Beating a Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott

June Bobb explores the different ways the Anglophone Caribbean's most important poets engage in rewriting history and re-conceiving a visionary world in which it becomes possible to reconnect the fragments of a past destroyed or denied by the Caribbean's confrontation with the institutions of slavery and colonization. In exploring common links as well as differences between Brathwaite and Walcott, and looking at their engagement with the mythology of the Caribbean's African experience, the author of this study identifies their contribution to the development of modern Caribbean poetics. Making a contribution to several areas of historical and literary scholarship, the author identifies a specifically Caribbean tradition out of which the poets have emerged.