Poetics and Criticism

 

 

 

The creation of a canon of major authors implies accepted stan­dards, values and preferences on the part of the poets and critics who establish taste and influence the judgment of others. Their comments, reviews and selection of who is to be published carry inferences about what is desirable and often reflect the nature of their own work or assumptions which are passed on to others. The elite which judges and sets standards is not monolithic, not a closed circle, not a clique, and may be unconscious of its in­fluence. Often they initially feel outsiders trying to counteract the bad influences of others; they may significantly disagree among themselves upon specific writers, poems or issues and will be found divisible into as many different groups as there are individuals. But as such poets establish the taste by which they are judged, it is useful to examine their various concepts of poetry and the way their views have influenced or been modified by others.

It is best to begin by contrasting P. Lai to Ezekicl as critics. Whereas Lai's views are still often cited outside India as represen­tative of the new poetry, he is now more likely in India 10 be viewed as insignificant except as a publisher. This perhaps denies Lai full justice. Lai's reviews, columns and publications had a role in bringing the new poetry to attention, until he was overtaken by the rise in standards as Indian English poetry developed. When his Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo was first published in 1969, the need to defend the existence of Indian English poetry was becoming irrelevant, as was shown by the books of Ramanujan, Ezekiel, Das, Patel and the many new talented poets who had appeared in journals. Lai's indiscriminate publication of writers came into conflict with the need to esta­blish standards; his critical vocabulary, which may have been suitable for an earlier generation of middle-class intellectuals raised in a genteel British colonial culture, was also becoming old- fashioned.

 

Lal's review of A Time To Change, in Thought (28 June 1952) was in its time welcome praise, but now seems totally inappropriate to Ezekiel's scepticism, urban attitudes and modern conscious-ness:

These poems revolve like noons around a bright hard flame. The flame takes many shapes, but its essence constitutes a simple and harmonous [sic] way of
life, where the mind is free from vexation as far as possible, and the body con- tented with elementary satisfactions Mr Ezkiel flicks like a humming- bird) giving in each poem an aspect of what he believes to be the limpid style of life.

Lal's review shows no awareness of poetic technique, except for

'bright glittering vowels' and its description of the poems is inaccurate. While his review bears testimony to his own version of late romantic aestheticism—even echoing Pater—and his preference for poetry which is metaphoric, melodious, moral (see his 'Preface' to The Collected Poems of P. Lai, 1977, p. 9) and unironic, most readers will feel Daruwalla's 'Introduction' to Two Decades of Indian Poetry is more accurate where it is claimed that A Time to Change inaugurated a new era of Indian poetry by writing of the demands of the present-day world, bringing into play a modern sensibility confronting the confusion, bewilderment and disillusion of the time, while using a modern idiom without the archaisms and jangling rhyme schemes of the earlier poets. While Daruwalla's description of Ezekiel reflects his own work, it shows how far off the mark Lai was. The very title, A Time to Change, belies Lai's middle-brow, genteel hedonism. As Daruwalla says, the title poem shows a 'life of loose untied ends'. Where Lal had seen a flitting hummingbird (a phrase perhaps better applied to his own kind of deft, light, romantic lyric poetry), Daru­walla speaks of Ezekiel's realism, 'wrinkles, warts and all'.

It is unfortunate that Lai's anthology of 132 poets appeared when it did. A decade earlier, before the appearance of books by Kamala Das and Ramanujan and Ezekiel's Exact Name, it would have been useful; but then, of course, it would have been impossible, as the Writers Workshop and Miscellany had only begun publishing in 1960; 1969 was no longer the time, however, to praise R, L. Bartholomew's "authentic voice of feeling', P. K. Saha for 'the civilized seriousness of an eager beaver' or to defend Dom Moraes by saying 'but does meaning matter in poetry?' More embarrassing was F. R. Stanley's precious birdsong' and 'the heaven-knows-what of my own verse', Eunice de Souza, reviewing the anthology in Peera-dina's Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, called the intro­duction 'incompetent, incoherent, and pretentious' and after quoting Lai on Stanley's 'birdsong' added '(tweet, tweet?)’. De Souza argues 'There is a need for a representative anthology, but indiscriminate selection does not fill this gap and, worse still, it swamps the significant work included.' Elizabeth Reuben's introduction to Lai's poetry in Peeradina's anthology begins by saying that with 'absolute unconcern he fills his poems with roses, bees and 'bathos'. The poems 'lack concreteness in their imagery. "The roses, birds, and bees are like mere counters; nothing is done to make them real, or to convey their fascination.... It all adds up to something both over-rich and indefinite.'

