ABSTRACT
This chapter reads the late St Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s final 2010 collection White Egrets in order to think further about the connections between Walcott’s late-life creativity and his poetry’s insights into the ‘dimming world’ of neo-colonialism in the Caribbean. The aim is to use Theodor Adorno’s work on late style in order to elucidate Walcott’s extremely self-conscious performance of lateness in this collection. Adorno, by contrast, sometimes appears to suggest that there is only one sort of late style that is trans-historical because it simply befalls important artists in the last phase of their careers, involuntarily, as it were. That claim is indefensible. But what Adorno certainly does appreciate, and what I think constitutes the chief merit of his widely but often inaccurately cited work on Beethoven’s late style, is the fact that it is criticality that makes certain works of art important and valuable.
