My Confessions as a Young Poet
Of Poetic Influence and Other Anxieties
The “poetic-trinity” of South Asian Urdu tradition’s virtuosos Mir, Ghalib, and Iqbal has always left me thunderstruck and eternally in prostration in acceptance of their divine stature. The more I have turned leaves into their poetic universe, the more helpless I have become to fathom the expansiveness of their cosmos.
To put my submission into an image, it will suffice to bring the image of “Let God Arise” from the Psalms of David (Psalm: 68, KJB). The image strikes me to potently convey the feeling of the rising god (gods in this instance) from the valley of Urdu poetics after the rest prostrate in throngs; or else, bring to your imagination the ceremony of prostration in the Arabic “Jahilliya” poetic tradition (poets of the Seven Hanging Odes that were put on the Ka’aba, the holy sanctuary in the city of Mecca) where the contemporaries of the coroneted poet prostrated before him. Something similar, something irrevocably similar strikes me when I pass by the thrones of Mir, Ghalib, and Iqbal.
When Harold Bloom blew the trumpet of the Anxiety of Influence, I bet he had a similar rupture of epiphany for the poets in the western canon. In his opus, Bloom relates the anxiety of the novice poet “Ephebe” (“Ephebos”, a boy of seventeen who was sent into a martial training in the Grecian culture) voluntarily “misunderstands” his predecessor poets to make room for a poetic outpour which is, if not partially, wholly expressed with utmost coherence and due dexterity.
Bloom could never recover from the exuberance of Dante, godliness of Shakespeare, and Miltonic metaphysics until his last breath. To him it meant everything creative was concluded, and nothing remained unsaid in the porticos of human consciousness. I’m tempted to relate the title of Bloom’s devotional treatise on the grandeur of Shakespeare which he so rightly calls The Invention of Human. Everything that can remotely pass by the periphery of human consciousness, he believes, has been categorically rendered by the bard. Not a verse more, not a verse less.
Add to pleasure a few more dregs from the Arabic poetics when Labid Ibn Rabi’a, one of the poet laureates of the Jahilliya tradition, who later converted to Islam, was asked by the Caliph Umer as to why had he forsaken poetry. I marvel at the response he gave, which I believe Labid too contracted from his own poetic anxiety. “After Al-Baqarah and Aal-Imran…?,” (names of the first two chapters of the Quran) Labid helplessly shook his head, stating nothing else could be fathomed in the human consciousness after the revelation of the Quran. How many times have I thought, reminiscing Labid’s helplessness, of the Abrahamic God to be “the” poet of unimaginable stature — I fail to comprehend. Imagine the anxiety of the creative process after recognizing the cosmological expanse of divine revelation.
Rest assured, I think it will suffice to think of my anxiety which I feel after witnessing the “poetic-trinity” of Mir, Ghalib, and Iqbal is not a lonely whimper in the indifferent universe of poetry. Many who came before, and many who shall come, have and will feel what I feel at the moment. Losing sleep in such confrontations warrants the “sublimity” which rests in the essence of higher poetry and higher ideals.
“We belong to Allah, and indeed to whom we shall return.” (This is a verse from the Quran that’s always on the tongues of Muslims when they hear the news of somebody dying — you may connect the dots as to who dies is the young poet after this confession.)
