Poetry Question 10 — Appreciation: Style
(from: Niyi Osundare's "Not My Business")
10. How does Osundare's overall poetic style in "Not My Business" — encompassing its structure, imagery, diction, sound, and rhetorical strategies — serve its political and moral purposes?
A. Osundare's style is characterised by maximum formal complexity and linguistic difficulty — using dense allusions, compressed syntax, and arcane vocabulary to ensure only highly educated readers can access the poem's political argument
B. Osundare's style achieves a powerful alignment of form and political purpose — the accessible diction democratising the poem's reach, the cumulative stanzaic structure enacting the inevitability of political consequence, the ironic refrain delivering moral indictment through formal repetition, and the concrete domestic imagery making abstract political arguments viscerally immediate, creating a poem whose every stylistic choice serves its urgent civic argument
C. Osundare's style is characterised by aesthetic detachment and political neutrality — presenting the experiences of Akintunde, Danladi, Chinwe, and the speaker with equal objectivity without any authorial guidance about the moral evaluation readers should make of the speaker's behaviour
D. Osundare's style deliberately fragments the poem's structure and meaning, using contradictory imagery and structural incoherence to reflect his philosophical argument that political resistance is ultimately futile
