Walcott`s poetry

Derek Walcott is a very famous and important poet and professor who had a huge impact on the theme of colonialism and post colonialism. Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. Walcott himself and his family, were part of a minority in his island which was dominated by the catholic culture established during the French colonial rule, this will really have a big impact on the poet`s style and poems. He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems. Studying certain poems written by Walcott, we can really realize how colonialism had a strong influence in his life and the world around him.

The first and most powerful poem for me is « Missing the Sea ». In this poem we are concerned with the lack of something familiar. Because its presence is so missed. The person shows a great deal of confusion in describing his loss, for example the lack of the sound of the sea, in Walcott`s mind, is not really the lack of noise as dark is the lack of light, but an actual sound in itself – an audible silence. In Missing the Sea, the silence takes a very strong part through the way in which Walcott handles its representation and role. This paradoxical effect – used as a central theme throughout the poem – is the most unique and striking feature of Missing the Sea. The first words of the poem – “Something removed” are already very powerful as the poet is talking about something that is not there anymore, and we can first think about the sound of the sea ; always in the first stanza, we read « Till reflection lack substance », we can even interpretate this as his culture being a reflection, just an impression of something heavily missed.
In the following stanza, we see alot of punctuation used that makes the reader ask himself if the poet wants to give us a sad or happy sensation, but,