Campbell, James. "Derek Walcott: a Life in Writing." GUARDIAN October 4, 2008.

As a poet, Walcott stands in opposition to many of his contemporaries. Whereas the prevailing tone of modern poetry is idiomatic and conversational, he repeatedly returns to traditional forms, risking exotic flights in language (leaving him open to the charge of being airily rhetorical). Few of the younger Caribbean poets have aligned themselves with the Walcott manner; many prefer forms tailored to live performance - rap, dub, narrative. In the 1970s, Walcott came under attack from the Black Power movement on Trinidad, and later, on St Lucia, a group of performance poets staged a protest against his traditional loyalties - which are always in danger of being misread as "English" or "colonial" allegiance. When his name was mentioned in connection with the vacant post of Poet Laureate a decade ago, he did nothing to discount himself. On a visit to St Lucia in 2004, the New Yorker journalist Hilton Als observed that while the central square in Castries, the main town of St Lucia, was renamed Walcott Square after the Nobel award, local bookshops still failed to stock his books. (To date, Walcott has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including The Castaway, The Star-Apple Kingdom, Another Life and Tiepolo's Hound, illustrated with his own paintings.) In the US, where he taught for many years before retiring recently from Boston University, Walcott was frequently accused of being not black enough. Bruce King, author of the biography Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, observes that while Walcott was "much in demand on the Black Studies circuit", he regarded cultural black separatism as "continuing segregation". For his own part, Walcott dismisses the misconception of a white/black dichotomy in the Caribbean, preferring to stress the ethnic variety. "My generation produced some terrific writers, from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race." Harry Ross, the managing director of Manning Camerata, points out that "Derek was very keen that there not be an all-black cast for The Burial at Thebes. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/poetry.derekwalcott.