Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment written and published beforeA Shuttle in the Crypt. Indeed, inThe Road,the
play’s protagonist, Professor, specifically expresses a yearning to spend
a part of his years of retirement in prison, and in solitary confinement
too. It would of course be fatuous to read into this peculiar aspiration of
Professor Soyinka’s prophetic intimation of his own future incarceration.
But on a more heuristic and imaginative plane, the idea of a protagonist
representing a visionary artistic or intellectual figure who goes into a
period of seclusion to hone his spiritual and psychic powers had been
expressed in Soyinka’s writings beforeA Shuttle. The clearest example of
this inscription is Isola inCamwood on the Leaves, but we also see it in more
fragmentary and oblique forms in Eman inThe Strong Breedand Egbo
inThe Interpreters. Its specific linkage to a spell in prison by Professor in
The Roadpartakes of the dark, ironic and tragicomic atmosphere which
pervades the dramatic action of that play, but it also contains a serious
undertone which, linked to similar inscriptions in other works of Soyinka,
amounts to a profound artistic interest in the travails of voluntary or
coerced sequestration from the human community as a liminal space in
which to sharpen the powers of intuition and projection of the visionary
artist and intellectual. This is why, despite the extreme isolation and
irreplaceably unique experience of his detention in solitary confinement,
Soyinka writes of the experience in his Preface toA Shuttle: “the landscape
of the poems is not uncommon; physical details differ, but finally the
landscape of the loss of human contact is the same (viii).”
These observations help to provide a clarifying context for what, surely,
is the most startling aspect of many of the poems in this volume. This is
the juxtaposition of experiences and moods of great, excruciating nega-
tivity with consistently exquisite and polished formal expression. Most of
the poems in this volume, given the context in which they were written,
plumb deeply into the innermost recesses of the poet’s fears, anxieties,
reveries, waking nightmares and the very infrequent moments of grace
and solace in solitary confinement.Moreover, many of the poems were first
written even as the poet actually lived these experiences.Itisthusamatterofgreat
literary interest that these same poems are some of the most formally pol-
ished and even meticulously crafted in Soyinka’s poetry. Indeed, so few
are the poems giving rise to the old, accustomed accusations of “obscu-
rity” and “incoherence” in this volume that where they are encountered,
they have a definite source which cannot easily be identified for similar
poetic gaffes in Soyinka’s other volumes of poetry. For always in this par-
ticular volume, the source of “obscurity” or “incoherence” seems to lie
in the fact that the regress into the innermost recesses of a psyche under