Sea Grapes

'Sea Grapes', the title poem of Walcott's 1976 collection, articulates personal pain and melancholy through an engagement with history and myth; the longing for home and the need for adventure are part of an "ancient war" which will be part of the human condition forever. Derek Walcott is a poet of great verbal resources and skills engages in a complex struggle to render his native Caribbean culture, the new world, first successor to Eden.... He is one of the most incisive poets writing today. Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1992, two years after the publication of his most ambitious and celebrated work to date, "Omeros", an epic poem which draws on the Homeric tradition and relocates it in the voices and lives of the people of the Caribbean.