Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Love and Poetry Thinking about Meerabai

Love is one of the oldest theme of poetry. In fact, poetry is traditionally considered as an expression of love. This is the reason why writing love poetry is one of the most difficult challenge for a poet today. It is so easy to slip into a cliche or be sentimental in your treatment.
Yet there is no denying the fact that some of the greatest poetry in the world is love poetry: Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Meerabai, Kabir and of course Ghalib.
I believe Meera composed the finest love poetry in the world. Why? Because most of the others mentioned above were unable to transcend their masculine consciousness. Masculine love poetry is always tinged with the violence of lust and certain roughness which reduces the beloved to an object of sexual desire. Meera wrote magnificient love poetry without attempting to write like men. and thats what gives her poetry certain delicate elusive beauty which the male poets lack.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

great observation sir....