Wole Soyinka
technical craftsmanship and highly differentiated techniques and idioms
requiring an appropriate degree of technical expertise, learnedness and
specialism. Stated differently, the distinction being urged here is perhaps
captured in the contention that if all good or great poets are perforce
obliged to be good or great versifiers, not all good or great versifiers
make good poets. Applied to the subject of our present discussion, the
line of departure established by this dialectic of “poetry” and “versifica-
tion” indicates that while Soyinka is both a poet and a versifier, the great
controversies generated by his volumes of poetry have tended mostly to
focus on issues and problems of versification, of technique and diction
to the extent that they allegedly impede or confound readers’ efforts at
sympathetic engagement with our author’s exhilarating and challeng-
ing poetry. To adequately account for the workings of this dialectic in
our evaluation of Soyinka’s merits as a poet, it is necessary, I repeat, to
move mostly within, but also beyond the confines of the volumes of his
formal verse. Thus, what follows is a juxtaposition of discussion of the
poems collected in the five volumes of collected poetry with critical forays
into the pervasive inscriptions of poetic utterance, design and vision in
some of Soyinka’s dramas. In practical terms, the focus in the discussion
in the rest of this chapter will be primarily on Soyinka’s first two vol-
umes of poems,IdanreandShuttleand the fifth and last volume,Outsiders.
This is because these first two volumes between them contain the bulk of
Soyinka’s published poetry. The third and fourth volumes,Ogun Abibiman,
Mandela’s Earth, comprise poems which are based for the most part on
realities and events in southern Africa.Ogun AbibimanandMandela’s Earth
contain poems which in effect reprise, in other human and social spaces,
the themes and not a little of the technical and stylistic armory of the
poetry of the first two volumes.
The impressive work of scholarly reconstruction of the gestative origins
of the poems collected inIdanre and Other Poemsthat Robert Fraser executes
in his seminal study,West African Poetry: A Critical Historyis as good as any
point from which to start a reappraisal of this first volume of Soyinka’s
published poetry. Two important facts carefully uncovered by Fraser are
particularly apposite here. One is the fact that the ordering of the seven
sequences of poems in the volume does not correspond to a chronolog-
ical pattern since the last poem in the volume, the title poem “Idanre,”
was in fact written before many of the poems which sequentially precede
it in the collection. Second, Fraser highlights the broad biographical
connection of the young Soyinka’s personal life and burgeoning artistic
career with many of the poems in this first collection of his poetry. Thus,