These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The critical relevance of the notion of history to Walcotts creative enterprise is fundamentally captured in the epitaph to his essay. Robinson Crusoe, I want to argue, is one face of a castaway presence which speaks through the voices of Odysseus, Crusoe and Homer. Walcott too is a painter and very much familiar with the problems in developing his skills in painting. 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. In his critical essay The Muse of History Walcott admits having mimicked the work of predecessors to avoid the frequent problem of young inexperienced writers and artists. 56 Derek Walcott which may resist, but also insinuates by resistance, the. 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. One which accepts subconsciously a condition of being praised or corrected. The presences I would identify are overlapping and related categories which serve to focus aspects of that obsession.

Why does Walcott argue that there is no forgiveness or pardon to offer the past How can one give.

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. What is a summary of 'The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory' by Derek Walcott Muse Of history. 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. 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’.

Muse of history walcott