Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment calculated to startle most of Soyinka’s academic critics who, on the
question of his merits as a poet, have tirelessly inveighed against what
they consider the overspecialized nature of his poetry, and consequently,
against the alleged inaccessibility of many poems in the five published
volumes beside the popular and endlessly anthologized pieces like “Tele-
phone Conversation” and “Abiku.” This assertion by Soyinka of the
non-specialized, protean nature of traditional African poetry in partic-
ular and all poetry in general, flies in the face of the fact that, with one
or two notable exceptions, neither the defenders nor the accusers in
the charge of “obscurity” and “inaccessibility” in Soyinka’s poetry have
ever brought into their critical purview the pervasive presence of poetry,
metrical and non-metrical, in both the dramatic and prose works of the
Nigerian author.
The five volumes of Soyinka’s formal poetry that are discussed in this
chapter singly and collectively participate in a dialectical articulation
between the elegantly conventional and the bracingly experimental in
the exploration of serious and pressing issues specific to the negations
and contradictions of postcolonial Africa but of vital pertinence to the
more general expressions of what many contemporary thinkers have
called the malaise of modernity.These works areIdanre and Other Poems
(),A Shuttle in the Crypt(),Ogun Abibiman(),Mandela’s Earth
() andOutsiders(). The main burden of the discussion of these
works in this chapter is a shift of attention in the critical discourse on
Soyinka’s poetry away from the polarized debate on “complexity” and
“obscurity,” considered as independent, abstract and determining vec-
tors. This shift is enabled by an intertextual comparison of the poetryin
Soyinka’s dramatic works with the poetryofhis formal verse writings. I
shall in effect base my readings of Soyinka’s poetry on a central, orga-
nizing thesis. This is the thesis that a stand for or against “complexity”
or “obscurity” should not be the ultimate or overdetermining factor in
taking a measure of Soyinka’s significance as a poet since, in much of
his dramatic poetry and formal verse, we are often taken beyond “ob-
scurity” as complex, evanescent experiences and modes of being and
thought are given formal poetic expression of considerable lyrical force
and memorable articulation. If this is the case, we are forced to look else-
where for a point of departure in our assessment of the nature and scope
of our author’s poetic output. This point of departure I would locate in
the dialectical tension between “poetry” and “versification” in Soyinka’s
writings in this genre. “Poetry” here implies a more inclusive, less gener-
ically bounded category, whereas “versification” pertains to matters of