’You are sentenced to reality for life. 

No possibility of parole. 

Parole is death.’ 

– Yehuda Amichai 

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At the very outset I do seek kind permission from the revered readers of this journal to express myself on the topic cited above, with a tag-line of reality and life, for which I owe to a celebrated poet of our time, namely, Yehuda Amichai. With this I would like to draw your attention to the word ’insight’, which Merriam Webster Dictionary defines: (i) ’the power or act of seeing into a situation : penetration; (ii) ’the act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively’. Although my personal preference is the second definition, I hope the following few lines will reflect both meanings. How I personally view insight is a combination of intuition, power of the individual to delve into the core of the matter, and all encompassing wisdom.

We are still in modern times, in some form or another, and I would like to reference Mathew Arnold’s view of modernity (Arnold is known for defining poetry as ’criticism of life’). In 1857, Arnold delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, later published as On the Modern Element in Literature. In this work, Arnold sought to redefine the notion of modernity, expanding it from merely a temporal category to with aesthetic and even moral dimensions. Arnold’s insightful view found no modern element in the poetry of his time. To him, Periclean Athens was more modern than that of Victorian England, leading him to define modernism as ’intellectual deliverance’. 

We see Arnold’s insight in his concept of time – more precisely, the present age surrounded by a copious and complex present, and behind it, a copious and complex past. This arises because the present age shows the individual who contemplates the spectacle with a vast multitude of facts, awaiting and inviting comprehension.

Intellectual deliverance, in Arnold’s view, lies in man’s comprehension of both the present and past. The individual mind is confronted with an immense, moving, and confusing spectacle that perpetually excites our curiosity while also baffling our comprehension. The hallmark of the modern poet is his complete adequacy to this challenging world. ’The modern poet,’ as Arnolds intuitively puts it, ’can see life steadily and see it completely.’ 

I would leave Mathew Arnold here to take up another visionary; the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. His insights can lead us to an hitherto undiscovered plane of thought and feeling. For nearly all his career, Milosz set himself against modernism as he understood it. This is not a question of style – the polyvocal, the ironic, and the obscure, were always important tones and tools of his art and gifts of modernism. The modernism he opposes is, rather, the pampered child; the Belle Epoche – it is symbolism, the ivory-tower, and the hermetic avant-garde. It believes, or pretends, that art is autonomous and deals contemptuously with the tame world of the bourgeois. In Against Incomprehensible Poetry, Milosz condemns modern poetry’s chief tendencies: the floods of artistic metaphors and linguistic fabric liberated from colloquial meaning. The same definitive modernist style can be seen in his poem, A Treatise on Poetry:
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A pure thing, against the sad affairs of earth. 

Pure, forbidden the use of certain words: 

Toilet, telephone, ticket, ass, money. 

A muse with long hair learns to read 

In the dark bathroom of her parents home 

And knows already what is not poetry, 

Which is only a mood and a breeze. It dwells 

In three dots, followed by a comma. 

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He also believes that nothing can be fully understood without its dateline. Milosz compels us to read all texts historically. In an interview he stated, ’It would certainly be very nice to view a poem apart from its date and circumstances, but that cannot be done. Besides, what do we want – marble, unshakable canons, beauty? I’m no Mallarme. Dates are important.’ 

This would be better illustrated by another poem of Milosz, in which he urges his Prufrockian alter ego; Adrian Zielinsky, in a sequence of poems written in 1943-44:  
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What wise man you are, Adrian. 

You could be a Chinese poet, 

You needn’t care what century you’re in. 

You look at a flower 

And smile at what you see. 

How wise you are, how undiluted 

by folly of history or passions of the race. 

You walk serenely, the light, occluded, 

Eternal, softening your face. 

Peace to the house of the sage. 

Peace to his prudent wonder. 

O black treason, black treason – 

Thunder. 

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Another poet, Derek Walkott, acknowledges that the poet without history will find himself compelled to create a history, even a ”pseudo” one. This is because history gives places, people, and relations a content for the mind to react against; without it, there is nothing for the poet to write about but landscape. 

If I am allowed to bring Anubhav Tulasi into this discussion, I would immediately take up his book titled Srimontamonporua; a collection of four sequence poems which exhibits life in its varied manifestations, such as– myth, human heritage, reality and relationship. By interlinking these different exponents of life by poetic insight, the four sequences become one, encompassing all seasons of life itself. 

I began this paper with Yehuda Amichai and shall conclude this deliverance with him only – here is another piece from his sequence poem Houses(Plural); Love(Singular): 

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We divided the language between us: 

you took the

vowels 

and I the consonants, and together we were of one                    

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language 

and many words. Listen, man, listen, woman: 

our life is one, of deaths there are many and 

gods not   

a few, 

our life is one and our love is one.

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In the above lines, I aimed to present poetic insights rooted in the lives of people of our own time, illustrated through the poets mentioned.