BEGG - 174

Creative Writing
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Humanities

Block

2
MODES OF CREATIVE WRITING
Block Introduction 57
UNIT 1
Feature Writing 59
UNIT 2
Short Story Writing 69
UNIT 3
Writing Poetry 81
UNIT 4
Imagery and Symbols 95
EXPERTS COMMITTEE
EXPERTS School of Humanities IGNOU
Dr. Anand Prakash, (Retd.) Prof. Malati Mathur
Hans Raj College Director (SOH)
University of Delhi
English Faculty, IGNOU
Dr. Hema Raghavan (Retd.) Prof. Neera Singh
Gargi College Prof. Nandini Sahu
University of Delhi Prof. Parmod Kumar
Dr. Pema Eden Samdup
Prof. Ramesh Menon Ms. Mridula Rashmi Kindo
Adjunct Professor, Symbiosis Dr. Malathy A
Institute of Management and Communication
Pune

Prof. Ameena Kazi Ansari

Department of English
Jamia Millia Islamia
New Delhi-110025

COURSE COORDINATION AND EDITING

Prof. Neera Singh
Faculty of English
IGNOU

COURSE PREPARATION
Acknowledgement
This Block has been adapted from existing IGNOU course materials.

SECRETARIAL ASSISTANCE
Ms. Monika Syal, AE (DP), SOH, IGNOU

PRINT PRODUCTION
Mr. Tilak Raj,
Assistant Registrar,
MPDD, IGNOU, New Delhi

September, 2021
© Indira Gandhi National Open University, 2021
ISBN :
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means, without permission in writing from the Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Further information on the Indira Gandhi National Open University courses may be obtained from the
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BLOCK INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Block 2 entitled Modes of Creative Writing. We have 4 Units in
this Block and they are:
Unit 1: Feature Writing. In this we have taken up writing about women and
travel writing.
Unit 2: Short Story Writing. Here we’ve spoken about how to write interesting
short stories. In order to do this the basic elements of a short story have been
taken up in detail i.e. atmosphere and character. We’ve also spoken about certain
innovations in style that are prevalent in short stories.
Unit 3: Writing Poetry. In this Unit we have discussed the various themes on
which you can write poems and how to structure a poem.
Unit 4: Imagery and Symbols. As the name implies we have talked about the
use of imagery and symbols and also language and diction in writing poetry.
The Check Your Progress exercises given in the Unit will help you to assess
yourself and so you must attempt them for a better understanding of the material.
Modes of Creative Writing

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 Feature Writing
UNIT 1 FEATURE WRITING
Structure

1.0 Aims and Objectives

1.1 Introduction
1.2 Writing about Women
1.2.1 How to Change Existing Attitudes
1.2.2 Some Suggestions for Writing about Women
1.2.3 Familiarity with Allied Subject Matter
1.3 Travel Writing
1.3.1 Prerequisites for a Travel Writer
1.3.2 Kinds of Travel Writing
1.3.3 Techniques of Travel Writing
1.4 Summing up
1.5 Answers to Check Your Progress

1.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Our aim through this Unit is to introduce you to certain significant aspects of
feature writing which are most common to magazines and week-end supplements
of newspapers. We have identified two such areas ⎯ writing about women, and
travel-writing. By the end of this Unit you will be able to:

• write features about women without your language showing any gender bias
and

• write many kinds of travel articles which are interesting and informative.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
A lot of writing is slanted in favour of masculine thinking. This Unit will attempt
to advocate a balanced view while writing about women, as it is important to
visualize women’s problems from many points of view in order to counteract
traditional biases. Indifferent and irresponsible attitudes to women need to be
discarded and features on women should be written with humility and imagination.
The extensive popularity of travel and tourism these days has led to an increase
in demand for travel features in daily papers and magazines. As a travel writer
one must develop some skills and qualities which will form a part of this Unit.

1.2 WRITING ABOUT WOMEN

Some years ago a national daily newspaper began a unique experiment in
journalism by ‘adopting’ a village and carrying regular reports on the development
work that was going on there. These reports, however, said little or nothing about
women, although they did mention men, sheep, cattle, chickens, hens, pigs etc. 59
Modes of Creative Writing A woman journalist became curious about this and decided to visit the village to
see if there actually were any women there.
Not surprisingly, she found women at work all over; fetching water, carrying
fuel and fodder, working in the fields. She wondered how the male journalists,
who wrote those reports, had missed these women. When she questioned them
on this and asked why women were so conspicuous by their absence from the
report, some of the men pointed out that they could not write about them because
they were not able to talk to them. How then, asked the woman journalist, had
they found it possible to write about the cows and pigs⎯were they able to talk to
them? To this, of course, the men had no answer. So here, although there were
plenty of women around and they were quite clearly making an equal, if not
greater, contribution to the village, they had remained invisible somehow.
Would the above statement have been any different if the writers had been women?
It is difficult to say, for women too might have the same view of reality, or approach
the situation with the same prejudices as do the male journalists. What the example
just given demonstrates is, that writing about women, or about any subject, is
not an easy job. It can be very tricky, particularly when the subject you are
writing about has been neglected for a long time, and furthermore, when its very
presence calls up in you certain preconceived notions. What is it that springs to
mind when you think of writing for and about women? In nine cases out of ten,
people will think that the only suitable subjects for such writing are fashion,
clothes, beauty-care, cookery and babies.
Why don’t we see women as contributing to every aspect of life? After all, they
play a role in such activities as farming, health care, politics, etc. Thus, the question
to ask yourself is: while writing about women, should one continue the tradition
of thinking about them as mere playthings, sex-objects, unintelligent human
beings with a limited range of interests? Or should one begin to look at them
differently as being central to our life today⎯as central as men or children?
The first thing to bring to bear on such writing then, is not to let oneself be
influenced by existing prejudices and preconceived notions, but to come to it
with a new vision and a positive approach.

1.2.1 How to Change Existing Attitudes

The question then arises: how are you going to be able to look at women in a
positive and constructive way? How does one bring about change in the way
one treats a subject? And how does one begin to consider treating a subject afresh?
I always feel that, in order to write sensitively, one has to cherish people as
people, not treat them as mere subjects. Also, one has to be open and willing to
look at a problem in all its complexity. This kind of sensitivity can only come if
you live by the values you are trying to project in your writing. For example,
you cannot be a sensitive writer on women if, in your own life, you treat them
with disrespect, and treat them as non-entities.
An article speaks of the rape of a minor girl by two policemen in rather frivolous
terms: ‘The Mathura case was, as rapes go, somewhat pedestrian’, and goes on
to describe it as an ‘ambiguous investigation of an alleged assault by two pyjama-
clad policemen, of a somewhat precocious and sexually-forward girl’.
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Note how the fact of the policemen wearing pyjamas is casually brought in to Feature Writing
trivialize the rape, and the girl’s alleged forwardness is put forth as an excuse for
laying her open to such assault. When people begin to write they tend to forget
that they are taking up quite a heavy responsibility, that they are more or less
casting themselves in the role of truth givers. Rape is no subject for fun.
Often when you question people about where they got certain facts or opinions
from, they say, ‘but I read it in the papers’, or ‘I saw it on television’. Thus,
whatever appears in the media is seen as (a) objective and (b) fact. Clearly, the
media exercises tremendous authority. It is seen as reflecting the truth and existing
values. But what we tend to forget is that, because of its seeming authority, the
media plays an equal role in shaping public opinion. So, if newspaper articles,
for example, portray women as mere objects and not as human beings, people
begin to believe that this is actually so. And if you are taking upon yourself the
role of a writer, you are equally taking upon yourself the responsibility to write
truthfully, honestly, objectively and critically⎯with a sense of judgment. The
kind of cleverness and smartness we have seen in the example given above is too
easy to fall into, but few people are fooled into thinking that such writing is good.

