18 pages • 36 minutes read
Derek WalcottA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and fellow Nobelists Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, whose influence Derek Walcott often acknowledged, counseled their generation of post-war poets not to diminish the reach of poetry by confining it to tacky public confessions of the joys, agonies, and ironies of a poet’s private life. The public function of a poet, these poets argued, was not to be a citizen of one but rather the voice of many.
Everything about “The Almond Trees” sets up the all-too-familiar confessional poem, an autobiographical reminiscence on Walcott’s childhood. After all, Choc Bay, a scant few miles from where Walcott grew up, was an integral plot-point in his childhood, growing up in poverty with a heroic single mother, a schoolteacher to the poorest residents of Saint Lucia, and a twin brother and a younger sister—a wealth of experiences that could easily be translated by the alchemy of a poet into a confessional poem.
But Walcott upcycles the stuff of his personal experience to create a statement not about his own identity but rather to explore the implications of Caribbean identity. In juxtaposing the sunbathers and the ancient sea-almond trees thriving along the edges of the beach, Walcott investigates how Caribbean identity, after centuries of occupation by a variety of predatory European countries, must confront the reality of that history, make its peace with the impact of their perception of themselves, and ultimately use that sense of a hybrid cultural identity as the sole way to move forward.
By Derek Walcott
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Adam's Song
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A Far Cry from Africa
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Dream on Monkey Mountain
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Love After Love
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Midsummer XXVII
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Omeros
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Pantomime
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Ruins of a Great House
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Sabbaths, WI
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The Flock
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The Schooner Flight
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To Return To The Trees
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