Transition and the Problems of Modern Nigerian Poetry: An Overview of Selected Nigerian Northern and Southern Poets

Abstract

Ever since Aristotle propounded the theory of the difference between literature and history, scholars and researchers have continued to develop different levels of interests on the problems bothering on these two fields of study. Even though Aristotle expressed the view that ‘history reports the particular truth while literature reports the universal’, literary theorists have over time absorbed history into literature, while critics have equally adopted it as a critical approach. The controversy surrounding literature and history is such that other terms like transition, movement, periodization and regionalization have come to share in the broad scope of this idea. This paper attempts a scrutiny into the position of history and transition in literature and the problems these have posed in the study of modern Nigerian poetry. It uses the works of some Northern and Southern Nigerian poets to make an incursion into these areas and observes that history has indeed played a part in the modern Nigerian poetry.