I located my old high school poetry text book… an Oxford University Press publication entitled "Panorama - A selection of poems".
It was a good selection, with the best representatives of all types of poetry. But back then, I was required to study these poems, and at an age when the aesthetics of poetry was totally lost upon me. Science was all important then, and anything which could not be measured was just not interesting.
Leafing through the poetry textbook now was a revelation. Those very same poems, discarded in the flightiness of youth as mere collections of rhyming words, reveal worlds of meaning in every syllable. It is like being blind, and suddenly seeing colour.
My first step was to put in all the poems into this blog. They can be accessed by clicking the link "Panorama" in the menu.
Not all poems from the text are on the site, just the ones I could find on the internet. It does seem that Indian poets, even those who wrote in the English language, are very poorly represented on the internet. Especially these poets:
- Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
- Patrick Fernando
- Toru Dutt
- AK Ramanujan
- Shoshee Chunder Dutt
- Hur Chunder Dutt
- Michael Madhusudan Dutt
- Ashok Mahajan
- Kamala Das
On the other hand, it was fairly easy to find the works of Nissim Ezekiel and Rabindranath Tagore. I plan to transcribe the works of the Dutt family. They all wrote over a century ago, and any copyright on their works should have expired now.
I plan to read, and re-read these poems and document my interpretation of these verses. Of course, since my site is open, just about anybody is welcome to put in their thoughts too.