I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Derek WalcottRead
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of auditory experience in poetry, highlighting how hearing it performed brings excitement and depth to the words.
Derek Walcott's quote illustrates the unique interaction between the reader and poetry, where reading silently is different from experiencing it aloud. The quote points out that poetry is not just about the words on a page; it is about the auditory aspect—the melody and performance by the poet—that enriches the experience, making it more captivating and impactful.
Themes
PoetryMelodyReadingExperiencePerformance
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a poetry reading event to emphasize the importance of performance.
More from Derek Walcott
All quotes →Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
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A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
Derek WalcottRead
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
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When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Derek WalcottRead
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
Derek WalcottRead
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