‘The Poet from the Periphery’: Derek Walcott, Prestige and Literary Centrality

Abstract

In 1985, seven years before Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sven Birkerts hailed the Caribbean poet as a prodigious talent. Expressing admiration for his literary ‘craftsmanship’, Birkerts concluded a review of Walcott’s work by suggesting that this poet’s evident ability might prompt a reconfiguration of assumptions about dominant literary realms. ‘He is the outsider’, Birkerts asserts, ‘the poet from the periphery, but it may be time to centre the compass at his position and draw the circle again’. 1 Throughout the review, Birkerts uses tropes of ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’ to clarify his opinion of Walcott’s capacity to ‘redraw’ conventional Western assumptions about literary boundaries. However, although he proposes a radical re-centring of the literary ‘compass’ in order to position Walcott as the focal point of a prestigious ‘circle’ of literary excellence, Birkerts’s comments do not challenge the idea of a literary sphere divisible into cultural and economic ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. Instead his analysis clings to the conventions of what Timothy Brennan has called a ‘centre/periphery model’ 2 of world literary space, promoting a perception of the Caribbean region as external to established systems for the production and appreciation of literary works, while portraying Walcott as a figure whose unusual talent might allow him to transcend the perceived limitations of his region and emerge as a new ‘centre’ on a world literary stage. Birkerts’s characterization of Derek Walcott as a ‘central’ poet from a ‘peripheral’ region provides a conceptual starting-point for this article, which considers how conventional perceptions of Walcott’s status as a public literary figure relate to the portrayal of economically marginalized communities and canonical literary traditions in his poetry. Comparing the rhetoric surrounding Walcott’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1992 with the portrayal of ideas about ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in his widely