“Let the City Breathe”: Re-imagining Lagos as City of the Muses in Nigerian Poetry

Abstract

For many Nigerian poets, Lagos is not just their abode but also the City where the Muses can be invoked for literary creativity. In this sense, the city represents the meeting point of all networks of intellectual and creative interactions. The symbolic representation of life in the city is depicted in Odia Ofeimun’s Lagos of the Poets (2010). This paper examines and analyses selected poems from the empirical experiences of the poets who have invoked the muse to capture their imagination of in different appellations of the city. This is an attempt to underscore the environmental influences, the metropolis, private dwelling, interiors, and self-awareness in the chaotic and ever busy city. Apparently, many of the poems traverse the realm of the manipulating words to initiating and revealing the journey of self-discovery. The paper deployed some methodological insights of Betrad Westphal’s Geocriticism to explicate the textual and literary representations of the spaces in the city as shown by the various poets. It concludes that Lagos is the sky where every writer with poetic wings can fly. It is a city of the muses for many Nigerian creative writers.