Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- West Africa: State borders and principal ethnic groupings
- Introduction
- 1 From oral to written verse: development or depletion?
- 2 Ladies and gentlemen
- 3 The négritude movement
- 4 Poetry and the university, 1957–63
- 5 The achievement of Christopher Okigbo
- 6 Continuity and adaptation in Ghanaian verse, 1952–71
- 7 Two Ijo poets
- 8 ‘Psalmody of sunsets’: The career of Lenrie Peters
- 9 The road to Idanre, 1959–67
- 10 The poet and war, 1966–70
- 11 The poetry of dissent, 1970–80
- 12 The return to orality
- A guide to availability
- Index
9 - The road to Idanre, 1959–67
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- West Africa: State borders and principal ethnic groupings
- Introduction
- 1 From oral to written verse: development or depletion?
- 2 Ladies and gentlemen
- 3 The négritude movement
- 4 Poetry and the university, 1957–63
- 5 The achievement of Christopher Okigbo
- 6 Continuity and adaptation in Ghanaian verse, 1952–71
- 7 Two Ijo poets
- 8 ‘Psalmody of sunsets’: The career of Lenrie Peters
- 9 The road to Idanre, 1959–67
- 10 The poet and war, 1966–70
- 11 The poetry of dissent, 1970–80
- 12 The return to orality
- A guide to availability
- Index
Summary
For a long time I could not accept why Ogun, the Creator God, should also be the agency of death. Interpretation of his domain, the road, proved particularly depressing and symbolically vexed especially inasmuch as the road is so obviously part of this same cyclic order. I know of nothing more futile, more monotonous or boring than a circle.
So, in 1965, wrote a thirty-one-year-old playwright at the foot of the typescript of his poem ‘Idanre’, written in Nigeria several months previously and performed that year at the Commonwealth Arts Festival. At the time Wole Soyinka's reputation rested primarily on his work as a dramatist. Though several of his poems had found their way into The Horn, Black Orpheus and other Nigerian periodicals, he was not to publish a full collection for another two years.
When in 1967 ‘Idanre’ was published as the climactic piece in the volume which bears its name, rapid recognition followed, together with a spate of critical activity intent on asserting both the inner cohesion of the collection as a whole and its vital bearing on the adjacent world of the plays. Signs of internal organization were not hard to find. All of the poems, including the title work, dwelt on moments of transition: dawn, birth, death, the first pangs of war.
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- Information
- West African PoetryA Critical History, pp. 231 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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