Metaphysical Poets and Ghalib

Ghalib and Metaphysical poets? A friend suggested that there is a connection or similarity between these two poetries. Perhaps he implied that there is a shared ground between the Urdu ghazal tradition and the Metaphysical style. I dont think there is much of similarity between the two. The Metaphysical poets were avant-garde of the times, trying to reinvent the language of poetry to suit intellectual and cultural pressures of the times. Ghalib's poetry is stylistically far more conservative as he does not inflict violence to the language using far fetched and outrageous metaphors or `conceits'. The eternal and universal themes of love, death, and god can be found in any two tradition. Sher in Urdu ghazals come closer to the witty neoclassical couplets of Pope or Dryden which aspire to express `what oft was thought, but n'er so well expressed'. Besides, the religious poetry of Herbert and Crashaw is hardly as profound and dark as that of Ghalib. Existential agony, dark vision and unsettling expression of suffering that we find in Ghalib is far removed from the smart ingeniousness and cleverness of Donne and Marvell. I personally feel that Ghalib is far greater poet than the Metaphysicals.

Metaphysical Poetry at the turn of 21st century.

Teaching Metaphysical poets to MA part one students these days. It made me think on how a mode of writing which was considerd marginal and freakish for hundreds of years, suddenly became an object of admiration and a model in the twentieth century.

My own poetry resembles metaphysical mode in many ways. I have written on the things like spam and corrupt floppy and cyber porn and even `alu vadi' ( paatra in Gujarati) an Indian recipe. These guys used all the learning and scholarship to do violence to the language of poetry and even then their expression of love, devotion, death remains remarkably precise. What is remarkable is that their imagery sounds far fetched and their poetic logic seem to carry things too far, even after extreme avant garde movements like Surrrealism and Dadaism. I think thats what makes them so very interesting.

The Metaphysical mode is the avant-garde of the seventeenth century because it aims to include and absorb everything thats considered `unpoetic' into the language of poetry and inflict great violence on it to express its meaning. Perhaps this is the reason why Sachin is so terribly interested in them even today at the turn of the twentifirst century and understand why Eliot was so excited about them almost a hundred years back.