Le titre anglais de cette thèse, Soyinka’s Language – calqué sur celui de l’ouvrage de Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language – est traduit librement en français par Les mots de Soyinka en mouvement pour évoquer la richesse poétique de ‘language’ dans ce contexte littéraire. Cette étude adopte l’approche de Kermode pour analyser un corpus d’oeuvres de Wole Soyinka (neuf pièces de théâtre et deux essais), dans la tradition critique anglaise de ‘close reading’. Les mots nous pénètrent malgré nos efforts pour nous tenir à l’écart de l’expérience (The Lion and the Jewel; le diptyque Jero). Ils peuvent également rendre concret le passage d’un monde à un autre – par exemple, à travers un vocabulaire pédagogique qui tombe rapidement en désuétude (The Road; Madmen and Specialists). Comment exprimer, comment articuler sur scène la notion ambivalente de la distance – d’un côté, la distance de la théorie, de l’objectivité; de l’autre, l’absence d’empathie, de compréhension humaine – (The Strong Breed, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides, et The Burden of Memory)? Il s’agit d’un problème rhétorique qui s’apparente à un risque d’autarcie ou de solipsisme. Désamorcé dans la prose de The Man Died, ce risque sert de repoussoir, pour Soyinka dans Myth, Literature and the African World, à l’articulation d’une conception (yoruba) de l’existence, dont les tensions constitutives s’expriment à travers les ressources rhétoriques de la poésie orale. Cette étude se termine par une lecture de Death and the King’s Horseman, expression exemplaire de la tension entre l’affirmation de soi et le retour à la communauté, entre l’être et le non-être. / The title of this thesis is an allusion to Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language. There, Kermode directed his attentions to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, its poetry, demonstrating how the demands which words make on the ear might attune us to the insinuating possibilities of language, if attended to by a patient reader. This thesis adopts the same methodological principle, in approaching a number of Wole Soyinka’s dramatic and prose works in English. Throughout, it is concerned with his intelligence as expressed through literature. To this end, it does not hesitate to speculate, in the manner of Shklovsky, as to schemata which Soyinka might have used in order to ‘make’ his works. At the same time, it sees in formalism, for writer and would-be critic alike, the danger of words’ being cut off from the common human constituency and experience which assure their meaning. Words penetrate us, undermine our attempts to stand apart, draw us into a realm of consequence (The Lion and the Jewel; the Jero plays). Consequence, in turn, implies passage between two distinct moments, inviting us to reflect on how language can become strange (The Road; Madmen and Specialists). What happens to words in one who is content to look on from a distance, instead of participating? This is the starting point for a discussion of Soyinka’s interrogations of justice in The Strong Breed, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides and The Burden of Memory. Implicit in onlooking is the risk of self-sufficiency. Warded off in the prose of The Man Died, self-sufficiency provides a foil to a Yoruba conception of being and tragedy, as articulated in Myth, Literature and the African World. The study culminates in Death and the King’s Horseman, which best enacts the tension between self-assertion and commonality, departure and return, being and non-being, in and through poetic language.