is because either in the literal or metaphoric sense, the internalization of western poetic
traditions and the influence on the works of the African poets speak to the question of
exile which, as has been seen, is crucial in one way or the other to the understanding of
poets in this generation. The list runs from West to Southern Africa: Christopher Okigbo,
Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Lenrie Peters, John Pepper Clark, Kofi Awoonor, Taban lo
Liyong, Okot p’Bitek, Mazisi Kunene and Dennis Brutus. Earlier Romanus Egudu had
published Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament which was linguistically
all encompassing by looking at the commitment of African poetry to the socio-political
realities of sub-Saharan Africa.
Besides, other critical works have engaged with regional poetic traditions with focus on
individual poets in each of these regions from Michael Chapman’s A Century of South
African Poetry , to Robert Fraser’s West African Poetry: A Critical History, to Landeg
White’s Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices In History, among others.
While some of these critical works have included poets of the second generation, others
have concentrated on members of this generation in the main in order to explore the
defining tropes of their creative oeuvre. Among such are Adrian Roscoe and Mpalive-
Hangson Msiska’s The Quiet Chameleon: Modern African Poetry from Central Africa ,
Tanure Ojaide’s Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays on African Poetry and
Michael Chapman’ s Soweto Poetry and David Attwell’s Rewriting Modernity: Studies in
Black South African Literary History. However, much as these works have explored
works by poets in this generation, there has been no decisive effort to reflect on the
poetry in this generation with respect to the writers’ responses to the phenomenon of
exile that has become too overwhelming in contemporary times to be ignored. Where
such attempts have been made at all, the critical reflections have been anecdotal and, at
best conflated with other themes. This then explains why this research has chosen to
engage with the concept of exile as directly responded to by the selected authors in some
of their collections.
Bound by the paradigm of periodization, one is constrained to assess the works of poets
of the second generation against the backdrop of the influence of their emergence. Their