摘要：Literary historians in Nigeria are wont to credit Niyi Osundare with being the leading light or champion of a new kind of poetry, a poetry fundamentally different both in thematic concerns and style from that of the preceding generation of the so-called Ibadan-Nsukka school of Nigerian poetry. However, as some critics have argued, every age has a way of producing its own human medium through which it expresses its peculiar socio-cultural spiritus mundi. Accordingly, Osundare arrived on the literary scene at a time which shaped and prepared him for the task of freeing up poetry from the prison-house of obscurity in which the Soyinka generation was said to have put it. The socio-cultural and historical background or context of Osundare's emergence ¨C family, schooling, village setting, prevailing ideology, et cetera ¨C went a long way in moulding and shaping him for the kind of poetry for which he has come to be known, namely: the poetry of performance. But before we go into details of his unique kind of poetry, it is proper for us to, first and foremost, pause to reflect on the shaping/gestative impact of these features of his development both as a man and, more to our purpose, a poet
