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1. My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was ’25 Poems.’ It cost 200 dollars.
2. Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean — and that’s wonderful.
3. I don’t believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.
4. I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
5. When I went to college — when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott — I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy’s. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
6. You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
7. Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can’t tolerate poets because — it isn’t that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the ‘perfect’ condition of man — in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
8. The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
9. Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Howl,’ you can hear a cantor between the lines. It’s fully alive, and I think that’s what’s missing in modern poetry. It’s too dry and cerebral.
10. The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
11. I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often.
12. My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
13. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
14. The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.
15. What I described in ‘Another Life’ — about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened — is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
16. I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: ‘Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.’
17. My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
18. What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there’s something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her.
19. I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
20. Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn’t come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I’m not saying that there aren’t prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word ‘miscegenation’ is not something that we think of.