Therefore, it was with a heavy heart that I read about a poetry workshop – the first of its kind, I was informed - in Bangladesh. Our intelligentsia are already so divorced from the obvious and the ordinary, that any further encouragement along these lines cannot fail to have an insalubrious effect. If I want poetry to lift up my spirits, whom do I read? Hardly any of the modern and none of the contemporary poets. I pick up Shelley’s Epipsychidion, the greatest love poem ever penned in the English language. To describe it as a love poem is an affront to Shelley (and to Mrs. Shelley, with whom Shelley was very much in love, though she was not the subject of the poem); he has so widened and universalised the meaning of love as to render it, rather, a hymn to the human spirit.
Can any amount of technique scale such heights? Poetry can no more die than that the memory of a great man can be forgotten. But when he has been reported to the Missing Person’s Bureau and has not been found in a hundred years, we can conclude that he is no longer among the living.
Requiescat in pace.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
