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 would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the vibrant and dynamic nature of language as seen in diverse cultures.
Derek Walcott highlights the beauty and liveliness of language, using the example of speech in Barbados to illustrate how language evolves and reflects the rich cultural tapestry through which it flows. He contrasts this with stagnant forms of language that lack the spontaneity and expressiveness found in everyday conversations, suggesting that true linguistic artistry thrives in active and adaptive communication.
Themes
LanguageCultureArtistryCommunicationExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about cultural diversity, this quote can illustrate the unique qualities of language.
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.
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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.
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