1.2.2 Some Suggestions for Writing about Women

Research is an important requirement of writing about women; it is necessary to
make sure of your facts and your points before you put them down on paper,
because once they are in print, they tend to become gospel truths.
Language is particularly important in any feature writing on women. Apart from
the fact that the language you use should be simple, you should consciously
avoid the gender bias inherent in your use of language. Just as in our earlier
example, we saw how women had been left out of the article on village
development by their absence, so also, language often shuts out women from
even the most ordinary discussion, as though they do not exist at all. Here, the
fault lies equally in the language as in our use of it. Why is it, for example, that
we always speak of ‘man’ and ‘men’ when we mean both men and women? If a
newspaper is advertising a particular event, it can do so in two quite different
ways; it will tell you that there is ‘an exhibition of paintings by women painters’.
This would seem to imply that painters are men and women-painters are mere
curiosities. Similarly, people use the masculine noun and pronoun ‘man’ or ‘he’
to represent both men and women. But this can often cause problems as may
be seen from the example below:
This book can be read by people who wonder about strange facts; why men
speak and why animals don’t, why man feels so sad in the 20th century….
If we were to take this passage at its face-value we would conclude that men
speak, but women obviously don’t, since the writer hasn’t mentioned them. The
lapse is even more noticeable because, just before saying this, the writer has
referred to women and men as people. It would have cost him nothing to continue
in the same vein and to have written “why people speak and why animals don’t.

1.2.3 Familiarity with Allied Subject Matter

After the careful selection of a topic, what is needed is a fair method of its
investigation, a readable style, and a wide acquaintance with related areas of
knowledge. This alone can guarantee the excellence of an article. 61
Modes of Creative Writing Familiarity with allied subjects, besides ensuring the objectivity of a feature
article, makes it possible for the writer to view women’s problems with
understanding and sympathy. Thereby, the writer becomes ‘engaged’ in the
activity of social progress, and tries to improve the lot of women by evocative
writing.

When you choose a particular area for your witting, you are in fact selecting an
area to specialize in. While specialization is good, it is always better to have an
idea of the entire field because unless you can place your knowledge in a wider
context, and relate it to what is going on around you, your writing will gradually
become more and more insular, and you will have very few readers left.

When you write about women, there are various aspects of the subject that you
should bear in mind. These may be identified as: Women and health, Women
and politics, Women and media, Women and work, Women and the family, Women
as farmers, Women and the environment, and so on. This list can, indeed, be
endless,

Besides, women play a crucial role in every aspect of human life. People tend to
say, for example, that dowry is a women’s issue. But let’s look at the issue more
closely. What is the significance of dowry? It has to do with religion and custom.
In Hindu families, it used to be customary to give dowry, and many Hindus also
claim there is a religious sanction for this custom. Can we say, then, that religion
is a women’s issue only? Dowry also has to do with economics; it is said (we are
not discussing here the truth or otherwise of this claim, we are merely using it as
a hypothesis) that dowry is given to women because until recently, they did not
have the right to inherit property. So they had to be given some kind of
compensation.

Here we are entering the field of law and more; we are getting into economics,
into social anthropology, sometimes even into agriculture. Let me elaborate.
We need to have an understanding of law in order to see if it is true that Hindu
women were not allowed a share in family property. Many people say that this
was the case especially in rural families. If we find it is indeed true, we then
need to know why. There was the possibility of the property being split into
several segments, depending upon the number of claimants. If these claimants
further shared it between their children, the property would be split again, and
so on. If this property was farming land, you would end up with tiny fragmented
bits of land and this meant that no one would get much benefit out of it. So, the
answer was to keep the women from demanding their share in the land, by giving
them something else instead.

So what we are really saying is that, for the specialist, it becomes very important
to keep up with developments not only in his particular subject area, but also in
allied areas.

Women’s groups are working on problem areas as wide-ranging as, violence in

the family, rape, women’s health and child rearing, the dumping of dangerous
contraceptives in the Third World (making women the target of such contraception
and, therefore, exposing them to other health hazards), equal wages, the question
of political participation, safety for women on the streets, women’s work on
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farms, and so on. An alert writer must keep up with the kinds of developments Feature Writing

that are taking place in all areas, particularly those that are likely to affect women.

Check Your Progress 1

Answers should be brief and to the point.

i) How do you explain patronizing attitudes towards women?

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ii) Of the measures suggested to bring about a basic change in attitudes, which
according to you, is the most important?)

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iii) What are the characteristics of bad and good writing about women?

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(Check your answers with those given at the end of this Unit)

1.3 TRAVEL WRITING

Travelling has always been a basic human urge. Men have travelled for various
motives⎯out of curiosity, for adventure, on errands, political and personal, on
diplomatic missions, on pilgrimages, for trade and business, in search of food or
jobs, and so on. Some travelers, with alert and methodical minds, recorded in
writing their observations and experiences and facts of history, as they appeared
to them. The world’s ancient and medieval travel literature is indeed very rich.
In India we are familiar with the travel books of the Chinese pilgrims, Fa Hien
and Huien Sang, and also with those of the medieval French travellers, Tavernier
and Bernier. These books are important documents of our religious, political,
social and cultural history. You would also recall other famous names like those
of the Italian Marco Polo, and the Arabians Ibn-Batuta and Alberuni. In modern
times interesting travelogues have been written by such literary celebrities as
Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul and Ved Mehta.
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Modes of Creative Writing The early travel books served several purposes; they provided us with reasonably
accurate records of particular peoples, places, customs, ceremonies, etc. Often
these books provided the only records we have of the lives ordinary people lived
at particular times in history. They gave us insights into different cultures. They
showed how the same things could often be perceived differently by different
people. They showed, too, how travelling and travel writing, as its corollary, is
a complex exchange between the traveller, the place and its people. Perceptions
differed, depending on whether the travel writer kept an open mind or was guided
by pre-conceived notions and ideas.
The tradition of travel writing is still strong today. It is, however, somewhat
different in character, as the modes of travel, and the motivations, have altered
considerably. For one thing, travel books are no longer the only source we have
to tell us about a place. For another, travel has become so inextricably linked
with tourism, that the nature of travel writing has changed considerably. Since
tourism implies the whole business of package tours, travel agents, airlines, hotels
and so on, the pattern and emphasis of travel writing has to undergo significant
changes.

