Derek Walcott: Pulitzer Prize Winner &/or Monster

 I heard on the BBC today that the poet Derek Walcott died & a poem he had written, 'Love After Love', was read on air. I was intriguing enough to look for a copy on-line, but as I scrolled down the page, I felt deflated by charges of sexual harassment brought against him by several previous students enrolled in his college courses. As a woman with an MA, it brought me right back to those professors, in each of the colleges attended, who I was told 'to watch out for', or were easily recognized as predators without any warning needed. As an attractive, intelligent woman out in the real world, I fell in love with & had an affair with my own Naturapath Doctor, who was 12 years my senior. Although he was in the position of power, we were both single & frankly I pursued him & was the one who later moved on to another relationship. I heard years later that he was sued for sexual harassment by another patient & rightly so in whatever the victim's circumstance was.

Walcott’s honors includes a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Montale Prize, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. In 1992, Walcott became the first Caribbean writer to receive the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2015, he received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He was an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. And a sexual predator.

"It means that art—that space where our mortal condition approaches the immortal, where our myriad flaws form a fertile ground for empathy—cannot redeem Walcott for his behavior. It means that we should not look to it to redeem ours, either."  (New Republic, Derek Walcott’s Dueling Legacies, by Ryu Spaeth)