While the views of Daruwalla, de Souza and Reuben are part of an aesthetic developed in India by Ezekiel, I do not necessarily mean they were directly influenced. I suggest that the moral serious­ness, rational, modern, intellectual consciousness, technical compe­tence, concern for high standards and precision of language they demand were introduced into Indian critical thought by Ezekiel and through him spread to and developed by others.

Part of Ezekiel's influence can been seen in the kind of advice he gave others early in the 1950s when he was a sub-editor on the Illus­trated Weekly. He warned DomMoraes that the danger to a poet in India was the ease with which a reputation could be gained; he read Katrak's manuscripts, querying every word; Lai has commented on the time when Ezekiel, then editor of Qwest, returned a poem. 'He twitted me for using an exclamation mark, chided obvious poeticism and sentimental reiteration.' 'A precise observation at the close,' he suggested, 'would strengthen the poem' ('A Few Words', Lai's preface to The Unfinished Man). Dedication to being a poet and the art of poetry, international standards, precision in the use of every word, rejection of poeticism and sentimentality, and the need for logic, coherence and moral intelligence are among the qualities which Ezekiel required from the formerly amateur local world of Indian poetry,

Ezekiel's review of Daruwalla's first published book, Under Orion (1970), appeared in the Times Weekly and is reprinted in Peeradina's anthology. It begins by contrasting the 'remarkably substantial bulk' of Under Orion to the slimness of most Indian volumes of poetry in English and claims as a first collection it com­pares favorably with the first books of Dom Moraes and A. K. Ramanujan. The significance of the size of the collection is 'evidence not only of mature poetic talent but of literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness.' After comparing Daruwalla to his contemporaries (Mehrotra and Peeradina resemble him in 'their sharp perception of environment and forthright statement'), Ezekiel praises his 'depth of feeling, economy of language and originality of insight', his irony, his 'bitter, scornful, satiric tone' and 'energetic argument in verse' which is 'die end-product of a rigorous process in which attitudes have been explored and choices made.' Daruwalla's altitude towards India is 'unsemitnental'. Ezekiel further comments on Daruwalla's descriptive skill, creation of

characters and situations, use of poetic dialogue and the dramatic as well as the 'blend ol freedom and discipline, metrical rhythms and the word order of prose, compact and harsh alliterative phrasing.' Throughout the review he contrasts Daruwalla's verse with that of 'poetasters' whose craftsmanship is limited to 'the simple expression of emotion with a sprinkling of imagery.'

This is a remarkable review, remarkable for its quality, perceptiveness and conviction that the first book of a previously obscure poet is among the best achievements of Indian English poetry to that time. It is also remarkable how the initial, somewhat sur­prising observation of the 'bulk' of the volume evolves into evidence of the way Daruwalla's achievement surpasses that of most of his contemporaries. Key concepts are maturity, stamina, intellectual strength, social awareness, perception of environment, forthright statement, economy of language, irony, tone, blend of freedom and discipline, word order, 'reflection on experience', and the variety of creation. These are expansions of Ezekiel's earlier requirement that a poet be committed to being a poet, that the craft of poetry be mastered at the highest standard, and that poetry should be the result of moral, intellectual and social intelligence expressed in new ways with economy and precision. Much ol what Ezekiel says of Daruwalla will be said by others about his Own verse. The concern with exactness of language, economy, craftsmanship, 'perception of environment' fort brightness, intelligence and the evaluative com-parison of poets will be characteristic of many writers and critics who have been associated with Ezekiel.

Peeradina, for example, introduces his anthology by criticizing those who indiscriminately promote Indian poets, encouraging 'trash'. By contrast Ezekiel is praised for his craftsmanship, and Parthasarathy for his 'polish and precision and exact images'. Peera­dina criticizes Ezekiel's recent work as lacking content despite a new, freer flowing style. Mehrotra is criticized for aiming at a purity of language without content; Daruwalla's sensibility is 'acutely aware of and committed to present-day socio-political-cultural reality.' Literature must show an awareness of the physical and human landscape of India and be involved in the local life. While Pecradina's concern with local realities is reflected in his own verse, especially 'Banda', it is an extension of Ezekiel's praise for poets aware of their environment. He also shares Ezekiel's concern with die need to discriminate and to judge who has or has not worked diligently for precision and exactness.

