Identity Of A Poet: ANALYSING THROUGH TEXT, TEXTURE, PLATFORM, SOCIETY, UNIVERSALITY

Poets create literary history and tradition by using and passing on poetic structures and ideas about life and art from generation to generation. They transmit information about the cultural life of the country. Their Literature can be a source of pleasure and a stimulus towards the citizens’ personal development. Much of the literary importance of Poets and their work stems from their use of moments that evoke an identity. In common usage, an identity indicates a realization or understanding that comes from an personality. Poet's identity, however, occur during his literary life. It covers the wide gamut of -- TEXT, TEXTURE, PLATFORM, SOCIETY, UNIVERSALITY etc.

Although great poetry is sometimes said to be timeless, poets think of their writing as part of history, and they intentionally imitate earlier poets. The idea that a poem should be original is a relatively recent development, dating from English romantic poets of the early 19th century. Read More Poetry In fact many avant-garde experimenters of the 20th century—poets seeking to break with existing conventions of poetry—have turned their attention to ancient poetries or to oral practices that continue today. The word “original” contains the word “origin—”and for the modern poet the search for new poetic forms is often a matter of looking back at the past ones. Prior to the 19th-century emphasis on the original, imitation of earlier models was not only acceptable but was the standard way of learning to write poetry and becoming a poet in other people’s eyes. Even in the New World Canadian and American poetry began with poets asserting their voices by writing in the forms of European and English poetry.

For poets of the English Renaissance, from about 1485 to 1660, the imitation of classical Greek and Roman poets was a way of earning a place in the lineage of that early artistic and philosophical culture that had glorified the human image in art and writing. Finding their roots in this earlier era was a crucial step for the English poets. Read More Poetry They wanted to show how their art was different than that of the medieval period that preceded the Renaissance. At that time, the medieval period was viewed as a dark age in which the glorious culture of the ancients had been lost. Over the ages many poets have found writing in traditional forms a means of “talking” to poets of the past, both to acknowledge what they have learned from them and to add their own voices to the tradition. Among poets continuing this convention in their own ways, the English late–19th- and early-20th-century poet A.E. Housman and the 20th-century Canadian experimental poet Anne Carson, both classical scholars, juxtaposed ancient and modern to jolt the reader into seeing the continuities of tradition.

‘Literature,' according to Mathew Arnold’s definition is at bottom 'a criticism of life.' In other words it is a vital record of the writers’ impression and reaction to the life that he finds around him. A great artist must come into close grip with the reality of life and what he sees or experiences in life is to be transmuted into work of art by imagination, feeling and beautiful language. So, literature as an interpretation of life springs from life and is intimately connected with it. The greatest of a poet is in the powerful and beautiful application to life.

Read More Poetry In his study of poetry, Mathew Arnold elaborates, ‘poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty’. And further said, ‘the end and aim of all literature is ……a criticism of life ………. The greatest of a poet is in the powerful and beautiful of ideas to life”. As Eliot stressed in a 1943 lecture the poet's duty "is only indirectly to the people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve." I have the feeling that Eliot's main interest is in the language and he does not seem to pay attention to what many may regard as the social function of poetry. Eliot went further and lifted the human being to the point of linguistic abstraction.

 

In the look east, literary sources for ancient Indian society mainly include the Vedic texts, the Epics as well as the Indian Puranas. Further, in Sanskrit literature and in Indo Aryan literature, the evolution of the ancient societies in India is very well reflected. Besides these literary sources of the ancient Indian societies, the various Buddhist Pali works, mainly Jatakas, and Jain works also provide significant references to the ancient eras. Interestingly, the Rig Veda is considered as one of the most primitive written records of Indo-Europeans and their considerably high degree civilisations. Read More Poetry In Vedic Samhitas too, the origin and other references of the ancient Indian societies can be found. It mainly includes the Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda. Not only these, numerous poetical works, dramas and prose disclose some significant information about the ancient Indian societies. They mainly comprise references about what was considered ideal and what basically happened in the societies of the past. In the ancient Indian world the poets were the articulate bearers of honor and blame. It was they who had the power to counsel, to sneer, to curse, to make peace and to point to the vanity of human endeavors. 

Again in  The Republic, written by Plato in the form of a dialogue, is an inquiry into the nature of justice and the organization of a perfect society.  According to Socrates, the principal speaker in The Republic, poetry is a mimesis or imitation. He illustrated its relation to the Universe by a mirror which turned round and round can produce an appearance of all sensible things. According to Plato the sensible universe is an imitation of the eternal ideas. Art therefore is an imitation of an imitation. It is thrice removed from reality.

In Aristotle’s Poetics, the various kinds of poetry are also defined as marginal life in poetry. A tragedy then is the imitation of action that is serious and also having magnitude …….. Complete in itself’, says Aristotle and for him ‘action’ means “the affairs of life”. Aristotle points out that ‘Art imitates Nature. Artistic work is both natural and ideal.’

Horace in his Ars Poetica emphasizes the aim of the poetry and declares that every poet should have a close contact with life, the world abroad being the best school. Horace’s Ars poetica, his longest single work, extols the Greek masters, explains the difficulty and the seriousness of the poetic art, and gives technical advice to aspiring poets and dominated literary criticism through the  Renaissance and 18^th century.

In Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet, Hamlet says to the players, “Hold the mirror up to nature”. Hamlet’s comments seem to carry the ring of Shakespeare’s own voice. It is Shakespeare who perhaps tresses the cult of realism through Hamlet. But when one thinks of realism in art, one should do well to keep Sidney as well in mind ‘Her (Nature’s) world is brazen, the poets’ world is golden”. We may mark the distinction between the brazen world and the world of gold. It one simply keeps the mirror up to nature, one is likely to reflect the brazen world. But this photographic reflection of the brazen world is the function of a journalist. The poet’s function is quite different. He remains faithful to the brazen world, and yet what he finally reflects is a world of Gold. The life of D.H. Lawrence, for example is an object of the brazen world and when Lawrence is transmuted into Paul in Sons and lovers, he achieves a new lease of life, a life which follows reality as well as transcends reality. Sidney points out that poesy are an act of imitation - A speaking picture, with this end to teach and delight.Read More Poetry  The Vedic literature provides a glimpse of the vast culture and civilization of the ancient Indian societies whereas the two greatest epics as well as the Buddhist and Jaina religious texts give some significant historical material about the societies. The Upanishads are considered as the main basis of Indian philosophy, which are also known as Vedanta Philosophy.  

Arnold says that while poetry goes to serves as a criticism of life, it must abide by the principles of poetic truth and poetic beauty philosophy is a criticism of life but it is not poetry because it has no allegiance to poetic beauty. Aristotle himself is a philosopher offering a steady criticism of life. But in no sense he is a poet. Poetics cannot be poetry though both have their root in life and both are in their own ways, critical. Poetic truth aims at the universal while poetic beauty insists on concreteness. In his Apology for poetry, Sidney distinguishes between ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’. While philosophy is abstract and universal, more-over, philosophy is concerned with knowledge while poetry is pre-occupied with delight. Of course, poetry combines delight with knowledge.

Wordsworth in his To A skylark forecasts that true creative artist is ‘true to kindred points of heaven and home’. In his Immortality Ode, he truly clarifies the philosophy of life and its significance on earth. Keats creates us such an eminent literature where he epitomizes the whole human life through the echoes of:

          “Here men sit and hear each other’s groan     

          Where palsy shakes a few and last gray hair,

          Where youth goes pale and spectre then and dies,

          And but to think is to full of sorrows and laden eyed despair,

          Where beauty can’t keep her lustrous eyes

          And new love pines at the beyond tomorrow”.

Shelley says “A poem is the very image of the life expressed it in its eternal truth”. He comments, “Poets learns in sorrow what they teach in songs”. He relates: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Read More Poetry In Victorian period, the artiest like Tennyson, Browning, and Victorian Novelist stately reflects the life and habits through literature. Tennyson is the Victorian voice and he explores the criticism of life of Victorian society through his poetry. His Ulysses and Lotus eaters reveal the attitude of life of Victorian people.

Literature is rooted in reality and at the same time it breathes something other worldliness. Wordsworth’s Lucy is so similar to the little girl of our everyday world that we can easily identify her as our own. But Lucy in Wordsworth has a glow of her own, a luster of divinity which distinguishes her from the girl of mundane world. The same and similar slightly stand apart. Literature or for that matter, any kind of art is similar too, but not same as life. The words ‘very similitude’ aught to be examined at this point. It means ‘very similar’. No art can ignore very ‘similitude’. Regan and Goneril, for example have their counter parts in our every day life. When we speak of realism in art, we must take into consideration the basic difference between art and reality. Art weaves a texture of make-believe paying little attentions to possibility. Plato rightly points out that reality which is an idea can never be translated. So, when poetry goes to translate reality, it misses much of reality. Read More Poetry In Geometry, the idea of a line has a length but no breadth. But the moment of a line can not be translated in the material plain. Understandably, when one says that poetry or any other branches of art reflects reality, one forgets that reality is beyond reflection.

T.S Eliot’s The Waste land reveals the barrenness of England as it appears today and it is one of the most important documents of his age. His poetry gives way to mood of terror in face of an outworn and disintegrating civilization, a terror deeply felt, even when hidden beneath the surface irony of his poems.

 Literature is only one of the many channels in which the energy of an age discharges itself, in its political movements, religious thought, philosophical speculation, art; we have the same energy overflowing into other forms of expression. The study of literature will thus take us out into the wide field of history by which we mean the history of politics and society, manners and customs, culture and learning, and philosophy and religion of a country or race. A writer is not an isolated fact but the product of the age in which he lives and works. His picture of life is pervaded with the influences of his age. Thus literature is simply a mirror of life, a reproduction and obviously a social document. Literature is the progressive revelation, generation by generation, age b age, of a nation’s mind and character. Read More Poetry A writer is able to give abiding perennial and universal appeals to work of art. His feet are deeply rooted in his age, but he appears to remain above it. Thus the relation of society and literature is inseparable. Finally, I would like to touch upon two key arresting phrases, which should be  applicable to poets or writers in general --- they are 'aesthetic supervisor' and 'social dedicator'. If you have any complain, lodge it to the dead soul of great poets.

Ardhendu De       

Reference: 1.Aristotle, Baxter, J., & Atherton. (1997). Aristotle’s Poetics: Translated and with a commentary by George Whalley. McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP.
                 2. Albert, E., & Stone, J. A. (1979). History of English Literature.