Chapter 6 - Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment

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