1.3.1 Prerequisites for a Travel Writer

A good travel article should, first of all, be readable and lively. It should be able
to excite the interest and curiosity of the reader. No one would care for a dull
record of facts. The writer, therefore, should choose a style that arouses and
sustains the reader’s interest. It is obvious that this cannot be done without
introducing an element of personal experience, which alone can make any writing
authentic and credible. But you should guard against being too subjective. You
have to be a genuine creative writer to make your personal experiences carry a
universal appeal. Nevertheless, a personal anecdote here and there, can add
considerably to the interest of a piece of writing. Additionally, it can offer the
reader the feel of a place, and can recreate a period or moment in history.
One of the first prerequisites of a travel writer is that he/she should have a
completely open mind. This does not mean, however, that you deliberately,
keep your mind blank. It only implies that you should go to a place with an open
but informed mind ⎯informed yet free of prejudice. Mostly, travel writers choose
to go to a particular place, because they have read or heard something about it. It
is only rarely that someone gets hold of a map, selects a spot at random, and
visits it. So, if you wish to be prepared, talk to people who have been there
already.
Reading about a place, its history, its geography, its politics, culture and people
is as important as talking to people who have visited it. Such reading will save
you from an embarrassment in which you arrive at a place without knowing
where to go and what to look for. It will help you not only to form an overall
idea of the natural and historical landscape of a place but also to locate spots of
interest, e.g. medieval bazaar in a historical city, chief monuments and their
architectural styles, the racial types to be found among its population and so on.
Reading will, thus, help you counter the bias of subjective reporting. The only
danger you should guard against is this: you should not allow your reading to
make your mind too stuffed with pre-conceived ideas, because then your
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experience of a place will be coloured and conditioned by what you have read Feature Writing
about it.

1.3.2 Kinds of Travel Writing

Before you even begin to locate an appropriate subject, it is imperative that you
know very clearly who your readers are, and what sort of publication you are
writing for. These two factors are important. They determine the types of travel
literature that is in demand today. You may note the following types of travel
writing:

Promotional literature: Brochures, booklets, pamphlets and other materials

which are put out by state and national tourism promotion establishments, with a
view to inducing people to visit a particular area.

Informative articles for the tourist: Articles which inform would-be travellers
about interesting places and are meant for publication in a general travel magazine,
a Sunday newspaper supplement, or the travel section of any magazine.

Articles aimed at the business traveller: These are factual articles aimed at
conveying travel information to this important and growing segment of the
travelling public.

Travel trade reporting: This is meant to carry news for members of the travel
trade; these comprise travel agents, tour operators, people from the government
tourist offices, airlines, and hotels, etc.

Promotional literature

The Department of Tourism and the State Tourism Development Corporations

publish a variety of brochures and booklets with a view to promoting travel
within India. Such publications are clearly designed as forms of advertisement
or sales aids. Your reader, in this case, is the potential tourist. Your objective is to
persuade your reader to visit a particular place by extolling its points of interest,
the enjoyable activities it promises, and the opportunities for shopping and
recreation that the place offers.

Since such a brochure has to appeal to as wide a range of interest groups as

possible, it is necessary to research your subject well, and give accurate
information on relevant aspects of the place.

To write the text of a brochure, you need to combine advertising and copywriting
skills with an accurate recording of facts. You are, in fact, selling a destination,
just as an advertisement sells a product, so your text should, necessarily, reflect
this.

Informative articles for the tourist

These might be published in the Sunday supplement of a daily newspaper, in a

Sunday newspaper or magazine, in general interest magazines that have a travel
column, or in a travel magazine aimed at the general reader.

Here again, your target is the potential traveller, but your object is not to convince
him to go to a particular place. You are, in fact, in the position of an adviser, so
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Modes of Creative Writing your aim should be to provide as honest and comprehensive an account of a
place as possible. Based on the contents of your article, a family might decide to
spend its hard-earned money on travelling to a particular destination. You have,
therefore, a serious responsibility to discharge, and you must do it in the best
way you can. Your integrity, your impartiality, and your eye for detail are what
matter most in an article of this sort.
Articles aimed at the business traveller
The business traveller is a very important member of the travelling public and he
or she requires information to fulfill clearly defined needs. In general, the business
traveller has neither the time nor the inclination to visit monuments or centres of
culture. What he or she wants to know is what sort of facilities are available in
centres of commerce and industry across the country. He would like to read
articles that give him up- to- date information on hotel accommodation, special
packages and offers, restaurants and cuisine, airlines, travel and ticket details,
and other facilities that can help endure the strain of frequent travelling.
Here, the job of the travel-writer is to be in frequent touch with the organizers of
these services and facilities and to report on them as accurately as possible. The
public relations departments of airlines and hotels are always glad to provide
assistance and information to a travel writer.
Articles for the armchair traveller
There is a section of the reading public which is intensely interested in exotic or
unusual places, but prefers to avoid the dislocations and discomforts that such
travelling often entails. This is the readership for which you should write first-
person, anecdotal accounts of particular journeys.
Accounts for the armchair-traveller are usually in the first person, and deal with
the writer’s experience of people he or she met along the way, unusual forms of
transport used, exotic places, interesting experiences, etc. The object is to re-
create, as vividly as possible, unusual travel experiences. However, a mere recital
of your travels to an exotic destination can be crushingly dull. Therefore, writing
a travelogue requires a careful selection from a mass of experiences and a style
of writing that is both lively and distinctively your own.

1.3.3 Techniques of Travel Writing

Once you have decided what kind of travel story you are going to write, and who
your readers are likely to be (casual Sunday newspaper readers, travel
professionals, armchair travellers, would-be travellers, magazine readers, foreign
visitors to this country, business travellers and so on), you have to get down to
the actual work of collecting information, visiting the place you have in mind,
and settling down to write.
Some writers begin by looking at a map, because it can often act as a stimulus to
speculation and can lead one to the kind of information that should be gathered.
The proximity of a place to the mountains or the sea, its location and standing in
relation to the neighbouring countries, both geographically and politically, its
rivers and waterways, its railway connections and roads, all determine the kinds
of experience you are likely to encounter in that particular place.
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You may set out on your travels armed with a certain amount of information and Feature Writing

some anticipation of what you are going to see. But one of the delights (and
dilemmas) of travelling in India is the fact that things seldom turn out the way
you expect them to. The result is that you frequently have to revise your pre-
conceived notions in order to adjust to a reality that may be quite different from
what you had expected it to be. Thus a very important quality for the travel
writer is simply this: be prepared for anything, and always have an open mind
that adjusts to things.

Once you have reached your destination you will have to rely on your powers of
observation and your sensitivity to the place, and its people in order to gather all
the first hand details that makes an article come alive.

Students, a local shop-keeper or scooter-or-taxi driver, a local guide, are important

from the point of view of getting the feel and flavor of the place. In addition to
this, some magazines expect their writers to interview people on the travel trade,
or to interview crafts people, or other travellers, in order to collect the material
with which you will work.

You must be very clear in your mind at this point whom you are writing for. If
you’re aiming your article at the reader of a Sunday newspaper, perhaps a potential
tourist, then you should try to present as much accurate information as you can,
backing this up with your personal experience, and the authentic, verified, details
that only you can provide because you’ve been there. A mere series of facts
would sound rather dull.

So, as a travel writer, you’ll have to use a blend of fact and creativity to make a
place come alive to your readers. A good rule to follow is to always use very
simple, straight and preferably short sentences and adjectives that fit. Try to
avoid hyperbole as far as possible.

Furthermore, travel writing for magazines, is not restricted to what are called
‘destination pieces’. You could do an article on something as specific as the
food of a place, bringing in local customs and history related to the ingredients,
preparation and serving of particular kinds of food. Again, you might write on
the crafts of a region or even on one particular craft that is special to that place or
culture. If you have an interest in wild life or a specific period of history, or
gardens, you might be able to vivify a place by writing on this particular aspect
of it.

