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Transcription: [00:04:37]
the Negritude poets wrote about public kind of concerns. Europeans, their politics, the European culture, the European customs and all of this that the Negritude wanted the Africans to get away from.
[00:04:53]
Now, the reason I made that point was because it's one of the major factors that separate the Negritude poets of the 30s and 40s from the African-English poets that began to write in the 1950s.
[00:05:05]
And the African-English poets you'll see moved away, not totally from emphasizing the importance of blackness but they moved away from the public kinds of concerns
[00:05:18]
and they dwelt more heavily on the individual, a kind of personal-ness about the poetry that the African-English poets wrote.
[00:05:28]
When one looks at African-English poets specifically, one automatically looks into Western African because simply the most significant African-English poetry came out of western Africa.
[00:05:43]
From Nigeria, West Africa as some of the major West African poets you had Wole Soyinka, who's more famously or more popularly known as a dramatist, but he's a very fine poet as well.
[00:05:59]
You had John Pepper Clark, Gabriel Okara and so on. But probably the most important west African poet and by most critics estimates he is, it's Cristopher Okigbo.
[00:06:13]
As a prime example of African-English poets dealing with the individuals concerns as opposed to the public concerns projected by the Negritude writers Okigbo stands out dramatically.
[00:06:28]
Okigbo is just very personal in his poetry, almost religiously so.
[00:06:34]
And Okigbo is known for his concern with the spirituality of man. Man's soul, his souls development, his development and growth and so on.
[00:06:45]
So from a prelude to the limits we'll allow you to hear

Transcription Notes:
names: Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_poets