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" My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape. "

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" A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is. "

Derek Walcott

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" I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender. "

" There's a ritualistic element to tragedy that everyone shares; there's something curiously glorious in terms of the most horrible kind of events that happen. "

" My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars. "

" I think young writers ought to be heretical. "

" I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about. "

" Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole. "

" You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it. "

" Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?' "

" This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. "

Derek Walcott

Athens

Spain

" I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. "

" I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.' "

" I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare. "

" Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven. "

Derek Walcott

Dead

Real

" As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body. "

" The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. "

" I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big. "

" That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people. "

" Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. "

" I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them. "

" There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature. "

" If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. "

" What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings. "

" Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand? "

" A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other. "

" When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK. "

" Minor writers think style is all. "

" I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young. "