Reviving Modern African Poetry: An Argument

Abstract

It is an understatement to say that contemporary African poetry lacks vibrancy or popular appeal, compared to modern African poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s. African contemporary poetry appears to be suffering from generic exhaustion that has thrown avid readers and literary critics out of balance for what to embrace with passion. It is not that modern African poetry, by nature of being written, especially in European languages, in a society that has primarily been nonliterate and illiterate generally, has not always reached the general populace as the writers would have liked for their works to be read and studied. Also there has always been something in modern African poetry for readers and literary scholars to complain about. If it was not the naïve imitativeness of the “pioneer poets” of the 1930s to the 1950s, whose poetry was highly imitative of Western Christian hymns or Victorian writings, there was the obscurity, disjointedness, and difficulty of the African “euro-modernists” of the 1960s to the 1970s. And following that generation, there was the lack of form of the “alter/native” group of poets who paid much attention to revolutionary messages in the 1980s and 1990s. Now there is everything to complain about in contemporary African poetry from lack of a discernible African voice in the age of globalization to a palpable lightness that makes poetry seem irrelevant to the needs of the society and age.