La bibliothèque antique de l’œuvre poétique de Derek Walcott avant Omeros

Abstract

Derek Walcott’s work has often been studied through the lens of the author’s interaction with the classical intertexts that are consistently woven into his writing. Most scholarship has, however, focused on Omeros, sometimes to the detriment of the preceding phase of Walcott’s work. I analyze instead Walcott’s relationship to classical texts in his poetic works before Omeros through the concept of the “library”, which paves the way to an analysis both of the texts with which Walcott engages, and of the highly personal, sometimes disconcerting and often paradoxical dimension of his relationship to this corpus. What symbolic status do these references carry for a Caribbean poet? What use does Walcott make of Antiquity, beyond a strictly intertextual interaction, and what do these practices reveal about his relation to the canonical European tradition that Walcott has continuously commented in his poetry?