Traditional African Nidation in Works of Selected Contemporary African Poets

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 artand the written expression in the received language.