chapters that take place in the West Indies in the late 18th century (following the ancestors of the characters Achille and Plunkett). These passages describe the Battle of the Saintes which took place off the coast of St. Lucia in 1782 and ended with the British fleet, under the command of Admiral George Rodney (who appears in the poem), defeating the French. For another example, in Books 4 and 5 of the poem, Walcott also writes about and in the voice of the 19th-century activist Caroline Weldon who worked on behalf of the rights of the Lakota Sioux Indian tribe in the Dakotas. The plot of Omeros can be divided into three main narrative threads that crisscross throughout the book. The first one follows the Homeric rivalry of Achille and Hector over their love for Helen. There is also a minor character named Philoctete, an injured fisherman, inspired by Homer's Philoctetes. The second thread is the interwoven story of Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, who live on the island and must reconcile themselves to the history of British colonization of St. Lucia. The final thread is the autobiographical narrative of Walcott himself. Walcott, by using myth and history, advocates the need to return to traditions in order to challenge the modernity born out of colonialism. Form Through the vast majority of the poem, Walcott uses a three-line form that is reminiscent of the terza rima form that Dante used for The Divine Comedy. However, Walcott's form is much looser than Dante's. His rhyme scheme does not follow a regular pattern like Dante's. Although Walcott claimed in an interview that the poem was written in hexameter, this characterization of the poem's form is inaccurate. Lance Callahan notes that "despite the fact that most lines are composed of twelve syllables, so wildly varied is the metrical construction of the poem that at times it gives the appearance of being in free verse." Jill Gidmark notes that "Walcott’s lines are visually, though not metrically, the same length." For one brief section (Section III) of the opening chapter of Book 4, Walcott breaks completely with the three-line form and writes rhyming couplets in tetrameter. Reception Soon after its publication in 1990, Omeros received praise from publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, the latter of which chose the book as one of its "Best Books of 1990" and