SOURCE: "The Poet and His Inner World: Subjective Experience in the Poetry of Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka," in UFAHAMU, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1979–80, pp. 23-41.

In the following excerpt, Maduakor examines the retrospective quality of Okigbo's poetry and comments on its significance in relation to modern African poetry.

In an interview with Marjory Whitelaw published in 1965, the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo made a distinction between what he called "platform poetry," and the lyric mode he referred to as the poetry of "inward exploration." Platform poetry, he felt, is declamatory and rhetorical; but it deserves, nevertheless, the labour of the poets who write it. Still, it is a less difficult kind of poetry to write than the poetry of inward exploration:

Much more difficult … of course is inward exploration. I hope that ultimately people will start doing that sort of thing in Africa. They haven't started doing it yet. [Journal...