Any critic embarking on a study of West African poetry ought perhaps to be accused of presumption. There are few histories of the poetry of Western Europe, and those that exist are prominent for their sketchiness. Africa is arguably a much more complicated case. To begin with, the number of potential literatures to be considered is daunting. It has been calculated that there exist between 700 and 1,250 distinct languages within sub-Saharan West Africa, an area itself larger than Western Europe. Each of these possesses an oral literature, though our knowledge of them is as yet very incomplete. To do justice to this range of human expression would be too much at the present time to expect of any one scholar. Moreover, though oral and written verse from these areas demonstrate many interconnections, there are few students trained in such a way as to give a coherent account of the relation. As things stand, we have, on the one hand, folklorists reared in the techniques of field work and subsequent classification; on the other, critics cast in a literary mould who have been encouraged to read and then render an account of their subjective reactions. The two approaches do not often marry well.