Check Your Progress 2

i) What skills and qualities does the present day travel writer need?
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ii) What do early travel books offer us?
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Modes of Creative Writing iii) What factors have changed the character of travel writing today?
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(Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit)

1.4 SUMMING UP
We discussed the following points in this Unit.
• Writers who wish to write about women have a challenging assignment as
they must ensure that their work does not reflect any gender bias.
• They must be sensitive to the aspirations and options of both rural and urban
women in the context of changing social values.
• There are many types of travel writing and each type requires a particular set
of skills for writing.
• A travel writer needs to be honest, precise observant and open-minded.

1.5 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
i) The patronizing attitude is built upon the assumption that women are an
inferior and weaker sex.
ii) The most important corrective is for men to shed their superiority, and regard
women respectfully, as equal partners.
iii) Bad writing is biased, negative and ill-humoured. Good writing is open-
minded, sympathetic, constructive and free from gender bias.
Check Your Progress 2
i) The present day travel writer needs the skills of a journalist, reporter,
researcher, and creative writer. He should have a lively imagination, keen
observation and an open mind. Besides being well informed he should have
the capacity to appreciate both the past and the present.
ii) a) Early travel books offer us reasonably accurate records of people, their
custom, habits, ways of living, etc.
b) insight, into alien cultures,
c) knowledge of different attitudes and viewpoints of different people at
certain periods of history.
iii) a) travel is today often linked with tourism;
b) people travel for short periods and have varied interests;
c) information has become more important than impressions;
d) travel writing today is published in magazines and newspapers, hence
68 articles are of medium length.
 Feature Writing
UNIT 2 SHORT STORY WRITING
Structure

2.0 Aims and Objectives

2.1 Introduction
2.2 How to Make a Short Story Interesting
2.2.1 Need for Design
2.2.2 Manner of Telling
2.2.3 Message and Comment
2.3 Atmosphere
2.3.1 Setting it in Time
2.3.2 Setting the Locale
2.4 Character
2.4.1 Choosing Characters
2.4.2 Developing Characters
2.5 Experimental Stories
2.5.1 Anti Hero
2.5.2 Anti-Plot
2.5.3 Open-Ended Narrative
2.5.4 Innovations in Style
2.6 Summing Up
2.7 Answers to Check Your Progress

2.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This Unit deals with such basic elements of a short story as plot and structure,
atmosphere, character, and narration. While none of these is indispensable, a
judicious combination of all these will make your story interesting, authentic
and readable. We also introduce you to a new kind of contemporary short story—
the experimental story. In this story we encounter the emergence of the anti-
hero and the anti-plot. Open-ended narratives and other innovations in style
characterize such stories.
By the end of this unit you will have a good idea of what elements form a good
story and you will be in a position to write short stories of your own.

2.1 INTRODUCTION
The creative artist seeks to capture the inchoate world in a certain form, so that it
could make some sense. Thus, there has to be a formal structure to the short
story you wish to write⎯an arrangement of characters interacting with incidents/
situations ⎯ for greater effectiveness. However, your skill lies in making it
appear that it is no conscious arrangement, no contrivance, no ‘plot’ to deceive
the reader, and that it could well have happened that way.
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Modes of Creative Writing It is not possible to devise a plot which would interest everybody. There are
some readers who hate to think, while there are others who want their stories to
be no more than escape sessions, in between the serious business of their daily
life. There is also a small minority who would go to the other extreme and insist
on their money’s worth of nutrition, such as philosophy, morality, knowledge
and what-have-you, with each story. So the best you can do is to attempt enticing
an adult of more-than-average intelligence who has a zest for life as well as for
learning. This implies that you are a serious writer, but not a philosopher or
saint. All you can do is to try to make your stories acquire the status of serious
literature, and yet hope that they will sell. Discussed below are some factors that
give form to your story and make it interesting, plausible and meaningful.

2.2 HOW TO MAKE A SHORT STORY

INTERESTING
You must have lived through a storm sometime or other in your life, but if your
story is based on it, you could embellish it with a fury of such dimensions that it
will savour of a new and exciting experience. Perhaps you have seen a fight
between two stray bulls in a small town you happen to be passing through. In
your story you could weave this fight into a pattern⎯show how it threw the life
of the townsmen around the street corner into total disarray. Again, you must
have seen death. You may have been overwhelmed with grief, or merely forgotten
all about it after a while depending upon whether the deceased was a close friend,
a relative or a stranger. But couldn’t you ask of a certain dying man in your story
to suffer a spell of introspection as well, and comment inwardly on the falsity of
the living world around him as Tolstoy did in his Death of Ivan Ilych? And
when you bring a pair of lovers into the range of his thoughts, wouldn’t you help
your reader to gain new insights into the thing that passes for love?

2.2.1 Need for Design

Your story must have a beginning and an end. In other words, a promise and a
satisfying conclusion, like your grandmother used to tell you when you were a
child. The best kind of structure is that which would make the reader look forward
to a ‘finding’ at the end of his labours ⎯ the glimpse of a god, a demon, a patch
of the blue sky or whatever.
Hence the need to design an ascending structure, the process as well as the peak,
before you set out to write a story. Otherwise, your story may turn out to be flat,
round or labyrinthine, etc. What is important at the designing stage is that you
should be clear about the direction. For instance, in a love-story, are you going
to introduce the conventional triangle, followed by misunderstanding and end it
up with an easy sentimental reconciliation? Or would you like to carry the couple
through the complexities of love-and-hate cycle without the aid of a third party,
and make them finally arrive at some understanding? Or would you rather that
they move through more and more loving to the grand finale of a deception?
Your options are numerous, depending on your world-view, or may be your mood
at that point of time. But let the direction be clear right at the beginning, so that
both characters and incidents would know which way to go and thus produce the
results you have in mind.
70
You should have formulated, in advance, howsoever vaguely, the climax in your Short Story Writing
story. That is, what exactly would be the nature of interaction between the
character(s) and the closing incident? Or, if there is no incident, what would be
the contours of the situation yielding the final reconciliation? Or the grand
understanding? Or for that matter, the tragic deception?

2.2.2 Manner of Telling

You have now laid down the outlines of the structure. You know the direction in
which your plot will proceed. And you have a fairly good idea of the climax-to-
be. Now you may go ahead with the telling of the story. But how are you going
to ensure that the reader also goes along with you and does not give up in the
middle? Leaving aside the thought-content which we will discuss later, the manner
of telling is of utmost importance. It involves certain considerations of pace,
tone and colour, which are of particular relevance to a short story, as distinct
from a novel.
These considerations are:
Make sure that there is a constant sense of movement in the plot. There is little
scope in a short story for long pauses, reflections, observations on nature,
comments, etc. Such pauses are necessary only as breathers, not as relaxing
interludes which may weaken the tone of urgency in looking forward to ‘what
comes next’.
In this context, you would do well to follow a few guidelines in unravelling the
plot: (a) adopt a direct and conversational tone; (b) avoid verbosity; try to charm
the reader with an elegant turn of phrase rather than an impressive parade of
words; (c) try not to be obscure as it may give the impression that you don’t care
for the reader; (c) enliven your narrative with flashes of humour, share your
jokes with the reader even at the expense of the character(s), as if you and your
readers are a shade wiser than these poor character(s). The general idea is that
the reader should be with you in the plot – as a sort of co-conspirator.
Try to build up a certain suspense in the mind of the reader. We are not talking
here only of mysteries and thrillers, but of modern short stores in general, including
stories of literary merit, which attempt to reveal the truths about the human
condition. The key-word is ‘revelation’, and it does help if, while working out
the plot, you somehow suggest that ‘what comes next’ is not what your reader
would expect in the normal course, but something vastly different. The idea is
that you may occasionally throw a hint to the reader, that things are not what
they seem to be, and that he would better wait and see.

