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986

Synopsis

This retrospective collection includes most of the poems from each of the poet's previous books, as selected by the poet, and the complete text of "Another Life," a long narrative poem

About this title

Review:

Spanning more than a 30-year poetic career, Collected Poems 1948-1984 is an historic and monumental work collecting, as it does, 10 or so books by the foremost Caribbean poet writing in English, Derek Walcott. Born in 1930 in St Lucia in what was then the old British West Indies where he received a colonial education, Walcott showed an early, precocious talent for appropriating and transforming the works of the English canon to reflect his own troubled and morose diasporic experiences.

From his first book, In a Green Night to the justly celebrated 1979 work, The Star-Apple Kingdom, Walcott's rejection of both a need for revenge and a servile posturing led him to eschew the perhaps more obvious political path of black orality for a more formal, literary diction, but one fine-tuned and honed by his own Caribbean idioms. The result, rather than mimicry, or exorcism, has been to enrich the possibilities of English language and literature. While accused of working with a conservative, Eurocentric aesthetics, the richness of Walcott's texture and his systematic refusal of stylistic boundaries has produced a complex, historically astute poetics, capable of dealing with the denials, contradictions, ideologies and blindnesses of both the Old and New Worlds. In Collected Poems 1948-1984 that vision can be seen for the first time in its full complexity. --David Marriott

Review:

"One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book."--Seamus Heaney, "The Boston Globe"

"It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who--without ever betraying his native sources--has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature."--Peter Balakian, "Poetry"

One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book. "Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe"

It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who--without ever betraying his native sources--has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature. "Peter Balakian, Poetry""

One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book. Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe

It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who--without ever betraying his native sources--has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature. Peter Balakian, Poetry

"

-One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book.- --Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe

-It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who--without ever betraying his native sources--has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature.- --Peter Balakian, Poetry

"One of the most instructive experiences afforded by this collected edition is the spectacle of a poet moving with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . This is a triumphant book." --Seamus Heaney, The Boston Globe

"It is difficult to think of a poet in our century who--without ever betraying his native sources--has so organically assimilated the evolution of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, who has absorbed the Classical and Judeo-Christian past, and who has mined the history of Western painting as Walcott has. Throughout his entire body of work he has managed to hold in balance his passionate moral concerns with the ideal of art. By his fifty-fifth year Derek Walcott has made his culture, history, and sociology into a myth for our age and into an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature." --Peter Balakian, Poetry

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0374126267
• ISBN 13: 9780374126261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1