The Imperative of Experience in Poetry: An African Perspective

Abstract

African poetry that expresses specific types of experience appears no longer common as it used to be. Some, if not many, contemporary African poets now think that only the style or form matters and not the content or experience expressed. This could be a response to two generations of African poets, namely the second and third generations. On the one hand, while the generation of Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka was said to have modernist tendencies of paying more attention to form than content, the generation of Kofi Anyidoho, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, and Jack Mapanje was said to pay much attention to content at the expense of form. However, a careful reading of the two generations of poets shows that in their works, except in a few cases, there was much attention paid to content. As discussed with some examples, the best of poems as by J. P. Clark, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Jack Mapanje, and Tijan M. Sallah, among so many African poets, have been poems based directly or specifically on one type of experience or the other. Contemporary African poetry will attract more readers the more new poetic works take into consideration the imperative of experience in poetry.