The Literary Critic as a Hatchet Man 

By Abdul Mahmud

Reading Jesuyemi’s widely shared review of the three shortlisted books for the 2026 NLNG Prize earlier today left me genuinely disturbed, not only by the severity of the language of the reviewer, but by the sweeping manner in which he dismissed the works under consideration simply because they failed to rise to the prescriptive height he had set for them. There is a difference between rigorous criticism and imposing a private aesthetic standard upon  bodies of works and then treating every departure from it as evidence of failure. The former opens a conversation about poetry; the latter risks closing it before the conversation has properly begun.

That said, and for me, the poet is both an imagist and a reinterpreter. In discharging these twin functions, the poet necessarily draws from established traditions of poetry, inherited images, cultural memory, religious texts, myths and mythologies, and the register of human experience, but does not simply reproduce them. The task is to take what has already entered the imaginative storehouse, re-see, rework, and give it another life within the poet’s own imaginary; the type of imaginary that the distinguished theorist,  Ernesto Laclau, frames, not as fantasy or mere invention, but the political and social horizon through which people imagine what is possible, desirable and collectively attainable. It is the field of meanings, aspirations and representations through which a society gives coherence to otherwise disparate experiences and constructs.

Originality in poetry, therefore, cannot always be reduced to the invention of wholly new images or subjects. It may reside equally in the intelligence with which the familiar is encountered and transformed. A poet may return to an old image and, through a new arrangement of language, context and consciousness, make us see what we thought we knew differently. That act of reinterpretation is not a weakness of the poetic imagination; it is one of its oldest and most enduring traditions.

I have read Ifowodo’s latest offering and Oburumu’s shortlisted collection in manuscript, and in both offerings I found a conscious negotiation of these two roles. Their poems draw upon recognisable traditions while subjecting those traditions to the pressure of individual imagination, experience and contemporary circumstance. I have not read Eze’s collection, so I would not presume to make a judgement on work I have not encountered. For that reason, I find Jesuyemi’s criticisms rather strange, particularly on the fact that they are premised on the assumption that the use or reworking of inherited images, traditions or poetic materials necessarily diminishes poetics and originality. The history of poetry makes such a proposition difficult to sustain. As a poet, I understand how poets enter conversations with what exists before their own poetics; but, the important question is what they do with what they inherit. The measure of the poet is not simply the novelty of the material, but the freshness of the seeing and the capacity of language to enlarge what has been inherited, allowing the poet’s intervention to produce meanings that could not have existed in quite the same form before.

The problem with Jesuyemi’s review is not simply that it is unsympathetic or severe. A literary critic is perfectly entitled to dislike a poem, reject its aesthetic premises, or subject its claims to rigorous scrutiny. The difficulty is that the review falls short of the standards expected of serious criticism because its animus too often displaces its exegesis. A critical review should enlarge the reader’s understanding of the works, even where its judgement is ultimately negative. It should enter the poems closely, attend to their language, form, images, silences and internal tensions, and show how their meanings are produced. Jesuyemi’s review seems less interested in undertaking the works than in prosecuting a case against the poets and their poems.

There is an important distinction between criticism that dismantles  works and criticism that simply attacks them. The former can be devastating while remaining intellectually generous because its objections emerge from sustained attention to the texts. The latter may sound forceful, but it leaves the reader with little beyond the critic’s verdict. In Jesuyemi’s case, the ambition to “add to knowledge” is weakened by the manner in which the review is conducted. Knowledge is not added simply because a critic makes a strong claim about certain poems; it is added when the claim opens the works to a more precise understanding than was available before. The critic must make us see something in the poems that we might otherwise have missed.

That is where the review becomes problematic. Its posture is closer to a hatchet job than to a critical literary exegesis. The distinction is not that one of tone alone. A hatchet job begins with the conclusion and marshals the poems towards that conclusion. Exegesis begins with the poems and allows sustained reading to complicate the conclusion. The first seeks confirmation; the second seeks understanding. Even a hostile reading can possess considerable critical value if it takes the works seriously enough to discover what makes them worth resisting. Jesuyemi does not consistently achieve that level of engagement. The result is criticism that is assertive in judgement but comparatively thin in interpretation.

A serious literary review ought also to recognise that poems are not exhausted by the critic’s first encounter with them. Poetry frequently works through ambiguity, dissonance, indirection and competing registers of meaning. The critic’s task is not to punish  poems for failing to conform to an already established conception of what poetry should be, but to determine what the poems are attempting to do and then ask whether, and how successfully, they achieve that purpose. This requires the willingness to inhabit the poems before passing sentences on them.

Jesuyemi’s review, by contrast, appears to mistake the violence of its own judgement for the depth of its criticism. The language of denunciation can create the impression of intellectual authority without necessarily producing intellectual illumination. The reader is left with the critic’s dissatisfaction, but not always with a sufficiently developed account of the poetic processes that occasioned it. That is a serious limitation, particularly in a review that implicitly claims the higher purpose of contributing to literary knowledge.

The best criticism does not only tell us that works fail; it also tells us where, how and why they fail, and in doing so reveals something about the nature of the works itself. More importantly, it may discover that the works succeed in ways the authors did not anticipate or fail for reasons more interesting than the critic initially imagined. It’s this openness to discovery that’s is central to criticism. Without it, reviewing becomes adjudication, and literary criticism risks becoming little more than an exercise in taste dressed in theoretical language.

My objection, then, is not that Jesuyemi is too harsh. It is that the review does not sufficiently earn the harshness of its conclusions through the close, patient and intellectually serious reading those conclusions require. A critic can take  poems apart without taking them seriously; the harder task is to take them seriously enough to understand what holds them together before demonstrating where they break. That is the standard a critical literary review should meet, and it is precisely the standard Jesuyemi’s review, in my view, fails to meet.

As a commentator adds, how does a critic judge a book of poetry and pass it as, “is better”? What does “is better” mean in critical canon?

Naija!!!