Abstract

Terada describes this approach as one of the most ancient and critical oppositions in Western culture. She considers the ways in which Walcott's poetry, written from this ambiguous vantage point, illuminates the relationship of American poetry to Old World culture, as well as the ways in which American languages relate to one another and to the material world. While mimetic theories of art hold that culture is a representation of something original (nature), Walcott's does not. Thus, he must re-examine the relationship between culture and nature. Beginning broadly with Walcott's mental map of the world, Terada demonstrates how his "geographic imagination" is played out in Omeros. She goes on to explore Walcott's unusual openness to his poetic precursors, among them Homer, Beaudelaire, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Lowell, which for some critics is as problematic as his adoption of the creoles and dialects of the Caribbean.