2.2.3 Message and Comment

And finally, you should remember that all meaning is not limited to a certain
notional response in the mind of the reader which you may have pre-
determined⎯amusement, wonder, anger, disgust, or whatever. Surely you can
write stories that way if you want to. But they will be richer if the meaning
carries a message too, an implicit commitment on the facet of the human condition
that you have brought out in your story. In other words, it will be a better story
if you could marry the desired emotional response to a certain intellectual
understanding in the mind of the reader. Modern literature is growing more and 71
Modes of Creative Writing more cerebral, hopefully as a part of the evolutionary process. Your story will,
therefore, fall short of your legitimate aspirations, if the end-result of the plot is
merely a chuckle or a sigh, and does not provoke the reader to pause for thought.
But in order to carry the intellectual message effectively to the modern reader
the message should be implicit in the story. The authorial voice should be
muted, for nothing repels a reader more than the didactic tone, the impression
that you are seeking to place yourself on a platform. Also whatever you have to
say should better be derived from a complexity of ideas yielding some food for
thought, e.g. – could there be jealousy between a mother and her daughter?
Couldn’t one be noble without being absurd? How could two sentinet beings
cause such pain to each other, in spite of the best of intentions? Does the class-
character of a man have to dominate over his individual psyche? Thus you
would be making an intellectual overture to the reader, charming him with its
subtlety, and provoking him to thought.
Check Your Progress 1
i) What are some of the ways in which you can make a short story interesting?
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(Check your answer with that given at the end of the Unit.)

2.3 ATMOSPHERE
Atmosphere is an integral part of fiction. It enables a writer to establish life
likeness and win the reader’s willingness to accept the world created by the
storyteller. Atmosphere is as necessary for fiction as it is for our planet. Life-
forms and characters would not be able to survive without it. Atmosphere is,
therefore, one of the basic elements in a short story. It creates the mood as well
as the psychological and physical effects appropriate to the theme of the story.
By setting a story in an appropriate time and place, you lend it verisimilitude and
authenticity.
Atmosphere binds the story together; sets the time-frame⎯past, present or future;
creates the psychological mood in the reader; and establishes the locale. Thus,
atmosphere helps the writer in creating the texture of his imagined world, with
its characters, locale and environment.

2.3.1 Setting it in Time

Any work of fiction has to be set both in time and place if the story is to sound
authentic. Most fiction nowadays deals with the present, the recent past or the
imaginary future. In all stories, the time setting must immediately be recognizable,
due to reasons of space. Take for example, the following passage:
72
 Switching off the air-conditioner, he leant back and stared at the blank screen. Short Story Writing

Hopelessly, he even turned a few knobs, waiting for a picture, any picture, to
appear. He rotated the antenna and pushed the set at a new angle. Now he
had missed the opening of the Festival of Russia.

Do you need to be told that it is the very recent past that’s being talked about?
Again, read this:

The spaceship had taken off just a minute ago. The bushes were still shaking
and the dust hadn’t settled down. Now he was stuck, for good, on this
unfamiliar red planet since the next space-shuttle would land there long after
his energy tablets were finished.

Clearly, this deals with the future when interplanetary travel will become a reality.

Historical fiction, of course, requires its ‘period setting’, costumery and the use
of language current in that period. The prejudices, modes of thought and beliefs
of the time would also have to be given due consideration.

2.3.2 Setting the Locale

A fictional world always has to be set both in time and place. While a novel has
considerable scope for creating ‘atmosphere’, the short story is, however,
handicapped because of its length. A novelist can build up the locale at leisure
and give his characters lengthy pasts, detailed ancestries and legacies, a description
of their school-days, their first loves and even the emotional crises of their
childhoods. But a short story writer cannot afford to linger on the past for too
long. His brushstrokes have to be economical and yet evocative. All references
have to be to the point and revealing. Even a cursory glance must reveal the
place of action. The reader does not always have the patience to wait until the
last page to be told that ‘Delhi’ or ‘London’ or ‘Singapore’ is where it all happened.

Check Your Progress 2

i) You may be familiar with the following ghost story:

There are two men sitting in a train compartment. After some time the first
man asks the second, “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No”, he replies, and
vanishes.

Now expand this into a short story of 200 words.

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(Check your answer with the hints given at the end of the unit.)
73
Modes of Creative Writing
2.4 CHARACTER
When planning a story at what stage does one start thinking about its characters?
The question resolves into a consideration of what comes first at the conceptual
stage⎯the plot, i.e. the total framework, or the characters, who are but a
component of the plot. This is largely a matter of strategy. In a conventional
short story it would be useful to lay down the structure first, as it is the turn of
events that provides the result, and then summon the characters. But if the result
consists in the surprise provided by the twists or turnabouts of the characters, or
in an essentially intellectual or psychological revelation, it would be better to
choose the characters carefully before setting out the plot. This is because the
mental equipment and conditioning of the characters is relatively more important
than the situations they are required to handle. In choosing your characters you
have to bear in mind that there is hardly any place in a short story, as distinguished
from a novel, where a character is not called upon to make a substantial
contribution to the story.
Thus you should exercise utmost economy in the number of characters you choose
for a story; and you should choose only such characters as you can visualize in
fairly clear dimensions right at the start; or are confident of making whole and
full-bodied during the course of the story.

2.4.1 Choosing Characters

The parameters you will do well to adopt in the choosing of characters are,
however, common to all fiction, novels or short stories and would lead you to
formulate answers to the following questions, among others. Do you know your
characters? You must know the likes of them, so that you may write about them
in realistic detail, and articulate their thoughts. They must be credible to you,
before you can expect your readers to fall for them as ‘real’. William Faulkner
had said that experience, observation and imagination are the three sources you
have to draw upon for your fiction, and the deficiency in one can be made up by
generous supplies from the rest. But this is not to say that you can depend on
your imagination to substitute entirely for experience and observation; a balanced
use of material is always to be preferred for any construction. So you should
recall the men and women within your knowledge, and see if one or more can fit
in with the general idea of the plot and whether they react in a manner which
suits the purpose of your story.
You need not look for exact prototypes, unless, of course, the story itself is
suggested by a vastly interesting character you know in real life. More often
than not, it would be convenient to create a living collage, e.g., the facial
expressions of A combined with the social habits of B and the philosophical
outlook of C, and thus present a character, both familiar and fascinating. And in
so far as central characters are concerned, you should not fight shy of projecting
bits of your own personality too into him/her for the best results; it will seep
through any way if you are not insincere in your story-telling.
For reasons of social motivation, you may sometimes feel compelled to choose
characters from a totally different milieu. Thus a confirmed urbanite may wish
to write about rural people, an affluent businessman, smitten with sympathy or
74 remorse for the slum dwellers, may wish to write about them and so forth.
As regards fantasies, the characters must necessarily be ‘incredible’ in a facile Short Story Writing
sense. But unless they are written entirely for children, the apparent nonsense
must make sense by being in purposeful juxtaposition to the real. Like Goya’s
paintings, you may deliberately distort reality, so as to provoke in the reader a
certain awareness of the realities that he tends to ignore. But such demons and
fairies that you may create must relate intrinsically to recognizable modes of
human thought and behaviour. In this context, you may recall Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, or clever parables designed to hold the interest of children and adults
alike, at different levels, like Alice in Wonderland.

