Chapter 2 - Connections and separations: from 25 Poems to The Gulf

Summary

Walcott assented readily when David Montenegro observed that, although there had been ‘many changes’ in his work, there had been no development as such, since ‘a maturity in the voice’ had been present even in ‘the earliest poems’ (CDW, 147). Walcott said that he had been struck by how, ‘tonally,’ he seemed to have been always ‘the same person talking’, the same poet that he had been at age eighteen (CDW, 148). Some qualification is necessary. In his earliest poems as a whole – from the three privately published books, beginning with 25 Poems, published when he was eighteen, and up to his first commercially published collection, In A Green Night: Poems 1948–1962 (1962) – he is still feeling for a voice, for his stylistic signature.

In the three earliest books, many of the poems, however accomplished, remain primarily exercises after the manner of the poets, notably the English poets of the thirties, to whom he was going to school at the time. Even in this respect, though, he was signalling crucial new directions for West Indian poetry, wrenching it out of a ‘soft’ Romantic–Victorian–Edwardian tradition and into a more intellectually demanding modernity. If there is not yet full maturity, there is compelling precociousness, both in the imitation of modern poetic styles and in the general air of world-knowingness and angst; and there are enough memorable figures and flashes of wit to go beyond mere promise.