Poetry, versification and the fractured
burdens of commitment
The roots of Soyinka’s English are uncompromisingly Anglo-Saxon
rather than Hellenic or Latinate because they represent for him the
closest approximation to the primal roots of Yoruba cultic diction.
But the virtue of ‘originality’ lies not merely in its freshness or quaint-
ness but indeed in its vitality, in its ability to evoke in the mind a
memory of the dynamism of original Yoruba. For Soyinka, particu-
larly in those poems in which legend, tradition and ancestral custom
constitute the internal structure of his poetry, is in fact a translator.
That is to say that to anyone who even vaguely understands the
tonalities of the Yoruba language...the structure and fertile am-
biance of Soyinka’s English derives, in fact, more from the Yoruba
than from the English.
Stanley Macebuh, “Poetics and the Mythic Imagination”More than three decades after the publication of Soyinka’s first volume
of poetry,Idanre and Other Poems, the preface poem to that volume now
appears as a reflexive metacommentary that is radically at variance with
generally held critical opinions on the contents of the volume itself and,
more generally, on Soyinka’s reputation as a poet. A quatrain without
end-rhymes, the wistful etherialism of this preface poem suggests a be-
guilingly harmonious, even trouble-free pact between the poet and his
muse, and between the poet and his audience that virtually no critic now
associates with Soyinka’s writings, least of all his poetry. The poem is
short enough to be quoted in its entirety:
Such webs as these we build our dreams upon
To quiver lightly and to fly
The sun comes down in stately visit
The spider feeds him pearls (IOP,)The “webs” of the first line obviously and unambiguously – a very rare
occurrence in Soyinka’s poetry – refers to the poems we shall encounter in