Illuminating the illuminator: A stylistic study of Obafemi's Illuminations

The use of linguistic and literary tools to unravel twisted and knitted contents of poetic works has become well established. This paper attempted an interpretative stylistic study of selected poems in Obafemi's Illuminations in order to reach the deep recess of the poet's imagination. Nine poems, which exhibit man's contact with oppression and its organs, out of the 40 poems that make up the collection were selected and analyzed. The study was carried out by the identification of the 12 most prominent linguistic features of phonology, graphology, lexis, syntax and semantics in the poems, i.e., alliteration, hyphenated compounds, dashes, ellipses periods, polyptoton, exact lexical and syntactic repetition, personification, descriptive adjectives, lexical verbs, anaphora, parallelism and hyponymy, which were related them to the artistic motivation of the poet. It was discovered that careful attention to Obafemi's marked employment of these devices would clearly illuminate his inventive and deft treatment of the theme of repression and domination in Illuminations. Adapted from the source document