'The Situation' by Sydney Clouts - Professor Dan Wylie (Rhodes University)

What can a poem tell us about the world when it seems to tell us nothing at all? In this video lecture, Professor Dan Wylie (Rhodes University) reflects on the fragmentary brilliance of Sydney Clouts, one of South Africa’s most enigmatic modernist poets. Through a close reading of Clouts’s poem ‘The Situation’, Wylie examines the experimental form, ecological insights, and philosophical disquiet that define Clouts’s work. From his pipe-smoking presence on campus in the 1980s to a life cut short in exile, Clouts remains a cult figure—praised by J.M. Coetzee and dismissed by critics for being too obscure or apolitical. But, as Wylie reveals, the deceptively elusive lines of his poetry resonate deeply with the fragmented experiences of modern life and our urgent need to rethink human relationships with the natural world.

Further Reading

Michael Chapman, ‘Sydney Clouts: Poet’s Poet…and More?’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 30.1 (2018), 35-47

Sydney Clouts, One Life (Purnell, 1966)

---, Collected Poems (David Philip, 1996)

Kevin Goddard, ‘Sydney Clouts’s Poetry’, English in Africa 19.2 (October 1992), 15-34

Susan Joubert, ‘The Unresolved Shibboleth: Sydney Clouts and the Problems of an African Poetry’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 75 (May 1990), 87-106

Dan Wylie, Intimate Lightning, Sydney Clouts: Poet (Unisa Press, 2018)