Derek Wolcott, Poet of the Caribbean

The great poet of the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, passed away at home on his native island of St. Lucia on March 17. It is hard to summarize his achievement. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, most notably Omeros (1990), which transplants the Trojan War to the Caribbean fishing world and helped deliver him the Nobel Prize in 1992. He wrote dozens of plays, too, often directing them himself, and he composed important essays about colonialism and identity before these became trendy subjects. He founded theater companies and taught poetry at Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and, for many years, Boston University.