Probably the best poet in the world: Robert Winder salutes Derek Walcott, who yesterday became the deserving winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature

IN THE long, 80-year history of the Nobel Prize there have been, to be sure, plenty of interesting choices. The modern world does not often pause to discuss the work of, for example, Vernier von Heiderstam (1916), Roger Martin du Gard (1937), Ivo Andric (1961) or Vincente Aleixandre (1977). Indeed in recent years the nomination of the new laureate has provoked in Britain a weary and jittery chorus of sarcastic put-downs . . . Naguib what? Camilo Jose who? The mere fact that the victorious writers are not famous in London pretty much proves they're rubbish, doesn't it?

But in choosing Derek Walcott the judges have lived up to their brief. If you were making a television commercial for his uniquely supple and rich poetic gift, you'd be happy to settle for someone with an Orson Welles voice growling: Walcott . . . probably the best poet in the world. And you'd only be including the 'probably' for pedantic legal reasons.

Naturally, the Swedish Academy cites him as the authentic 'voice of the West Indies', as if he were merely a bright spokesman for St Lucia's palm tree sunshine. And it's true that he is the most admired (and with the pounds 700,000 prize money, the wealthiest) poet in the Caribbean. But the abiding preoccupation of his verse has been the tidal tug of affection between his two homes: the coast of St Lucia, where he rises at dawn and pulls poetry from the fresh unpainted landscape, and his lofty nest in the English language (he is a professor at Boston University and the holder of the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry).

He has risen superbly above local grievances, refusing to accept that the ambiguous imperial voice of Shakespeare and Milton is not also his, while rejecting the timid lyric fashions of the western literary scene. Standing astride the chasm between two cultures, he has found a toehold in the best of both worlds. One of his very first poems, 'Ruins of a Great House', ponders the tensions between the murderous excesses of colonialism and the passionate wonder its heroes have inspired in him.

There was some thought that Walcott would win the Nobel last year, when his already exotic reputation as a poet and playwright was capped by the appearance of a new work, Omeros (Faber, pounds 9.95), an astonishing 300-page verse epic which rewrote the Homeric stories - Achilles, Hector and Helen - and set them on St Lucia. Had anyone else attempted so magnificent and bold an enterprise since we last looked? It was the kind of poem one thought the world had left behind - long, exciting, highly- charged, rhythmical, fierce and bursting with vigorous imaginary life.

He didn't win, but who cared: his poem won over practically everyone who read it - not many, one must admit; for a famous poet, Walcott wasn't a very famous man. But at long last someone had found the nerve and verbal talent to write a novel in verse, with stirring episodes, even with chapters, the way Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Byron, Dante and Chaucer used to to do.

Reading Omeros was like reading English literature again. Critics queued up to list it as their favourite book of the year at Christmas time. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate of 1987, wrote: 'He is the man by whom the English language lives.' Poetry magazines devoted whole issues to the state of the art as Walcott had now defined it. And last year saw the publication of a new anthology of criticism, The Art of Derek Walcott (Seren Books, pounds 16.50), which attempted to take the measure of the man and his work.

Omeros took its title from the Greek name for Homer. The poet explains:

O was the conchshell's invocation, mer was

both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,

os, a grey bone and the white surf as it crashes

and spreads its sibilant collar on the lace shore

As always, lines that seem at first to be a bit jerky and elaborate quickly come to seem both condensed and fluid. While appearing merely to be playing with words, Walcott's interest is in the conch, the shells and bones, and the crash of waves on a rocky shore. 'Just as nouns can rhyme,' he said once, 'so I believe things can rhyme.' His poetry finds a thousand unthought-of echoes and analogies and mashes them into stirring puns. Omeros was dedicated to 'my shipmates in this craft', and the marching feet of the slaves melted into the marching feet of the verse.

Walcott's argument about the status of poetry is straightforward. In the Independent a year ago he said: 'It's been sort of an imperialist colonial state. The novel came in, invaded every damn thing, grabbed what it could out of poetry - narrative, the third person - and poetry's been out there waiting ever since. A lot of contemporary poetry sounds like, you know, 'Someone hit me.' Whereas in a narrative you know exactly who hit who.' As a playwright, he is equally zealous about poetry on the stage, arguing that most of the great dramatists (except Chekhov) are poets.

In interviews, Walcott talks with the same elastic and metaphorical rhythm that inspires his poetry, loosing off easy epigrams like a man dishing out chocolates. 'I want the casual, relaxed throw of the thing, like something draped over a chair,' he said of his writing method. 'For Omeros, I wanted the lines to feel as if they still have the dew on them. Chaucer's like that, the lines are still wet, they're like spring branches.'

Walcott's lines have the dew on them, all right. And though the Nobel can't enhance them at all, it is a nice signal to any readers happy to get their feet wet.