TS Eliot recaptured in Dawes lecture

Keisha Hill, Gleaner Writer

Jamaican literary giant, Kwame Dawes, recently reintroduced the public to a poet most had thought they had left behind in high school: T.S. Eliot. Dawes, who is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, outlined Eliot's influence on Caribbean poetry in a lecture held in the main reading room of the National Library of Jamaica (NLJ) last Sunday.

"I think you see Eliot's greatest influence on Caribbean poetry in the willingness to experiment with form and voice," Dawes said in the afternoon lecture, which drew a crowd of some of Jamaica's most well-known literary figures.

He then continued, "And I think they are both really important; that the poet is willing to use different forms, different ways of structuring the poem to experiment with different voices, different characters speaking, and I think most writers responded to that."

The literary afternoon began with a welcome from the national librarian/chief executive officer of the NLJ, Winsome Hudson, who made the initial link between Eliot and Caribbean poetry. "When I read a Derek Walcott poem, I can see Eliot there in the allusions, and in their similar descriptions of their surrounding landscape," she said.

Following Hudson were two readings of poems Dawes later referred to in his lecture. The first an Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, read by speech and drama specialist at the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission, Andrew Brodber, and the second a Caribbean piece, Edward Brathwaite's The Dust, read by actress and lecturer at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Carolyn Allen.

After a detailed introduction of the speaker, given by author and vice-chairman of the board of the NLJ, Kellie Magnus, Dawes proceeded to take his audience down the rabbit hole of this strange post-colonial connection. He described in great literary detail exactly how T.S. Eliot's writing style has been adopted by Caribbean greats over the past 60 years.