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Martin Carter Biography

1927-1997

Poet

One of the most important poets to come out of the Caribbean, Martin Carter has been compared to literary lions such as W.B. Yeats and Pablo Neruda. His most famous work was fueled by the political turmoil that gripped his native Guyana in the 1950s and 1960s. He told fellow Guyanese writer Bill Carr in an interview for the Guyanese magazine Release that politics and poetry were inseparable. "[If] politics is a part of life, we shall become involved in politics, if death is a part of life we shall become involved with death, like the butterfly who is not afraid to be ephemeral." Unfortunately, because of the fame of his politically-charged poems Carter was often pigeon-holed as a revolutionary poet. But as Guyana's Stabroek News wrote, "there were other voices in Martin Carter, strains of tenderness, love poems of moving fervour, agonies expressed that have nothing to do with politics, insights into all of human nature."

During his life, Carter received limited recognition outside of Guyana, mainly because he refused to abandon hi

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Martin Carter (Martin Wylde Carter) Biography

Guyanesepoet and politician, born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), educated at Queen's College in Georgetown. He wrote and published poems privately in the 1950s, including To a Dead Slave (1951) and The Kind Eagle (1952), but it was a spell of three months in detention for his anti-colonial political activities which led to Poems of Resistance (1954), the collection which established his reputation as a major political poet. After independence, Carter became Minister of Public Information and Broadcasting, and represented Guyana at the United Nations. Stark, militant rhetoric dominates many of his poems, but others are characterized by compassion, and startling imagery. Many of his best, such as ‘I Come from the Nigger Yard’, fuse the political and the confessional. In ‘For Milton Williams’, a poem in Poems of Succession (1977), which also contains work from earlier collections, Carter, however, rejects any cosy nostalgia about his youthful political activism. His other volumes include Po

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The Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-97) was one of the foremost Caribbean writers of the 20th century. Twice imprisoned by the colonial government of British Guiana during the Emergency in the 1950s, he became a minister in Guyana’s first independent government during the 60s, representing his country at the United Nations, but resigned in disillusionment after three years to live ‘simply as a poet, remaining with the people’. He was one of the first Caribbean poets to write about slavery, Amerindian history and Indian Indentureship in relation to contemporary concerns. Wise, angry and hopeful, Carter’s poetry voices a life lived in times of public and private crisis.

Martin Carter’s poetry was first published in Britain in 1954 by the leftwing publishing house Lawrence & Wishart when publication in colonial British Guiana wasn’t possible, and later by New Beacon Books. He appeared in E.A. Markham’s seminal anthology Hinterland (Bloodaxe, 1989) as one of the father figures of modern Caribbean poetry. Two editions of Selected