Poetry as Literary Work

According to oxford dictionary, Poetry is “Literary work in which special strength is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of different style and rhythm”. Poetry is also a way to express one’s feelings, emotions or ideas and it does not come naturally which means it can be based on real life experience and can be imagery and its right to say that poetry is ‘life changing conversion’. Rhythm and sounds are the two most important elements of poetry which makes the poetry more actual.

The person behind all the poetries are called poet. These are people whose occupation is to write poetry for themselves as well as for their audience. Poets are unacknowledged abettors of the world. Also, words play significant role for the poets as words describes different emotions of the poets. There are many famous poets who laid great emphasis across different countries through their poetry. For examples, William Shakespeare- one of the great poets and a playwriter who wrote his first two poems on erotic themes which are “Venus and Adonis “and “The Rape of Lucrece”; T.S. Eliot who got famous after his poem-“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), which could be called a masterpiece of the Modernist movement etc. Poetry not only based on ideas, feelings and emotions but it also explores different relations.

Firstly, it explores the relation between nature and aesthetics i.e. interaction between nature and culture which means how poetry inspires the nature as nature can be historical or relative and how poetry inspires the culture as culture has their own different aspects. Famous poems on nature are- “Nothing gold can stay” by Robert Frost; “the glory of the garden” by Rudyard Kipling etc. and famous poems on culture are- “Blessing” by Imtiaz Dharker; “Half- caste” by John Agard etc. Secondly, it also explores the relation between experience and freedom. Experience is something by which you get knowledge or skill by feeling, doing or seeing the things or events and also something happens in your life which either motivates you and make you a better person or can demotivate you and make you weak depending on how you take lesson from that experience.

Experience is a higher way of learning. Each person whether a poet, a writer or anyone learnt from their life experience which makes them successful. For example- If a poet write a poem but he/she does not able to write well and unable to describe what he/she wants to convey through his/her poem to their audience and receive bad feedback than they will try to write better and work hard to achieve success. How did they get motivate or influenced to write better? The answer is from their bad experience. Therefore, it is important to experience each and every aspects of life to learn better.

Let us take an example of a young poet HANNAH HODGSON who is the second prize winner in 19-25 age category in Young Poets Network. Through her own life experience she gets motivated and started writing poems at young age. At the age of 20, she went through many distressing events as she got physical disabled and chronically ill because of which she did not able to walk and use wheelchair. Also, she stopped eating and drinking. Due to her disability, people used to make fun of her, used to stare her and used to gossip about her but besides all these she inspired a lot of people through her writing and also to express what she is going through. She also try to provoke the disables by saying that “stop fighting to use public transport because empty buggies are taking up the space”. She wrote a poem “TOWN” which is based on her experience on wheelchair. Last line from her poem is given below-“Access rarely thought aboutunless you need it –then it’s something you think about.”I personally like this poem as it shows how she struggled and faced many obstacles during her disability.

Her story is the best example to encourage and inspire people. We also have many more poets who influenced themselves towards writing poetry through their own life experiences which not only make them successful, but they inspired and encourage lot number of people. Freedom is the right or power to speak, think, do and act whatever we want. Freedom in context of poetry plays an important role. Engagement is the key to freedom. There are many poets who are engaged in different freedom and civil rights and many of them wrote poems on freedom, civil rights and protests.

Irom Chanu Sharmila who is a civil rights activist, political activist and poet from Manipur, India sat on a hunger strike against armed forces. It was the “world’s longest hunger strike” as she was on strike for 16 years and during this period she did not ate and drink anything. After this strike she came to known as the “Iron Lady”, there are famous anthems made during the time of civil rights movement like- “we shall overcome”, “if I had a hammer” etc. There are different poems on the protests which can be called “Poetry of protest”. The protest was done by the people or civil rights to want their reforms and change.

Not only poets but there were singers also who protest through their singing such as- NINA SIMONE, PETE SEEGER etc. Beside this, there are two movements which in which different poets and writers were also engaged which are “BEAT MOVEMENT” and “HUNGRYALIST MOVEMENT”. In the beat movement, the beat generation started this movement with group of authors like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac (during this movement Jack wrote a poem “ON THE ROAD”) etc. whose work was to explore and influence American culture and politics in the post-world war second era. Hungryalist movement- a movement launched during the early 1960’s in Kolkata. It was an Indian literary movement that focused mainly on poetry. This movement was in Bengali language and group of young Bengali poets spread this movement. “Shakti Chattopadhyay (one of the strongest poet), “Malay Roy Chaudhry”, “Samir Roy Chaudhry” and “Debi Roy” were the mains of this movement and they were called ‘HUNGRY GENERATION’.

During this movement, no food was provided even to the rich and 600 million people lost their homes. After these two movements, a new movement called “NEXALITE” erupted in Bengal in late 1960’s. This movement was originated from a village named Naxalbari in west Bengal. In this movement, tribal people were fighting for their rights and 14 people were shooted by the police during this movement.From the above descriptions and different examples, it is right to say that the poetry explores the relation between experience and freedom.