Creole Baroque in Derek Walcott's Archipelagic Imagery
Résumé
Derek Walcott is a superficial poet. Perhaps that is because he is also a painter, for painters deal with nothing but surfaces. That is especially true of water-colour painters, who do not even have the minimal, crusty thickness of oil paint. All their art must be contained in the minute film that sips in the water-colour at the surface of a sheet of paper. You can rework an oil on canvas again and again, even wipe it off and start over again on the same surface. But you cannot do so with watercolour. You take another piece of paper and make another painting, write another poem, another stanza, another chapter. In the same way, Derek Walcott's poetry has this superficial horizontality and moves on. It runs on. "Ecriture." "Trace," etc. It is predominantly cursive. Not discursive, in the sense that most of the time it takes care to steer clear of ideologies, all ideologies, including the romantic, although he has defined himself as being "by nature a romantic."