Poetic Style And Social Commitment In Niyi Osundare’s Songs Of The Marketplace

ABSTRACT This essay studies how oral performance constitutes the core poetic style employed by Niyi Osundare to project social commitment and vision in Songs of the Marketplace.  It discusses how the poet’s deployment of oral performance makes his poetry more accessible to a larger audience than those of his predecessors. The pervasive theme of moral degeneration remains a serious concern in the selected poems. Like the oral traditional performance, Osundare employs rich Yoruba oral literary devices in a way that is unique. His poetic style has a clearly defined concept and role of concentizi…