Poetry and Pleasure [Archives:2000/04/Culture]

Dr. Siya Ram Rai
Professor of English
University of Ibb
Of all forms of art, poetry is the most complex, the most refined and the most compact. Poetry is a sensuous art. It encompasses beauty and all her aspects. Beauty is vital, urgent, and dynamic. Beauty must have vitality. Beauty is sensuous and deeply related with sex. Sex is the root of all creation. Dylan Thomas holds that a woman figure is a poem. If not so, why is it that the whole world hates eunuch, who is neither a man nor a woman. So is the case with impotent men or sterile women. All creation is a sublime work of nature. To be a poet is to be romantic enough to arrest the voluptuous curves of beauty in the form of art. Poetry lies in the contemplation of beauty. Such a thing of beauty gives us joy for all times to come. In art, the lowly becomes holy and the vulgar becomes sublime.
In art, successful expression is Beauty and an artist creates the Beautiful – the Word laboring to articulate in and through words. In fact, the whole creative process is a spiritual exercise. Language is also a spiritual creation. Art experience is an intuitive identification of this self with that self. Inspiration is seminal to poetry. Poetry is not craft but spontaneous inspiration. It originates from the cosmic rhythm of creation. Rishi Valmiki, the first poet of the world, is about to have a dip in the water of Tamsa river. Suddenly he sees a couple of Kraonch birds busy in the obscure physical contact in the branch of a tree on the bank of the river. He finds a hunter under the tree almost ready to shoot an arrow. He hits the male partner who falls down on the ground and after a travail of suffering, dies. His female partner comes down near the male bird and keeps on crying bitterly for her lover. 
This pathetic scene creates such an impression on the mind of the saint that he curses the hunter, later to detect in his Ashram that his outburst is poetry. This pathetic incident leads him to write the greatest Aryan called Ramayana. Shelley rightly says that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”Poetry is the sonorous echo of the soul. It is an expression of the inner urges of the human soul. It articulates the rare moods and the rare moments. One must Know that all human transformation springs from within. Poetry lays emphasis on intuition and imagination rather than on rhetoric. When rhetoric comes inside the gate, poetry is bound to fly out of the window. Pure poetry lifts man from the individual feelings to the absolute universals. It is capable of producing the desired effect on the reader. It refines our sensibility and taste. Poetry offers the experience of beatitude and felicity. Its experience is exalting and ennobling. It ultimately results in the liberation of our soul and in the purification of our mind.
Plato holds that poetic imagination is a kind of divine madness which arouses and waters our mundane passions. In fact, an aesthetic rapture is much akin to spiritual rapture. Poetry has the movements of a symphony, for it originates from music and dance. Movement is the essence of dance while soundÑ-beating of time is the essence of music. In pure poetry, sound and sense blend into one, making it all the music of ideas and intuition. A poet unlocks his sensitive heart in his work of art which abounds in word-pictures sensuous and vivid.
Numberless passions, emotions and feelings float in the imagination of the mind of the man creating. They force themselves down onto the paper like the water of a torrential rain rushing for the plain from the top of a mountain. It flows in the plains like a river yet in high flood. Chaos in fact is the shape of things. Coherence is an essential feature of a successful work of art, and Rasa… the aesthetic pleasure in the heart of the reader originates from the discovery of this coherence. A reader gets a unique experience of the beautiful which is ultimately leads him to the realization of delight. An aesthetic experience, which emanates from the work of art itself, gives a sense of elevation and upliftment in the human heart. This state of aesthetic pleasure is known as the state of the perfect bliss which is much akin to the mystic realization of Brahma- the self.
Intuitive experience of the self offers an immediate awareness of the God’s presence in the bosom of man. It is something like Roso vai sah.
I find Rasa theory is far greater in depth and dimensions than the theory of catharsis. While Rasa includes the creative experience of the artist as well as the aesthetic enjoyment of the reader, the theory of catharsis is based on the principle of homeopathic treatment: similia similibus curanter, i.e. like curing the like. Poetry produces illumination in the mind and a state of perfect rest of the self within itself. A poet spiritualizes the moods of nature and makes final raids upon the inarticulate. Sugar is universally sweet while salt is universally salty. But it is rather impossible to explain or articulate what is sweetness or saltiness Ñ- such experience are inarticulate. It can only be felt.
Art is in fact never vulgar or profane. Vulgarity like beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, and not in the object. We see things not as they are, but as we are. Art doesn’t require the approval of the moralists. It must not have any palpable design. It is for the sake of aesthetic delight. A reader rises above narrow individual self and forgets his mundane pre-occupations. Poetry breaks a new ground and renews our wit.
But no poet can claim that he will write a poem tomorrow. Poetry comes to the mind of the man as leaves come to a tree. A tree doesn’t know what new leaves are coming to its branches. No doubt, there are many definitions of poetryÑ- rather as many as poets but each definition only touches a fringe of poetry. Poetry is elusive, deceptive and mysterious. It is every thing and at the same time, it is nothing. Really speaking, first rate poetry is sung, second rate poetry is spoken and the third rate poetry is written. Homer, Virgil, Valmiki, Vyas, Kalidas, Tulsidas, Surdas, Meera, Kabir and many great poets of the world used to sing their poems and are all classics. Great poets combine their powerful feelings, tense passions and excited imagination together in an organic sensibility and much of it is visionary in tone. Great poetry tends to prayer as well as music. Here beauty extends itself into sublime.
Much of modern poetry, on the other hand, is either spoken or written. We find methods in place of inspiration in modern poetry. Some of the modern poets try to utter all in oneÑÑ they use utmost compression, which is why, their language is the language of spare and strange. Modern poetry uses the language of telegram and ideogram. Modern poets believe in distancing the intimate and this they do by using the language of code which requires decoding. We find many dislocations in modern poetry, but all with a meaning to suggest that the modern man’s personality itself is fractured. Here one finds the language in the search of a situation. Modern poetry is all crudite and obscure. One must know that too much of crudition is bad for poetry.
Teaching poetry is like threading a needle, and at times, threading a wild bull. It is so because beauty in the form of an emotional experience of life provoked and directed by poetic imagination requires a long courtingÑ- only then it yields. Never swim but float is the formula in teaching poetry. As a reader and lover of poetry, on certain occasions, I have found myself in tears and on other occasions, I have had peals of laughter also. But for this, a biological heart is not enough. A man with a mechanical heart can not understand it. A university teacher has to analyze and interpret things in such a way that the students are automatically transported to the same realm of creative imagination in the alchemy of the mind of the artist. Students find themselves floating with the creative imaginationÑÑ poetic moments of the poet and enjoy RasaÑ- the aesthetic pleasure out of it. Students are made poets by proxy but this is possible only when a teacher is capable of producing the desired effect. Poetry is not meant for a prosaic fellow. Similarly, students of poetry must have literary imagination otherwise the effect would be reverse.
This reminds me of an academic incident faced by a professor of Hindi, while teaching a Hindi poem he thus explained, when padmavati, the heroine combs her long black rippling hair, it becomes all dark in the whole world and when she looks at in any direction, the lotus flowers bloom. All on a sudden, two students stood up in the class and told the teacher that it was all nonsense and bogus and later they changed their subject of specialization. Poetry requires a certain amount of imagination and literary taste on the part of the students as well Ñ- only then it offers a sense of pleasure and beatitude. it is never enough about a piece of poetry. it is always not like that ÑÑ not like that.

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