Subscribe on iTunes.

Nobel Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow Derek Walcott is one of the most celebrated poets of our time. Born in Saint Lucia, Walcott has written over twenty books of poetry, drama, and criticism. In 2010, he delivered the Robert B. Silvers lecture, focusing on the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and the Caribbean. For this week’s episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we’re proud to present Walcott discussing the time he planned to visit Hemingway, traveling, and his first love.

As a young man during the 1950s, Walcott recalls, he once plotted to visit Ernest Hemingway. At the time, it seemed like a wonderful idea because of the joy Hemingway’s books had given him and his friends:

“Alcohol, Red Stripe beer, fueled the discussion that we three writers one night in Jamaica were having in my small house near the university in the 1950s. John Hearne the novelist, Slade Hopkinson, the actor and poet, and me. We were planning a visit to Cuba to present ourselves to Hemingway, a surprise tribute from three Caribbean writers. We would go to the Finca Vigia outside Havana and tell Hemingway how much we were indebted to him. We were certain that he would invite us in to have some drinks. We were absolutely certain of it. This without money for airplane tickets, taxi, or hotels, because he was someone whose work made us grateful and happy. Because he knew what it all looked like, the mountains after rain, the rain that traveled the horizon in slow-moving veils, the sight of leaping marlin, dolphins racing, all those things that brought us happiness with his prose, the height of frigates floating above the perennial Caribbean sea.”

So profoundly did Hemingway affect Wolcott, the poet found the world beginning to corroborate Hemingway’s writing, rather than the other way around:

“Over the years as I traveled, I found myself confirming cities and places that I had read in Hemingway, Miami, Venice, Key West, Bimini, Madrid, Pamplona. Doing things that were in the books such as eating lamb ribs barbecued on pine branches in an awful place with a noise and a river like a dam, not in the spirit of literary pilgrimage, but every city authenticated his prose.”

Looking back on the places of his childhood, Wolcott was struck by the way that the physical landscape seemed to conflate with Hemingway’s fictions. The plots were almost fairy tale-like, and this magic, too, appeared in his own life in the Caribbean:

“Below that gamboge wall like a battlement, my first true love lived, solid in the magical light of a tropical dusk, a light that was from another country as my love herself seemed to come from another country, perhaps Italy. The tower, the yellow wall, a processional wave of the dock and its boathouse at a distance that was fabulous, a medieval fragment. The light had a simplicity that stayed in the descriptions of Hemingway. Not surprising because of the medieval design of his stories. His young heroic knight, often maimed or wounded, and his doomed maidens. The plots of the novels are as emblematic as legends. The knight, a doomed princess, a dragonish war—the rhythm of the narrative was often that of the fairy tale and the nursery rhyme.”

You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!