By Alfie Goodwin
Author Biography:
Alfie is a first-year student at Edinburgh University. He is passionate about Literature and History, particularly fascinated by poetry, his interests include the work of the Metaphysicals, the Modernists, the French poètes maudits, and contemporary anglophone poets, to name a few.
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Derek Walcott, the acclaimed Saint Lucian poet and playwright, notably proclaimed that he had ‘never separated the writing of poetry from prayer.’ This essay confronts Walcott's The Season of Phantasmal Peace, reading it as a meditation upon a moment of transcendence which is alternately figured as the ideal experience of artistic beauty, love, and God. To do this it explores links to the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Walcott is known to have been influenced by, as well as exploring the prosodic, symbolic, and figurative complexities of the work.
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