SOURCE: Thomson, Jeff. “The Politics of the Shuttle: Wole Soyinka's Poetic Space.” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 2 (summer 1996): 94-101.

In the following essay, Thomson surveys Soyinka's political poetry in such works as A Shuttle in the Crypt, asserting that “his is a poetry of such personal courage and emotion that one can hardly accuse it of being merely political, yet it is deeply concerned with protest and the reclamation of cultural ground.”

Robert Bly writes that “the political poem comes out of the deepest privacy” as at the same time he suggests that a poet's imaginative authority derives from an ability to speak for the people, not just to them (qtd. in Lense 18). For a good number of readers, as well as poets and critics, this philosophy borders on anathema. As Carolyn Forché notes,

We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems...