Martin Carter

Who is Martin Carter?

Martin Carter was a Guyanese poet and political activist widely regarded as one of the Caribbean's most important twentieth-century poets. Born in Georgetown, he became active in the People's Progressive Party during the 1950s independence movement and was detained without trial by the British colonial government in 1953 for his political organizing. His experience of imprisonment shaped his best-known collection, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (1954), which fused personal reflection with anti-colonial defiance and became a landmark of Anglophone Caribbean poetry. He later served briefly as a government minister after independence but grew disillusioned with post-independence politics and largely withdrew from active political life, continuing to write spare, philosophically dense poetry until his death. Carter's work is taught throughout Caribbean schools and universities, and he is frequently described as Guyana's national poet; institutions including the University of Guyana have established prizes and lecture series in his honor, and his poem "This Is the Dark Time, My Love" remains one of the most widely anthologized works of Caribbean literature.

Sources: Carter, Martin, Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (1954) · Carter, Martin, University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (2006, ed. Gemma Robinson) · Dabydeen, David (ed.), The Art of Martin Carter (1993)