2.4.2 Developing Characters

Obviously a plot denotes movement in time and space, and when the characters
are but actors in the plot they cannot remain static. But the movement appropriate
to a character goes beyond the time-space dimensions. Any character, howsoever
well-conceived, would appear to be wooden and static if he just moved along
with the demands of the plot and reacted predictably. It is essential that he must
grow, and seem to grow. That is, his personality must unfold itself in the process
of his thoughts and action, so that he reveals himself fully, and often surprisingly,
only at the end of the story.
Consistent as he may be on the whole, as a character distinguished from an
average man-in-the-street, you should subject him to the pains of growing up,
and make him go through a measure of inconsistencies, anxieties, contradictions,
et al, revealing new facets of his character each time he deals with a situation.
You should make such unfolding possible even within the smaller canvas of a
conventional short story.
A clever storyteller should maintain an even flow in developing his character in
such a way that the reader’s interest is not only sustained all through, but an
element of suspense is also built into his absorption, so that the revelation at the
end appears to be quite logical and yet eminently satisfying as a surprise.
Check Your Progress 3
i) What factors does one have to keep in mind in choosing charactors for a
short story?
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ii) In the limited space available in a short-story is there room for developing a
character? If so how can it be done?
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75
Modes of Creative Writing ........................................................................................................................
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(Check your answers with the ones given at the end of this Unit).

2.5 EXPERIMENTAL STORIES

Experimental stories are stories where the modes are reversed due to the result
of change in sensibility over a period of time.

2.5.1 Anti-Hero
The anti-hero story is a marked feature of the twentieth century. It is closely
connected with changes in traditional values and life styles. The term ‘hero’
normally brings to mind a person somewhat larger than life (the heroes of Greek
tragedies or the heroes on the screens of our Hindi films). He is usually someone
of a commanding presence, as great in life as in death⎯noble, proud and almost
overwhelming. Such nobility of human beings has become increasingly dubious,
if not outright comic in our age, where wars can be triggered off by someone
pressing a button, and computers are made responsible for planning our lives,
our careers, our industry, and even our marriages.
Human nature is seldom, if at all, uni-dimensional. Stories with what we call an
anti-hero offer greater opportunity to the writer to depict human nature in all its
complexity. R.K. Narayan’s characters in his Malgudi stories belong to this
category. The anti-hero is complex, variable and ambiguous, in contrast to the
traditional hero of romances who is handsome, fundamentally decent and good-
hearted, even when he defies law and order.
The anti-hero story is mainly a twentieth century development and is the product
of a people’s awareness against the forces of oppression and injustice. He is the
despised and the disinherited: a peasant, a farmer, a coolie or an untouchable:
the ‘scum’ of society, one who challenges the concept of ‘noble descent’, of
racial, feudal and class superiority. He struggles to assert his identity as a human
being. He wishes to be treated on par with others. The protagonists of Premchand,
Gorky and Anand are anti-heroes of this kind.
Late twentieth century fiction is significant, because it presents before us a society
that has endured unforeseen technological and material innovations. Ironically,
as this society has become richer, the human soul has become poorer. The hero
as spy, in the works of some of the best writers of murder mysteries today, is not
the traditional hero like the ever-optimistic James Bond who is loyal to the crown
and to the traditional values. In the hands of authors like John Le Carre, he
becomes both a political analyst and a sad and lonely individual in the decadent
field of international espionage. He reveals to us the basic futility of his
supposedly noble trade, and his yearning for the common, daily world of family
affection and traditions, friendship and love, which are almost outdated. The
very title of the novel, A Perfect Spy, is bristling with irony, as is the hero narrator,
76 who unfolds its complex world.
2.5.2 Anti-Plot Short Story Writing

The earliest storytellers were not bothered by considerations of form. They simply
spun a tale⎯ ‘Once upon a time….’, and narrated the story in a straight line, the
chronology and the plot progressing together. In the course of storytelling they
would often put in their own ideas and comments and close the tale with a moral.
Form, or the shape in which a story was presented, became a serious consideration
when stories began to be recorded in print.
In the traditional story, a major element is the plot which, as we all know, refers
to the sequence of related incidents which make up a narrative. Plot is the easiest
element in a story to understand, and beginners often tend to think that the plot is
the story. For a mature writer, however, this is not so. He or she writes a short
story, not to demonstrate how b follows a, and c follows b, but because the whole
story ultimately presents a deep insight into human life or character. The writer
may begin——‘Let’s suppose that a shy, timid, but romantically imaginative
young man is invited to a party, at which he receives an eager kiss in the dark
from an unknown young woman, who has mistaken him for her lover.’ (‘The
Kiss’ by Chekhov). Here the author of the story challenges the conventions of
the traditional story-form by allowing his narrator-writer to make the statement
that the plot of the story he is writing is imaginary. The reader is warned against
implicit belief in the story as a form that relates events as they actually happen.
The traditional plot having a beginning, middle and an end, with a chronological
progression of events was too patterned and artificial to reflect the complex nature
of modern reality. The revolutionary impact of science and technology on life,
breakdown of faith in Providence and the Divine scheme of things, researches in
depth psychology, and man’s continuing struggle against different forms of
oppression, gave rise to several new insights. The traditional plot thus became
an insufficient and imperfect medium to express the many-sided realities of
contemporary life.
A writer of a modern short story is more self-conscious. We now realize that
there are many ways of telling a short story. The writer, for instance, may choose
a method, and even set up his or her own rules. The plot of the story and whether
it is the author, the characters or one special character who spins it, becomes less
important, than how it is spun. The viewpoint presented by the story is here the
single most important factor, and not the moral of the tale: messages are rarely, if
ever, clearly stated.
The ultimate purpose of every short story writer is to communicate an aspect of
the truth of life as seen and experienced by himself, and personal truth rarely has
a beginning, middle or an end.
Thus authors naturally find a creative outlet in stories which challenge the
commonly held concept of a plot as a sequence of happenings, with a beginning,
a middle and an end. Their aim is basically interpretative, and not the recounting
of the factual details of our daily lives, or a narration of complicated happenings,
all unraveled at the end (as in a detective or a romantic adventure story).
Frequently, the ultimate appeal of the anti-plot stories to the reader’s sense of
truth, is made through symbolism or allegory. Consider, for instance, Kafka’s
well-known story, ‘The Metamorphosis’ where a man finds that he has changed 77
Modes of Creative Writing suddenly into a hideous insect. Do we disbelieve the story because this does not,
and cannot happen in real life? The writer, by depicting an impossible chain of
events, is however able to present an imaginative study of human behaviour
which is undeniably truthful and absorbing. By breaking up the traditional
structure of the plot he is able to transform seen reality into a felt experience.

