Traditional African Nidation in Works of Selected Contemporary African Poets

Abstract

The growth of African poetry written in English medium has been credited to a number of African 
pioneer poets whose verses have been published in English. These poets have modeled their verse 
artistry to Eurocentric style though with traces of African oral tradition. The contemporary 
Nigerian poets, however, have continued to implant oral traditions in their works in a bid to 
sustain the values of traditional and cultural heritage of the African society. The paper, therefore 
examines, instances of imaginative engravings of traditional myths, legends, symbols, images, 
proverbs, rituals, and other oral traditions in contemporary Nigerian poetry. While focusing on 
eclectically selected poems of Nigerian poets, the study probes into the sustenance of aesthetic 
values of oral tradition into the scripting of verses published in English expression. Using the 
structuralism with its cultural strand, the study further investigates how the aesthetics of oral tradition of performance, the communal spirit of the 
verbal art, resonate in written and published poetry in English. The study discovers that 
female poets also contribute towards the recreation of traditional verbal poetics in their 
verses. The study concludes that contemporary Nigerian poets have continued to implant the 
abundance of traditional oral heritage into their scripted verses in English. It submits that the 
borrowings from oral cultural identity have helped to bridge the gap between oral verbal art
and the written expression in the received language.