Soyinka, Wole (Vol. 179) - Jeff Thomson (essay date summer 1996)

Jeff Thomson (essay date summer 1996)

SOURCE: Thomson, Jeff. “The Politics of the Shuttle: Wole Soyinka's Poetic Space.” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 2 (summer 1996): 94-101.

[In the following essay, Thomson surveys Soyinka's political poetry in such works as A Shuttle in the Crypt, asserting that “his is a poetry of such personal courage and emotion that one can hardly accuse it of being merely political, yet it is deeply concerned with protest and the reclamation of cultural ground.”]

Robert Bly writes that “the political poem comes out of the deepest privacy” as at the same time he suggests that a poet's imaginative authority derives from an ability to speak for the people, not just to them (qtd. in Lense 18). For a good number of readers, as well as poets and critics, this philosophy borders on anathema. As Carolyn Forché notes,

We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we...

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