THE
CRITICISM OF NISSIM EZEKIEL
An
Appraisal
BIJAY KUMAR DAS
Indian English criticism
is of recent origin. Sri Aurobindo is the first Indian English critic who has
given a shape to Indian English poetry criticism. Nissim Ezekiel’s name is
almost synonymous with post-Independence Indian English poetry. It is he who
has given a new direction and a name, as it were, to Indian English poetry. But
when his poetry brought him laurels his criticism suffered neglect. Few people
know that he is a critic with original insight and deep understanding. His
criticism when read in its perspective reveals the greatness of his mind, and
the breadth of his understanding. Though he has written a small number of
critical essays, they point to a new direction of Indian English poetry criticism.
It is difficult to separate the poet in him from the critic in him, and again
the critic in him from the scholar in him. In him not only scholarship merges
into criticism but all three–poetry, scholarship and criticism – act and interact
upon one another. Keeping these premises in mind let us turn to his criticism.
First I take up the essay,
“Poetry as knowledge”1 for discussion. At the outset Ezekiel makes
his position clear.
“I want to remain within
the sphere of poetry and to speak of anything outside it only in terms of
apparent relationships. This is always felt to be necessary and important by
poets and critics of poetry”.2
According to Ezekiel a
poet does not theorize. “The creator of poetry, even if he is not a very good
one but provided be is authentically a creator and not merely a cultural
initiator, is bound to see poetry as knowledge in his own special way”.3
The experience is vital to
the poet. The poetic process can be spoken of through the language of
experience. He also admits that “the poet too uses that common language and
these methods in certain cultural roles he may choose to play. But it seems to
me that these roles are secondary”.4
He does not agree with
those who claim the highest status for poetry among the arts and sciences. He
disagrees with C. D. Lewis views on Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”, when
the latter says that “Wordsworth’s task was to show the uniqueness immanent in
a commonplace experience’, to describe or project ‘the state of mind she
produces in him’ and that the knowledge we get from the poem is knowledge of a
certain mood”.5 According to Ezekiel, knowledge of a mood is
knowledge at all. He maintains that “There is a sudden heightening of awareness
without which the Highlandlass is not the Highlandlass of the poem but any lass
in any landscape”.6 The metaphors and images form “a cerebral aura
around the immediacy and totality of the experience.” According to Ezekiel, “We
know of this experience when we read the poem, to the extent that we respond to
poetry. But we still do not know the experience till such time as we appear to
have passed through a process resembling that which is implied in Wordsworth’s
poem. When we do, it seems that our experience of Wordsworth’s poem is complete.
In reality, degrees of intensity, dimensions of feeling, potency of thought,
quality of inner change, all are revealed as vistas only, with further
potentialities clearly hinted at, so that between the beginning and the unseen,
perhaps unseeable end is our life itself in the knowledge of poetry”.7
Ezekiel believes that one has to live with poetry and not merely to read it
occasionally.
Versified knowledge is “superfluous
as knowledge and superficial as verse”. “Poetry as propaganda is equally
suspect”, says Ezekiel. According to him, “The surrealist movement in poetry,
claiming to arrive at the truth by using automatic modes of writing derived
from the alleged workings of the unconscious failed miserably to produce much
poetry with staying power. Marxist poetry is more Marxist than poetry.
Drug-induced states of mind in which the consciousness is temporarily expanded
and intensified have so far not produced any notable poetry. Poets who have
mystical experiences and project them in verse have occasionally been
successful but mystics who write poetry do it badly. Religious hymns, however
notable the religious sentiment they express, are not notably poetic. Great
religious poetry undoubtedly exists but the greatness is unequally divided between
the poetry and the religion, while perfect integration between the two is rare.
To be good, poetry has to be an independent art”.8 Poetry to Ezekiel
is an art which is independent of all other branches of learning. He believes
in working on a poem - revising and re-revising till it achieves a kind of
perfection. He is not pleading “poetry for poetry sake” – far from it. He
implores upon us to see poetry as knowledge.
Ezekiel disagrees with I.
