BY P. R. RAMACHANDRA RAO

The tragedy of modern life is largely owing to its divorce from poetry.

What does poetry mean to modern man? To the man in the street it is unmeaning stuff, not for the like of him but reserved for higher folk. He instinctively turns from poetry in respectful awe. It is different with the bourgeoisie. With them poetry is fashionable and treasured in leather volumes, uncut and naphthalined. Among those who care for poetry and read it, few understand. To some, poetry is more poetical in proportion as it is not understood. This ‘un-understandability’ is glorified into mysticism or some such name. Very few people appreciate poetry in the real sense. For, the appreciation of poetry implies a corresponding mental altitude to the height of poetic genius. Appreciation is essentially re-creative effort.

It is elusive to start with a definition of poetry. Let us work up from the other end.

The life of man is multitudinous with change. His political and economic life is a ceaseless process of shuffle and remodeling. Our institutions are shattered and our empires dismembered. The lasting element in our social life is its impermanence. We build to pull down. We reconstruct from the debris.

What have not changed are the emotions of man. From the beginning of the world man has loved and hated, sorrowed and joyed, and will do so to the end of the world. Man, indeed, is not subject to mutation. Human emotions are the links that connect the ages. It is the primeval instincts of humanity that make the world one kin. They leap land frontiers and break through antagonistic nationalisms.

Now, literature is the most authentic record of human emotions. It is a series of emotional echoes through Time. It is authentic because the experiences of man are recorded at their highest and purest. And poetry is the double distilled quintessence of literature. It is the concentrated expression of the greatest human experiences.

So, poetry touches the springs of human life. It establishes the fundamental affinity of man. Poetry, that is to say, is international. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Kalidasa, indeed, belong to no country. They register the vast human drama which is played on the stage of the world.

The world today stands in diametrical contradiction to the spirit of poetry. Our life is rapidly becoming political first and other things afterwards. The world is fragmented by fratricidal barriers erected on geographical boundaries. Our nationalisms are absurd anachronisms in a progressive civilisation. Yet we unashamedly cling to them in superstitious veneration.

What is the basis of this collective suicide? We take it for granted that men live to eat each other up. Science comes supporting with the fatal doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The law of life, it is stated, is exploitation. Capital exploits labour and annihilates it. Capitalism grown empire-minded goes foraying on weaker nationalities. The imperialist powers in the mad fury of suicidal competition swallow each other. We have the world problem in brief.

Why does all this happen? Because the world has grown grossly materialistic. It is devoid of sympathy and the finer emotions. It lacks imaginative poetry.

Does it not look absurd that on the frontier of the Rhineland French cannon should be opposed to German cannon? What difference should an arbitrary frontier make in the continuity of mankind? Why does civilised mankind perpetuate the callous anachronism of war? Let us attempt an explanation.

Man seems to be endowed with two selves, the one the higher self willing the highest good and the supreme virtue; the lower self driving towards the immediate end and the practical means. The conflict is between idealism and materialism (miscalled reality). It exemplifies the larger opposition between the forces of good and evil. ‘Budge.’ says the one. ‘Budge not.’ says the other. It is the fiend that has emerged triumphant. Materialism has come to stay.

Poetry is the expression of idealism. It is an expression of the supreme virtue. The highest good is exemplified in the experiences of the greatest minds. Virtue cannot be opposed to virtue, nor good to good. Neither can there be categories of good or virtue. Thus what the better selves of men will, are not mutually contradictory. There can be no conflict of poetic minds.

To pursue another line of thought. When Keats said ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ he said all that we need to know on earth. Poetry is the appreciation of all that is beautiful in the universe. Broadly speaking, all life is expressed in terms of beauty. So, Art is the Cult Beautiful. It is man’s realisation and interpretation of what is poetic in creation. Virtue is the principle of beauty operating in human conduct. Vice is ugly. Love is man’s realisation of the vision of beauty. Woman typifies the Vision Beautiful. Life is beautiful. Death is ugly and does not exist. What exists, therefore, is the beautiful. It alone is permanent. All life in a larger sense is the triumph and the expression of the principle of beauty in the universe. It is the one in contradistinction to the many which change and pass.

And poetry is the imaginative realisation and expression of the beautiful in creation. Life becomes miserable when it lacks poetry. Squalor in life is due to the absence of art from it. Aesthetics, really, is not the flower of life: it is the very basis and the starting point.

As Ruskin would say, we have banished poetry. Our Art becomes a grotesque simplicity, being expressed in dull straight lines. The colour has gone out of our efforts. The human form divine is flattened out, cut and scissored. We have no contours. We are geometrical figures. Our edifices have lost the architectonic quality. They tower as monstrous cubes, pile upon pile. Our mechanistic civilisation is getting robot-ridden. It pulls us down Demogorgon-like into the bottomless abyss.

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