POETRY, THOU PROSAIC ART-FORM IN PROFANE HANDS !

POETRY, THOU PROSAIC ART-FORM IN PROFANE HANDS !

Much of what goes by the name of poetry by the ordinary person of extraordinary pretension is literary gimmick. True poetry is not easily come by. It springs forth spontaneously from the soul full of music and mirth and cascading flows forth in rhythms of bliss. There is a subtler sense that makes for poetry, a refined sensibility, an optimal balance of beauty and blissfulness in expression, of fancy and feeling, emotion and ecstasy, and yet without a trace of linguistic affectation that so taints what passes off as poetry but in real is its parody and no more.

Anybody and everybody cannot be a poet. Poets are born. They have an innate sense of music in their souls, a melody that bears the lyrical metric and sets up a tension between freedom and restraint of lines tending alternately to each. This tussle is sweet and soft, never harsh and discordant, for poetry is the song of the soul, its ethereal effusion in earthly terms, its interface with the prosaic world of rigid forms. Poetry is the fusion of form and fancy, of light and shade, of the sunlit summits of inspiration and the devastating depths of depression, but all caught in words and phrases that never suffer from loss of light or love. Poetry has its own personality, its own individual identity that sets it aside from all other genres of literary endeavour and marks it out uniquely as the quintessence of all literature. Hence, it is not the common man's cup of tea. Neither is it the common composer's mismanaged metric. It is music in words and that requires sensibility of a high order in both the word and the melody that runs through as the subterranean current infusing life into it. So, mere assemblage of carefully crafted words makes not for poetry but a free flow of words issuing from the depths of the heart and carrying with it the tinge of the inner feel that composes this sublime art form. Gimmicks are no kin to poetry, neither are varied, manipulated assortment of words and images poetry. There is something called false poetry and it is this. True poetry must pass the litmus test of creating beauty and insincerity of composition can never attain it. Poetry must like breath, like music, like love be free of all artificial taint and be secure in its solitary splendour as the acme of literary perfection in all its spontaneous manifestation, in all its sublime simplicity redolent of beauteous forms, of images and dreams.

Written by Sugata Bose