2.5.3 Open-Ended Narrative

One of the sacred or crucial elements of the traditional short story was its ending,
which built on the expectation of the reader that a meaning would be lent to the
preceding narrative in the way it ended. Experimental writers found this to be an
impediment, among other things, in fully communicating to the reader the
complexity of much that was narrated⎯and of life itself.
So they took recourse to the ‘open-ended narrative’, where conclusions are not
clearly stated; they are not even always left for the reader to infer from elements
that have been developed in the story. Quite often, the stories have no conclusions.
They leave the reader with a dangling ambiguity, which he has to resolve with
his imagination, in the light of his own perceptions and experience.
Interestingly, the trend for open-ended narratives was set by Anton Chekhov. In
his story, ‘The Lady with the Dog,’ Chekhov has two central characters who are
strangers at the beginning but soon fall deeply in love with each other. The man
and the woman meet when they are on separate vacations in Yalta and grow
increasingly infatuated, although there is a big difference in their age and social
status. When the vacation is over, they return to their respective towns and
homes; both are already married, and the man has children almost the same age
as the woman with whom he has fallen in love. Much as they try, neither can
treat what has transpired as a casual affair. We hear it mainly from the man’s
viewpoint. He has shaken off other affairs before, but this one he cannot. He
goes off in search of her, finds her, and discovers that she too cannot put him out
of her mind. They resume their affair, in stealth from the rest of the world,
especially their families. They know the deception would have to end, but cannot
figure out how. Chekhov ends the story when it is tantalizingly poised; seemingly
the lovers are ‘within an inch of arriving at a decision,’ but in their heart of hearts
both know the end is ‘still far, far away, and that the hardest, most complicated
part is only just beginning.’ Chekhov seems to have developed the complication
to a nicety⎯ covering the beginning and the middle of the classical story ⎯but
he leaves the denouement or ending to his readers.
Krishna Baldev Vaid, the well-known Hindi short story writer, does something
similar in ‘My Enemy’. In this story, the narrator runs into an old crony, with
whom he has been long out of touch. Their stations in life have changed since:
the narrator has become a married, respectable man who lives in orderly affluence,
while the friend has stayed a bum and a derelict. Despite this distance, and the
distance in time since they were friends, the man has sufficient hold on the narrator
to move in with his family. A series of incidents follow and the narrator’s wife,
Mala, moves out of the house with her children threatening not to return until the
‘friend’ has been thrown out. Five day pass after the narrator’s family leaves
him. And he sits there merely contemplating the options available to him, telling
himself: ‘if Mala were here, she’d come up with a third alternative. But she’s
78
not here and I don’t know what to do.’ On that note of self-realization, the story Short Story Writing
ends. The reader is no wiser as to how the tangle is resolved, but he is left free to
make his guesses from what has been revealed of the narrator’s personality.
Other experimenting writers go even further. Instead of the closed ending of the
traditional story, or the open ending we just discussed, they may use a multiple
ending (in which there are several possible endings), a false ending (in which
what you first think of as the end is not quite it), or mock ending or parody
ending.

2.5.4 Innovations in Style

There has been so much innovation in the form and style of the short story,
especially in the past three or four decades, that there are difficulties in applying
the term ‘story’ itself to much of experimental fiction. The rich variety of
innovations or experimentation in style has led to the emergence of a host of
alternative narrative forms. Fictional texts, short prose works, pieces, sketches
these are some of the new arrivals on the scenes.

The dominant mode of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction was realism. As
life, both individual and social, became increasingly more complicated, realism
or the mere portrayal of surface events did not seem an adequate mode to represent
it in all its facets. Writers interested in probing the inner recesses of their
characters’ minds rather than external events per se (Dostoevsky for instance),
took the first step away from realism. Hence the turn inward, with characters not
only responding to the external world, but also turning inward to look at their
own thought processes. Yet other experimenting writers turned to earlier forms
of fiction, such as fable or romance, to recreate fantasy worlds that bore no
resemblance to the ‘real’ world. The types of fiction they wrote laid no claim to
plausibility. Instead, they indulged in the free play of the mind, coming up with
farfetched tales that seemed to have their own inner coherence in a limited world,
circumscribed only by the artist’s imaginative power.
Numerous examples may be cited here. Take the Malayalam story, ‘The Bear’,
by C. Radhakrishnan. In it there are some events, but they are only sketchily
developed and they seem to bear no direct relation to each other. The image of a
bear is first confused with the image of a man in the narrator’s mind, then with
the image of his father. The reader can guess what those associations mean, but
he is not told. The story, somewhat terrifying in its imagery, defies both chronology
and normal credibility of plot. The author seems merely to mock at ‘what happens
next’. Yet the fiction has a certain coherence, deriving its strength neither from
events nor from credible characters or plot.
To study contemporary manifestations of short stories techniques, you can read
John Barth and Donald Barthelme, (Americans, ), Borges (Argentinian), Gunter
Grass or Peter Handke (Germans), Italo Calvino (Italian), the bilingual Samuel
Beckett, Salman Rushdie (Indian), and a host of others.
If some experimenting writers tend to develop analysis and interpretation to their
tedious end, others mock at the concept of ‘developing’ a story. They write
pieces that are so brief that the stories end before the reader has a chance to
ponder where they might lead. The following short story is one such example. 79
Modes of Creative Writing Taboo
Enrique Anderson Imbert
His guardian angel whispered to Fabian, behind his shoulder:
‘Careful, Fabian! It is decreed that you will die the minute you pronounce
the word Doyen.’
‘Doyen?’ asks Fabian, intrigued.
And he dies.

2.6 SUMMING UP
In this Unit we have dealt with the basic elements of a short story like plot,
atmosphere, character and so on. We’ve also spoken about experimental stories
and how these are changing the basic perspective of looking at this genre.

2.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
(i) You can make your story interesting by:
a) giving it a sense of movement
b) involving the reader
c) building up suspense.
Check Your Progress 2
(i) You may add details of atmosphere like:
a) Was it day or night?
b) Were there other people in the compartment?
c) Was the train passing through a jungle a ravine?
d) Was it raining outside or not?
Check Your Progress 3
i) Clarity of visualization is essential in depicting character and the characters
must seem to be familier to the writer and reader
ii) An even flow should be there while developing a character and the
development should not be jerky or sudden. It should be consistent and
evenly paced.

80
 Short Story Writing
UNIT 3 WRITING POETRY
Structure

3.0 Aims and Objectives

3.1 Introduction
3.2 Themes in Poetry
3.2.1 Personae
3.2.2 Nature/Landscape
3.2.3 Sociological Themes
3.2.4 Romantic Themes
3.3 Structure of a Poem
3.3.1 Where to Begin
3.3.2 Development of Theme
3.3.3 Climax
3.3.4 Ending
3.4 Summing Up
3.5 Answers to Check Your Progress

3.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

In this Unit our aim is to identify two chief elements that are intrinsic to a poem.
The first one is theme i.e. the central or dominating idea of any literary
composition. The second being structure i.e. the process of organizing one’s
material. By the end of this Unit you should be able to:
• decide how to begin a poem
• develop the theme organically and take it to a climax
• know exactly how to end your poem

3.1 INTRODUCTION
It is rightly said of a poem that it is not reducible to other terms. But in order to
be able to write poetry, it is imperative to understand what goes into the making
of a poem. Not only is it important to decide what themes you want to tackle, but
it is also equally important to structure it in such a way so as to grab and hold the
interest of the readers. It is obvious that if the opening lines do not immediately
engage the reader’s attention, the poem has failed to take off. Similarly a poem
is not a jumble of ideas or a conglomeration of disparate themes. Each successful
poem is basically concerned with carrying the central idea forward. And if we
agree that a poem is an artifact, a skillfully crafted piece, it must move towards a
climax after which it climbs down to some kind of resolution (denouement).
Finally a budding poet must also learn to end the poem in a proper manner.

