[Critics have] hinted that Christopher Okigbo … widely accepted as the greatest of modern African poets, was influenced by Ezra Pound…. [It is in the] technical aspects of style that Pound's influence on Okigbo can be fruitfully and meaningfully established.

What has often bothered me is the fact that Okigbo has always, whether deliberately or not, omitted Pound's name from the list of those who have influenced him; and yet Pound's influence on him is enormous…. It is because of the fact that Okigbo might, very likely, have deliberately kept silent about Pound and the fact that Pound's influence is vast and has, it seems to me, helped to make his poetry difficult that I consider this topic worth investigating. (pp. 144-45)

While Okigbo shows the same kind of tendency toward "imagemaking" and "melody-making" that Pound does, it cannot be argued that the former must necessarily have inherited this trait from the latter; for in the final analysis, imagery and sound are indispensable elements of good poetry. (p. 145)

The influence of Pound on Okigbo is more direct and obvious in other ways. First, both poets share the technique of having a descriptive or lyrical passage followed by a vivid image, which epitomizes and clinches the passage or resolves the mystery therein. It has been remarked that "Earl Miner, the closest student of Japanese influences on Pound, calls this the 'super pository method.'" (p. 146)

This method is used many times in Okigbo's work. The poem "Passage I" demonstrates it…. The last line of this poem is a vivid image demonstrating not only the solitude of the poet mourning a lost "mother," or goddess (which is partially what the poem is about), but also the uncertainty that shrouds him as he is immersed in the "dark waters of the beginning." Although the theme of Okigbo's poem differs from those of Pound's, yet there is a similar atmosphere of solitude in both cases.

The poem "Watermaid 1," which deals with the secrecy of love and the loneliness of a boy waiting in vain for the arrival of his girl friend, also employs the "super pository" style…. Okigbo's extraordinary power of image making can hardly be better illustrated by any other of his poems. All through the poem one gets the impression that the poet is in a secret, hollow, fragile situation…. It should be warned here that the peculiarity of this technique does not consist in the fact that the final images in the poems are charged or that they round off the poems neatly. This is not the point, for most poems (though by no means all) have this characteristic. What is peculiar to Pound and Okigbo after him is that their final images also rehearse ("repeat" is inadequate) and recapitulate dramatically and imagistically the themes and the atmosphere of the poems. (pp. 147-48)

Another stylistic trait that reflects Pound's influence on Okigbo is syntactic. This is the tendency to reverse the order of subject and verb…. Okigbo's poem "Initiation 3" is full of such syntactic arrangements (or rearrangements)…. The second stanza's "where liveth / in the heart of Aguata / a minstrel" and the refrain's "Singeth jadum" illustrate this technique clearly…. Thematically, the poem satirizes the Catholic priests who dragged the poet into Catholicism in his childhood and whose preaching means to the poet nothing more than the rantings of the madman "Jadum." The validity of this interpretation can be fully realized by reading all five poems that make up "Initiation." Nonetheless, the last two lines of the poem, "and there are here / the errors of the rendering," directly point to the poet's opinion that the preachers of Catholicism have misinterpreted the church Christ originally founded.

Now we may take up the final technique, which can be called the artistic placenta linking Okigbo to Pound, and that is the use of tags from other authors and other languages. Pound's Mauberley and The Cantos are full of lines from Greek, Latin, and French. (pp. 150-51)

In the same way, Okigbo has taken many lines from other sources and languages. It is quite remarkable that he has practiced this technique of borrowing tags by exploiting Pound himself. In the first part of "Limits 3," there is the refrain "& the mortar is not yet dry."… The refrain comes from Ezra Pound's Canto 8. The only change Okigbo has made is to substitute "&" for "As." In each case the line has the import of prohibition or caution. (pp. 151-52)

Furthermore, like Pound, Okigbo has borrowed tags from Latin. In his poem "Lustra 3," for example, we see the phrases "Lacrimae Christi" and "Lumen mundi."… (p. 152)

It is thus clear that Ezra Pound bulks glaringly in the work of the African poet, Christopher Okigbo. But it should be much more clear that this is no mere accident. The continuation of a tradition is characteristic of English poetry, as T. S. Eliot has made abundantly clear in both his critical writing and his poetry. Okigbo, though he is African and because he is using the English language for his medium, has simply found Pound's tradition interesting enough to him that he considers it worth preserving and worth promulgating.

One must concede to both master and apprentice the power of creating wonderful images and sounds. But with regard to the effective organization of those images for the purpose of communicating thought, one must also note that at times Okigbo's style is almost too "beautiful" to communicate. The poet sometimes appears confused, carried away by his music and forgetful of his failure to make sense. Still, if to imitate Pound was one of the aims of his artistic endeavors, he has achieved a considerable success. And this has probably helped to widen his audience, for the fans of Pound will certainly appreciate most of Okigbo's poems. (pp. 153-54)