Derek Walcott’s Poetry’s Hamletian Blends

‘Hamletian blends’ are tiny parts of Derek Walcott’s juvenile poems and early mature work (phrases, single words, images, sounds) that converse with Shakespeare’s play as well as with the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Wordsworth’s Prelude that similarly open a conversation with Hamlet to establish a transcultural poetic identity and sense of history. Process and outcome of Walcott’s poetic experimentation, by the early 50s these intertextual blends are no longer visible, although traces show through the mature work and the Prince himself emerges in Walcott’s latest collection Morning, Paramin. This book studies the biographical-literary formation of these blends making use of contemporary Cognitive Stylistics and Text World Theory.

Roberta Cimarosti is a Tenure Track Researcher at the University of Calabria. Her main fields of study are Caribbean literature, critical stylistics, World Englishes in postcolonial literary perspective, critical applied linguistics and translation studies. She has published essays on Shakespeare’s plays and postcolonial rewritings, English and identity in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and contemporary rewritings, J. M. Coetzee’s novels in relation to Beckett and Defoe, Arundhati Roy’s essays and opposition theory, Édouard Glissant’s creolization, a monograph on Derek Walcott’s poetics.