Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet on one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvellous first book of poems. We had never had news like this before, not about a new book of poetry or about any kind of book, and I still wonder by what means this news could have reached us...It seemed unlikely that there were people out there who were guardians of the life of the mind, were watching out for new movements, and could make a serious judgment about a new book of poetry.
But in the strangest way something like that had happened. The young poet became famous among us. He came from the island of St Lucia. If Trinidad was a dot on the map of the world, it could be said that St Lucia was a dot on that dot. And he had had his book published in Barbados. For island people the sea was a great divider: it led to different landscapes, different kinds of houses, people always slightly racially different, with strange accents. But the young poet and his book had overcome all of that: it was as though, as in a Victorian homily, virtue and dedication had made its way against the odds.
The poet was Derek Walcott. As a poet in the islands, for 15 or 16 or 20 years, until he made a reputation abroad, he had a hard row to hoe; for some time he even had to work for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian. Forty-three years after his first book of poems came out, self-published, he won the Nobel prize for literature.
