Of words on paper and prayers on one’s lips...

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: Suhel Seth

Managing Partner, Counselage

When we were growing up in Calcutta, we were fed on a diet of literature, which was almost always heavily loaded in favour of poetry. To this day, Calcutta takes pride in the fact that not just a Nobel Prize winner but even a Poet Laureate was born within its confines. I remember picking up Tagore’s short stories to only be told that while Hungry Stones was a superb tale, the great man’s poetry was infinitely better. And then the Nobel and the Gitanjali happened.

In school, our literary nest was filled with nuggets from a Harivansh Rai Bachchan and a Nirala on the one hand and Auden, Shelley and Keats on another. Wordsworth was my inspiration for the appreciation of flowers and I can still say with my heart on my hand, that I read about daffodils long before I saw them as also the tiger was burning brightly on paper before vanishing from our game parks.

Amongst all the literary forms that exist, there is nothing more personal than poetry and the danger with poetry is precisely this: it can be so personal that it may only remain a conversation between the poet and his pen. And because it is so truly personal, it allows for realms of expression which fiction may replicate but can rarely surpass. In the times of yore, while historians captured the travails of those times, the poets were the ones who captured the emotional essence of that cultural moment. They were the chroniclers of romance and war; they were the ones who were mirrors of the literary evolution that those times must have gone through and to that end, poets were perhaps the finest souls: they captured emotions and then presented them but these emotions were personal; they were interpretations and introspection, but very rarely commentaries as perhaps some of Shakespeare’s political plays were.