The disarming ease of English Poetry

English poetry has no entry barrier. Anyone from 4th grade onwards, with a working knowledge of English can write poetry. The school magazines are filled with poems. It is English poetry’s strength as well as its weakness. The problem is, to an untrained eye, the 4th grader’s output is indistinguishable from a poet of merit. It is a little like Modern Art that faces a similar crisis. Except for the discerning eye of the connoisseur, for the rest of us, my child’s scribble and the Master’s work look much the same. 

 In some sense, writing English poetry has a disarming ease. “I went to the market” is a simple sentence. “To the market went I” becomes a poem! Just a little change in the construct and you have a prospective poem. Once you have the first line in your poem, you simply hunt down all rhyming words from A to Z looking for the right fit. You now have a set to play with- “Buy, die, fie, guy, high, lie...”. You finally settle for “buy” since it is connected to the “market” in the first line. The second line is now ready to team up with the first. ”To the market went I; apples, oranges and a lot more to buy!” The third line will be a fresh line. The fourth will rhyme with the third. You get it? It is simply too easy and reams and reams of poetry can be written this way! 

 At least, English poetry with rhyme has a certain cadence. You can read it loudly and it sounds nice. “To the market went I” when read loudly has a tingling effect, regardless of the common-place meaning. However, modern poets don’t subscribe to rhyme any more. This is a bigger problem. At best, the poems look like prose except for the trailing ellipsis, those tiny three dots at the end of the line. Now, “I went to the market...” itself is a poem. You just need to replace the full-stop with an ellipsis. School magazines, personal diaries and facebook pages are filled with these new poems. A third brand of English poetry has also found its way. In this form of poetry, you do not have to write even a sentence. You stack up a few words right out of the dictionary. “Anguish, Angst, Anger” That’s it! Voila! The poem is ready and can serve as a poetic response to any of the current social ills. 

 We have reached a point where we have lost the norm to evaluate English Poetry. Anyway, no one wants to evaluate. When we flip through the school English textbooks, we continue to see only Wordsworth and Keats and Browning. We wonder why none of these modern poets can find a place in school textbooks. We may not have seen Bradman in Cricket. However, we can relate to greatness in sport today through a Virat Kohli. On the same lines, shouldn’t a modern exponent of English Poetry walk into the school textbooks? 

All Indian regional languages have a rich tradition of poetry. It is a heritage that has come down to us. When lines of poetry are read out to an audience in a regional language, there is an immediate response- a “wah wah” for each line. Some beautiful turn of the phrase, some deft expression, there is an inexplicable delicate nicety to the lines that evokes instant relish.In contrast, a reading of English Poetry has a somewhat muted appeal. Not that it falls totally flat, but it fails to stimulate the senses to the same extent. At times, we are drowned with archaic usage like “thy”, “thine” and “thou” in the poems. It is jarring to the modern ear and we just cannot go past this barrier. Also, the locales for traditional English poems have a distant setting- Scottish highlands with its vales and dales. Though human feeling is universal and transcends location, still, the particular aspect of the poem is lost on us. It is a little like a polar bear from the Siberian regions that has accidentally strayed into Chennai and that too in the sweltering heat of summer. There is just so much commonality possible for both the bear and us to make each other feel truly comfortable. 

 A controversial streak runs through the mind- May be, English has limited tools for writing appealing poetry, lines that can truly touch the heart. Perhaps, the synonyms are limited. Perhaps, the words are scattered in all shapes and sizes and cannot be easily fitted in an attractive poetic meter. May be, it lacks the ability to coin new compound-nouns, words that can leap out with a meaning far different from the individual nouns. Conversational English is simple. It serves the purpose. English Prose is just fine. It has a bigger canvas and the elaboration compensates for the peculiar problems faced by English Poetry. As a language of Science and Technology, we appreciate English’s brevity. As a computer programming language, English is more than adequate. Only Poetry...where art thou?