IX
POETRY

Poetry, we saw earlier, was the language of power. It is more essentially the power of the emotions. Emotions are powerful and once provoked they can dictate the way. From time immemorial, we see that good poets have cleverly used the vehicle of poetry to usher in the reader the emotion they wish. Nevertheless, this is no easy task. The poem has to be written in such a way that the reader can be roused. Each language has its own form of poetry and they vary a great deal. “Where the originating experience is predominantly emotional, .........it is largely a matter of accident........ whether prose or poetry is used for the expression; except that where the emotion is peculiarly intense and peculiarly personal the impulse to poetic expression is predominant...... For, where the emotion is intensely personal, poetry is the form which gives the maximum of control.”¹ In poetry, Walter Pater feels the “Composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.”² Hence, we note that the poet becomes “personal.”

To write good verses in one’s own tongue is a creditable accomplishment and to write verses in a totally alien language is a remarkable achievement. And this is what some European scholars and Missionaries did. Robert-de-Nobili, Beschi, Ziegenbalg, Ellis, Rhenius and Caldwell were those who left their stamp on Tamil verse.

Robert-de-Nobili, Rev. Rajamanickam says, wrote three poetical works... “On The Suffering Of Our Lord”, “Apology of The True Religion” and “Eternal Life”, besides a number of hymns which were lost. Charles E. Gover says “Rober-de-Nobili

1. Middleton Murry; The Problem of Style; 1952, P. 53

2. Walter Pater: Appreciations with An Essay on style; 1913, Pp. 7, 8