Art & Creativity Quote by Derek Walcott

The line is a quiet provocation against professionalism-as-safety. Walcott is arguing that the poem can smell fear: if you begin already holding the finished meaning, the writing becomes an act of transcription, not discovery. “Average” here isn’t a sneer at craft; it’s a warning about intention calcifying into product. A poem that knows where it’s going tends to take the most paved road to get there.

Walcott’s subtext is that genuine poems are made in the dark, by an intelligence that surprises its owner. The best lines arrive with a slight shock, as if the language has outpaced the plan. He’s defending risk - not the sloppy kind, but the deliberate surrender of control that lets sound, image, and association make arguments your outline couldn’t. That’s why the quote lands: it reframes uncertainty from incompetence to method.

Context matters. Walcott built a career navigating inherited forms (epic, lyric, stage) while refusing the comfort of inherited stories about the Caribbean. In work like Omeros, the whole project is a fight against the “already known”: colonial narratives, tourist postcards, even the poet’s own urge to package identity neatly. As a playwright as well as a poet, he understood structure intimately, which makes this less anti-structure than anti-predestination. The craft is real; the destination can’t be. The poem has to earn its ending by discovering it.