Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), himself an outstanding poet, in his 'Notes on the Art of Poetry' wrote as follows: 'Read the poems you like reading. Don't bother whether they're 'important,' or if they'll live. What does it matter what poetry is, after all? If you want a definition of poetry, say: 'Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn or be silent or what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing, and let it go at that.' All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance, however unlofty the intention of the poem. Poetry makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own'...
Thus a good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
A poem can change your life. In poems, we discover the words and images to understand and interpret the world. Whether writing birthday songs or elegies, love vows, our political anthems, lyric outbursts or narratives, great poets, throughout the ages have transformed ordinary experiences, thoughts and emotions into something memorable and everlasting.
A poet regards the page differently from the prose writer. That is why the French poet Paul Valery (1871-1945) wrote: 'Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking'. Poems have unique power when read aloud. Poets are attuned to sound. Robert Frost (1874-1963) rightly said 'That all great poets create the sound of sense and the sense of sound'.
Poets live the life all of us live, with one difference. They have the POWER�THE POWER OF THE WORD�to create a world of thoughts and emotions which others can share. We only have to learn to listen.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. It will not be too much to say that the poet marries the language and out of this marriage the poem is born. The glory and grandeur of language in its most exalted, wrenching, delighted and concentrated form and its unique power to recreate the vast spectrum of human experience ranging form falling in love, facing death, leaving home, playing cricket, of losing faith to finding God� this is the exclusive domain of poetry and poets.
In short, a poet, any great poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his sagging cynicism regarding human beings into an arresting optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens and the flowers, apart from Spring, Love and Nature. A poet is a discoverer, rather than an inventor. The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) said: 'The poet is like the prince of the clouds, who rides the tempest and scorns the archer. Exiled on the ground, amidst boos and insults, his giant's wings prevent his walking!' A great poet always sees and gets disturbed by the chaotic disorder of society and the world and therefore sees a new world in the eternal virginity of words.
Recently I was reading a volume titled 'French Lyrics in English Verse' published by the University of Wisconsin in 1940. I have come under the spell of French Lyrics translated into English verse by William Frederic Giese, who was an outstanding Professor of Romance Languages in the University of Wisconsin in USA during the inter-War period from 1919 to 1939. All his life he felt to the full the enchantments of literature and his beautiful English translations of great works of French Literature will continue to remain an imperishable and abiding part of Comparative Literature.
I am presenting below a beautiful poem by the French Poet Henri De Regnier (1846-1936) titled Love's Hour. He began as a disciple of the Parnassians and the Symbolists, but achieved his best individual style after he had outgrown their influence. He voiced his modern and sophisticated impressions in a chastened and classic French style that often resembled that of Chenier (1762-1794).
I WILL NOT SPEAK the passion lodged in me
Till your dear image, in the fountain glassed,
Has palely writ in watery charactery
How brief a time your beauty's date shall last.
I will speak only when those gentle hands
Are redolent of all the season's bloom,
And when your smiling spirit understands
The tearful joy that mocks at mortal doom.
I will speak only when the flitting bees
That in the warm air tilt the drooping flowers
Have thrilled your ear with murmurous melodies
And rustic scents that blessed the sunlit hours.
I will speak only when the last red rose
Sets your white arm a-tremble on my own,
And when the shadow of the dim day's close
Subdues your spirit to a twilight tone.
The intermingled balm of night and day
So tenderly your tremulous heart shall move
That it will blend in the soft words I say
My voice, your voice, and the sweet voice of love.
Another poet who wrote great poetry in French was Jean Moreas (1856-1910). He was a native of Athens in Greece. At the age of 10, he conceived the ambition of becoming a French poet. He settled in Paris in his early youth and made his literary debut with Les Syrtes (1882), in which the influence of the Parnassians and of Verlaine (1844-1896) was evident and apparent. In 1891 he founded the Ecole Romane, whose mission consisted in a revival of Greek, Roman and French poetry of the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century. I am presenting below a poem titled 'This Shadow of a Dream' by Jean Moreas. In this poem the underlying ideal is the Romantic theme of the isolation of the artist, the brevity of earthly life and the inevitability of death.
This Shadow of a Dream
SAY NOT: Life is a flowery bed of ease;
Heart, speak not so, by noble impulse fired.
Nor do not say: Life is a long disease;
That speaks an unstrung heart, too quickly tired.
But smile when spring leads in her flowery train,
Weep with the north wind and the moaning stream;
Taste every pleasure, suffer every pain,
And say: How sweet�this shadow of a dream.
Next I am presenting a wonderful poem titled 'RAIN' by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). With the publication of Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. Verlaine belonged to this movement.Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others, came to be referred to as 'Symbolists'. In poetry, the symbolist procedure - as typified by Verlaine - was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation
Rain
O SOFTLY dropping rain,
Falling on earth and roof;
For a heart filled with pain,
O the soft-singing rain!
Tears well within my heart
Like rain that softly falls;
'Tis the rain's counterpart,
This weeping in my heart.
O tears without a cause!
O my disheartened heart!
Heart that obeys no laws�
O tears without a cause!
O heart so full of pain,
Unmoved by love or hate,
Why weep as weeps the rain?
O heart so full of pain!
Here is another poem by Paul Verlaine:
Autumn Music
MY heart-strings throb
When violins sob
In autumn woods;
Again relive Days fugitive
And languorous moods.
Vainly distraught
By haunting thought,
I cannot sleep;
But all alone,
All woebegone,
I dream and weep.
And then I go
Where wild winds blow,
Drifting in grief
Now here, now there,
I ask not where,
Like a dead leaf.
We are condemned to live in an age of classical ignorance of the classics of the world. Some of my friends and readers send e-mail to me from time to time casting honest doubts about my boundless enthusiasm for classical literature. To such decent doubting Thomases, I can only reply through the poem of Alfred De Musset (1810-1857), titled �TO THE READER� which I am presenting below.
To His Reader
THIS BOOK records my wayward youth�
I took no pains to fetter it.
A foolish book! In very truth
I had been wise to better it.
Yet all things change without redress;
Then why amend my past? Ah, no!
Go, little bird of passage, go!
Go, if God will, to thy address.
And you who read, whoe'er you be,
O do not think too ill of me,
Read what you will, read what you can;
My earliest rhymes reveal the child,
The next betray the stripling wild,
The last scarce saviour of the man.
Democracy needs her poets, in all their diversity because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another's lives. Only poetry can do that. Only poetry gives us language packed with feeling and personality. No wonder Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) has said �The blood-jet is poetry, there is no stopping�
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