Wole Soyinka
poems like “Dawn,” “The Hunchback of Dugbe,” “Luo Plains” and
“Easter.” In the longer epic and narrative title poem, this dualistic vision
finds a much tougher formal impediment to its artistic realization, but
ultimately, it achieves a remarkable breakthrough in the mobilization
of language, form and vision to bring within its imaginative universe
startling ideas and views about history and existence which, at that stage
of Soyinka’s career, were still rather inchoate.
In approaching the title poem of the volume, “Idanre” as a complex
poem which poses tremendous methodological problems of analysis and
interpretation for the critic or scholar, certain unhelpful formulations of
these problems must first be dispelled. Derek Wright, for instance, accu-
rately advances the view that the poem aggrandizingly attempts to do
too many things. However, thisunquestionable assessment leads Wright
to make the following patently inaccurate and unproductive remarks on
the history of the critical reception of the poem: “What all these elements
amount to, practically, is as hard to say now as when the poem was pub-
lished, and the preface and notes are more distracting than illuminating
().” For a statement which comes from a book published in,
Wright unaccountably misrepresents the interpretive challenges posed
by the poem by projecting a nonexistent criticalcul de sacin the scholarly
reception of the poem. At the very least, Robert Fraser inWest African
Poetry, published in, had in his discussion of “Idanre” sorted out the
confusions in the first set of critical responses to the poem, in the process
identifying a credible imaginative and symbolic centre linking the diverse
thematic strands of the poem: the poet’s first impassioned glimmerings
of a possible rupture in metaphoric and epistemological constructions of
the repetitive cycles of creation and destruction, decay and renewal – of
Being and existence, and in natureand history. However, in his level-
headed and inspired commentary on the poem, Fraser does not under-
take an assessment of how, and with what effect, Soyinka gives form and
shape to the deeplypersonalspiritual and imaginative “awakening” that
the vision communicated in the poem represents for him. On this point,
the following observations from Soyinka’s prefatory note to the poem is
particularly apposite:
Idanrewas born of two separate halves of the same experience. The first was
a visit to the rockhills of that name, a god-suffused grazing of primal giants
and mastodons, petrified through some strange history, suckled by mists and
clouds. Three years later and some two hundred miles away, a rainstorm rived
apart the intervening years and space, leaving a sediment of disquiet which