The British Empire and the Postcolonial Caribbean

Walcott: Omeros

In this course, Professor John Lennard (Independent Scholar) explores the poetry of Derek Walcott (1930-2017), with a particular focus on his 1990 epic poem, Omeros. In the first lecture, we think about the history of the British Empire and the Caribbean, before turning in the second to the life and times of Walcott himself. In the third lecture, we explore some of Walcott’s early poems, including ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ and ‘Ruins of a Great House’, while in the fourth lecture we consider Walcott’s dramatic works and work as a painter. In the fifth lecture we explore Walcott’s verse autobiography, Another Life, while in the sixth we look in more detail at ‘The Schooner Flight’, the first and longest poem in Walcott’s 1979 collection, The Star-Apple Kingdom. In the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth lectures, we turn to Walcott’s masterpiece, the epic poem, Omeros, thinking about his debt to Homer and other poets in the Western canon (Dante, Eliot, etc.), his interest in synaesthesia, the myths of Philoctetes and Helen, and the importance of Omeros as a specifically Caribbean piece of literature.

The British Empire and the Postcolonial Caribbean

In this lecture we think about the history of the British Empire and the Caribbean, focusing in particular on: (i) the evolution of the British Empire from its beginnings in the 1530s (with the expansion of the kingdom of Henry VIII into Wales and Ireland) to the present day; (ii) the geographical differences between the various islands in the Caribbean, including the difference between the large islands of the Greater Antilles and the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles, and the difference between the western (Caribbean-facing) and eastern (Atlantic-facing) coasts of the islands in the Lesser Antilles; (iii) the history of population change in the Caribbean, including the disappearance of the indigenous populations of Caribs and Arawaks, the arrival of white Europeans (largely a matter of choice) and black Africans (enslaved and forcibly transported); (iv) the historical differences between individual islands in the Caribbean, including the date at which the island’s founding slave population was imported, and number of times each island changed colonial hands; (v) the extent to which the differences between different islands promoted different kinds of creative expression, including theatre among larger population centres (e.g. Jamaica, Trinidad) and novels and poetry elsewhere (e.g. St Lucia).