WORDS-one path to peace and understanding Historic and Literary aspects By SANTOSH KUMAR

Creative artists create bridges of understanding, love and peace. Two World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam, Gulf war, Iraq war, War between India and Pakistan-all these wars show that Earth needs peace literature to make our planet a better place to live in. It is significant that the best powers of the poets should reveal ‘the high moment’ and rapture in the world of world peace . Thus the poets will succeed in describing the mysterious responses of heart and mind to the dark clouds of nuclear war. The great authors can very aptly delineate a complex reaction to a changed world after terrorist attack on Sept 11, 2001. This may be done by the use of myths and symbols. According to T.S. Eliot, the use of ‘myth’ can help the writer in creating the complexity of reaction. “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporary and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history…It is a step towards making the modern world possible for art” (T. S. Eliot).

The present chaos, a true possibility of nuclear war threatening the very existence of our planet and terrorist attacks may lead the authors to mysticism, an immediate awareness and acute consciousness of the Divine Presence. This results in an intellectual intuition and ‘dialectic of the feelings’. This attitude is quite different from the postmodern destruction of meaning. “Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning” (Ashley). It is difficult to agree with Ashley’s above observation. We need poetry to bring peace and understanding, because the poets are “unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and they can express their communion with the highest. The postmodernists seem to reject the philosophical themes and subjects. “Theory conceals, distorts, and obfuscates, it is alienated, dissonant, it means to exclude, order, and control rival powers” (Rosenau). But it is not easy to discard every system of thought. W. B. Yeats pointed out the significance of mysticism: “The mystical life is the center of all that I do, and all that I think, and all that I write.”

Further, it is necessary to remember that the First World War (1914-1918) was fought on a scale unprecedented in any previous century. It was rightly pointed out: ‘The national Debt of Great Britain was in 1914 before the war £708 millions – it was £7435 millions in 1915.” R. C. Macfie in his review of The Biology of War remarked thus: “Each chapter points the same moral and derives home the same lesson, that war is a blunder and crime” The British army attacked the Somme and lost sixty thousand men on the first day.

True, the Trench poets did not make use of the idealistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzche and Bergson. Unlike the modernists, the Soldier poets wrote in steady meter and rhyme as well as in obscure suggestiveness. One may say that the quest of Modernism and postmodernism is entirely negative in attitude, revealing as it does the possibility of getting nowhere, On the other hand, the Soldier poets tried to tell the truth about the modern war in order to warn England and the world of its horrors. Both Sassoon and Owen concentrated exclusively on their immediate experiences in the trenches and exposed the traditionally ideal and poetic view of war by depicting the realities of death, mutilation and madness. They depicted the genuine unadulterated truth about it. For example, we may take the following lines from Owen:

I, too, saw God through mud,-

The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.

War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,

And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

(Apologia Pro Poemate Meo)

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

(Insensibility)

The anti war poems by a gigantic genius like Owen will surely inspire us to create a world of peace and love. Therein lies his strength of down-to-earth artistic thinking and this makes him different from the traditional war poets like Henry Newbolt, Kipling and Rupert Brooke. It will benefit the whole world if the publishers today publish peace poetry and antinuclear literature.

It is rather strange that W. B. Yeats excluded the greatest antiwar English poet Wilfred Owen from his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. It is difficult to agree with Yeats’ comments about Owen: “a bad poet though a good letter writer”, “He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick…There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him.” The international publishers and editors should encourage antiwar, antiterrorist and antinuclear poetry war. Owen writes about his mission: “My subject is war, and the pity of war. The Poetry lies in the pity.” No doubt, Yeats’ exclusion of Owen from his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse is “a monument to the idiosyncratic nature of his judgement.”

The postmodern critics in their endeavor to rearrange ‘the Furniture of the Universe’ emphasize the value of Web-oriented, and multiple levels of reasoning. Richard Harvey Brown’s “Postmodern Representations” (1995), Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Explained” (1992), and Christopher Norris’ “What is wrong with Postmodernism” (1990) point out the great importance of ‘demystifying the text’. This means creating a text ‘with which the reader can never be finished’. Instead of surrealist and postmodern nightmares, the authors today should describe the brutal reality of terrorism and nuclear war. It will be good if the creative artists no longer linger in abstract castles and Kafka’s ‘no man’s land’. Literature should become a manual for transformation of the world according to the eternal principles of nonviolence as emphasized by the Bible and Buddhism. The author’s power of creation and workmanship can do miracles. Dryden (1631-1700) wisely compared the poet with ‘gunsmith, or watchmaker’: “In general, the employment of a poet is that of a curious gunsmith, or watchmaker; the iron or silver is not his own, but they are the least part of that which gives the value; the price lies wholly in the workmanship.”

The purpose of all great poets is to “Arouse the sensual from their sleep \ Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain \ To noble raptures” (William Wordsworth). Few will doubt the significance of the Cyberwit publications in this direction. W. H. Auden took a limited view of poetry when he wrote “Poetry

makes nothing happen.” The attitudes and techniques of the authors published by Cyberwit adequately depict their belief in the primary, simple and benevolent impulses. Some of these artists are Adam D. Powell , Albert Russo, AZsacra ZARATHUSTRA, Ban'ya Natsuishi, Barbara E. Mercer, Bhuwan Thapaliya, Diane Oatley, Eric Tessier, Fabio Croce, Geert Verbeke, Jan Oskar Hansen, Janet K. Brennan, Louie Levy, Maria Cristina Azcona, Prof. Moshé Liba, Oliver Rice, Roger W. Harrington, Sayumi Kamakura, Dr. T. Wignesan, Victoria Valentine. All these authors deal with the vastly multiplied moral confusions of the postmodern society. Their works not only contain brief lyrics, but also long philosophic poems, not distorted by sentimental emotions or limited by subjective bias. The poets reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to reconcile their emotions to the demands of the contemporary world for sanity and peace. The question ‘how to live’ has been answered by several poets. Great poets always express an inward world of a person’s moral and spiritual nature. Matthew Arnold aptly comments: “A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life. In poetry, however, the criticism of life has to be made conformable to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness substance and matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty; and it is by knowing and feeling the work of those poets that we learn to recognize the fulfillment of such conditions.”

The above quotation of Matthew Arnold makes it evidently clear that the present-day globalization processes by producing ‘a systematic skepticism’ will only harm the cause of serious and sublime Poetry with a message of world peace and understanding. The ‘nostalgia for the impossible’ afflicting most of the authors today poses a serious danger to sublime substance and content of a poem.