In his recent review of Derek Walcott’s poetry, John McAuliffe writes that the poet’s range went “from Marley to Pryor and from Gauguin to Yeats.” Don’t miss this eloquent review. Here are excerpts with a link to the full piece below:

In his account of the poets’ discussions in Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt writes of Walcott that he “chose to identify himself with all the resources of his language. After all, [he said,] English wasn’t his ‘second language. It was my language. I never felt it belonged to anybody else, I never felt that I was really borrowing it.’ ”

Despite its unevenness, 600-plus pages of The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (Faber, £30) will remind readers of the justice of Walcott’s claim. The opening pages testify to his precociously stylish fluency and his early discovery of a subject he has yet to exhaust, the situation of a…