The Intensity of Modern Poetry

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The Intensity of Modern Poetry

A collaborative collective encounter with modern poetry a couple of years back was a fascinating experience. It helped me touch base with poems I had read long ago. The experience was like coming home.  Poems, true gems which I hugged close to bosom helped through different stages in life. Then other poems, which had been knocking at door for a long time, I decided to let them in. Poems which had opened a window in my mind, completed a thought, untangled a knot, rattled me mad, made me cry, soothed me over or  opened unknown recesses of myself to myself.  And the rest had just taken me on a pleasure trip which never ever failed to delight me!

The journey began with proto-modernists, in the 19^th century, a period in history of great change. The Victorian Age was at its peak (1837-1901). America became embroiled in Civil War (1861-65). Darwin came out with the ‘Origin of Species’ (1859). Sigmund Freud studies on psychoanalysis opened up the playfield on human behavioral patterns.   Friedrich Nietzsche said, “God is dead!”  Art offered a richly textured, yet clear and logical introduction to Neo-classism, Romanticism, Realism, 

Impressionism, Post Impressionsm and Symbolism. "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was an advertising slogan coined by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, in 1888.

 In such a tumultuous yet refreshing era lived poets like, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Khalil  Gibran, Paul Dunbar, Henry Derozio and many others.  But here we shall have an interlude with the so called three ‘decadent poets’, who went against the fallacy of the Victorian ethos in spirit, lifestyle and poetry.

Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde born half a century apart, gave birth to terms like’ flaneur’ and ‘dandy.’ Baudelaire, often branded as ‘Mama’s Boy’, led the way from struggle to intensity.  He wanted to meet life head-on in the streets, in those unexpected, unplanned encounters. He wrote poems about depraved, unpoetic aspects of urban life. Wilde on the other hand gave birth to ‘aestheticism’- ‘Art for art’s sake’. He sought beauty, sensual pleasures and edited a magazine on women ‘Lady Like’ -mirroring not only fashion and aesthetics but also what women thought and said. Their bohemian lifestyles led to scandals and in Wilde’s case, a court case on homosexuality.  Baudelaire’s collection of poems ‘Les Fleur Du Mal’ (Flowers of Evil) was banned for its sexual, erotic imagery. Yet they were sought for their wit, flamboyance and intellectual sensitivity. Their poems cut through the social hypocritical fabric of the Victorian Age. 

To a Malabar Woman

Your feet are as slender as your hands and your hips
Are broad; they'd make the fairest white woman jealous;
 To the pensive artist your body's sweet and dear;
Your wide, velvety eyes are darker than your skin

by Charles Baudelaire

Impression – Le reveillon

The sky is laced with fitful red,
The circling mists and shadows flee,
The dawn is rising from the sea,
Like a white lady from her bed.

by Oscar Wilde

Edgar Allan Poe, the macabre poet became a legend whose legacy was followed by Sherlock Holmes, Tennessee Williams and Franz Kafka.  Creator of enduring terror, he was the working writer and frequent magazine contributor, the inventor of the detective stories and the science-fiction tales. He applied himself to graphology, ciphers, cryptograms, puzzles, labyrinths and mesmerism with equal ease.  He befriended darkness finding a fecund core to dredge out poems, “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” ‘The Raven’ and ‘Bells” are fine examples of his art.

Hear the loud alarm bells-- Brazen bells!

What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!

Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire

Often labeled as poets of the decadent movement, the three poets in different countries ushered in an era of excess, notoriety – yes, but also ‘in-the-face attitude’ to reality. The decadent thread is, "an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, a refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity," said a critic, further adding that such literature was, “new and beautiful and interesting disease."

(A collective collaborative encounter with modern poetry happens at Bookworm on the second Saturday of every month 5pm–7pm)