Poetry as language and ideological tool for environmental agitation: A stylistic study of Tanure Ojaide and Benji Egede’s poetry

Abstract

Previous studies on Tanure Ojaide and Benji Egede’s poetry have concentrated on literary and linguistic features without paying adequate attention on the roles of linguistic-stylistic features that are crucial for the interpretation and description of their poetic discourse. This paper, therefore, examines poetry as language and ideological tool for environmental agitation in Tanure Ojaide’s The Endless Song, The Beauty I Have Seen and Benji Egede’s Testament of Hope and Songs of Fuellessness. The study reveals that poetry is a language and as well an ideological weapon aimed at unfolding the socio-political decadent of their time. From the poetic analysis, the study highlights the nature of discourse in the selected poetry in relation to social contexts, projecting what is communicated and how it is communicated. The theoretical approach adopted for this study is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic model which is concerned with the identification, description and explanation of textual features in a given discourse situation.