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This study proposes to venture into the common elements and differences in both W.B. Yeats’s and Derek Walcott’s poems. It has been said that the young Walcott was sympathetic to the Irish writers, such as Synge, Pearce, Yeats, and Joyce, because he intended to make himself master of the themes and rhythms of the exile or castaway that the Irish writers echoed in their works. Of the Irish writers, Yeats was especially a poet who a little more previously wrote of the same issue as the young Walcott tried to and the young poet’s attention was deeply caught in the
Yeatean poetics, more specifically, in the Yeatean mask which echoes a solitary self as an artist.
Walcott’s Crusoe as a poetic self echoes the Yeatean mask. More specifically, it is a parallel for a poet with his daily ritual of the poet creating a new poem in the desperately isolated island. It is believed to be created by Walcott’s comparing himself and his own country to Yeats and Ireland in terms of an exile, a castaway or a lost self, which reflects a solitary and artistic figure in his poems, such as in “Crusoe’s Island” and “As John To Patmos”. Despite this fact, Walcott is also a poet who has built up the self-figure on a different base from Yeats’s heroic or
aristocratic self. His poems are based on the Caribbean multi-racial background characteristic of slavery, poverty, lost hope, and lost identity that have resulted from the colonial policy of the British government that stepped into the Spanish and the French shoes.
His Caribbean figure is a poverty-stricken, obedient, but patient, willful castaway, with his thick lips tightly closed. Although Walcott is a poet who has developed his own poetic self on the Yeatean base, which resulted in his fruitful poems, it is believed that he made greater efforts to weave the Caribbean spirit into poems than others. Then, the Caribbean tropical landscapes, such as sea, wood, and sun, etc. are a poetic space which sublimated his themes into the Caribbean soul.