Not a systematic or original critic, Ezekiel has a distinctive view of poetry. Although the concepts and even phrases sound similar to what has often been said, the emphasis and implications add up to a personal position. In his talk on 'Ideas and Modern Poetry' (Indian Writers in Conference, ed. N. Ezekiel, PEN All-India Centre, Bombay, 1964, pp. 45-84) Ezekiel argues that modern poetry is not used to do what prose can do; the propaga­tion of ideas is not the job of verse. Modern poets try 'to find a language which will match the actual speech habits, rhythms, and typical attitudes' of the twentieth century. While using forms from the past they have used them in new ways, avoiding 'con­ventional forms used in conventional ways'; they have 'rejected standard images and, phrases, the whole tone of the age preceding theirs.' The essay continues with a discussion of how modern poets have needed to construct a framework of ideas through which to unify and express their sensibility; it is necessary to find a language, form and attitudes which express contemporary life.

A lecture on 'Poetry as Knowledge' published in Quest (76, May 1972, pp. 45-8) is significant for the tension between the concentration and concreteness of pure poetry and Ezekiel's belief that poetry contributes 'to man's knowledge of himself. While a poem must 'strive to fuse thought and emotion in images that have moral and philosophical implications', and which there­fore make poetry a 'precise and exact' form of discourse, a poem lacks weight without truth, meaning and, especially, knowledge.

Such views echo much of what has been said about poetry in. this century, and certainly make no major new advance on theo­rizing about the nature of the art; but they do set up specific goals which are unlike those, say, of the American New Critics, who emphasized form and purity to the exclusion of knowledge, meaning or truth. Ezekiel requires that poetry be grounded in reality, reflection, experience and have a logical, discursive form. Poetry is seen as a different, more concentrated, economical, precise kind of communication about a person's felt and considered experience of life. Poetry is not just formalized, ornamented, rhetorical self-expression; it results from a fusion of thought and feeling into precise images which give expression to the con­temporary mind as experienced and reflected upon by the poet. This requires the discipline to create new forms of precise articulation. And as far as possible the modern poet should have an intellectual framework, which integrates his or her work.

There are various tensions in Ezekiel's discussion of poetry in these and other essays. He wants the economy and precision, aesthetic distance and unified vision of the major early-twentieth-century poets. But he also wants poetry invested with moral awareness, truth, self-knowledge and mature experience. The former kind of poetry has been the major accomplishment of the modernist movement; in theory and tendency it has aimed at purifying itself of claims to knowledge and truth. Ezekie’ss view of poetry would seem to, and does, put more emphasis on poetry as the communication of insight and experience, expressed in concentrated, precise forms. While representative of the modern mind it will be centered on the self's engagement with its environment. To speak of truth, meaning and knowledge in poetry does not return it to versified feeling and ideas, but does mean that it will be more immediately, concretely related to society and situations, and more moral and spiritual in its tendency than art which aims at purity or meta-poetic statements about itself and the nature of the imagination: thus Peeradina's insistence that Indian poetry should both have precision of language and social aware­ness. These concepts were also in Ezekiel's review of Daruwalla and his comments on Jussawalla and Mehrotra. Although his own spiritual yearning and intellectual awareness influence Ezekiel’s view of poetry, it was extended by other poets to further areas of social, political and cultural concern. Attempts to bring together purity and concentration of image with political aware­ness can be seen in Jussawalla's poetry, while Parthasarathy is concerned with overcoming the cultural effects of colonization. In the mature work of both poets, there is a pressure of argument, the saying of something, and an attempt to reach a conclusion, although the mode is imagistic rather than versified talk.

 

Parthasarathy in particular seems to extend the range of Ezekiel's criticism into other areas. Parthasarathy's poetry has an unusually dense compression, economy and reliance on imagery drawn from his environment, which is used symbolically. The poetry reflects personal self-knowledge, emotion reflected upon, and aims at maturity of vision; experience is placed within a dominant intellectual framework in which the main concern is to overcome his alie-nation from Tamil culture caused by colonialism and a westernized English-language education.

