Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 ‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka
- Chapter 2 Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical and theoretical writings
- Chapter 3 The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
- Chapter 4 Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka's dramatic parables
- Chapter 5 The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis: fictional and nonfictional prose works
- Chapter 6 Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment
- Chapter 7 “Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 ‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka
- Chapter 2 Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical and theoretical writings
- Chapter 3 The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
- Chapter 4 Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka's dramatic parables
- Chapter 5 The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis: fictional and nonfictional prose works
- Chapter 6 Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment
- Chapter 7 “Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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 quaintness but indeed in its vitality, in its ability to evoke in the mind a memory of the dynamism of original Yoruba. For Soyinka, particularly 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 ambiance 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 beguilingly 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), 8- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Wole SoyinkaPolitics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, pp. 220 - 275Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003