Learning outcomes
This course has been designed to:
- Introduce students to, and contextualise, four major Caribbean poets; and
- Explore and begin to understand their variety.
Course sessions
1: Barbadian Articulation
1.1 Introduction: ‘The Empire Writes Back’ and the Caribbean
1.2 Barbadian Articulation: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants
Late and post-colonial writing has some common features but also a vast variety. The Caribbean, moreover, is itself a larger and much more various region than the image tourists and outsiders tend to have would suggest. In setting out, we will sketch some of the historical and geographical contexts of Caribbean poetry before turning to our first major poet, the Barbadian (or Bajan) Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and look at two excerpts from his breakthrough work, the epic trilogy The Arrivants (1967–9). The first, ‘Rights of Passage I.4, All God’s Chillun’, chillingly evokes both the degradation of slavery and its lasting consequences; the second, ‘Islands II.5, Rites’ is perhaps the best cricket poem ever written. Recordings of Brathwaite reading them will be available.
2: Jamaican Articulations 1
2.1 Odd Island Out: Jamaica and Independence
2.2 Edward Baugh and Mervyn Morris as critics
Within the Caribbean Jamaica is distinct, a Greater Antillean island that chafed within the British West Indian Federation from 1958–62, and in leaving it ended that federation, charting its own course amid considerable political violence, especially in the 1970s. But the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies also sheltered and nourished two great poet-critics, Edward Baugh, a notable scholar and annotator of Derek Walcott’s work, and Mervyn Morris, an editor and anthologist as well as an important essayist.
3: Jamaican Articulations 2
3.1 Edward Baugh, It Was the Singing
3.2 Mervyn Morris, Peelin Orange
This third session simply enjoys the variety and differing voices of Baugh’s and Morris’s poems, using Baugh’s Jamaican–Canadian collection, It Was the Singing (2000), which includes his first collection, A Tale from the Rainforest; and Mervyn Morris’s Peelin Orange (2017), a collected poems from Carcanet gathering material from many small-press volumes. Both poets can be exquisitely grammatical, but have also been pioneers in using truly Jamaican voices, speaking patois. For some poems, recordings of Baugh and Morris reading them will be available.
4: St Lucian Articulation 1
4.1 Poet, dramatist, painter, critic: Derek Walcott’s mastery
4.2 Early Poems and Another Life
Though best known as a poet, Derek Walcott was also a major dramatist, a talented amateur painter who illustrated some of his own work, and an occasional critic, including his superb Nobel Lecture ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’. After introducing his range and sketching a mobile yet rooted life, we turn to his earlier work, building a voice and readership, and beginning to bring together the characteristic imagery and syntheses of his distinctive voice and sensibility, and look briefly at his neglected verse autobiography, Another Life.
5: St Lucian Articulation 2
5.1 Walcott’s Breakthrough: ‘The Schooner Flight’
5.2 Walcott’s Masterpiece: Omeros
The final session considers two longer poems by Derek Walcott. His breakthrough to a world readership came with a tremendous eleven-part chamber epic, ‘The Schooner 'Flight’', in The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), a tale in the voice of the mixed-race sailor Shabine; while his single greatest work is the book-length Omeros (1990), mapping Homeric identities from the Greek archipelago onto that of the Lesser Antilles and claiming with it the equality of revered classical and still slighted Caribbean cultures. Some recordings of Walcott reading from Omeros will be available.
Certificate of Participation
At the end of your Winter Festival course(s) a Certificate of Participation will be sent to you electronically.
Non-credit bearing
Courses on our Virtual Winter Festival of Learning are non-credit bearing.