Reading Udoidem's Philosopoetry: A True Medium for Conveying Value Patterns and Fortification of Emotions of the Good, Bad, and Ugly

Abstract

Iniobong S. Udoidem’s PHILOSOPOetry morally influences its readers by providing veritable patterns of value, significance, and meaning to life and existence. Udoidem’s PHILOSOPoetry makes one think, imagine, and cultivate moral knowledge, emotions, and imaginative reflections on the issues of life. Adopting the criticality of the Philosophy of Literature, the work helps readers learn how to exercise their moral capacity for approbation and disapprobation, how to exercise their emotional, intellectual, and moral capacities, and how to allow for complex responses. In this article, I will lay bare the work’s worth, building on how it successfully caused amusement and how it successfully led to the robust display of our mental and emotional capacities in producing the good, the bad, the ugly, and those values useful in the exercise of a kind of emotionally inflected understanding which cannot be dissociated from ethical value. By keenly examining some of the poems in PHILOSOPoetry, I deduce that they engender amusement, happiness, anger, and varying moods, which directly follow from the presentation and form of these poems. I choose to pursue this goal by relying on the formalist and reader-response criticism approaches, through which I will unravel the underlying mindset that birthed these morally reflective thoughts. My conclusion is that the various shades of emotions expressed serve to enhance our appreciation of the work and stand as beacons of hope in our search for answers to the frustrating quest, “Man Know Thyself.”