“Politics are liable to fuse into aesthetics in Walcott’s conversation. His literary theory could be boiled down to a single principle: that the artist must make maximum use of the resources of tradition. ‘If you asked a young Caribbean painter, ‘Why are you painting like Turner? He was an Englishman,’ he would tell you fuck off. As writers we’re not as belligerent about this as we should be. What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it’s better than anybody else’s because it’s yours. It’s extremely provincial, and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be: ‘Don’t read Shakespeare because he was white.”

“His own experience in universities allowed him to witness ‘the terrible devastation to young minds caused by people who are poets themselves, who believe there are all sorts of horrible things about technique’. As a teacher, Walcott insisted on ‘the importance of the shape that you make out of a poem. That makes me a dinosaur, an old fogey. And why should I care? I always cite something that Pasternak said: ‘Great poets have no time to be original.” Imitation, he believes, ‘is not only a form of flattery, but is in a way creation. No two things are going to be alike. Whatever you bring to the craft is going to be individualistic.’ Bruce King suggests that, because of his education, Walcott was raised “in the Arnoldian world, not the Third World”. Walcott agrees, though it is Matthew Arnold ‘with a percussive beat’.”

–From an interview with Derek Walcott by James Campbell, “You promised me poems”, care of The Guardian, Oct. 04. 2008