Okigbo, Christopher - Obi Maduakor (essay date 1979–1980)
Obi Maduakor (essay date 1979–1980)
SOURCE: "The Poet and His Inner World: Subjective Experience in the Poetry of Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka," in UFAHAMU, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1979–80, pp. 23-41.
[In the following excerpt, Maduakor examines the retrospective quality of Okigbo's poetry and comments on its significance in relation to modern African poetry.]
In an interview with Marjory Whitelaw published in 1965, the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo made a distinction between what he called "platform poetry," and the lyric mode he referred to as the poetry of "inward exploration." Platform poetry, he felt, is declamatory and rhetorical; but it deserves, nevertheless, the labour of the poets who write it. Still, it is a less difficult kind of poetry to write than the poetry of inward exploration:
Much more difficult … of course is inward exploration. I hope that ultimately people will start doing that sort of...
[The entire page is 3729 words long]
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