173 Quotes by Derek Walcott

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

I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.

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

How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.

I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.

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.

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.

I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.