72 pages • 2-hour read
Omeros
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Background
Authorial Context: Derek Walcott and Post-Colonialism
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and Nobel Laureate whose work explores themes of identity, colonialism, and cultural hybridity. Born in Castries, Saint Lucia, into a family of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage, Walcott grew up immersed in both Caribbean and European traditions. He published his first poem at 14 and released his first collection, 25 Poems, at 18.
In his career, Walcott blended classical literary forms with Caribbean content. Walcott’s poetry, including acclaimed collections like In a Green Night (1962) and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), reflects his deep engagement with language, landscape, and post-colonial identity. In addition to poetry, Walcott wrote over 30 plays and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. His achievements earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Celebrated for his lush, lyrical style and intellectual depth, Walcott remains a central figure in world literature, giving voice to the complexities of Caribbean identity and the legacy of colonialism.
Walcott was deeply influenced by Western literature—particularly the works of Homer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton—yet he also sought to challenge and adapt these influences to articulate the complexities of Caribbean identity. This duality places Walcott at the center of post-colonial discourse. As a post-colonial writer, Walcott was concerned with the legacy of colonialism and the struggle for cultural identity in former colonies, as well as the psychological effects of colonization, such as an internalized sense of inferiority and fractured self-perception. His poetry and his plays confront the erasure of Indigenous and African traditions by European colonial powers, while drawing upon and transforming the literary traditions of those same powers.
Omeros is loosely modeled on Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Walcott’s epic of the Caribbean, set primarily in Saint Lucia, reimagines Homeric figures such as Achilles, Hector, and Helen as fishermen and villagers, making local struggles of love, pride, and economic survival into feats of heroism. In doing so, Walcott collapses the distinction between the classical and the post-colonial, asserting the Caribbean as a site worthy of epic storytelling.
Characters, who are descendants of enslaved people and their colonizers, try to make sense of a past that has been imposed on them. Rather than seeking to return to a lost, pre-colonial authenticity, Walcott embraces hybridity: His characters carry multiple histories, languages, and traditions. This hybridity becomes a form of resistance and renewal, challenging colonial narratives that seek to marginalize Caribbean culture. Moreover, Omeros critiques the tourist industry and neocolonial economic structures. Through the eyes of his characters, Walcott shows how global capitalism continues the dynamics of colonialism under a different guise.
Some critics have accused Walcott of being too enamored of European forms or insufficiently radical in his critique of colonialism. However, this critique often ignores Walcott’s aim to inhabit and transform the Western canon. By writing an epic of the Caribbean, Walcott asserts the right of formerly colonized peoples to make this Homeric form their own.
Literary Context: Homer in Literature
As cultural artifacts, the ancient Greek poet Homer’s epics The Iliad and The Odyssey have served as educational and moral models that have taught language, ethics, and cultural values for centuries. Each era interprets Homer through its own lens. In the Modern and Postmodern literary periods, authors James Joyce and Derek Walcott have radically reimagined his work to explore identity, history, and the role of narrative in shaping human experience.
Homer is one of the most influential figures in Western literature. Traditionally credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey, he is hailed as a foundational figure in the Western literary canon. His epics, passed down orally before being written down around the eighth century BCE, are cornerstones of ancient Greek culture and have shaped countless literary traditions over the past two millennia. Despite his towering legacy, Homer’s identity remains shrouded in mystery. Scholars debate whether Homer was a single historical individual, a symbolic name for a group of poets, or even a fictional construct representing a collective oral tradition. The Iliad and The Odyssey recount heroic narratives set during and after the Trojan War. The Iliad focuses on the wrath of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, and the tragic consequences of pride and vengeance; The Odyssey follows the long, perilous journey of Odysseus as he attempts to return home after the war.
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a sprawling Modernist reinterpretation of The Odyssey as a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish clerk in early-20th-century Dublin, Ireland. The novel’s structure mirrors Homer’s epic: Each chapter corresponds loosely to episodes from The Odyssey, though Joyce infuses them with contemporary themes and experimental narrative techniques. Joyce’s transformation of Homer’s epic into the everyday world of early-20th-century Dublin elevates ordinary life to the level of myth, suggesting that epic meaning can be found in the daily experiences of modern individuals.
