Politics & Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a major English Romantic poet who was also a radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, had once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But then, WH Auden, a British-American poet whose poetry was known for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, had very emphatically asserted that poetry 'makes nothing happen'. But then the fact remains that poets with strong political views had contributed immensely to the freedom struggle of India. Sri Aurobindo was one such political activist and poet whose modern epic 'Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol' is a wonderful, inventive retelling of a traditional story, in which he interwove it with political aspects of the Indian national movement. Like him, many other poets instilled patriotism and amplified the freedom struggle through their verses. The list, in fact, is long and includes names of giants like Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarojini Naidu, Hasrat Mohani (credited with coining the 'Inquilab Zindabad' slogan), Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam. In Assam, we had Nabin Chandra Bardoloi, Ambikagiri Raichoudhury, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Ganesh Gogoi, Parvati Prasad Baruva and Bhupen Hazarika were among the leading poets who had added extra impetus to the freedom struggle. In the post-Independence era, a number of poets had written strong political poems. They included those with Socialist leanings, like Hem Barua, Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya and Syed Abdul Malik, and those with Left leanings, like Sumitranandan Pant, Sahir Ludhianvi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, UR Ananthamurthy, Keshav Mahanta and Amalendu Guha. In Assam, one also cannot leave out Dev Kant Barooah, a leading romantic poet But then, the question arises, as to whether poetry can be used as a political instrument or whether political poetry can exist or not. There are critics who argue that political poetry cannot exist, the reason cited being that politics do not belong with and cannot be incorporated with traditional definitions of poetry. In a 1968 essay titled "Studies in English Literature: Restoration and Eighteenth Century" author and critic AL French had claimed that though many poets have tried to inject political messages into poems, the quality of such poetry has been invariably poor. According to him, the attempt to incorporate literal politics can destroy the fanciful and imaginary qualities that make poetry what it is. What, however, must be kept in mind is that poetry can be extremely difficult to write well if one doesn't have the background knowledge of tools used in creating a poem.