'Omeros', Derek Walcott and the contemporary epic poem

This article analyzes Derek Walcott's poem "Omeros" through its structure, characters, and themes. It shows their connection to the classical Greek epic poems, following its interwoven threads and complex patterns as they depict a sort of Penelope's woven cloth against the background of a collective memory. In its new vision of epic, Walcott insists on the humanisation of the hero, who, in contrast to his traditional predecessors, is himself in search of a mythic dimension. Walcott's characters utter a choral epic, and the Caribbean Nobel Prize poet offers himself as the singer of a contemporary reality which is collocated within History, going beyond the drama of colonizer and colonized.