I reiterate that language is not poetry.
You wonder what I meant to say about language in poetry in my last letter. I know that the idea sounds strange to those who did not bestow thought on it, and it is also inassimilable to my Telugu friends whose minds have been nurtured for a thousand years at least on a thoroughly wrong notion that language is poetry.
Here the crucial question ultimately is what is the role of language in poetry. If we analyse the phenomenon of poetic creation, we will realise that the origins of poetry are inside the ‘being’ of the poet and certainly not outside. There is no doubt scope here to misunderstand me. The materials of poetry maybe outside the poet as for instance like his social life: but the circumstances of poetry are inside. The birth of poetry is exactly like the birth of a plant from the seed. The poet is exactly like the birth of a plant from the seed. The poet is the seed of the poetry. The seed may no doubt draw on the salts of the soil but the plant is born only in the seed. One cannot say the plant is born in the soil. Like the birth as well as the circumstances of the birth are an internal development of the
Seed.
Poetry is born before it is communicated. It existed before it is brought into language. It is not born during its communication. There is a species of poetry in Telugu known as Ashu Kavita (Extempore poetry). But even in this case the poetry is born before it is communicated and only the gap of time between the birth of poetry its communication is sought to be minimised as much as possible. That is why more often even the extempore poetry is falteringly expressed, this kind of poetry has been held in Indian poetics as of inferior order hardly conforming to any identifiable features of true poetry.
It is usually said, and it a gross statement, that a poem is made under inspiration. Inspiration is the result of the touch of poignant situation in life. Contemplating on this, Lorca said, “The state of inspiration is not the most advantageous one for the writing of poetry. One returns from the inspired state as one returns from a foreign country. Poem is the legend of the journey.”
I recollect a very meaningful saying’ the unheard melody is more melodious than the heard one’: this sums up the entire life of a poem. The poem at its birthplace is unlimited melody but when it is sought to be communicated to the outside world, commences the journey of hazardous adventure of the poem. It is the legend of this journey, which Lorca refers to and which remains to be recorded and which record comes to be called a poem. Poetry lying murmuring in the shores of the remote being of the poet comes out grudgingly under the forcible hand of communication like a cobra into the poet’s basket of words. However, the grandest poem also bears the cruellest marks of the rape of communication. It is here that languages raise their head and words play havoc. In this sense the word occupies an important place in the dialectics of poetry.
If language is indispensable for communication, words become the fundamental constituents of the medium of poetry, and communication turns into the most trickish problem of poetry.
The poet fights his historic battles in the field of language single-handedly with whole armies of words. The readymade weapons are useful only to face the readymade and conventional situations of the warfare. But a real poet whose problems are purely his own the makings of his circumstances, has to find perforce his own methods and manoeuvre of war. He has to construct his own arsenal of weaponry. In this process he manipulates, he pushes and kneads words into places and postures convenient to his motives. Such manipulation of words, which rises to the level of art, however much of art it may be, is still therefore purely incidental to the problem of communication. The plot of communication thickens and hazards increase specially if it is poetry.
Do understand that language is definitely not poetry and that poetry, which clings to language, is inferior poetry. The lay-man’s mind which has no grasp of poetry mistakes it to consist of certain classical words, classical Sanskrit phrases, and certain prosadiacal flourishes which became conventional by flux of time: this is an unscientific and thoughtless feeling and therefore only a figment of imagination. Those so-called modern poets of Telugu who cling to such classical flourishes still are really not modern since they have evidently no modern perception. Even the poetry lovers and critics in this language suffer from the same handicap, for they remark either that there is no craft or that the dignity of language is lost, whenever they miss the aforesaid conventional flourishes.
It is a great historical truth in Telugu poetry that for a thousand years it never occurred either to the poets or to the scholars to apply the established principles of poetics to the Telugu poetic creations during the different centuries in the past, though they were well conversant with them. If they had been applied Telugu classical poetry would have broken off from the language bound line of poetry giving up the false concept of word beauty, which it has remained to be this day.
Failure to develop consciousness of poetry in the light of the principles of established poetics had led Telugu poetry in the past along only the path of word-beauty and misled generations of untrained minds into thinking that all poetry lies only in achieving word-beauty, and thought was relegated to the background. This is perhaps due to a contemporaneous fact that that in the field of Sanskrit poetry all the schools which project focus on thought or rather spirit, like Dhvani, and vakrokti have declined both in the field of creation and in the field of criticism and the schools of word –beauty rose up to power, when the career of Telugu poetry commenced round about 11th century. This is approximately the position. Nannaya Bhatt the first Telugu poet has derived this influence indirectly through pampa the Kannada poetry, who was himself under the influence of the fashions of the then Sanskrit poetry. Therefore, if there are still some poets in Telugu in the contemporary times clinging to the conventional classical flourishes mistaking it to be poetry, it is not their personal fault but it is only that they are not of such original and imaginative calibre to visualise a new language for a new of creation, and come out breaking the shell of the old world.
-Seshendra Sharma
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