AN APOLOGY FOR MY POETRY: 1

I Poet, dip my pen

In my own blood to write my songs...

                              - Hareendranath Chattopadhyaya 

Once my teacher quoted something like this in our class: "Many people write poems. Bad poets publish them and good poets burn them". I know that he was commenting on the false self impressions of amateur poets like me. But still, I was confused. Where do I belong in the above classification ? Or am I not a poet after all ? I knew that I would never publish in print, any of my works. Also I couldn't burn them. So I decided to put all of that in a blog. Since every person I knew were not interested in reading poetry, no one would visit my blog. At the same time I can also be happy when I see my works published on some platform, acknowledged or unacknowledged. Some of my friends may visit this blog, that too once or twice, out of their love for me. But it really doesn't matter. Whether they read it or not, after a very long time when I look back at my life, I need to see what I was in the past and how I was made into what I will be that day( As long as you understand the meaning, please don't question me about the tenses in this sentence).

If Eliot were to read my poems( if one can call them that), he would be very much disappointed and would give pretty much anything to exorcise the feeble muse out of me. Because my lines are not an 'escape from personality' but a search of personality. It goes deep into my very essence and exposes me with all my weaknesses. I don't know how I can write poetry if I try to eradicate emotions from what I have to say. For me, the very state of being poetic is emotional in nature. You scoop out pieces from the particulars to obtain small but vivid pictures of life in general. 

Many critics regard poets to be superior individuals with faculties privy to common men. But it was Dr. Samuel Johnson who said that a poet is a man among men and that he doesn't possess any special powers denied to the rest of humanity. As a common man, this makes me happy. And since there are more common men in the world than intellectuals and since common men can relate themselves with another common man easily than with an intellectual, I think that more such people should engage in poetry. 

Till this point I could not accomplish anything worth noticing. But in that matter, Milton whose only goal in life to be the greatest poet in England, is my inspiration. Though I don't wish like Milton to be a great poet( that would be like saying Utopia is real ), I dream of being a small lesser poet. I have dedicated to him, a poem of 33 unrhyming metreless quatrains titled 'Eden Wonders'. Whenever I feel so futile, the example of this man and his passion for poetry keeps me going. But it is said that he became completely blind at the age of 44 due to excessive reading. I must admit that this little detail worries me slightly.

I have no knowledge of classical poetry. Nor am I an expert in any particular period in literary history of the world. I am not a master in any literary format. And I am not so familiar with contemporary literary theory and criticism. At the moment I have only a peripheral knowledge of all this. Even though I have employed rhyme in some of my poems( just for the fun of it and I think it would appear as ruins to the refined eyes ), I don't know how to metrically arrange verses since I am a non-native writer. Like the Romantics, I really don't like confining poetry to rules and regulations. May be that's because I cannot follow them( we all know the     Aesop fable about the Fox who tried to grab the grapes from the tall vine ). I know that in poetry, the way things are said is more important than what is said. That's why we call it poetry, right ? But like Pope said, one must set aside the rules if it is affecting the content.

This is not all. I thought it would be nice to give some introductory remarks before I embark upon this futile task. I am looking forward to write more about my views regarding poetry or literature in general as we go along. If anyone not familiar with literary criticism is reading this, I want them to know that none of the ideas presented here are mine originally. I am merely standing on the strong 'shoulders of the giants' before me. Once again, if anyone at all is foolish enough to read all this nonsense, I wish to pacify them by quoting E. E. Cummings from the introduction of his 'New Poems':

"The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs".