MADNESS WITH METHODS.docx

Notable critics, including Sunday Anozie and Robert Morsberger, have branded Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths as allusions to the Nigerian crisis of 1965, and the civil war that followed in1966, as well as Ibo traditional religion, the historical and personal idiosyncrasies, and as a literary work from Theocritus and Vergil to Howl. This article veers from such imputations into a hitherto untrodden ground. It subjects behaviours of the persona in  Labyrinths  –from “Heavensgate” to “Limits” and “Silences”, and from “Distances” to “Path of Thunder” to clinical and qualitative inquiries and concludes: the poetics are not only symptomatic of mania, the obscurities are couched in methods