A Stylistic Analysis Of Selected Christopher Okigbo’s Socio-Political Poetry

Style is the manifestation of one’s personality. Every writer has a natural, linguistic and idiosyncratic way of expressing ideas that leads to the identification of style with man and his thought. The manipulation of words by a writer creates a distinct style through which he/she reaches out to the audience. This research work focused on a stylistic analysis of selected socio-political poems of Christopher Okigbo. This aims at identifying Okigbo’s unique use of language. Stylometrics was used as a theoretical framework for the study. The findings in this are that Okigbo’s poems begin with some words in capitalisation which are foregrounded to the theme of the poems. He makes use of elements like repetition, alliteration, rhyme, parallelism and so on which add musical colour and rhythm to his poems. It is also evident his poems are sometimes prophetic, ritualistic and often address socio-political issues from a universal perspective. The work found out that each of the linguistic choices has an identifiable function that is performed in the poem. The study concludes that Christopher Okigbo’s poems are musical in nature and highly figurative in language use.

This chapter serves as general introduction and includes background to the study, the statement of the problem, as well as the scope and delimitation of the study. Also, included in chapter one are the aim and objectives of the study, significance of the study, limitations of the study as well as the research design and a definition of terms.

Language use by individuals differs from one person to the other. This is because of the differences in language ability. Stylistics is a borderline discipline between language and literature.  It  focuses  on  language  use  in  both  literary  and  non-literary  texts. Stylistics is also concerned with the study of the language of literature or the study of the language habits of particular authors and their writing patterns. Therefore, it can be said to be the study of style. Style on its own has been defined differently be scholars. According to Leech and Short (15), style is the cover of our feelings and it is the tool of the writer to transfer the message to readers. Leech further says “style proclaims the man” (11), that is, there is an intimate relationship between the choice of language and the author’s personality. Haynes defines it as “the study of style is the study of differences” (3).  This further drives home the point that our choice of diction differentiates us from others.

Language gives the reader a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them (Widdowson 9). So, although the reader may still use the same exhausted words and vague terms like ‘love’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ to refer to human experience, to place these words in a new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry (76).

Every writer’s works can have a great influence on fore coming literary works even though their purpose is the same. This is because writers do not have the same approach when it comes to language. That is why one person’s style can be different from another. Thus, this work will focuses on “A Stylistic analysis of selected Christopher Okigbo’s socio-political poetry”.This aims at revealing what has made Okigbo so popular in the literary world despite his short life.

Stylistics is the study of style. It is the description and analysis of the variable forms of linguistic items in actual language use. This research project intends to carry out a stylistic investigation of selected Christopher Okigbo’s Socio-political Poems. When two or more authors write on a particular topic, the style of writing differs from one author to the other authors thereby distinguishing one from the others. This can be achieved through choice, deviation, conformity and so on. Okigbo has a style that is peculiar to him and differentiates his work from those of other authors. His style reveals his feelings about the socio-political situation in Nigeria. This research paper seeks to find out what is peculiar to his language.