Abstract

This study documents and analyzes oral poetry of traditional Igbo society in the aim of discovering how language is manipulated to create the poems, and what the patterns, forms, and variants of the language convey, and reveal about the nature of the traditional society which produced them.  The main thrust of this study is to explore into the role of language in elucidating the meaning of poems in the context of the socio-historical realities of the traditional society which created them. It is argued here that understanding the linguistic resources of poems is instrumental to appreciating them as works of arts. Though Eme and Nwankwere, (2020) carried out a stylistic analysis of Igbo folktales in musical rendition, little has been done to analyze Igbo oral poetry stylistically. A total of eight poems were recorded from the writer’s introspection and used for this study. Formalism and sociological theories are the theoretical frameworks guiding the work, while Simpson’s 2004 framework is adopted for the analysis. The analysis reveals that such devices as repetitions, neologisms, figures of speech, unique word choices and parallelism are used to create stylistic effects in the poems. The study, therefore, concludes that the beauty of poetry is in understanding the meanings communicated by the nuances of its language

Keywords

Igbo, traditional society, oral poetry, language , formalism, repetitions