Since Chinua Achebe appropriated the phrase Things Fall Apart from W. B. Yeats, African literature has often been framed as a response to earlier British and Irish texts.

This talk takes up Christopher Okigbo’s “Lament of the Masks,” a poem that strikingly addresses Yeats in the idiom of a Yoruba oríkì or praise-song, in order to propose a new approach to reading twentieth-century anglophone poetry.