The writers who matter are the ones who enlarge a form, showing us that there are more ways of thinking and doing than we realised. All sorts of possibilities suddenly appear obvious. They make it all look easy. Descriptions, like “a racketing triumph of cicadas/ setting life’s pitch” seem to clarify something we already knew; ars poetica seem effortless: “the light’s bounty on familiar things/ that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news”
When such writers die, the world correspondingly contracts. Suddenly, there will be no more of this particular way of seeing and interpreting the world. So when my inbox filled up with the news that Derek Walcott has died, what I knew was that the world had shrunk. No-one was any longer going to notice how “the pages of the sea/ are a book left open by an absent master”, or remind us that, “The classics can console. But not enough.”
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