8/14/2023 0 Comments Muse of history walcott![]() This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. The Muse of History: An Essay Derek Walcott - Authors, Caribbean - 27 pages 0 Reviews Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified What people. First Online: 09 February 2018 215 Accesses Abstract This chapter examines Derek Walcott’s negotiation with the aesthetic tradition and his development of an emancipated poetics or ‘sense’ of the world. In his 1974 essay The Muse of History we find Walcotts length. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The great Caribbean poet and Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, who expired in March last year at the age of 87, had written a provocative essay titled ‘ The Muse of History ’ that was published in. Today Canada marks 150 years of Confederation with lavish firework displays, celebrations and concerts. colonial poet engaged with a view of history that relates to the classical tradition. Robinson Crusoe, I want to argue, is one face of a castaway presence which speaks through the voices of Odysseus, Crusoe and Homer. These presences serve to liberate his imagination from the chains of ‘historical realism’, 4 from the limitations of a voice compromised by the contradictions of his personal situation, and allow him to comprehend and confront those very contradictions. At one level they are wilfully adopted masks in the traditional literary sense, devices to enable the poet to speak in other voices, but at another level they are the consequence of Walcott’s perception of his cultural and historical situation as a West Indian poet: they occupy him. This doesnt mean that the classical view loses sight of the problems of the past (or present), but it nonetheless looks to changes that absorb previous oppressions. The presences I would identify are overlapping and related categories which serve to focus aspects of that obsession. The classical view sees the possibilities of mixture and hybridity that the New World offers. I have suggested elsewhere 2 that those presences – masks, personae, figuras, voices – which the poet has ‘entered’ 3 represent a strategy for dealing with the complexities of the history which has obsessed his imagination. 1 It seems to me that the notion of a poetry inhabited by presences is a useful way to approach Walcott’s own poetry indeed by any definition he is by now one of those ‘great poets’ himself. He received noble prize in literature and is currently working as a professor of poetry at the University of Essex. He has certain mulatto ambivalence towards political and allegiances to Caribbean problems. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth. In time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. ![]() In his essay ‘The Muse of History’ Walcott asserts that the great poets of the New World perceive man as ‘a being inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to his past’. Walcott is one of the most realistic Caribbean writers. Walcott offers a philosophy of history: the method by which we are taught the past, the progress from motive to event, is the same by which we read narrative fiction.
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