Major Plunkett, an Englishman, is a veteran of the North African Campaigns of World War II, and his wife, Maud, an Irish transplant in the Caribbean. The poet makes appearances himself, and alludes regularly to his mixed Dutch, British, and Congolese genealogy. Derek Walcott, first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to hail from the Caribbean, was born in 1930 in St. Lucia, the central setting for Omeros.

The poem has a wide enough berth to also include a diverse array of other characters including the blind Seven Seas (a stand-in for Homer) and Philoctete, whose unhealing wound is caused by the Middle Passage. In total, these and others Walcott includes reflect the Caribbean’s modern history as a “contact zone” or crossroads at which indigenous Carib people encountered African slaves and the European colonists who conscripted them into forced labor on sugar plantations. The themes of trauma and contact develop over 500 pages, split into seven books which are further divided into chapters. The poem travels geographically out from St. Lucia, through Europe, the Congo, and into North America. It also moves back through time into the early days of slave raids on the coast of West Africa, to the plains of the nineteenth-century American Midwest during westward expansion, and to the 1782 Battle of the Saintes between France and Great Britain that solidified British rule in the Caribbean.

Walcott’s repurposing of the epic form to produce a historical narrative of our modern era also draws from the confessional poets of the twentieth century to gesture at the ways that individual fates (the author’s as well as his characters’) are bound within historical events. Walcott writes: “Time is the metre, memory the only plot” (129), binding his own personal experiences tightly to the temporal trajectory of historical time.

In his 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon links the epic to colonial historiography, proclaiming that it is “the colonist [who] makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey” (14). For Fanon, the narrative of imperialism is always written at a hyperbolic scale, relying on exaggeration, hagiography and Homeric epithets. And thus Walcott appropriates the excess of the epic form in order to equate St. Lucia with Ancient Greece, exalting the everyday man and woman to make them the heroes of our contemporary world.

In a famous passage, Walcott describes female mineworkers in St. Lucia who carry coal up a hillside in a rote circular motion of unceasing effort. He compares them to ants, suggesting that the stories of the “ants” deserve to be elevated to the importance of the characters in Homer’s two great epics—that their lives and experiences are as weighty and as deserving of literary remembrance and immortalization as the “great warriors” of Ancient Greece. The themes of love and war so famously linked to the epic genre apply necessarily, for Walcott, to these abandoned figures of history. To depict them with “epical splendor” is the use to which Walcott puts the genre, renovating its emphases on longevity and size for new purposes in our postcolonial present.