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- <text id=92TT2356>
- <title>
- Oct. 19, 1992: Nobel Prize
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Oct. 19, 1992 The Homestretch: Clinton in Control
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 24
- SOCIETY
- Nobel Prize
- </hdr><body>
- <p> AN ISLAND BARD
- </p>
- <p> A native-born Caribbean author had never won the Nobel
- Prize in Literature -- until last week, when the Swedish Academy
- bestowed the $1.2 million laurel on poet Derek Walcott. The
- choice had some of the earmarks of political correctness: of
- mixed ancestry (African, Dutch, English), Walcott was born 62
- years ago on St. Lucia in what was then the British West Indies.
- </p>
- <p> But the implication is misleading. Walcott, who teaches at
- Boston University, has long been regarded as one of the finest
- living poets in English; he adapted his colonial overseers'
- language to non-English subjects and unfamiliar landscapes. His
- 10 volumes of poetry -- especially the epic-scale Omeros (1990)
- -- give an exotic tropical world the rhythms of universality.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-