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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Critical perception of African poetry
Author:Dorsey, David
Year:1988
Periodical:African Literature Today
Issue:16
Pages:26-38
Language:English
Geographic term:Subsaharan Africa
Subjects:literature
English language
poetry
Abstract:The author argues that, for the most part, African poetry written in English has not received from its critics adequate attention to form, and that this omission is frequently the source of errors about content, even at a professional level of analysis. He presents examples of concepts and procedures which seem essential to full comprehension of both the 'thought' and the 'meaning' in a poem: poetry is a temporal art; every observable phenomenon is a potential element of the meaning; convention does not dictate the particular significance of any particular poetic device; attention to source or frequency of specific imagery in a poet's corpus is of only ancillary value; an extraordinarily complex conception of the varieties of ambiguity possible in poetry is required; and poetic utterance is of necessity carefully structured as an integral whole. Each principle is illustrated with examples from African English poems. Only by approaching each poem on its own terms, one can generalize to ascertain each poet's aesthetic principles and discover what makes some Anglophone poetry 'African'. Notes, ref.
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