The Poet as a Visionary: a Reading of Wole Soyinka’s Animistic Spells

In the earliest times the poet was originally seen as a seer whose verse gave valuable insights into the future because he looked far better into the present than the average human being. Since then there has been a steady devaluation in the poet’s status as seer. Perhaps because of the use to which poetry has been put, perhaps because of the rise in the number of poets. Nonetheless, now and then we have among us the advent of a poet whose verse gives us intriguing insights about our world. Wole Soyinka is one of such poets. Soyinka has been described in a variety of ways by different scholars, but hardly as a visionary, even though large chunks of his verse are about visionary or spiritual experiences. Because he hardly writes about abstract, spiritual experiences, without injecting into the poems the mythic and religious elements of his ethnic provenance, many critics have tended to emphasise unduly his use of mythological materials, thereby confining his verse to a narrower ethic space than they perhaps intended. Therefore taking his poem, “Animistic Spells” as our object of study, our aim in this essay is to avoid seeing his verse through the narrow mythological lens of his ethnic background, and highlight how his verse encapsulates universal human experience. Our choice is informed by our belief that the poem not only ought to be among the poet’s most anthologised poems for its artistry, symmetry and brevity but also because it is one of the best examples of Soyinka’s verse that both embody a personal religious ideology and intriguing insights about the complexity of our world.