While Walcott dedicated much of the 1960s to developing the Trinidad

Theatre Workshop and to rewriting earlier dramas, his primary focus was
on poetry. Between 1964 and 1973 he published four volumes which
continued his exploration and expansion of traditional forms and which
increasingly concerned themselves with the position of the poet in the
postcolonial world. In contrast to the plays of this period which arise from
a sense of shared colonial history and local mythology, The Castaway and
Other Poems (1964) draws on the figure of Robinson Crusoe to suggest
the isolation of the artist. “As a West Indian,” Katie Jones suggests, “the
poet can be seen as a castaway from both his ancestral cultures, African
and European, stemming from both, belonging to neither. To salve this
split, Walcott creates a castaway who is also a new Adam . . . whose task
is to name his world. Walcott’s castaway is a poet who creates and gives
meaning to nothingness”. Coping with internal division remains a concern
in The Gulf, which calls on the body of water separating St. Lucia from the
United State as a metaphor for the breach between the poet and all he
loves, between his adult consciousness and childhood memories, his
international interests and the feeling of community in his homeland.
Walcott explores these themes again in Another Life, a book-length
autobiographical poem that examines the important roles of poetry,
memory, and historical consciousness in bridging the distances within the
postcolonial psyche.

This investigation transferred to his dramatic writings in the 1970s,

which address the problems of Caribbean identity against the
backdrop of political and racial strife and which increasingly find
solutions to these troubles in the individual. These works also display
an expansion of his artistic concerns into different genres. After a
comical turn in Jourmard, Walcott wrote two musicals in collaboration
with Galt MacDermont: The Joker of Seville (1974), a patois adaptation
of Molina’s El buladorde Sevella, and O Babylon! (1976), a portrayal of
Rastafarians in Jamaica at the time of Haile Selassie’s 1966 visit and
which uses reggae music as a means of exploring West Indian
identity. O Babylon! also marked the end of Walcott’s association with
the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and the beginning of new period of
dramatic writing, highlighted by plays such as Remembrance (1977)
and Pantomime (1978). The protagonist of Remembrance, Albert Perez
Jordan, is a schoolmaster who lost his oldest son in the 1970 Black
Power uprising and who remains distressed by a political commitment
he cannot understand. Unable to connect with his family or with his
own past, Jordan finds himself divided between an older generation
committed to tradition and a younger one playing at revolution.
Characters in the comedic Pantomine confront similar divisions, but
here the issue of race comes to the fore. Reviving the Crusoe story
once again, Walcott creates a play-within-a-play and recasts the roles
so that Jackson, a black hotel servant, plays Crusoe and his white
employer plays Friday. This reversal highlights the fraught
relationship that binds black to white, master to slave, and colonizer
to colonized. Far from being an irreparable situation, however,
Jackson’s ability to synthesize his calypso talents with a poetic use of
the English language suggests a respect for differences and a
possibility for healing old wounds.