 

In his Introduction to Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets Parthasarathy begins by citing Ezekiel's editorship of Quest and mentions that the Contemporary Poetry issue of Quest offered its pages to an 'assessment' of the recent poetic scene. His own selection includes a sample of what he considers 'significant' in twentieth century Indian English verse. After a brief survey of pre-in-dependence writing in which Toru Dutt is singled out for her 'concretization' of her nostalgia for India in the poem 'Our Casuarina Tree', Parthasarathy says that Indian verse in English did not seriously exist before independence. The Indian poet in English feels alienated by his language from the environment and from a living idiom. There is no tradition from which to 'evaluate’ his work. Therefore he is conscious of his Indianness, which reflects a crisis of identity. The tension of using a foreign language with its lack of roots in the local environment becomes a main theme of the Introduction as Parthasarathy discusses those who use English to examine critically their own culture, those who are bilingual poets, and those who have been conscious of the incongruities of writing in English in a still largely traditional India. Whereas early poets were interested in Indian legend, the contemporary poet is con­cerned with finding a personal language; those who are successful have, like Ramanujan, turned 'language into an artifact' and, like Kolatkar, Mehrotra and Kumar, used images as 'the kernel' of the poem. In our time poetry is becoming increasingly concise; it is moving towards metaphor. Parthasarathy's prefaces to the individual writers are revealing of his own interests. Daruwalla is said to pare language to the bone; 'images are concrete and exact'. Ezekiel's poems show a 'keen, analytical mind trying to explore and communi­cate on a personal level feelings of loss and deprivation.' In Kolatkar's 'the boatride' imagination and reality are 'fused'. Kumar is praised for 'ironic humour' and his imagery and nostalgia are mentioned. In Mahapatra's poems 'the economy of phrasing and startling images' recall classical Sanskrit. Mehrotra piles images 'one on top of another'. Of his own Rough Passage Parthasarathy comments it is the start of 'a dialogue between the poet and his Tamil past. The strength rof the poem derives from his sense of responsibility towards crucial personal events in his life.'

As in Ezekiel's criticism, Parthasarathy sees poetry arising from personal experience, which is reflected upon; thought and feeling are fused into concise, precise images, which are used to communicate knowledge. Irony is valued, as are deep emotions maturely considered. A poet has responsibilities as a human being and as a poet. Although Parthasarathy seems to allow more freedom for purely structural experiments (Mehrotra) and the imaginative (Kolatkar) than Ezekiel, while giving even more importance to image, his main contribution to what had been previously said by Indian critics is a new approach to the national concern about recovering a traditional culture. Whereas Ezekiel dismisses this problem as not relevant to himself (although in recent remarks he has  acknowledged a possible role of his Jewish past in his poetry), Parthasarathy sees it as essential if the English-language writer is to overcome a sense of alienation from his environment, past and language. Ramanujan is cited as evidence that it is possible to overcome such problem^ by recovering an apparently lost tradition through hard work. Rather than the social, political and intellectual awareness of Ezekiel, Partha-sarathy is concerned with a cultural crisis as represented by his writing in English, a language without geographical roots in India. Rough Passage fuses personal crisis and cultural crisis into a series of linked, precise, compressed images which, to use Ezekiel's terminology, offer truth, meaning and knowledge.

In his essay 'Whoring After English Gods' (Writers in East-West Encounter, ed. Guy Amirthanayagam, London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 64-84), Parthasarathy claims that Ramanujan and Ezekiel, by expressing in an 'unobtrusive personal voice' their vision of 'every-day Indian reality', indicated the direction Indian English poetry social situations. There are, for example, poets who are experi­mentalists and those who write obscure, difficult, hermetically-sealed verse. Mehrotra's experimentalism might seem to fall outside Ezekiel's middle path between pure image and versified rhetoric, but because of his excellent craftsmanship, and perhaps because of the social awareness of his bharatmata: a prayer', and the use of local details in his later poetry, Mehrotra is accepted by most of the poet-critics influenced by Ezekiel.

