Thesis Abstract

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.

Thesis Overview

The aim of this research is to carry out a stylistic analysis of some of Okigbo’s socio-political poems. The objective is to give better understanding of the poems, thereby maximising the enjoyment of the poems.