Sailing off

In poetry as in life so much is about tone; William Logan's review in the Times of Derek Walcott's latest collection bothered me from the first line:

Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”

Yeah, poets would be like conquistadors if they slaughtered and stole wherever they go. The rest of the review continues in a condescending, passive aggressive vein; there's some very odd writing in there, actually, it's like someone professing to your face they like you, they really do, as they proceed to trash you to everyone else.

Really, the above watercolor by Olivier Kugler is the best part of the review.