EXAMINATION 1971
The essence of poetry is that it deals with events which concern a large number of people and can be grasped not as immediate personal experience but as matter known largely from heresy and presented in simplified and often abstract forms. it is thus the antithesis of all poetry which deals with the special, individual activity of the self and tries to present this as specially and as individually as it can. The poet who deals with public themes may himself be affected, even deeply, by contemporary events at some point in his own being, but to see them in their breadth and depth he must rely largely on what he hears from other men and from mass instruments of communication. From the start his impulse to write about them is different from any impulse to write about his own affairs. It may be just as strong and just as compelling, but it is not of the same kind. He has to give his own version of something which millions of others may share with him, and however individual he may wish to be, he cannot avoid relying to a large extent on much that he knows only from second hand.
Fundamentally this may not matter, for after all what else did Shakespeare do: but the political poet does not construct an imaginary past, he attempts to grasp and interpret a vast present. Between him and his subject there is a gap which he can never completely cross, and all his attempts to make events part of himself must be to some extent hampered by recalcitrant elements in them, which he does not understand or cannot assimilate or find irrelevant to his creative task. in such poetry selection which is indispensable to all art, has to be made from an unusually large field of possibilities and guided by an exacting sense of what really matters and what does not. On one side he may try to include too much and lose himself in issues where be is not imaginatively at home, on the other side he may see some huge event merely from a private angle which teed not meab much to others. Political poetry oscillates between these extremes, and its history in our time has been largely attempts to make the best of one or the other of them or to see what compromises can be made between them.
Title: The essence of Political Poetry
Poetry encompasses a collective social conscience and manifest itself into a conceptual framework. Such poetry is opposed to all other forms that are based on unique experiences. In an attempt to cover the entirety of the event, a poet must not solely employ his personal experience, irrespective of his urge to be individual in his perspective, but also incorporate the social interpretation. Importantly, work of a political poet is a reflection of a contemporary society. His attempt to reconcile schism between his work and his audience is thwarted by heretic elements that are contrary to his creativity. Similarly, selection criteria is based on numerous possibilities and is stringent in its practicability. Therefore, the art ought to be relevant as well as desirable to the audience. Thus, the essence of political poetry is to create a best fit between relevancy and desirability.