Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment according to this meticulous scholar-critic, as Soyinka wrote these early
poems – and the dramas and essays of his early career – he was going
through the normal business of living at that stage of life – roughing it
out in Paris as a student on the edge of pecuniary insolvency, getting into
and out of a first marriage, having children, returning home to Nigeria
and, most important of all, attempting to achieve a breakthrough in the
fusion of his aesthetic ideas with a morality of art which could adequately
respond to the powerful, conflicting “nation-building” currents of inte-
gration and fragmentation in his newly independent country. Many of
the poems in the volume thus grew out of, and in some respects poeti-
cally transpose facets of the familial, social and aesthetic experiences of
Soyinka at that stage of his career. Most important of all, Fraser remarks
on how the gestative pains of the title poem, “Idanre,” are particularly no-
table, if only because they have largely been ignored by most of Soyinka’s
critics:
The title poem...poured forth in one day as the result of a transforming spiritual
awakening, a coming together of many strands, early in. Though later
publicly recited in London, it was in no sense a commissioned piece, but rather
the culmination of a process of fusion binding together particles in the poet’s
mental make-up which had, as his manuscript note to the typescript implies,
until that time obstinately refused to cohere. (Fraser,)
We can see from this vital information why Soyinka would interrupt the
chronological sequence of the poems in the volume and place “Idanre”
at the apex of his first collection of poems since it represented a defining
moment not only for his poetry but for all his writing. And in this respect, it
is significant that Soyinka excludes from the published prefatory remarks
to “Idanre” the manuscript note on which Fraser bases his superb work of
constructive biographical criticism of the poem. Here is that manuscript
note; it reads nothing like the published prefatory remarks to “Idanre”
which generally present the poem as having crystallized in the poet’s
mind as more or less fully formed:
For a long time I could not accept why Ogun, the Creator God, should also
be the agency of death. Interpretation of his domain, the road, proved par-
ticularly depressing and symbolically vexed especially inasmuch as the road is
so obviously part of this same cyclic order. I know nothing more futile, more
monotonous or boring than a circle.
The metaphysics of the inextricable and necessary duality of birth and
death, creation and destruction broached succinctly in this note was to