POET WALCOTT OF BU WINS NOBEL PRIZE

Author: By Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 9, 1992
Page: 1
Section: METRO

Walcott, 62, said he was honored and surprised by the news. "When you say Nobel laureate, suddenly I realize that's who I am. It's hard to associate me with that sound."

The prolific Walcott, who was born on the West Indian island of St. Lucia, is known for a body of work that blends Caribbean, English and African traditions. The academy cited him for "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural achievement."

The prize, he said, brings "great honor to my origins." Walcott said he hoped the award would bring greater attention to Caribbean writers and generate "a wider, more benign consideration of what the Caribbean is."

In making its announcement, the academy wrote: "He has both African and European blood in his veins. In him West Indian culture has found its great poet."

Walcott's "Omeros," published in 1990, is a sweeping 64-chapter epic that intertwines Homeric legend, classics, folklore and history.

The Nobel prize was announced just three days before the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the western hemisphere, and scholars said yesterday that the timing is significant. "If the Nobel committee was going to give him the prize, this was the year to do it. It was a brilliant decision," said A. James Arnold, founding director of the University of Virginia's New World Studies program.

"His work straddles his extreme general literacy and his being in touch with the people of the islands of St. Lucia and Trinidad, where he lived for so long," said poet and translator Richard Wilbur in a telephone interview yesterday. "He is one of the best poets writing in English."

"There is an accommodation between older resources of the English language and extremely vernacular tradition that he makes work well together. It's fascinating," said Paul Breslin, an English professor at Northwestern University who is writing a book about Walcott.

While poets and academics issued verbal bouquets yesterday, Walcott himself said he had hoped poets Seamus Heaney and fellow West Indian V.S. Naipaul might win this year's Nobel. Walcott has befriended many poets, including Heaney and Soviet-born Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize in 1987.

Novelist Leslie Epstein, director of the creative writing program at Boston University, where Walcott teaches, said she was struck by the intellectual and emotional rapport shared by the triumvirate of poets. "I remember one evening when he and Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney were together," she said. "Those three men sat there quoting Homer and Pound and Eliot and other Greek poets for hours on end."

Walcott first discovered poetry as a young boy growing up in St. Lucia, then a British dependency and now an independent member of the Commonwealth. Both of his parents were educators who immersed themselves in the arts. His father died when the poet and his twin brother, Roderick, were quite young, and his mother, an amateur actress, introduced the twins to literature. He remembers her reciting Shakespeare. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to write something to please her, something good,' " Walcott said yesterday.

He published his first poems at 18, and his pen has since produced a prolific output of verse that explores both the isolation of the artist and regional identity. It was at home in the West Indies that he developed his early-morning work schedule, which begins at 6 and lasts until about noon. The sunrise inspires him. "It's very melodramatic. You're a writer, and the sun is coming up."

Walcott attended Jose Quintero's acting school in New York in 1958, and after returning to the Caribbean, he founded his own theater company, the Trinidad Theater Workshop. Since then, he has worked to establish an indigenous theater in the West Indies.

Walcott won the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1981. He joined the BU faculty as a professor of poetry and playwriting that year.

The next year he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, but his term ended in a cloud of controversy. A freshman student complained that he had sexually harassed her and given her a C when she resisted. At the time, Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky said he would be "reluctant" to reappoint Walcott, who returned to BU.

George White, president of the O'Neill Center, said Walcott maintains a sharp sense of humor despite difficulties in his life. The poet is currently separated from his third wife. "Derek has gone through a lot," White said. ''He's just been beleaguered by life. He went through a time when he felt he wasn't fully recognized, and I think that's true. It's about time he got the prize."

Walcott said yesterday that his plays have not been widely performed in Boston because dramas by people of color are ghettoized in this country. "We have all sorts of ways to pigeonhole people here -- no, we're crow-holed," he said, referring to the so-called Jim Crow laws that discriminated against people of color after slavery was abolished.

He also said he hoped the award would bring attention to his homeland. ''It's not a resort," he said, praising the "superb spirituality" of ordinary people in his native land.

The poet yesterday also displayed the sharp wit his colleagues say is one of his finest traits. The publicity made him feel like a "third-rate congressman," he said, adding, "I feel like I'm having a hit movie, 'The Exorcist IV.' "

But he also mentioned Hollywood in a different context, saying he'd like one day to make a film about the Caribbean. He's working on a new draft of his musical "Steel," about the social and political forces behind the development of the steel drum in the West Indies. The play received a workshop production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge last year.

ART artistic director Robert Brustein applauded the poet yesterday. "He clearly absorbs and works out of West Indian tradition and has all that color and life and music," he said. "At the same time, he hasn't broken with the masterpieces of world literature. That is true multiculturalism, the capacity to combine cultures and integrate them."

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