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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

Derek Walcott

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Derek Walcott
Age: 87 †
Born: 1930
Born: January 23
Died: 2017
Died: March 17
Author
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Derek Alton Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott
Pentameter
Ditch
Firsts
First
Thing

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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
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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.
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For every poet it is always morning in the world history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
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The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
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There's always more to see.
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
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Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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