The publication of Wings of the Morning (1938) established Vivian Virtue (1922-98) as one of the principal poets of Jamaica. In 1950 he was awarded the Constance Hollar Memorial Medal, and in 1960 he was awarded the Musgrave Silver Medal for poetry by the institute of Jamaica. In 1961 Virtue retired to London, and he contributed poems to over twenty-five journals as well as to anthologies of Caribbean, Negro, and contemporary British poetry. Virtue’s early interests were the sonnet, villanelle, and rondeau verse forms; subsequently, he explored a range of modern techniques. Michael Anthony, the important Trinidadian novelist so valued Virtue’s "King Solomon and Queen Balkis," a villanelle sequence, that he committed it to memory while still a schoolboy. And of it J.E. Clare McFarlane, the first historian of West Indian literature, wrote that "It is one of the finest achievements of this verse form in English." In his retirement Virtue was commendably prolific, writing poems about people, places, and circumstances and translating from Latin, French, and Spanish. He took great pride in his translation of over one hundred of Les Trophees, the poems of Jose-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905), the Cuban-born French Parnassian poet whose goal was technical perfection: these were praised by Professor C.V. Wedgwood of the University of Oxford. Virtue’s final poems reveal his longstanding and deep religious sensibilities. This collection of Virtue’s poetry, spanning sixty years, shows the full range of his subject matter and abilities and demands that he no longer be regarded as "Jamaica’s forgotten poet" but—in the words of another Jamaican—a versatile poet not inferior to his father-in-law, Claude McKay, the country’s national poet. As the distinguished literary critic Bruce King has observed, "not until Vivian Virtue’s Wings of the Morning was there a poet of any real consequence in Jamaica.
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