Walcott undertakes a different kind of Homeric engagement in his epic poem Omeros. Drawing from both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the poem explores themes of colonization, slavery, displacement, and cultural hybridity, using the epic form to give voice to histories often silenced by empire. Walcott’s use of Homer is both literary and political. By placing Caribbean characters into a Homeric framework, he asserts the value and dignity of their stories, suggesting that the struggles of post-colonial peoples are no less epic than those of ancient warriors. At the same time, Omeros critiques the legacy of Western literary dominance, showing how classical forms can be reworked to express non-Western experiences. Walcott, like Joyce, uses Homer to explore identity, but he does so from the perspective of cultural fracture and recovery, seeking to piece together a coherent self from the broken shards of colonial history.
Literary Context: Epic Poetry
Walcott adopts the epic form for his work, transforming an ancient genre typically concerned with the myths of a glorious and forever-eclipsed past and the world-altering behaviors of gods and near-divine heroes into a paean to the everyday lives of ordinary people on the island of Saint Lucia.
Epic poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature, characterized by lengthy narratives, elevated language, and themes of heroism, war, journey, and the fate of nations. Traditionally rooted in oral storytelling, epic poems reflect the values, myths, and histories of the societies that produced them.
The earliest known epic is The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed in Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE. Written in Akkadian on clay tablets, it recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh, a legendary king who seeks immortality after the death of his friend Enkidu. The poem blends myth, history, and moral reflection, setting the pattern for later epics by focusing on a heroic figure and the human confrontation with mortality and meaning.
In ancient Greece, the epics attributed to Homer—The Iliad and The Odyssey—laid the foundation for Western literature. Composed around the eighth century BCE, these works introduced formal conventions like in medias res openings (or beginning narration in the middle of the plot and then flashing back to previous events), invocation of the muse, epic similes, and extended speeches. More importantly, Homer’s work explores ancient Greek identity, emphasizing honor, fate, and divine intervention.
The Roman poet Virgil continued the epic tradition with the Aeneid (first century BCE). Commissioned by Emperor Augustus, it tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero who journeys to Italy to found Rome. Modeled on Homer’s epics, the Aeneid served a political purpose: to legitimize Roman imperial destiny and link Rome to the heroic past of Troy. Virgil’s blend of personal emotion, political ideology, and literary refinement made the Aeneid a central text of Western education for centuries.
During the Middle Ages, works like The Song of Roland (France) and Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon England) emphasized loyalty, martial prowess, and the defense of faith. Beowulf, composed between the eighth and 11th centuries, tells of a hero who slays monsters and eventually dies in battle against a dragon. Similarly, The Song of Roland (c. 1100) recounts the heroic death of Charlemagne’s knight Roland, framing it as a noble sacrifice for God and king. Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1308-1320), comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, combines classical form with Christian theology. The poem follows Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, using epic conventions to elevate personal spiritual transformation to the level of universal drama.
The Renaissance saw a revival of classical forms. Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) combine chivalric romance and epic grandeur. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) remains a monumental retelling of the biblical story of Genesis in elevated blank verse. Milton drew on Homer and Virgil but infused his epic with Puritan theology and political allegory, presenting Satan as a complex, even tragic figure and emphasizing themes of free will, obedience, and redemption.
In the modern era, the epic form was reimagined by writers seeking to explore new kinds of heroism and identity. The 20th century saw a fragmentation of the heroic archetype typical of classical epics. Instead, many authors used epic frameworks to examine contemporary life. Walcott’s Omeros draws on Homeric structures to tell the story of post-colonial Saint Lucia. The epic transforms fishermen and villagers into Homeric heroes, weaving together history, mythology, and post-colonial critique. Walcott retains the musicality and ambition of the classical epic while challenging its Eurocentric assumptions, using the form to explore displacement, identity, and the scars of empire.
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