In his 1958 statement concerning his sonnet sequence ‘Tales of the Islands’, Walcott, as we will recall, had said, ‘I suppose the idea is to do away with the prerogative of modern prose in narration.’ Thirty-five years later, when asked whether he felt, when writing Omeros, as if he was writing a novel, he replied: ‘Not a novel, but I have felt for a long time that poetry has surrendered too much of what it used to do. The novel used to be an epic poem’ (CDW, 191). As with most aspects of his poetics, he seeks, perhaps with some overstatement, to give his writerly interest in narrative a Caribbean grounding: ‘What remains in the Caribbean, and in Caribbean fiction, is the human element of telling a story… I think that contemporary culture has absolutely lost the idea of narration…’

Not a novel, but a narrative poem with novelistic features. The recuperation of narrative in poetry, while satisfying ‘the basic need’ for storytelling, and thereby, perhaps, giving the poet a sense of touching the popular pulse, would also allow for expansiveness, a large sweep of theme and action, a breadth of representation of nature and society. Another Life, Omeros (1990), Tiepolo's Hound (2000) and The Prodigal (2004) are the major achievements to date in this project. The experiment, which had its smaller landmark moments in works like ‘Tales of the Islands’, and ‘The Schooner Flight ’, is an experiment in the interplay and dialogue of genres.