While Mehrotra's methods of making a poem are unique among Indian poets, they have some resemblances to the use of the surreal in the early work of Kolatkar and Chitre, to the free-associational, experimental early writing of Pritish Nandy, to some of Deba Patnaik's poems and to the poetry of jayanta Malrapatra, Starting With Kolatkar and Chitre, a number' of Indian writers began experi­menting with a variety of avant-garde techniques ranging from surrealist free association to concretism and visual poetry. Although there was no one particular objective or set of assumptions involved, different kinds of poetry were being written which could not easily be fitted into an aesthetic of preciseness, economy, the distillation of thought and feeling into images and mature reflections on personal experience and the modern world. Little magazines in Bombay, often associated with Mehrotra, and later Pritish Nandy's Dialogue in Calcutta, often published this experimental poetry.

The new poetry had no theoreticians or influential practising poet-critics like Ezekiel or Parthasarathy., There were certain, often opposing directions that the new poetry took, sometimes by the same poet. Either there were surrealist free-association techniques, often combined with an immediacy of a colloquial speaking voice (as in Beat-influenced poetry) or there was a tendency towards abstract constructions. Either poetry tended towards the loose rhythms of prose or the poems might be made up of contrasting juxtapositions of material or employ visual typographical effects. It was 'open’ rather than 'closed' in form, and its methods of construc­tion were more likely to be private associations than sustained logic. It was either extremely subjective or extremely public, either hermeti­cally sealed against interpretation or openly addressed to a wider readership than is usual for poetry. The shared assumption among such diverse poets as Chitre, Nandy and Mehrotra was that something had happened, some cultural shift that required expression through a radically different kind of verse than in the immediate past; they, however, recognized that such poetry had its own tradition in earlier revolutionary and avant-garde writers.

An early statement of this aesthetic is Chitre's Introduction to his Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1967). Starting with the up-rootedness of the modern mind and the disintegration of tradi-tional culture, Chitre asserts that at present poetry 'begins either with a total denial of moral values or in the spirit of unflinching moral commitment.' Mysticism, anarchy and cries for order are the only kinds of poetic expression. Chitre praises the Marathi poet Mardheker for his obscurity: 'the obscurity arising out of a specific communication-technique based on his private poetics'. It is the defiant obscurity of modern poetry in the face of hackneyed techniques of communication; to understand the poetry we must 'grasp the grammar of the poet's individual consciousness.' Mardheker used musical organization of imagery and counterpoint. Chitre offers his own aesthetic of the avant-garde. He claims that 'any thing creative challenges, nullifies all previous moulds of conscious­ness5. New speech rhythms, new syntax or vocabulary or imagery, result from a 'revolutionary structural upheaval deep within the creative poet's personality'. Such changes show a change in society itself during a generation. A major poet breaks away from previous modes of consciousness and thus will always be obscure to most readers. He or she will, like Mardheker or Kolatkar in Marathi, 'hit upon the new' and crash 'into the unknown', annihilating in the process the habitual poetics of past generations. Chitre concludes his introduction by claiming that all kinds of knowledge and ex-perience are now part of what goes into poetry. Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones are published in Marathi, Indians read Pablo Neruda, Rilke, Rimbaud, Kafka, 'a fantastic conglomeration of clashing realities ... visions ... a living confusion'.

Some of the key concepts here are: new formal structures; new speech patterns reflecting a shift in consciousness which destroys the old; a shift in consciousness caused by the conglomeration of cultural influences and new and increased communication since the Second World War, which has shocked traditional societies and while making life absurd created new kinds of meaningfulness. In other words great poetry expresses a new consciousness, and there has been a new consciousness in recent decades; therefore there is a need for a new poetry which will either express the anarchy of the time or impose order on it by some alignment of what would other- wise seem incongruous. Its form is. likely to be a musical orga-nization in space rather than logical exposition uf ideas, thoughts and feelings.

In The Emperor Has No Clothes' (Chandrabhaga 3,1980 and 7, 1982) Mehrotra, another of the experimentalists, complains about the absence of excitement and despair on the Indian English poetry scene, the kind of extreme emotions that come when a major new work of art appears, such as Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', which radically changes the direction of literature while at the same time being a reflection of a new state of contemporary consciousness. Such a work challenges literature still written in older modes. For Mehrotra. Kolatkar's Jejuri has such a significance in its idiomatic, concise precision. Mehrotra sees in the modern peroid a rift between language and experience; while poetry reflects this disintegration, being what George Steiner calls 'structured debris’; it is necessary to forge a personal language to express the particularities of experience.

