Names as Poetic Terms of Art: A Sustained Close Reading of Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie”

Abstract

This article provides a sustained close reading and literary onomastic analysis of Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie”, arguing that the poem presents names as poetic terms of art: sites of mimicry, misnomer, and transformation. The poem confronts the philosophical and linguistic instability at the heart of naming. By weaving together multilingual references, colonial and postcolonial toponyms, oral traditions, and etymological slippages, names are shown to act not as referential tools but as creative misrepresentations. Resisting referential realism, Walcott presents a name not as a mirror of the world but as a poetic artifact with an aesthetic value derived from its capacity to generate meaning beyond its referent. Ultimately, the article shows that Walcott’s poetics do not seek to repair the inherent aporia between name and referent but to embrace it as the very grounds of art. In contrast to dominant philosophical theories (from Frege to Russell to Searle), Walcott’s approach recasts the name as a transformative site of memory, loss, and aesthetic form and naming as a mode of poetic authorship that sustains cultural identity amidst historical dislocation. Within this view, naming becomes a mode of poiesis.