OMEROS:HOME

Omeros Chart: A guide to Derek Walcott's Omeros

Welcome to Omeros Chart.

This site is a work in progress created by students in "Caribbean Literature and Film," a course taught by Prof. Jared Stark at Eckerd College. Each year, students in the class add to and revise this site. We also welcome comments, corrections, and additions from readers.

Omeros Chart is envisioned as a navigational chart to Derek Walcott's book-length poem, Omeros. In that spirit, the students who contributed to this project have sought to create a series of "buoys" in the form of reflective chapter summaries and glossaries of names, places, and unfamiliar terms. These annotations record students' efforts to orient themselves and to help orient future readers in their experience of Walcott's masterpiece. As such, these buoys should be understood as the students' own attempts to navigate the poem, each finding its own way--and at times losing its way--through Walcott's richly allusive, and often elusive, language.

Needless to say, there is no comparison between studying a navigational chart and making the journey itself.