New Wine in Old Skin: Wole Soyinka’s Cult and Meaning in Selected Poems (1965- 2022): A Retrospective (2023

Abstract

Critical interventions that have attempted to assess the verses of Wole Soyinka have always pointed at the “obscure paths” to meaning in his poetry. Although there are few dissenting views, Soyinka’s pedigree as a poet is always questioned on the basis of inaccessibility of his verses. This article engages with the ‘new poems’ in Soyinka’s latest poetry collection, Selected Poems (1965- 2022): A Retrospective (2023), to address the question of obscurity in his poetry by synchronizing the topics that highlight the themes in individual poems. The article harnesses the major issues that cut across Soyinka’s poetry to include forests or voyage experience, the meaning of nature, life and existence, and dystopia conditions across the world. These interventions are constructed under the humanist ideals that the poet leverages on to interrogate the meaning and essences of life or existences. The conclusion of the article is that the “new” poems studied expose fresh possibilities of arriving at meanings while studying Soyinka’s poetry. However, the methods suggested, even though they have basis from the poet’s “old” collections, are unique in the ambivalence of “old in new” or “new in old” which has now become a major characteristic of Soyinka’s poetry