A. Richards when the latter describes the statements of poetry as pseudo-statements.
He argues that the distinction between two types of statements in terms of true
and pseudo is deplorable because poetry is true or nothing, though its mode of
approaching, grasping and expressing the truth may be different from that of
science. Poetic truth is not pseudo-truth if such a term is permissible. It has
to be examined in its context and may be located anywhere between the strictly
personal and the universal. In fact, even when it is strictly personal in the
sense of not corresponding to the known external facts, it is still true or
false to the poet’s feelings, and the truth or falsehood is revealed in the
quality of the statement, in the coherence, consistency, tune and resonance of
the poem as a whole. However personal the poetry may be, it has to obey the
laws of truth, even the truth of an experienced contradiction poetically
expressed, which gives it a universal significance ... But the statements
poetry sets out to make are true statements in their own context and according
to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”.9
It is not correct to say
that poets do not think. Ezekiel differs from T. S. Eliot on this point:
Ezekiel maintains that “What is more plausible is that the thinking is done in
poetry as in philosophy or literary criticism and then projected in a form which
conceals its conceptual character”. 10 Ezekiel rightly observes that
“poetry that is broken up into thinking on the one hand and all the other
elements on the other, which are then further broken up into individual units
or qualities, is no longer poetry”.11 Unlike Eliot, Ezekiel believes
that “Shakespeare does all the real thinking which the poetic imagination
requires. Without real thinking his poetic imagination would be powerless”.12
Commenting on the relation
of poetry to knowledge, Ezekiel says: “I think that if the relation of poetry
to knowledge is not more often discussed by poets and critics, it is because
they are afraid of its narrow, utilitarian connotation the false expectation it
may create of a highly organized body of concepts visibly within the body of
poetry. The body of poetry is emotion and the knowledge assimilated in it is
emotionally assimilated. Otherwise it is not poetry though it is often the
prose element of it in the guise of poetry”. 13
Ezekiel considers metre,
metaphor, image, symbol, structure, texture and tension as means of poetry but
not its ends. The ends of poetry are meaning, knowledge and truth. Knowledge is
the centre of the trinity. This essay is highly intellectual and
thought-provoking. But it confuses rather than clarifies the proposition taken
by Ezekiel: “Poetry as knowledge” because he has not explained what he meant by
knowledge. Is it the knowledge of the poet that the poem expresses? Or is it
the knowledge derived out of experience that the poem expresses? Should we take
knowledge in the sense of power? Ezekiel cleverly avoids this problem by
stating in the beginning of the essay that “we know what poetry is and that we
know what knowledge is.” Nevertheless it is a very illuminating essay on poetry
seen as knowledge in a specified context.
Ezekiel has made an
attempt to define “Indianness” in Indian English poetry in his essay “What is
Indo-English Poetry”.14 He rightly observes that “There is no single
Indian flavour which alone can claim the designation and that its value, too,
depends on a host of generative factors which should never be simplified for
purposes of praise or blame”.15
Ezekiel considers some
titles of Ramanujan’s poems a having Indian orientation. According to him “A
mere glance at what is Indian in Ramanujan’s Selected Poems, is enough
to indicate a complex interaction of psychological forces kept under linguistic
and formal control. This complex interaction can hardly be called Indian without
adding the word modern to it”.16 Ramanujan’s poetry raises in the
Indian reader’s mind sophisticated questions about ancient and modern Indian
culture.
According to Ezekiel, “Kolatkar’s
way of being Indian is natural and effortless, seeing the present in the
context of the past. Belief and habits of the Indian tradition crumble under
his sharp glance without recourse to any special poetic devices of the kind of
which Ramanujan is a master”. 17
Indian reality and the
presence of Indian scene are easy enough to recognize in Indian English poetry.
Similarly complex organised response to contemporary Indian situation can
easily be found in modern Indian English poetry. One such example, according to
Ezekiel, is Adil Jussawalla’s Missing Person.
Though Ezekiel gives a few
examples of Indianness in Indian English poetry, it leaves much to be desired.
He is not very clear about the term “Indianness” in this essay and his
reference to only a small number of poets regarding “Indianness” in their poetry
is not very satisfactory. He too quotes liberally and profusely from the text
to drive home his point.
