SATIRE

This study looks at how satire points out social issues in Niyi Osundare’s poetry collections entitled Village Voices and Songs of the Marketplace. It also illustrates how satire enhances the poet’s functional status as critic of the social, political, cultural, religious and educational facets of the Nigerian nation. The two collections were closely read and qualitatively analysed through the use of the theoretical framework of New Historicism developed by Stephen Greenblatt. The study shows that, through the employment of satire in Village Voices and Songs of the Marketplace, Osundare criticizes the political hypocrisy, educational decay and societal negligence ravaging the Nigerian nation and also uses his poetry to express hope in having a classless society that treats all human beings equally, with all the barriers of wealth, class, rank and ambition displaced for the good of humanity