Indeed, there is a modicum of truth Ojaide's paradox that writers of the new generation are not doing anything different from his generation. I take this to be the summation of the untautened artistry and weak literary language that the new generation has inherited from his generation and has refused to let go. With the exception of few writers – I have mentioned here – the writers of today, like those before them, deviate from the kind of craft that has made Soyinka great because they have desperate messages for an audience illusorily constructed in their minds. Do you realise that quotable lines have eluded our literature today?There must be something metaphorical or paradoxical about a line that can stick to your memory. The depth of language is what differentiates literature from other kinds of writing just as the profundity of speech (proverbialised) distinguishes an elder from a young person.

If the poet, as Ofeimun says, in an interview, ought to be in the enterprise of moving language forward, i.e. reinventing language, then the audience should be poised to learn language from the poet and, indeed, any creative writer. What will the audience learn when the poet reduces literary language to banality because he wants to mean, he wants to reach, or he wants to raise consciousness? What else could be more disappointing than when the poet comes out, at the peak of his audience-patronising orgy, to say that he resorts to the use of clichés or pidgin English in order to reach the audience? Our literature has suffered too much from the art of audience patronising. Writers should rise and aim at the peak of their imagination with intense creativity instead of worrying about the audience who may not be able to operate in the same height of imagination with the writer. Indeed if Okigbo and Soyinka had not ascended the height of their imaginations, no one would be celebrating them today.

I strongly suggest that a writer must not forego the sublimity of art for his lazy audience. Otherwise our poems will "metamorphose" into children rhymes, especially with the poor standards of education and consequent poor performance in English language. This audience (of common people) is usually not even there. Most literary works today are read by writers (themselves) and scholars. Our students only read when they are compelled. We know what has happened to reading culture in spite of the fact that the post-Soyinkan disciples of simpleness have brought literary language low to accommodate general readership.

Every work of art must have a level of complexity manifested in the profundity of the language and the uniqueness of the style. There is nothing in storyline or theme that can strike a critical reader. Even in the dramaturgy. Ahmed Yerima's plays, for instance, have certain arresting dramaturgy, but the shallowness of his language will dwarf his dramas in the presence of Soyinka's dramas. If not for Soyinka's craft (and had it been it were written by those whose language must mean to the ordinary people), The Beatification of Area Boys, a play about the street people, would have been a poor sensation. Another writer will reason that since it is a play about the poor people, the language has to be very simple, bereft of metaphors, so that the poor people can understand it.

I totally agree with those who say language is the major failure of our generation. But, as Jeyifo said in his keynote address at the colloquium, it is the failure of all generations. The damage reflects more in our time. To arrest this, our writers must mask their social commitment in artistic garb that should be a chosen personal trope. It is the reader's duty to make out meanings from that garb, and the writer's audience is constituted by the acceptability of that garb. A writer worthy of his craft does not reach out for audience; rather it is his work that will draw audience unto itself. Great novels, dramas and poems have constant and large audience because of their intrinsic values. The audience is not only fascinated by the idiom of such great works, it also sources wisdom of speech from such works.

I conclude this essay with a word on what many people see as prescriptive criticism. Someone has argued passionately somewhere that nobody should tell another person how to write or what to write. No one should tell anybody what is good or bad literature. This is taken as a prescriptive howler. Sure, a writer has the liberty to write what he wants to write – like a woman who chooses to write about women – and he can choose his language, as some of us write poems in Pidgin English. But prescriptive criticism sets in when a critic or, even, an ordinary reader reads works of art and naturally, instinctively grades them. He praises a work with literary accomplishment and dismisses a work with literary deficiency. (And somebody hollers: Who sets the standards?). If the critical reader does not dismiss that with deficiency, then he has lost his critical mind; he has helped to sink literature into mediocrity. In this age of literary narcissism, critics and reviewers praise their friends' works at the expense of literary standards. We cannot avoid and must not undermine prescriptive criticism when it is obvious that literature thrives on artistic standards. Indeed now we need prescriptive criticism to arrest our literature from the un-Soyinkan pitfall that Titi Adepitan, as well as other people, has identified. In a reaction to my essay, "Literary Language and Recent Nigerian Fiction", a young self-important Nigerian professor of literature living outside Nigeria dismissed my prescriptive, formalistic tendencies about literary language as the kind of talk that is only valid in an Ajengule bus. Why should I talk about language when I should be spending my energy on Postcolonialism and the other isms? But my honest contention is that in literature, isms are not the first things, but the craft in the language. I enjoy Arrows of Rain and Invisible Chapters not for their socio-political messages, but for the unique metaphors and fresh language of the novelists. That is what has made Shakespeare great; that is what has made Soyinka great; that is what has made Nardine Gordimer great (oh yes, she doesn't write: "That girl is strong"; she writes: "That girl is a lioness"!).