Prof Howard McCord : Poetry of Chaos and Death

Prof Howard McCord Poetry of Chaos and Death Every attitude has its poetry, and a small, neat nation may, in one age, present a singularly unified attitude and its poetry to the world, as did England in the last sixteenth century. But such a tidy clarity is impossible for India. No country in the world offer greater extremes or variety in the total experiences which shape poets. Every social ordering from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, may be found; every major religion and most of the minor ones are practiced: the world views and value structures of India are nearly endless and expressed in 723 languages. The only area in the world that offers even remotely an equivalent complexity and confusion is the whole of Africa. Two things give the country what unity it has: the first is false generalization---that there is an Indian temperament, discernable both in the North and the South, composed of egoism, agility of mind, quickness to violence, a penchant for vapo...