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INTERVIEWER
You once described yourself at nineteen as “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and said that as a young writer you viewed yourself as legitimately prolonging “the mighty line” of Marlowe and Milton. Will you talk about that sense of yourself?
WALCOTT
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style. The highest achievement of style is rhetoric, as it is in speech and performance. It isn’t a modest society. A performer in the Caribbean has to perform with the right flourish. A Calypsonian performer is equivalent to a bullfighter in the ring. He has to come over. He can write the wittiest Calypso, but if he’s going to deliver it, he has to deliver it well, and he has to hit the audience with whatever technique he has.
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