Word: poets
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Heaney, who spends six weeks every two years in residence at Harvard as a visiting poet, made his way slowly through the crowd, pausing frequently to stoop and embrace his friends and colleagues along...
This detail initially strikes Walcott as a mystical confirmation of the transcendent powers of art, its superiority to the transiency of life. How frustrating, then, that as he grows older, the poet cannot again find the white wolfhound where he was sure he saw it in Veronese (or maybe Giambattista Tiepolo). How puzzling that his imagination keeps calling up a picture of a black mongrel scavenging along the wharf of a Caribbean harbor town...
...example, Walcott portrays Pissarro's choice--to abandon St. Thomas for France and high European culture--in different ways. At one point the poet gives his blessing: "There was no treachery if he turned his back/on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds/of the feathery immortelles, on a dirt track/with a horse cart for an equestrian bronze." But later Walcott wonders whether Pissarro's Impressionist renderings of French scenery did not involve treachery after all: "Are all the paintings then falsifications/of his real origins, was his island betrayed?/Instead of linden walks and railway stations,/ our palms and windmills...
...eerie moment Walcott imagines himself actually being sketched, a century or so earlier, by Pissarro: "I felt a line enclose my lineaments/and those of other shapes around me too." The poet sees himself, under Pissarro's watchful eye, "keeping my position as a model does/a young slave mixed and newly manumitted." How, Walcott muses, can he be so swayed by the art of Veronese and Tiepolo when people of his color appear in it, if at all, only on the margins, as servants or attendants, Moors holding the leashes of white wolfhounds...
...outrages veterans. It outrages lots of Americans. It is intended to. It is not difficult to sympathize with the anger. Vietnam outraged people, too - just as World War I outraged the poet e.e. cummings, who wrote, in "The Song of Olaf": "There is some s--- I will not eat/I will not kiss your f------ flag...