Thread: LETTERS OF SESHENDRA.

In defence of People and Poetry


Seshendra is not an individual but a movement Excerpts from his letters entitled in Defence of people & Poetry Secondary carry his incisive views on the contemporary Indian scene of thought. The reader will find in these pages the multidimensional vision of the poet who has made a colossal impact on the in this country; both are exploited by all and sundry entirely for.

He holds the view that people & Poetry are defenceless
Thus arises the primary duty of the honest and the intellectual to rescue them and build once again their defences, resurrect living thought, and re-establish the genuine intellectual processes of reason and enquiry. Only such of the excerpts from his point of view. Names of those to whom these letters were addressed and passages of personal and private nature have been carefully removed. The material in this volume is of purely literary interest and concerns the topics of the present epoch.

References about Telugu Poetry found in some of the letters are not a recent development in his thinking. As early as in April 1958 he addressed a letter to The Hindu with reference to J.B.S. Haldane on Telugu dated 27-4-58.

“Will all these advantages it is surprising to see that not much of original literature in produced in Telugu so far since the beginning of its career in the 11th century ndian soil …Then is we turn to English, Urdu, Sanskrit and other languages we find many original productions…In the present period original works can be counted on fingers. The bulk of it represents only gross plagiarism. It is not able to cater in any useful manner either to the taste of the common man or the intellectual. Both sections are naturally turning to other languages for deriving the benefits of reading. I feel the Telugu writers should devote more time to thought than for writing”.

In an article called “Post Independence Literature” which appeared in Andhra Prabha Daily, 1962 (included in his collection of essays Oohalo, 196 he comments bitterly on the lack of original thinking in Telugu Literature.

This volume “In Defence of people and poetry” o presents crystallised thought on different issues of the 20th century felt and experienced n the I
--Publisher’s Note.
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LETTERS OF SESHENDRA.

I. A problem indeed what an irremediable problem I am faced with. It is a feeling of a whole country hurting me then, where to run for refuge? A person who acquires complete consciousness of all climes and conditions of human existence is the very person most hurt, not the common man who has not developed this cursed consciousness.
Evil has been haunting the world despite many men of action who rose up against it. . In all times and in all centuries’ thinkers, crusaders, honest and truthful men were humiliated and persecuted. Despite this historical threat. I cannot change you see.


!! I shall pass on to the aspect of what my philosophical eye perceives in the poet and his tools of work.

Poetry is a struggle between language and human experience. Poet the chosen medium to express the local experience of man on earth is an eternal; adventurer scaling to the peaks of expression while the language which is the product of common people and pedestrian experience and which alone is available to the poet in his adventure. keeps failing him. It is on these struggles of the poet that the common language arrives at levels of sublimity in the expression of higher experience.

The growing understanding of life by man is not merely the effect of external experience gained by age but in truth a gradual flowering of ones own soul.


When the flower of the soul blossoms and its fragrance begins to waft on the breeze, an attempt to bring it under one division of other of creative art as romanticism, classicism, surrealism, or any other ism is too much of a gross approach to too subtle a thing which transcends, the mere physical plane of human experience. No attempt at a formal denomination of that state of creation can ever be successful.

Each emotional and intellectual stress of each instance of intense experience that I pass through, is a step higher in my mountaineering of poetic peaks, for, I look upon thins around and things within thereafter, only from that level.
----Seshendra Sharma
To be continued......

I'm sorry I didn't read, this isn't really my sort of thing... but I noticed you're also on Elite Skills! So am I... just saying hi =^..^= ~Coraz Windy