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“... I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head, the sucked vowels of a syntax trampled to mud, a division of dictions, one troop black, barefooted, the other in redcoats bright as their sovereign’s blood. One fought for a queen, the other was chained in her service, but both, in bitterness, travelled the same road. Our occupation and the Army of Occupation are born enemies, but what mortar can size the broken stones of the barracks of Brimstone Hill to the gaping brick of Belfast? Have we changed sides to the moustached sergeants and the horsy gentry because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry guarding its borders? No language is neutral; the great oak of English is a murmurous cathedral where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all, helped widen its shadow ...”

“... to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic stance’ (Eavan Boland); ‘I have found Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). ...”

“... Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott has a claim to be considered the great poet of the same experience. They share an acute sense of belonging to more than one culture and hence to none ...”

“... For Derek Walcott This is the place. The chairs are white. The table shines. The person sitting there stares at the waxen glow. The wind moves the air around, repeatedly, As if to clear a space. ‘A space for me,’ he thinks. He’s always been drawn to the weather of leavetaking, Arranging itself so that grief – even the most intimate – Might be read from a distance ...”

“... the literary map: one can expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in ...”

“... The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of the earth ... stepmotherland’, into his chorography of islands: That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the ...”

“... A culture, we all know, is made by its cities,’ Derek Walcott said in his Nobel lecture. Greeks and Romans would have agreed. Although 90 per cent of the ancient population, perhaps more, lived on and worked the land, the thought-world of Mediterranean antiquity was based on the city. It was where all the life that mattered – public life, that is to say, the life of the adult male citizen – took place ...”

“... of the native Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, not to that of the Trinidadian internationalist Derek Walcott, whose learned allusions – ‘as Ugolino did’, ‘that phrase of Traherne’s’, ‘those sheeted blighters, the Stoics’ – must denote for them a poetry of political compromise and impotence. Self-accusing as he is, ...”

“... childhood in the late 1940s and is largely concerned to deflate the reputation of the poet Derek Walcott through a clever exercise in condescension and faint praise. Walcott and Naipaul, both Nobel Prize winners, have long been rivals, in both a literary and a political sense, and clearly bitterness ...”

“... centre cannot. So universities must go on being places of scholarly investigation.’ When Derek Walcott accepted an invitation to become professor of poetry in 2009, he had a trace memory of this experimental, cosmopolitan place, so surprisingly based in Essex. The political disturbances there in 1968 were notorious, but the novelty of the ...”

“... it will fail to reflect the radically ‘meaningless’, indeterminate nature of our experience. Derek Walcott’s poems, informed and invigorated as many them are by a coherent ideology, don’t conform to this negative aesthetic. Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite ...”

“... of the finest poets writing in English, one of a superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky’. This is astonishingly vulgar, and I suppress the author’s name to spare his blushes. But if we reject the notion that poets can be ranked internationally like sprinters or discus-throwers, still we must take note that ...”

“... The crew of distinguished pen-men who helped him in the past – Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, Derek Walcott and others – has for the most part been laid off. It is understandable why, after all these years, Brodsky should wish to tackle the job single-handed: poets are seldom natural collaborators, and praise for his command of English, impressive ...”

“... way, for there has been a good show of opposition already, especially from blacks and Indians. Derek Walcott has been harsh, and Selwyn Cudjoe, a professor of Black Studies, produced in 1988 a long book called V.S. Nai-paul: A Materialist Reading, which describes Naipaul as ‘an apologist for the imperial world order’, as scornful of Caribbean ...”

“... deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves’, as Seamus Heaney said of Derek Walcott. One language has gone, and that means that the one we use now could fade too, slip and fail, as Mrs Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall points out to Mr Rooney when he says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead ...”