Ideological Perspectives, Style and Trends in Nigerian Poetry

This research interrogates, analyses and interprets selected poems of Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Tanure Ojaide, Odia Ofeimun, Obari Gomba and Psalms Chinaka. Particularly, it is concerned with underscoring the various ideological undercurrents and stylistic mannerism prevalent in the selected poems by the foregoing poets. The ideological focus this research interrogates are those reflected within the texts, and topicalized; such as the notion of duality, the social, economic, political and gendered nature of power, the concept of the self and the idea of modernity. From a stylistic purview, this research sheds light on the linguistic mannerisms or features that constitute text grammar in the poems, which are deployed for the purpose of focalisation. This is demonstrated in terms of the nature of deviation, the deployment of nominal and pronominal elements; the use of registers, point-of-view, and other rhetorical strategies deployed by the poets to construe the ideology ofthe texts. It adopts a sociological, descriptive, critical and analytical approach within the tenets of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Louis Althusser's: Ideological State Apparatus.