Crossing Couplets: Making Form the Matter of Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

Abstract

A review of the scholarship on Derek Walcott's poetry indicates that critics pay most of their attention to prominent thematic issues that recur throughout Walcott's forty years of poetic output. 1 These themes include exchanges between Europe and the Caribbean, the power inherent in language and naming, the artist as exile and voice of a people, the role of culture in contemporary life, and the place of history in Caribbean writing and society. 2 But Walcott has also always been a poet highly conscious of form, of the British literary tradition, and of his own role in reshaping form and tradition to express forcefully his position as a poet writing simultaneously from the edges of colonial society, and from one of the diverse and dynamic centers of postcolonialism. 3 In his book-length poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000),Walcott explicitly turns to the couplet as a matter of form and content, as a force that helps him cross the boundaries that might separate his continuing engagement with historical and social themes from his dedication to literary and artistic traditions. Walcott, that is, revives, and revises, the couplet as a form that mediates his commitment to art as an expression of social and historical conditions, and of individual desires, beliefs, and experiences. In Tiepolo's Hound form does not act to preserve literary or cultural tradition. Instead Walcott returns to the couplet, and transforms it, as a way to invest traditional literary form with a sensibility of crossing and fluidity that characterizes the Caribbean. Walcott's particular construction of the couplet in this poem, and his related exploitation of rhyme, present new possibilities in postcolonial aesthetics and expand the boundaries of postcolonial writing.