Derek Walcott

There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.

For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.

The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.

Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.