SOURCE: Ofuani, Ogo. “The Poet as Self-Critic: The Stylistic Repercussions of Textual Revisions in Okot p'Bitek's Song of Ocol.¹” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 4 (winter 1994): 159-76.

In the following essay, Ofuani explores p'Bitek's revisions of his poetry to discover the overall direction of his poetry.

Creative writers have often assumed the mantle of literary critics and, as self-critics, revised their own published texts in a bid to produce the ULTIMATE TEXT. This urge has fascinated other literary critics who have shown that the trend is neither genre-specific nor restricted to regional and linguistic provenance.

In English literature, Samuel Richardson revised his Pamela, or Virtue Revisited (1740); William Wordsworth, W. H. Auden, and William Butler Yeats have also revised their poems. E. A. Levenston, for instance, discusses the stylistic implications of Auden's drastic pruning of “September 1, 1939” between 1940 and 1945, while Thomas Parkinson distinguishes four categories of Yeats's revisions. In American Literature...