Provisional Notes on a Proposed Poetry Quartet: Historicism as Survey and the Nigerian Scene

Abstract

This treatise is the first part of a two-piece essay in the preparation of a book that proposes a quartet case for consideration in the literary history of written poetry in Nigeria. It is also part of another book project in progress and serves as part of its necessary historical background. The main case in question presently is of a particular group of poets worth special status as a distinct foursome whose impact and output have been profound by the sheer dint of the qualities and uniqueness of their poeticisms as they remain relatively unmatched in their strengths as bards. First, keeping in mind the efforts made and the conceptual and paradigmatic difficulties in the precarious labours of categorisation and generation delineations, let me nevertheless vouchsafe a grouping of the four for some semblance of form and containment. This will aid in the need for spatiotemporal alignments. Literary historians have left behind a saner yet slightly challenging grouping of Nigeria’s poets by largely considering context, content, and intent. While not counting the pre-independence poets for much now, we are left with Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and JP Clark as representatives of their group. They are commonly called the first generation while the Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Odia Ofeimun, and Chimalum Nwankwo are generally referred to as the second generation. There is still the military era group that “took over†from the second generation and will be encountered in the course of this essay and or its sequel. The emphasis on the last name of the representatives of the second generation is because he is more or less the raison d’etre of this effort as I am convinced that his unsung stature is quite unfortunate. As the trio of Osundare-Ofeimun-Ojaide is already known, the creation of the quartet of Osundare-Ofeimun-Ojaide-Nwankwo needs to exist – fully justified as the important and major poets of Nigeria at the watershed of modernity.
This essay does a basic function: the historical survey of the highpoints and landmarks of the poetry journey of Nigeria especially from independence till the contemporary times. While it takes necessary contextual and textual elucidations from the pioneer pre-independence poetry, it does not go into detail of works, treating issues only as they point more to the general understanding of the bigger picture. It is multifunctional as a somewhat breezy and cursory hands-on grasp of the literary history of poetry in Nigeria and could serve many a writing project as informative background section. It adopts the historical approaches of the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism theories – fleshing out discourses with the parallel aids and applications of non-literary but relevant and informative texts. These theories are intrinsically woven in as they implicitly guide towards the fuller comprehension of the driving contexts of the poetic contents of the Nigerian scene through the years.