Harold McDermott
Temporary Assistant Lecturer
Department of Literatures in English
UWI, Mona

Local Readings of a Global Poet: Caribbean Critical Responses to the Work of Derek Walcott

This paper purports to examine the dynamics of local critical readings of Derek Walcott, a local poet, playwright, painter and critic, who posses an imposing global stature. It seeks to foreground how this critical reception by Caribbean academics and intellectuals forms the basis of a local aesthetic tradition in which Walcott features as both progenitor and subject. It will also explore the ways in which such readings complement and is otherwise counter discursive of the established and vast corpus of metropolitan critical responses. The main focus is to map and define, inter alia, the trajectory of regional critical responses from the early affirmation of Collymore, Simmons, Figueroa and Baugh to the polemical attacks of Brathwaite and Questel, the critical praise and blame of Rohlehr, Brown and Morris to the later cultural and nationalistic reclamation of Ismond.