Intertextual resonance in Christopher Okigbo's poetry

Abstract

Artistic creativity can be demonstrated in several ways, one of which is in the area of intertextuality as a literary endeavour. Intertextuality is the by-product of wide scholarship, which Christopher Okigbo exemplifies in his poetry. No work of art exists in a vacuum, as every writer is said to operate within a given literary tradition that has preceded him. This being the case, the issue of virginal purity in works of art is ruled out completely, if not partially. And rather than being a vice, this artistic device is a virtue. If anything, it is a demonstration of literary creativity; how a writer is able to re-echo the theme, structure and style of other writers before him. That is to say, no text is totally independent of the influence of other texts. Accordingly, Christopher Okigbo in his Labyrinth With Path of Thunder re-echoes the themes and style of other texts such as the Bible, classical literary sources of ancient Babylonian, Greek, Roman and some nineteenth and twentieth century literary traditions of Hopkin's The Wreck of the Deutschland, Debussy's Nocturne, Melville's Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eliot's Waste Land, etc.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 3 () 2006: pp.109-120