Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010 collection The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, this article examines selections from the body of Ojaide’s self-reflexive poetry in which he poetizes the role of the poet as an instance of the poet’s articulation of his poetics. It appraises the focal poems’ status as metacriticism by underscoring their abiding correspondence with Ojaide’s vision of poetry as expressed in interviews and scholarly writings, and by examining the aesthetic implications of his firm anchorage of his work in the tradition of indigenous African poetry.

塔努（Tanure Ojaide）的诗歌主要以他的社会行动主义为主题进行讨论，偶尔会关注他对本土Urhobo诗歌技巧的运用。然而，迄今为止，几乎没有引起任何职业关注的职业生涯是诗人主导使用他的诗歌作为对他的艺术和目的的诠释。特权他的2010年收藏《我所见的美丽：三部曲》，本文从Ojaide的自我反省诗的主体中考察了一些选择，在其中他诗歌化了诗人的角色，作为诗人对诗学表达的一个实例。通过强调访谈诗与奥雅德在访谈和学术著作中所表达的诗歌观的持续对应关系，并通过考察其坚定地依托非洲土著诗歌传统对作品的美学意义，来评价这些诗歌的批评意义。