Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment render them service that would assuage the great terror of their deaths
at the hand of the tyrants in power in their homeland:
Death that takes brutally breeds restless souls
You’ll find him in a throng of nine, seeking landmarks.
His soul’s violation, the weight of a task unfinished
May rob him of bearing yonder. Take his hand,
Lead him, be led by him.
()
When the important exceptions have been acknowledged, Soyinka in
his poetry shows the same openness to an extraordinarily wide range of
forms, idioms and models that is the aesthetic and ideological motive
driving his dramas, especially the most ambitious plays that we explored
in the fourth chapter of this study. That said, it is also true that in his
verse he has shown a proclivity for an over-literariness and a formal-
ism which are rare in his drama. However, on the other hand, there
is always at work in Soyinka’s poetry and verse a highly focused and
unwavering commitment to the defense and expansion of humane val-
ues against their erosion by the culture of impunity and repression in
much of post-independence Africa. The matter is further complicated
by the fact that this dialectic of an often highly wrought, over-literary
and resolutely non-populist poetic idiom and diction in the service of a
tenacious and consistent advocacy of humane values is played out on
many levels in his poetry. Often, the mode of expression shifts back and
forth between comic, satiric and tragic forms while the themes and sub-
ject matter traverse spaces encompassing deeply private intuitions and
expansively communal promptings, local Nigerian and West African
realities and cosmopolitan currents of modern global civilization. More-
over, these diverse poetic landscapes and idioms engage projects frankly
announced as appertaining specifically to “race-retrieval” in the “Black
world” and projects indubitably internationalist and universalistic. In
this capacious poetic corpus, Soyinka, as we have seen, can be fiercely
partisan in his political identifications and, side by side with this, he is
on occasion unapologetically mystical or metaphysical in some of his
visionary projections. These intricacies of his poetry and his activism
indicate that if for now and for a long time to come there can be no final
word, no definitive summation of his impact and legacy, we can at least
review the nature, sources and stress points of his considerable influence
in contemporary African literature and the Anglophone writings of the
world. In the final chapter of this study, we now turn to this topic.