Signs and signatures
What is the truth of poetry?
Darshan Singh Maini

A general, widespread view of the poet per se is that he is a person living in a world of dreams and fantasies, voyaging from nothingness to nothingness. An ill-informed view or opinion that has been floating around for generations, you may say. But even the great Greek philosopher, Plato, kept this tribe out of his Republic. And that’s something to ponder. However, the common opinion holds that poets, lovers and lunatics are a fraternity of sorts. In a lighter vein, even the poets themselves have put them in the same basket, so to speak. Nevertheless, there’s some truth in all these extravagant and fanciful utterances. For instance, the Sufi Muslim poets, in Persian, Urdu and Punjabi languages — and in other languages such as the ones that the 15th century Bhakti Movement bards adopted to describe their visionary horizons — did seem to be "possessed", and sought their mystic consummation or the union with the Lord on "wings of poesy" alone. That’s an insanity that only the divines and the darvesh ministrels, intoxicated and reaching out for the heavens, could exhibit when in search of the truth of God. We have the example of William Blake who eventually did turn mad, or nearly so, when he plunged into the depths of God’s universe and the mysteries of the life divine. Both his later poems and paintings, thus, remain the glory of the English tongue and brush.

This preamble is really meant to define the idea of the truth of poetry, the theme of this piece. There are several well-known definitions of poetry, both by the critics and the poets themselves. And I’ll soon cite a few to advance the argument. But one thing that T.S. Eliot, 20th centrury’s most influential poet and critic, observed acutely is, in a manner, my nuclear concern, and I hope to illustrate the point later as this discourse gathers weight and momentum. Eliot came closest to the heart of the matter, when he said that poetry alone carries the deepest truths, its method being indirect, tangential and oblique. What cannot or may not be said in prose for reasons of privacy or propriety comes out as of necessity. For certain experiences need a figurative language to drape the emotions wherein the truth of such moments is memorialised. Yes, a poem tells much more than a prose piece, for it enacts the inner truth in a more compact, condensed and telling form. In the Freudian sense, what lies deep in our unconscious, "the shaggy undergrowths" and the lurking fears, anxieties buried in the catacombs of memory, all come out unawares, forcefully and uncensored. There are several critiques on this issue. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, being one of the more penetrating books acknowledging the Freudian idea, particularly "the Oedipus complex" or "father-slaying". All this, of course, is metaphorical, and I’ve no space here to spin out the full argument.

Before I turn to my own muses which turn upon the dream-element and "the wheel of fire" in 5 poetry volumes — four in English and one in Urdu — I may as well take up a couple of the definitions of poetry advanced by Wordsworth and others. The Lake poet had a lot to say on the processes of poetry, and on how it is born. In one definition, he calls poetry "an overflow of powerful emotion", and yet in another, complementary definition, he observes that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquillity". In fact, it’s a balancing act, and most of his own poems from the lyric, The Daffodils to the Lucy poems, Tintern Abbey and beyond, illustrate his theories so wonderfully and felicitously. However, a third definition given by him has a deeper relevance for my purposes. Poetry, he avers, carries the same truth or truths which we find in science. As one of the greatest poets of nature, he realised, on his pulse, as it were, the mystical aspects of God’s universe, and of its deepest mysteries. After all, science is a study of the phenomena of nature, and its truths are acknowledged, albeit indirectly, in poetry. Only, the idiom and the methodology are different. The earlier view of science as mathematical, exact and objective has been challenged, amongst others, by Einstein himself. For, beyond the world of facts and phenomena are certain realms that lie outside of the orbit of science. The quantum theory of the physicists, Heisenburg’s "Law of Indeterminery", all suggest the limitations of science. That’s why certain modern scientists and thinkers like Pierre de Chardin, Paul Tillich, and Berdeyav have sought strenuously to effect a marriage between reason and faith, or between science and religion.

Which brings me to the second part of my dissertation — the birth of a poem. For when we begin to understand the secret and deep processes of poetry, we realise the necessity of the preamble that has preceded our discussion so far. Poetry is a spontaneous and compulsive utterance. A poem comes when it comes, a thing of ‘purgatory’ — a process of suffering. As John Keats put it,

Indeed, poetry and suffering — whether, born of unrequited love, or of the death of a dear one, or of unbearable physical pain in age and illness — are bonded in a manner that only the pain of nativity can describe. The American novelist, John Steinbeck, once said about poetry and pain: "And it is also the best therapy because sometimes the troubles come tumbling out". It’s, thus, that poetry becomes one’s catharsis, even one’s nirvana. It becomes eventually a mode of meeting "the assaults of reality" and "the ordeals of consciousness", to recall Henry James expressions.

I revert, then, to T.S. Eliot’s view about the truth of poetry. The examples I have quoted do tend towards the idea that poetry is the path to Calvary, and even to "the cross" when suffering becomes sublime. An extreme view, yes, but one finds this supreme point enacted in songs and hymns of nearly all religious scriptures. Since I’m not quite familiar with the holy Koran I confine my argument to the Bible, and, more particularly to the Guru Granth Sahib whose 1450 pages are all written in the form of rhymed verses, and all set by the musicians to the tunes of the classical Indian ragas. What’s more, the spousal metaphor — man’s union with the Lord — is chiefly used to describe man’s eternal suffering without his submission to the Will of God. Poetry, then, is the medium, the marga to salvation in the deepest sense.

The King James Bible, though written in prose, is poetic in seed and essence. Its long linked passages remind one not only of the suffering on the cross, but also of eternity, and of the spirit eternal. Only in poetry, via suffering, the creature can or may touch the hem of sublimity. So, the truth of poetry is the eternal truth. John Keats’s famous Lines, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is only a secular version of his vision of poetry. That’s how the wheel of truth comes full circle.

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