A CRITICAL STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POEMS IN TANURE OJAIDE'S NARROW ESCAPES

Abstract

Poetry, like all other genres where language is used to relate human experience, is not left out

on the subject matter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nigerian poets have contributed immensely

to the discourse in this domain. This study aimed to examine selected poems in

TanureOjaide'sNarrow Escapes, which is on the Covid-19 pandemic, It adopted a stylistic

perspective with a view to investigate how language is manipulated to convey the poetic

contributions to the trendy subject. Three poems were purposively selected and analysed with

the toolkits of critical stylistics. The analysis of the selected poems has revealed that not only

the poet's intent on the pandemic but also the poet's experience is related through specific

linguistic choices such as pun, personification, allusion and analogy which run through the

lines of the selected poems. The study concludes that the deployment of the critical stylistic

tools for the analysis of the selected poems has unravelled the underlying sense which the poet

conveys in a melodious manner