This somewhat hostile gesture towards his predecessors would turn out to be an act of clearing space, a vital step towards achieving his own creative space. There is no doubt that he himself was, to a large extent, influenced by their poetry, especially the poetry of Okigbo. In his essay, “Niyi Osundare and His Poetic Choices”, included in The People’s Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide attempts to show the influence of Okigbo and Soyinka on Osundare. But it is pertinent to point out that Osundare did not, as a matter of fact, imitate the poetry of his predecessors, as the tenor of Ojaide’s essay implies. Osundare was careful not to produce any poetic rendition, especially in his first outing, which might be seen as a vestige of his modernist-influenced predecessors. The influence of these precursors on Osundare, as evident in his first poetry collection, was characterised by anxiety (to echo Harold Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence). The relationship was that of tension in which Osundare needed to theoretically, polemically denounce or discredit his precursors’ praxis, not really because they were worthless, but because doing that would turn attention to his supposedly new voice. In other words, Osundare’s debut, both in poetic and theoretic spheres, constituted a strategy that all “strong” poets, according Bloom, deploy to announce their presence on the literary scene. Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence says of the new poet, such as Osundare at this stage: “[to] appropriate the precursor’s landscape for himself, [he] must estrange it further from himself”.12 Osundare’s “Poetry Is” and The Writer as Righter are clearly his articulation of the estrangement of his precursors’ landscape whose consequence, immediate and long-lasting, projects his own voice as the suitable substitute to the voices of his predecessors.
Osundare’s rhetoric, which has its basis in a materialist conception of art, would not go uncontested. In point of fact, Osundare, while clearing a poetic space for himself, was lending a voice to a familiar debate in modern African literature. He came to the scene at a time when literary criticism in Africa was, in Obi Maduakor’s words, “pitched into two opposing camps: the Leavisians who appreciate works of imaginative literature for their humanising influence; and the Marxist radicals who think that it should radically transform society”.13 Although, like most writers in Nigeria, he has been careful not to publicly label himself, it was evident from his theoretical option and poetic praxis that Osundare was inclined to Marxism. What is today regarded as the second-generation of Nigerian poetry in English, inaugurated by the poetry of Ojaide, Ofeimun and Osundare, was formed, as we have seen so far, by a radical, Marxism-rooted, rejection of the status quo in Nigerian modern poetic tradition. Marxism, whether it was parochial or not, conveniently became a label, as Maduakor points out, for the aforementioned trinity of the second-generation poetry, which they shared with other emerging, post-war playwrights and novelists such as Femi Osofisan, Tess Owueme, Bode Sowande, Kole Omotosho, and Festus Iyayi. It is fair, though, to point out that some of them have not really accepted the Marxist label. While some of them have been suspicious of the doctrinaire posture of Marxism, their writings have been often hastily classified as Marxist by critics eager to give them a label.
The opposing camps were constantly in debate, mainly manifesting in the critical and theoretical thoughts going on in Nigerian universities in the 1970s and 1980s. University of Ibadan, Ibadan, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, became notable bases of Nigerian Marxism. A circle of Marxist thinkers (Biodun Jeyifo, Omafume Onoge, G. G. Darah, Femi Osofisan, Kole Omotoso, Ola Oni, John Ohierhenuan) in the form of the Ibadan-Ife Group emerged, made up of scholars and writers. Osundare identified himself with this group, although he was not a vocal member of it. This group constantly taunted and haunted Soyinka, regarded by many as an archetype of Euro-modernist, and challenged the critical practice and theoretical assumptions of the so-called Leavisian critics and scholars (Dan Izevbaye, Kolawole Ogungbesan, Charles Nnolim, Donatus Nwoga, David Ker, Pius O. Dada, among others) who would be regarded as the pioneers of literary criticism in Nigeria. The debate or quarrel between the Ibadan-Ife Group and the non-Marxist group, in the words of Jeyifo, himself a prominent member of the Marxist group, “[c]entred around our call for application of a rigorous class approach to the analysis and evaluation of the production and reception of works of art and literature in Africa, especially given the fact that a class approach in African literary-critical discourse was at that time decidedly marginal”14 But it was the view of the non-Marxists, the Leavisians, that literature, as an imaginative sphere, could not be subjected to the somewhat unilateral prescriptivism of Marxism, which implied that all literature must be produced and evaluated through the class approach. Their training in formalism favoured a work of literature or criticism that paid attention to the formal properties of literature such as style, characterisation, plot, setting, structure; the tropological dimension of literary expression, the entire gamut of craft. The core of their argument, as repeatedly expressed in their essays, was an adequate attention to the form of literature – since literature was primarily a product of craft; and a balanced treatment of issues, social and humanistic, in a manner that gave no room to the imposition of one’s idea on the readership. While they did not dispel literature’s desire to serve humanity, they frowned at what they considered the rigid consideration of literature and criticism through dialectical materialism – that a literary work must express the aspirations of the proletariat in the society. Expectedly, it was in the aspect of what Izevbaye called technical excellence that the formalists launched their attack on the Marxists. Donatus Nwoga, for instance, said “[nobody] should expect a poet to vulgarize his inspiration and strategies to fit into the laziness of those who do not want to make effort to appreciate his achievement”.15 Izevbaye concluded on the emergent Marxism-inclined writers of the Osundare generation that “I think there is too much impatience, too little respect for form and especially for language”.16