The Emperor Has No Clothes' attacks Parthasarathy's poetics and reveals Mehrotra's own ideas about the direction Indian poetry should take. He argues that literature has both near (regional language) and distant (international) relatives and calls Partha­sarathy's concern with reintegration into Tamil tradition the provincialism of a 'Hindu revivalist mind'. An Indian English poem is a 'construct, housing two or more ways of seeing; four-eyed. 'The native idiom... has to seep through the English poem how could it not?' Each poet writes in a distinctive idiolect. 'Ramanujan's consists of English-Kannada-Tamil, Kolatkar's of English-Marathi-Bombay Hindi, Mahapatra's of English-Oriya, and so on. Each poet belongs to a tribe of one or two, seldom more than of six or eight':

Most Indian English poets are bilingual and, though it is too early to say how or where, the other language is the torsional force in their work in the same way that Russian presses on 'Nabokese' and non-native French, German and English glow beneath Borges' Spanish. Indian English literature belongs with the work of these new 'esperantists’.

Where Parthasarathy sees a specific gap inherited from colonia-lism between Indian experience and the English language, Mehrotra sees a general modern crisis. 'The rift, moreover, does not vary from place to place', the Indian English poet does not suffer from a specific alienation brought about by colonialism; the poet must 'hammer out' a 'most personal' style from language.

Believing that 'Poetry is perception's flames', Mehrotra accuses Parthasarathy of writing in a language of generalizations, without specificality, concreteness or immediacy. He complains that such poetry does not arise from attentively seeing and listening. Besides demanding that poetry be made of specifics, he challenges Partha-sarathy's claim that Indians, not being heirs to a European cultural tradition, should aim at an unreverberant use of English. Where Parthasarathy argues that an-Indian poet will not feel the various nuances of English words and expressions, Mehrotra claims that a writer uses words with associations gained through reading. These are two radically different notions of poetic language. Parthasarathy thinks of language as communication within a specific culture; Mehrotra regards language as dead material to which the poet gives life in the making of the poem. Such art builds on art and has its own international tradition(s) in which each poet shares according to his personal situation and history.

While the possible evolution of Mehrotra's aesthetics will need to be looked at more fully when discussing his poetry, it is clear that he began with an interest in surrealist notions of chance and constructivist concepts of art as object. These two views come together in the importance of the image. A poem is a construction of images, finding its inspiration in such varied sources as memory, the trivia of modern life and humorous, unexpected juxtapositions. Later he argues for the superiority of the particular over the general and for 'location—whether cultural, geo-graphical, or fictive'. He wants 'luminous details'. A poem is seen as an artificial and ideal order using particularized materials. While such an aesthetic would seem to imply a musical-spatial, rather than a rational, argumentative structure, the concern with location and specifics allows for poems which treat of the external world rather than solely of the subjective. Where Chitre seems to feel poetry reflects shifts in consciousness expressed in radically new, unpredictable ways, Mehrotra's aesthetic requires that some kind of real or imagined world be ordered and given a particularized existence. While responding to a crisis in the relationship between language and experience, the poem need not be radically open in form.

When Jayanta Mahapatra writes about poetry it is as an expres-sion of his inner world and problems about the relationship between the self and reality. In an essay published in The Literary Criterion (xv, no. 1, 1980, pp. 27-36) Mahapatra speaks of a poet's mental landscape, an 'inner world of his own making - a world spaced by his own life, of secret allusions, of desire and agony, of a constantly changing alignment between dream and reality/ Rather than moral choices, Mahapatra speaks of being 'uncertain' of his 'very existence' and of groping from poem to poem for the key to human understanding. In 'Face to Face with the Contemporary Poem' (Journal of Literacy Studies, vol. 6, no. 1-2, June 1983, pp. 9-17, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar), he says of poetry 'that a part of the mystery of one's self comes out' but rather than the con­tent being of significance 'the act of making or writing the poem itself becomes a full experience.' A 'great poem lets us embark on a sort of journey or voyage through symbols and allusions to cm compass the human condition,' Mahapatra speaks of the poem as an experience reflecting the processes of the poet's mind:

When the 'confessional' poetry of the sixties in America (markedly) gave way to a new 'surrealism', it evidenced a new ambiguity—not what the lay or common reader could follow, not something he had come to regard as poetry through the years. Generally speaking, today's poem utilizes a number of images and symbols to form a whole, leaving the reader to extricate himself with the valid meaning or argument from them. Thus the reader is left to find out his own meaning from the poem; this, I admit painfully, is true of much of the poetry I have written, if contemporary life is no longer what it was, say, twenty-five years back, can one expect the same content, the same form, the same substance from contemporary poems?

