Derek Walcott’s Odysseys

The first work that Derek Walcott published after Omeros (1990) was his Stage Version of the Odyssey (1993). Omeros itself, though, is an Odyssey-like poem of homecoming. The shape of Omeros, which is framed by books that take place in St. Lucia but gives over its narration in its middle books to an account of its hero’s wanderings, is Odyssean in structure. This article explores the relationship between Omeros, an Odyssey-like poem of homecoming, and Walcott’s version of the Odyssey. It argues that Walcott uses the different nature of each work’s relationship to the Greek intertext to explore aspects of that Greek text that are in tension with each other. While Omeros appears, for the most part, to explicitly ignore the Odyssey, it tells a story of return and homecoming that is very much informed by it. Walcott’s Odyssey, on the other hand, goes back explicitly to the Homeric Odyssey but centers on an Odysseus who is ambivalent about returning home and still driven by the lures of wandering. The two works complement each other and offer a reading of Homer’s poem in which home and away are two halves of the same whole.