Pragmatics of the Semantic-linguistic Opposition in the Poetic Ideas of Wadih Sa'adeh

The world of contemporary art and literature is filled with different ideas and discourses, where clash of opinions and schools of thought is of great importance. Poetry and literature are the embodiments of such contradictory views, where one can grasp these opposing viewpoints in the contemporary world by investigating them. Wadih Sa'adeh is one of the most prominent poets of the contemporary Lebanese literature, with postmodernist attitudes. His poems reflect the common social and intellectual currents in the world today and are important for the modern man, and especially for the Arab men and their society. This article is an attempt to understand the poet’s linguistic style, dominant views and his worldview through examining the conflicting ideas in his poetry. The result shows that the age of postmodernism is a period of competition between intellectual and social approaches due to the conflict of opinions, which leads to conflict at the level of words and interpretations. In this regard, Wadih Sa'adeh has adopted various semantic oppositions in relation to the major contemporary worldview such as freedom, death, absurdity, confusion, the environment, etc. in the form of general opposing ideas and concepts. It is worth mentioning that the present article uses the descriptive-analytical research methodology.