Download PDF
Author
- Chinedu Nwadike
Spiritan University Nneochi, Abia State, Nigeria
+234 8061541068
Abstract
Research Objective: This study looks at how traditions arise in poetry to provide poets with theoretical and methodological resources for poetic art. Specific objectives were to: examine how some major poets and critics view the role of emotions in poetry, and establish how emotions can provide a valid interpretive framework between subjectivity and objectivity in poetry.
Methodology: A historico-critical approach and critical textual analysis of data acquired from selected poetry was adopted. The study also included contextual sociology in the course of exploring how emotional encounters between a poet and a topic or theme can effectively provide a new theoretical framework and a method called “emotionism”.
Findings: Through emotionism, the style, structure, vision and mission of a poem emerge in organic unity from a pulse during an encounter between a poet and a topic or theme unlike the familiar method of choosing topic and structure ahead of writing a poem; excellent poetry is one that affects as many of the five senses and the imagination as possible; its language draws both the more and the less educated into the world of poetry; “split-line assonance” is a significant development; and the subjective provides a valid path to the objective in poetic art.
Conclusion: Emotionist poems arise from deeply felt emotions and also stir such emotions in an audience. Emotionism is a significant contribution to literature.
Recommendation: Poets and critics should explore emotionism further because of its contributions to poetic art.
Key words: Emotion, expressionism, impressionism, poetic style, subjectivism.
References
Chukwuemeka, D. (2010). Literature and the Apocalypse. The Muse: A Journal of the English
and Literary Students Association, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 38: 46-54.
Coleridge, S.T. (2001). Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. In M.H. Abrams,
& S. Greenblatt (eds). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.). New York: Norton, 1596-1598.
Donahue, N.H. (ed.). (2005) A companion to the literature of German expressionism. New
York: Camden.
Eliot, T.S. (1982). Tradition and the individual talent. Perspecta, 19: 36-42. JSTOR.
https://www/jstor.org/stable/1567048. Doi: 10.2307/1567048.
Gordon, D.E. (1987). Expressionism: Art and ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hauser, A. (2005). The social history of art: Naturalism, impressionism, the film age,
vol. iv. London: Routledge.
Nwadike, C. (2008). The wiseman. Enugu: SNAAP.
Nwadike, C. (2019). Inversion: Emerging perspectives in human experience and literature.
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL), 7(4): 143-155.
Okoro, F.U. (2006). When the bleeding heart breaks. Enugu: El ‘Demark.
Onuigbo, S. (2010). Language, literature and the development of our common humanity. The
Muse: A Journal of the English and Literary Students Association, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 38: 21-33.
Pagden, A. (2008). Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West. New York:
Random House.
wa Thiong’o, N. (1981). Writers in Politics: Essays. Nairobi: Heinemann.
wa Thiong’o, N., and Mugo, M.G. (1976). The trial of Dedan Kemathi. Nairobi: Heinemann.
Willett, J. (1970). Expressionism. New York: World University.
Wordsworth, W. (2001). Preface to Lyrical ballads, with pastoral and other poems. In M.H. Abrams, & S. Greenblatt (eds). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.). New York: Norton.