Chinua Achebe Poetry Analysis

Abstract: Modernism, which is often regarded as a Eurocentric phenomenon, meets the non-European intellectual and cultural movement through the paraphernalia of post colonialism. Chinua Achebe’s poetry, as much as they are subversive, often draws on the Imagistic patterns of European poetry of High Modernism in technique and representation. Poems like AgostinhoNeto, The Explorer or Pine Tree in Spring talk about the postcolonial angst of a dislocated self that is searching to anchor itself in a political, ethical and cultural space. At the same time, the image pattern of the poems reveal that Achebe is assimilating European Imagistic patterns of Ezra Pound or Hilda Doolittle into his poetic discourse as perhaps a statement of resistance through a recognition of the culturally “double-self” in a postcolonial scenario. At times, as in his novels, Achebe’s poetry does get into the binarisations of the “European” and the “Other”, and therefore his politics get criticized over allegations of stereotyping both the spaces, but one must bear in mind that Achebe’s mission was always to become a “national poet” in the political sense of the term and thus one needs to look

Quite clearly there is a strong temptation to idealize it-to extol its good points and pretend that the bad never existed. This is where the writer's integrity comes in. Will he be strong enough to overcome the temptation to select only those facts, which flatter him? If he succumbs he will have branded himself as an untrustworthy witness. But it is not only his personal integrity as an artist, which is involved. The credibility of the world he is attempting to recreate will be called into question and he will defeat his own purpose if he is suspected of glossing over inconvenient facts. We cannot pretend that our past was one long, technicolour idyll. We have to admit that like other people's past ours had its good as well as its bad sides” (Achebe,