It is useful to see how these different poetics influence or are reflected in reviews. There are signs of an evolving, but still con-fused, experimentalist poetic in Gray Book, with which Mahapatra and Deba Patnaik were associated. Patnaik's review of Mahapatra's first two volumes of poetry in Gray Book I sounds at times like Ezekiel ('the economy of words and clarity of perception'), but there are also new, quite contrary critical concepts: 'In these poems words converge into or hover around a distinct image without using one explicitly.' Rather than mature knowledge, Mahapatra's poetry, Patnaik claims, 'expresses a sense of tentativeness'. Patnaik's review of Pritish Nandy's poetry calls attention to the 'flow of vivifying impressions and images—montages against the poet's sifting and shifting mind' and mentions the beauty in juxtapositions in which 'desire, memory, dream and silence' are counterpointed by a world of reality. Although Patnaik seems to fluctuate between various kinds of poetics, including praise of simple language and sincerity, the kind of comments I have quoted could be the basis for a shared aesthe-tic by Mahapatra, as well as the early Nandy, Chitre and Kolatkar.

In Mehrotra's review of de Souza's Fix (Times of India, 10 February 1980), form, personal voice, distance and concern with the local are assumed to be significant. When Mehrotra compliments de Souza on letting her feelings settle down before writing of personal hurts, or when he speaks of the bristling surface of her poetry and its characters, he appears to have in mind something different from Ezekiel's wisdom and mature reflection of experience communicated through images. He appears to have an idea of the poem as object, as a surface covering and distanced from personal expe-rience. At the same time, he feels poems should be made from Indian materials (memories, characters, situations) and be about being Indian. The assumptions are those of his later poetry which is made from a pattern of personal memories and local allusions and often concerns his childhood and local society in Allahabad.

As several poets reviewed Manohar Shetty's first book, A Guarded Space (1981), it is possible to offer a few comparative examples of differences in critical assumptions and concerns. Daruwalla's review (Indian Horizons, 4 November 1982, pp. 51-3) -mentions images, craftsmanship, 'powerful vignettes, which really bring the neighborhood alive', 'control', and discusses details of rhyme, metaphor and dynamics. The emphasis is on craftsmanship. By contrast Jayanta Mahapatra's review (The Telegraph, Calcutta) is more focused on the subliminal private world behind the poem: 'Shetty is certainly adept at using the English language for those indescribable things that all of us have felt inside of us but haven't been somehow able to articulate'; 'its fascinating but dark ending'; 'The process of introspection becomes complete'; 'the unspoken menace of death'; 'We are at the centre of things, and we watch our lives being thrown back at us for us to see our revealed selves': 'The tightness and accuracy of construction; the unforgettable silence that is held in the world of his poems, helps to substantiate that feeling which throbs in our bones.'

There is a different aesthetic in Mahapatra's review of Shetty's poems, which is not similar to the shared assumptions and varied emphases of Ezekiel, Daruwalla, Parthasarathy and Peeradina. The poem is a 'construction' (presumably Mehrotra would agree) which brings to light otherwise unshaped, often inarticulate, deeply introspective feelings. The construction reveals the subliminal, the indescribable, the inarticulate, the world of silence, the unspoken, that which is felt in the bones. Such a view of poetry (which describes Mahapatra's own work) might be said to have similarities to Chitre's claim that major poetry expresses new kinds of consciousness. Although Chitfe sees such consciousness as part of a cultural rupture, radical shifts in sensibility, Mahapatra assumes a universality of processes of extreme introspection ('feeling which throbs, in our bones', Things that all of us have felt inside of us'). Chitre's radical poetics are still wedded to the modernist concern with cultural crisis; Mahapatra's assumptions are part of .1 new period of sensibility in which art is seen less as object than as a structure of often contradictory, unresolved, deep feelings.

