Literary Migrations: Homer’s Journey through Joyce’s Ireland and Walcott’s St. Lucia

This paper examines the literary kinship found in the works of Derek Walcott, James Joyce and Homer. Principally, it explores the way in which Walcott transplanted the classical epic tradition onto his Caribbean island of Saint Lucia in the wake of Joyce’s similar shifting of the Odyssey to twentieth-century Dublin. It argues that Walcott forged a colonial affiliation with Irish literature, which he used as a model for his reflections on the linguistic, cultural and historical situation of Saint Lucia. The paper concludes with Walcott’s homage to Joyce in his epic poem Omeros, which underlines the significant fact that the epic genre is not a fixed form of yesteryear, but rather a fluid, living category that travels across cultures and languages and acquires richer, more complex meanings through each of these migrations.