Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize-Winning Poet, Dies At 87

"Suffer them to come,

entering their needle's eye

knowing whether they live or die,

what others make of life will pass them by

like that far silvery freighter

threading the horizon like a toy;

for once, like them,

you wanted no career

but this sheer light, this clear,

infinite, boring, paradisal sea,

but hoped it would mean something to declare

today, I am your poet, yours,

all this you knew,

but never guessed you'd come

to know there are homecomings without home."

- Derek Walcott, Homecoming: Anse la Raye (1970).

Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize winning poet whose life on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia infused his writing and opened a window for the rest of the world to look in, died Friday. He was 87 years old.

Walcott was born on St. Lucia in 1930. His mother was the headmistress of a Methodist school. His father, who was a painter, died when Derek was 1.

While he regularly described himself as a "Caribbean writer," — regularly rejecting the label "Black writer" — he regularly went to classics, from Homer to Shakespeare to Eliot — for inspiration.

"I have no nation now but the imagination," he wrote in "The Star-Apple Kingdom."

"When I went to college — when I read Shakespeare, or Dickens or Scott I just felt that as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's," he's told NPR.

Walcott spent most of his life on St. Lucia - his family reported that he died in home there - but traveled the world and taught at universities from Trinidad to Boston to England. He wrote prolifically, turning out scores of poems as well as essays and plays.

His play "Dream on Monkey Mountain" won the Obie Award in 1971.

His mother borrowed $200 to help him publish his first collection of poetry when he was still a teenager, and by the time he was in his 20s he had received a Rockefeller fellowship. That was just one of many awards that included a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1981, the Nobel Prize in 1992 and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2011.

In awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said his "style is melodious and sensitive. It seems to issue principally from a prolific inspiration. In his literary works Walcott has laid a course for his own cultural environment, but through them he speaks to each and every one of us."

Many consider "Omeros," which came out in 1991, to have been his masterpiece. It reimagines "The Odyssey" in the Caribbean and is filled with allusions to language and culture, including not just Homer but also Herman Melville and The Beatles.

"I sang the only slaughter

that brought him delight, and that from necessity

of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.

I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea

who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,

who was gentle with ropes, who has one suit alone,

whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one."

Walcott occasionally attracted controversy.

Twice - once in 1982 at Harvard and once in 1996 at Boston University - he was accused of inappropriate sexual contact with students. The charges, which Walcott did not deny, came back to haunt him in 2009 when he was a candidate to become the professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Dozens of teachers at the university received packages with information on the incident, forcing him to withdraw. When it came out that the information had been mailed by one of his competitors - and that person had won the job - she was forced to step down.

His last book, "Morning Paramin" — was published last year. A collaboration with his friend, the painter Peter Doig, the two pair a poem of Walcott's with a painting of Doig's.

"Mr. Doig and Mr. Walcott attain a kind of double-barreled magic as the poet responds to 51 of the artist’s paintings," the Wall Street Journal wrote in its review of the book.

"Both men are worldly travelers, and their visual and literary journey here takes the reader from snowy northern landscapes to steamy jungles and tropical beaches."

He was married and divorced three times and is survived by children and several grandchildren.

Photo by Bert Nieuhuis via Wikimedia Commons