The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets The Excessive Influence of American Literary Magazines on Nigerian Poetry

Social media sparked a new life into Nigerian literature in the 2010s. But since American magazines became more prominent to Nigerian poets, many are seemingly now in a choreography of style and themes.

Poets are often the most sensitive members of society. In whatever a poet takes a special interest, they unveil the subject’s innermost secret with language. The monotony of existence sometimes makes us so used to our surroundings that we often forget the immense beauty surrounding us. It is to poets—these people who never lose their sense of seeing the world afresh—that we look to, to remind us of the intricacies, beauties and ugliness of existence, blurred to us by familiarity. As philosophers, through language, poets are able to encapsulate the variety of human experience in their words and to capture the soul of an era. When we study history, we often turn to the poets of the times to see the thoughts that warmed the hearts of the people the most, and to learn what voices such people heeded...

 

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