The Search for Genesis in the Castaway and Other Poems

Abstract

If In a Green Night Walcott grapples with isolated acts that coalesced into his delineation of the dilemma of his personality, in The Castaway and Other Poems, he attempts to situate the persona of In a Green Night in a landscape. To do this, Walcott creates a mythic history of the Caribbean personality by intertextually appropriating the Crusoe/Friday experience of Robinson Crusoe. This becomes necessary after he has domesticated all his influences and emerges with a desire to seek its style, to write verses as crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, cold as the curled wave, ordinary and as a tumbler of Island water. This desire is evidenced from his youthful vow never to leave his island until he has put it down in words. One of his earliest impulses then, is that of a chronicler, recorder or diarist writing about a new and unexplored world.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 8(4), 118-127, 2011