Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer

Abstract

Abstract This book puts Derek Walcott’s Omeros in conversation with Homer, especially the Odyssey, to understand how reading the poems against each other changes our understanding of both. By locating the poems in a zone of vibrant and unexpected encounter, it reveals how they are mutually informing texts, each made richer in the presence of the other. The book follows two interwoven thematic threads. The first focuses on the poems’ landscapes and seascapes, the characters who populate them and the ways in which Omeros reworks the Odyssey’s affective geography. Walcott reverses the Odyssey’s Ithacan trajectory from sea to land and finds a viable homecoming only at sea. In contrast to the Odyssey’s representation of the sea as lethal and its valorization of life on land, Omeros, which bears witness to the painful histories carried in the St. Lucian terrain, relocates the site of homecoming to the Caribbean Sea, a space which accommodates diasporic histories and the imagining of fluid forms of emplacement. The book’s second interpretive thread focuses on the “Poet,” Walcott’s authorial persona, as it follows his journey in and out of the poem and his positioning of himself as a “tribal poet” like Homer. The Poet’s ability to serve as the vessel of his people’s histories and give voice to their landscapes rests on his transformation into—and self-perception as—Homer’s contemporary and equal. Central to the project of Omeros is thus an account of the Poet’s shift from a diachronic to a synchronic relationship with Homer: over the course of the poem the Poet and Homer come to occupy the same temporality and creative space.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.