“To Revise or Not to
Revise” 18 is an essay on the poetic process, that is, - how poetry
came to be written. Ezekiel believes that as a rule poetry should be revised
before it is published. Since poetry is a craft, it needs revision.
Inspirational poetry does not need revision but there is a great danger
to it - that is, when inspiration stops, poetry stops. There are two extreme
viewpoints - one, inspirational poetry does not require revision, secondly,
there is Valery’s view that a poem is never completed - it is abandoned.
Ezekiel believes that there are a number of positions accepted as viable
between these two extremes. He says, “I assume that there is such a thing as
temperament which inclines the poet towards one or other mode of creation, and
sometimes a combination of modes. As he comes to terms with it and understands
its ways, he revises or does not revise expects inspiration or finds substitutes
for it”.19
Ezekiel suggests that a
poet should have an open mind regarding inspiration and revision in order to
make his poetry artistically viable. According to him “Involvement in poetry,
comprehensively, is of course the first condition, loving it, caring for its
past, present and future, wanting very much to write it and to achieve some
degree of excellence in the writing, thinking about its problems, assessing and
judging it without inhibitions, trying to assimilate knowledge of it; and even
becoming acquainted with its psychological signs and signals, this is the
beginning, the most elementary ,basis of poetic practice”. 20
Ezekiel has a word of
caution for the poets who want to revise their poems. Thus he says: “In
revising poems, poets should guard against the danger of adding complexity like
a varnish or altering a structure for the sake of a more intricate rhythm,
which may choke the meaning. A poem should never be revised to accommodate
mannerisms but to eliminate such as have crept in. Clearly, then, revision is a
double-edged weapon”. 21
In an article entitled “The
Writer as Historical Witness: Culture, Colonialism and Indo-English Poetry”,
22 Ezekiel maintains that “the bulk of Indo-English poetry is
necessarily remote from historical witnessing.” He is of the opinion that, “whenever
there is vitality in poetry there will be variety as well, and much of it will
seem, superficially, to be only self-regarding until we see it in a full human
perspective. In that perspective, the personal-private has a curious tendency
to become everybody’s experience”. “A lot of poetry, then, I argue is public
when it is most private”, writes Ezekiel and goes on to say that “to assess
Indo-English poetry in relation to two concepts: one is that of major and
minor, the other that of Indianness” would be more constructive and profitable.
I am inclined to agree with Ezekiel on this point not fully but fifty per cent.
It is difficult to say who is a major poet and who is a minor poet. There is no
clear-cut border line between major poetry and minor poetry. Even Eliot was
called a “great minor poet” by David Daiches. But it is desirable to assess
Indo-English poetry in terms of Indianness.
Ezekiel argues that Indian
references and images by themselves do not make an Indo-English poem Indian.
The determining factor is the sensibility at work in relation to all things
Indian, which are not to be identified with what is claimed to be a wholly
indigenous perception or way of thinking. “Indo-English poets are effective
witnesses of cultural history when they use those modes (i.e., irony, parody,
scepticism and allied modes of thinking) naturally and authoritatively.” says
Ezekiel. It is not difficult to agree with him on this point. The validity of
Ezekiel’s criticism lies in the fact that he is both a creator and a critic.
His observation is based on first hand experience and that lends authenticity
to his criticism.
NOTES
1 Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Poetry
as knowledge’, ed. S. K. Desai and G. N. Devy, Critical Thought, (New
Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 1987) Pp. 226-236
2 Ibid p.227,
3 Ibid p. 227
4 Ibid p. 228
5 Ibid p. 228
6 Ibid p.229
7 Ibid p.229
8 Ibid p. 230
9 Ibid p.231
10 Ibid p. 231
11 Ibid p. 232
12 Ibid p. 232
13 Ibid p. 233
14 Nissim Ezekiel, “What is
Indian in Indo-English Poetry?” Osmania Journal of English Studies Volume
XIX, 1983, p. 50.
15 Ibid p. 51
16 Ibid p. 54
17 Ibid
18 Nissim Ezekiel, “To
Revise or Not to Revise”, The Literary Criterion Volume XVIII No. 3,
1983. Pp. 1-9.
19 Ibid p. 3
20 Ibid p. 3-4
21 Ibid p. 7.