Derek Walcott Quotes

Derek Walcott was a celebrated poet and playwright known for his contributions to Caribbean literature and cultural identity. He might be acclaimed for his poetic brilliance.

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the wor... -Derek Walcott

The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.

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This quote personifies poetry, portraying it as having its own destiny or purpose. It suggests that poetry's inherent nature is to cultivate an affectionate and profound connection with the world, indicating that poetry serves as a medium through which one can deeply appreciate and understand existence.

The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.

Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.

I don't want to write poems about the royal weddin... -Derek Walcott

I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.

I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.

Derek Walcott Quotes

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