The Pleaded Grace of Song - Wole Soyinka and Nigerian Poetry stewart brown ISSUE 92-2 BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS In terms of its population, Nigeria is Africa's largest country. There are more than two hundred languages spoken within its borders, with vibrant oral cultures sustained through many of those languages, and several substantial written literatures. The place of English in that society and the role of the poet who writes in English is - to say the least - problematic. The poetry of Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, for his writing in English, highlights some of those issues. The publication of his Selected Poems (Methuen 2002), alongside two recent books edited by the distinguished Nigerian critic Biodun Jeyifo, which select from the considerable body of critical material published on Soyinka over the last two decades - Conversations with Wole Soyinka and Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (both University of Mississippi Press, 2001) - allows us to engage with Soyinka's work both in terms of his status as a poet-in-English in the global context the Nobel Prize celebrates and, more locally, in the context of contemporary Nigerian poetry in English. | |
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