The Portraits of Self-Love on the English Students’ Poems for Creative Writing

Abstract

Self-love is the main key to building healthy relationships with oneself and others. It plays a very important role in shaping the world and enables one to succeed or fail in life. The university students, especially, are eager to be aware of self-love at their age because they will experience furious changes for adaptation. Realizing this urgency, the lecturer in Creative Writing Course assigned the students to write English Poems which expressed how they had loved themselves. Not surprisingly, every individual had a portrait of self-love. Therefore, this study is very interesting to execute because it can result in various portraits of self-love. In accordance with this objective, this study is designed as qualitative descriptive research by using Bleich’s reader response approach. Documentation of the students’ English Poems is the main instrument in this study, while the researchers took a role as a human instrument to collect and respond the data. It was found twenty-two portraits of self-love. Although various portraits of self-love had been figured out, the researchers had highlighted four portraits of self-love which were stated more over the others in the students’ poems. They are 1) embracing self-imperfection, 2) realizing self-values and potentials, 3) facing the challenges and fears, and 4) being kind to ourselves by not focusing on satisfying others nor comparing ours to theirs. This study implies that all portraits of self-love, especially the four highlighted, must be respected by all parties, especially the lecturers. By using this study, the readers can generalize the results and hence disseminate them to promote people’s self-love. Lastly, further researchers should evaluate the results by confirming, adding, or even debating some parts of this study in order to portray self-love with a broader consensus.