Commonwealth Essays and Studies

25.2 | 2003
Forging Heritage

Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Old Metaphors: The

Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry
Robert Hamner

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/11848
DOI: 10.4000/1249r
ISSN: 2534-6695

Publisher
SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)

Printed version
Date of publication: April 1, 2003
Number of pages: 113-115
ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic reference
Robert Hamner, “Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Old Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s
Poetry”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 25.2 | 2003, Online since 07 April 2022, connection
on 10 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/11848 ; DOI: https://doi.org/
10.4000/1249r

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 Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Old Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walco... 1

Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Old

Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of
Derek Walcott’s Poetry
Robert Hamner

REFERENCES
Patricia Ismond. Abandoning Old Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry.
Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. 309 p.

1 Shakespeare’s genius is not original in story lines or in devices never seen before. He is
creative in what he does with recognizable characters, inventive in what he does to
make familiar ideas and techniques obtain fresh life. Regarding Ben Jonson’s literary
borrowings, John Dryden observed in ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, Jonson ‘invades
authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him’.
Nevertheless, these obvious precedents have rarely discouraged contemporary critics
of Derek Walcott’s work from dwelling on the fact that his poetry and plays derive
much in content and style from the storehouse of Western literature. On the other
hand, Walcott’s immunity from any ‘anxiety of influence’ has prompted a growing
number of critics to recognize the degree to which he engages in a creolization process
whereby his adaptations acquire new life and original perspective.
2 Following Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (1992) by Rei Terada, Patricia
Ismond’s Abandoning Old Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry
continues the task of analyzing the means by which Walcott transforms the matter he
assimilates. It fact at some point, such unrepentant assimilation might well be termed
appropriation (p. 106). Ismond’s initial thesis is that Walcott’s allusive metier is highly
complex: ‘he pursues an alternative, liberating order of values and meanings, generated
from the different time and place of his Caribbean, New World ground’ (p. 2). Her study
is confined to his earlier poetry from 1948 through Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), the

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period before Walcott began spending the major portion of each year teaching in the
United States. Ismond believes that even in his juvenilia there are vestiges of counter
discourse that later evolve into elements of characteristically West Indian expression.
Naming and metaphorical expression are singled out for special attention because they
constitute the imaginative designations of physical and metaphysical reality.
3 Chapter one is an honest appraisal of apprenticeship poems that are overtly dependent
on European sources: particularly the metaphysicals and moderns from Donne to Eliot,
Dylan Thomas and Joyce. Covering the verse through In a Green Night (1962), the second
chapter delves into Walcott’s confrontation with the inevitable themes of identity and
historical amnesia in the wake of colonial diaspora. Chapter three covers Walcott’s
years of residence in Trinidad (1959-77), primarily the poetry of The Castaway (1965)
and The Gulf (1969). Qualities that prompt Joseph Brodsky to label Walcott a
‘metaphysical realist’, lead Ismond to tout the ‘earthiness of idiom, directness and
economy with which [he] delivers... visionary ideas’ (p. 95). During this period, the
figure of a New World Crusoe replaces the earlier image of Stephen Dedalus to
represent Walcott’s persona; and both the positives and negatives of the indigenous
landscape give new meaning to older, given perceptions.
4 In chapter four, Ismond concentrates on two essays, ‘What the Twilight Says’ (the
preface to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 1970), and ‘The Muse of History’
(1974) in order to discuss Walcott’s arguments for the appropriation of canonical
sources and against racially based aesthetics and politics. The fifth chapter is devoted
to Walcott’s first major extended narrative masterpiece, the autobiographical Another
Life (1973). In the 84 pages of this chapter, Ismond pursues Walcott’s dependence on
personal experience to ‘recover the immanence of the metaphoric/mythic in the
ordinary’. Departing from his European models, he offers the ‘indigenous paradigm of a
people’s bid for creativity and identity in emergence from an oppressive past’ (pp.
145-146). The concluding chapter shifts to the more outwardly focused social and
political concerns of Sea Grapes (1976) and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979). From these
volumes, ‘The Schooner Flight’ and the title poem ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’ are singled
out – the former for the sustained lyrical and narrative blend of its creole voice (p. 229),
the latter due to its ‘sustained focus on political struggle as an important instrument of
change in the region’ (p. 249).
5 Recognizing that Walcott’s development has been incremental rather than systematic,
Ismond illustrates a significant theme or direction in Walcott’s development then
continues to reiterate connections with subsequent variations in later poems. Ismond’s
explications are cogent, her points well taken. One of her explications of a passage from
Another Life illustrates the process by which Walcott turns a natural object into levels of
indigenous meaning.
[T]hat child who puts the shell’s howl to his ear, hears nothing, hears everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls of all the races that crossed the water, the
howls of grandfathers drowned in that intricately swivelled Babel
6 As Ismond observes, herein are the middle passage, the loss of ancestry, the
replacement of recorded history with personal amnesia, the babble of forgotten
languages superimposed on Babylonian exile. The physical appearance of the shell’s
architecture, as well as its aural effect on the ear embody essential metaphysical
implications. Thus ‘[a]nother fresh metaphor has been generated from the naturalistic
setting in a thought process that anticipates the ‘sea is history’ conceit’ (pp. 219-20).

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7 The text of Abandoning Old Metaphors is well documented and edited, only two
mechanical errors; and only a pedant would cavil at the occasionally idiomatic nominal
suffix – ‘upliftment’, ‘at-onement’, ‘outsiderness’, ‘uprootment’. Ismond’s use of the
term ‘phase’ never suggests merely a temporal passage out of which a young poet must
grow en route to maturity. It does delineate nicely the cultural context of St Lucia,
Jamaica and Trinidad that continues to inform everything Walcott writes. No artist
creates in a void, none lifts himself by his own boot straps, no one ever does or even
needs to stand literally on his own. As T. S. Eliot points out in ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, criticism has a tendency to overrate originality. In the beginning on
the local scene, the young Walcott had at best only the poetic legacy of Jamaicans Tom
Redcam (Tom MacDermot) and George Campbell. Formal education and personal
imagination expanded his slate to include European history and the rest of the world.
He moved on to reside in New York and Boston, continually adapting the canonical, but
he never loses the tongue and palate of his West Indian origins.
8 Much of what Ismond argues is applicable to Walcott’s plays as well as the verse. She
mentions Ti-Jean and His Brothers, and Dream on Monkey Mountain in passing, but
considering the fact that drama is more immediately accessible to communal
audiences, we may hope that someone undertakes a similar study of Walcott’s earlier
works for the stage.

AUTHORS
ROBERT HAMNER

Hardin-Simmons University

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 25.2 | 2003