Preface

Preface

This is a relevant question for this book: what influences could poetry claim for itself? Poets across the world are generally concerned with their own and the reader’s mind to conjure what is plausible or imagined or established within the minds for a perhaps, figurative instrument. The professors of poetry, sooner or later, have always had tried to relate the existence of poetry with the quotidian life of the citizens.

As Vaclav Havel points out something about hope, which can also be correlated with the poetic mind, he says- it is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation…

W.H. Auden categorizes poetic faculties of the poet into his famous trinity- making, judging and knowing. Here, the faculty of making makes a free entry which enables it to go beyond the jurisdiction of the other two. W.B. Yeats in his words, says- the will must not usurp the work of the imagination.

When the readers grow scanty, the poets still feel that poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, the joy of being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. This although sounds like a statement of truism, is not worth repetition in the postmodernist or the postcolonial backlash or in the context of other politically approved themes.

Now, comes to fore the subject of redressal of poetry, as Seamus Heaney talked about. Poetry, at this point of time is understandably pressed to give its voice to objects that has hitherto been denied expression, like ethnicity, sexuality, feminism, profound ontology, politically maneuvered ideas and the classified strata of the society. This redressal is the power of poetry for acting as an agent to proclaim and correct injustice.

With the fullest artistic integrity, the poet can consciously seek to promote cultural and political change. The history of Irish poetry over the last 150 years is a clear ground of explanation of motives surrounded for the national purpose. Regarding the intent of propaganda in poetry, it can be said that it is far from being a guarantee to its success. But, still we can seek for a self-definition within it. There is always a mutual susceptibility between the formation of a new genre or tradition and the self-styling of the individual talent. Yeats desired at first to write lyrics in short or poetic dramas, where speeches would be short and concentrated. But, later this style merged with the national importance- to the Irish preference, thereby contrasting with the English mind.

To secede with the art, the writer has to obviously start as readers so that they could internalize the norms and forms of the art or any tradition.

Poetry, either it belongs to the old political dispensation or aspires to express a new form, must work as the working model for the inclusive consciousness. Poetry should never simplify. It should correspond to the intricate realities that surround it or from which it is generated. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is an adequate example of adequacy in total. Even a haiku can represent totality through its structure, which only depends on the poetic mind.

To read poetry of such totality is an experience of something bracing and memorable, something that always augments its value through its reading. Another poet that needs worth in this regard is George Herbert, whose poems such as The Pulley is an example of daylight sanity and totality.

In reaffirming poetry as an upright, resistant and self-bracing entity within the flux and flex of language, there should be a profession of the surprise and reliability of the poems, its unforeseeability must be celebrated by standing along with the poet, at the look-out tower of transcendence from where he tries to fly. The reader must start from that point, like one does to read Kant’s philosophy, else poetry could not be the art of celebration any longer.

These poems are probably the quintessential part of my life-our lives, the inner and outer subjectivities dealing subjects and tropes with its matching world. For the readers.