Enhancing the Pedagogy of Poetry Analysis Through the Linguistic Stylistic Method

Abstract

Poetry, the oldest form of creative verbal art, is considered unique for its peculiar linguistic form and function. It is often considered as the most challenging genre of literature due to its compact, condensed and obscurant lexical content. This paper contends that the pedagogy of poetry analysis can benefit from a linguistic stylistic method beyond traditional literary criticism. To this end, this study deployed a linguistic stylistic method to study the language of poetry as against the popular and traditional approach of the literary critical method. This is with a view to demonstrating how the linguistic stylistic method can be a viable and more systematic analytical technique for the study of poetry, which can make the pedagogy of poetry more clearly understood and fascinating to its practitioners. To match theory with practice, the study adopted a qualitative approach to apply the linguistic stylistic method to the study of the poem Africa by David Diop. Analysis was carried out at the graphological, phonological, syntactic and lexico-semantic levels of linguistic description. Findings revealed that the linguistic stylistic method does indeed allow for systematic, empirical and verifiable analysis of poetry in such a way that the contextual meaning and the thematic preoccupation of the poem can be easily identified and understood. The study concludes that the linguistic stylistic method is both a complementary and an alternative method of studying poetry as it helps in easy comprehension of poetry by unravelling the poetic content through the linguistic form.