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
There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Poetry has a unique ability to resonate during pivotal moments in life.
Derek Walcott suggests that during crucial and transformative periods, poetry serves as a vital form of expression and solace. It highlights the emotional depth and understanding that art can provide when individuals face challenging circumstances, illustrating how poetry can capture the essence of human experience when words are most needed.
Themes
PoetryCritical TimeExpressionArtHuman Experience
In practice
Example use cases
During a eulogy, one might use this quote to emphasize the power of poetry in expressing grief.
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.
Derek WalcottRead
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.
Derek WalcottRead
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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I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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