Since Mahapatra's poetry is different from the mainstream of Indian verse, it is of interest how other poets have tried to find a place for him within existing canons of taste. Many critics have been content to remark on his use of Indian landscape. Partha-sarathy says that Ezekiel and Daruwalla are 'intensely aware' of their 'environment'. 'Mahapatra observes similar incongruities in the Indian landscape.' In his preface to his selection of Mahapatra's poems Parthasarathy says, 'Mahapatra explores the intricacies of human relationships, especially those of love.' Such observations do not suggest what is different about Mahapatra's writing. Daruwalla's comments come no closer. 'Jayanta Mahapatra writes on the countryside.' 'His metaphors carry the reek of freshly upturned earth.' But Daruwalla does say that the 'landscape is utilized to set him off on his pensive reveries.'

Tensive reverie' might be a starting point for a discussion of Mahapatra's poetry. Meena Alexander's essay, 'Jayanta Mahapatra: A Poetry of Decreation' (The Journal of Commonwealth Litera­ture, vol. 18, 1, 1983, pp. 42-7) begins by describing a moment when she and Mahapatra observed the twilight together in Cuttack. Alexander, a poet of whom Mahapatra has spoken favourably and who has appeared in his Chandrabhaga, has written obscure poems in a private symbolism based upon images of the Indian landscape. In her essay she speaks of Mahapatra's 'quality of attention which is the finest refinement of desire', establishing 'a fragile self waiting'. But 'language fails us, even as we struggle to understand'. Alexander writes of Mahapatra's 'withdrawal of the will, the power of a visio­nary consciousness filling up the place the will had bent to its own purposes.' In India the writer has an 'anguished need to define a self, out of the bottomless flow of time.' Although the world must be 'remade through the visionary instinct-' there is no 'real solid self; the movement out of such darkness, 'the gesture of grace involves an attentive waiting, emptying out of the self, waiting, watching, witnessing.'

This is a rather different kind of criticism from that seen before in India, although perhaps anticipated by Chitre's Introduction. Instead of the poem as the crystallization of images of maturely considered experience, the focus has shifted to the mind's awareness of unwilled feelings arising during moments of silence, perceptions of feelings which are seldom articulated and which are normally suppressed for the sake of daily survival. Instead of the willed self, with its responsibility, the existence of the self is at least temporarily questioned. While only the reality of the external world exists, even its reality is in doubt; a poem is a construction made by allowing such subversive feelings to arise; they may not be resolved within a poem. For the critic the poem itself becomes less important than the attention, the desire, the vision, the 'cosmogony', the kinds of symbols and consciousness exhibited throughout an author's work.

Such a criticism became necessary when Mahapatra in particular, but also such other Indian poets as Alexander, began writing a new, puzzling, obscure kind of poetry, filled with private symbols, concerned with other kinds of feelings than those usually felt in social situations. In this poetry landscape often figures prominently as the poet is concerned with the problematic or fragile nature of the self and its relationship to external reality.

I have suggested that the poets themselves promote new poetry at first, as are the specific values by which it is judged. In India Ezekiel's concern with craftsmanship, intellectualized observations of life, moral realism and integration of personality ousted the amateurism, late romanticism, aestheticism, nationalist subject matter and vague spiritualism which were characteristic of Indian English poetry before and at independence. The standards of Ezekiel created the main critical discourse which others, notably Parthasarathy, developed in accordance with their own work. Parthasarathy has put more emphasis on the purity of image, problems of tone and association, the need to locate writing within a tradition, and themes reflecting the problems of biculturalism.

In contrast to the criticism of Ezekiel, Daruwalla and Partha-sarathy are the comments on poetry by the experimental writers according to which a poem is both a constructed object and a record of the inner life. In the cases of Chitre and Mahapatra the poetry is a record of an evolving consciousness, with all its desires, guilts, frustrations, contradictions and false starts. Mehrotra and Maha­patra put emphasis on memory as a source, and both require poetry to reflect the specific locale of the writer, although this may be more implied than given in detail. These three, along with Meena Alexander (and, apparently, although he does not write criticism, Arun Kolatkar) regard a poem as a construction which in its open structure reflects or is part of the act of making poetry.