Walcott, Derek

Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright, Saint Lucia

(Vidéo) [ENG] Derek Walcott - Entretien avec Charlie Rose

Artesquieu · Aug 27, 2026

• Derek Walcott
• Charlie Rose
• Tiepolo's Hound
• Caribbean poetry
• Saint Lucia
• ekphrasis
• painting and poetry
• Camille Pissarro
• memory and imagination
• Nobel Prize in Literature

Core ideas

This short segment finds Charlie Rose interviewing Derek Walcott around the publication of his narrative poem Tiepolo's Hound, built specifically around Walcott's own parallel career as a painter — the book pairs the poem's text with 26 reproductions of his watercolors and oils. Rose frames Walcott as a "Renaissance man" (poet, playwright, journalist, painter), a label Walcott deflects with visible discomfort ("I hate to say it... but it's true") before locating the source of his own art-making in his childhood environment rather than any innate gift: his mother, a schoolteacher, filled the house reciting Shakespeare from memory — Cardinal Wolsey's resignation speech, Portia's speech — until her children would beg her to stop. Walcott says hearing "the best possible" language that young shaped his own ambition simply as the hope that she might one day recite something of his; she lived long enough to see him published, though not, he notes quietly, long enough to see the full scope of what came after.

Walcott traces his painting practice to youthful plein-air sessions in St. Lucia with a childhood friend (who went on to paint church murals there) under the encouragement of a local mentor, Harold Simmons, plus the direct example of his own father, a watercolorist. The interview walks through a slideshow of his paintings, and Walcott's commentary on each functions almost as a second, visual mode of the same poetic sensibility discussed elsewhere in the transcript series: an imaginary Gauguin-in-Martinique painting staged as a self-conscious "montage of influences"; a canoe he once saw on a beach mislabeled "In God We Trout" instead of "Trust," which he finds more moving than the correct spelling because the owner's error carries more passion than accuracy would; a French watercolor built entirely around the difficulty of Northern grays versus the Caribbean palette, where "everything is gray" produces its own kind of harmony; and a sequence of Caribbean genre scenes — a fisherman repairing nets on a shore since wiped out by a hurricane, musicians including a Creole violin player, domino players sketched as a study for a possible airport mural, and a self-portrait Walcott describes as capturing his own "typical condition" at the easel: looking scared.

Asked about the book's title, Walcott gives an extended, genuinely uncertain account of its origin: decades earlier, on his first visit to the United States, he saw a painting at the Met — possibly by Tiepolo, possibly by Veronese, he still isn't sure which — of a dog whose inner thigh was rendered in a single, masterly stroke of light against flesh. He has never been able to relocate the painting or confirm the attribution, and says the book's real subject isn't the dog itself but the gap between memory and reality, between what he thinks he saw and what he may have imagined — an epistemological uncertainty he treats as the theme of Tiepolo's Hound itself rather than a research problem to be solved. He closes by reading a passage imagining the young painter Camille Pissarro walking the port of Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas, absorbing the light, the Sephardic family interiors, the faded postcard-France domesticity, and the fading photographs of immigrant ancestors on the walls — the same move, transposed into verse, of finding a whole inherited world inside a half-remembered visual detail.

Excerpts