3.2 THEMES IN POETRY

Let us delve right into the main topic i.e. themes which one can choose to build
a poem around. 81
Modes of Creative Writing Often, the theme of the poem you are writing is decided unconsciously. However,
if you consciously set out to select the theme most appropriate to your style and
your own concerns, you may choose any one of the four possible themes: personae,
nature, sociological and romantic.

3.2.1 Personae
But before we consider the different kinds of themes in poetry we must know
something about the ‘persona’ or ‘personae’ in a poem. Every poem has a speaking
voice, or two or more speaking voices. This implies that there should be one or
more persons in every poem to whom the voice or voices would belong.
There is no such thing as an unvoiced poem. Not only does the progression of
the central idea but also the very substance of a poem resides in the voice that
makes up the poem for us. All poems begin with, have their being in, and close
with, voices. The voice can be that of the poet himself, speaking directly to the
reader/listener. It may even assume the voice of the reader. Or it can be the
abstract voice of God. Often, as in the dohas of Kabir, you have the poet referring
to himself in the third person. You and I may also have a plurality of voices. We
shall soon see some examples of such usages.
Here is a short poem, in its entirety, by Shrikant Verma, entitled ‘Hastinapur’
(translated by Mrinal Pande):
Spare a thought to the man
Who comes to Hastinapur
And exclaims
No, no, it can’t be Hastinapur!
Spare a thought
To the man,
Who is suddenly all alone.
Does it make any difference when the battle of Mahabharata was fought?
If possible,
Spare a thought also,
To the City of Hastinapur
For which at short intervals
Several battles of Mahabharata are being fought
And yet it makes no difference to anyone,
Except to the man, who arrives in Hastinapur,
And exclaims,
No, no, this can’t be Hastinapur!
Let us examine this short, simple poem a little more closely, to see how the two
voices have given tongue to a work of art. The poem naturally divides itself into
three parts and we are asked to consider three things; a) the appearance of a
stranger in a certain geographical setting; b) his sudden isolation that brings in
mythic historicity of that setting; and c) the place, Hastinapur, known in both
geography and history, rendered urgently relevant to the politics and social realities
82
of the day. The poem closes with the stranger’s words of unbelief and frustration Writing Poetry
at the place where he finds himself, and what he sees is what we feel, and this
lone figure stands surrounded by a sea of indifference.
Therefore, every poem has a speaking voice/voices through which a poet
communicates with the reader.

3.2.2 Nature/Landscape
Nature has always been close to the hearts of poets because: it represents
permanence and peace in a world of constant flux, it sharpens their perceptions,
opens their eyes to detail, and stimulates their sense of mystery, and its beauty
and variety stir their aesthetic sense.
Not every poet can write a nature poem, since this kind of poetry requires a
special temperament. Unless you are interested in the world of nature around
you⎯its fauna and flora, its clouds, mountains and rivers⎯you should not try
out this genre. It’s better not to venture out of the emotional and imaginative
range of your own innate aptitudes. To poets like Wordsworth and Robert Frost,
nature is a sort of extension of their selves. They seem to commune with clouds,
birds or landscape on intimate personal terms. You may recall the concluding
lines of Wordsworth’s ode on the ‘Intimations of Immortality’:
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
So before attempting to write nature poetry, you must find out whether you are
made for it or not. Nature is not merely an interesting object, it is a being. It
should arouse deep emotions in you, give you a new perspective on life. If you
are planning to use nature as the theme of your poetry, go out and experience it
in all its manifestations. Try and put down on paper any new insights that may
come to you. Never mind if all this is written in prose at first. As you progress,
diction and rhythm will come to you as well, and then, you may begin writing a
good nature poem.
Assuming that you have the necessary temperament for writing nature poetry,
you may then remember that merely describing a river or a landscape will not
do. This is because writing a nature poem is not merely an exercise in
description⎯however picturesque it may be. It should also evoke some human
emotions⎯of joy or pain, hope or despair.
Poets do not love nature passively. It evokes in them an emotional response; it
often gives them a new vision of life. It can sadden them, gladden them or
console them. Perhaps you also forget your worries, when you chance upon a
beautiful sunset or a rainbow. Have you ever asked yourself why some poets are
fascinated by nature? What special aesthetic or moral pleasure do they derive
out of this kind of poetry? Why do they prefer writing a nature poem to a satirical,
narrative or a reflective poem? There are many reasons for this.
Nature poetry has, to begin with, three qualities or characteristics you need to be
conscious of : 1) description 2) emotional response and 3) philosophical insights.
We will analyse Robert Frost’s poem ‘Desert Places’ in these three dimensions. 83
Modes of Creative Writing Description
If you are a lover of nature, describing natural objects should be quite easy for
you. Take, for instance, the poem ‘Desert Places’ by Robert Frost:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last…..
Emotional response
Robert Frost then responds to the snow, the night and the loneliness in a very
emotional manner:
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less-
A blanket whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
Philosophical insights
As it continues to snow, the poem now moves to another level. It now acquires
a philosophical dimension, inviting the reader to share a new insight:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars⎯on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
As you will have noticed the poem breaks into two main sections. The first part
(first three stanzas ) is presented almost as a pure descriptive sketch of a man at
dusk, walking past an open field on which snow is falling ceaselessly. The ground
is entirely submerged under snow, except for a few weeds and stubble. All animals
lie in their dens, each wrapped in loneliness, which also includes the passerby.
As the poem moves forward, the backdrop of the snow gets interfused with the
observer’s own sense of loneliness. It’s only in the last stanza that the man’s
realization of his own loneliness emerges as the predominant emotion behind
this snowy evening. If the snow blankets everything on the ground, isolating
one object from the other, and if the stars are also separated from each other by
the empty spaces in between, then why should man alone be scared of his
loneliness? Isn’t he a part of the natural universe? In fact, unlike animals, he
should be able to gather up enough inner strength to master his own ‘desert
places’, instead of letting himself be frightened by them.
This is, therefore, an ideal specimen of a poem that operates at two levels⎯
descriptive (denotative) and symbolic (connotative) ⎯which finally merge into
the final stanza, suggesting a philosophical meaning. This is the kind of synthesis
that you should aim at if you are interested in writing nature poetry.

3.2.3 Sociological Themes

In case you decide that sociological concerns are your forte, then we show you
84 the possible approaches and the possible levels of treatment.
Sociological themes in poetry may cover a very wide range. One of the commonest Writing Poetry
of these themes is politics. National pride and love of one’s own country have
inspired both bad and good poets. In the old days, the kings and queens functioned
as patrons, and many poets were content to work as court poets praising their
masters’ heroism and generosity. Poet-laureates are appointed specifically for
the purpose of composing poetry about state occasions even now. Sometimes
poets have turned against the rulers of the land. In modern times, other patrons
have tried to gather poets around them.
Certain types of poets are obsessed with social problems. In Indian poetry in
English specifically, some of the problems treated are poverty (‘An Old Woman’
by Arun Kolatkar), and class struggle and inequality (‘Background, Casually’ by
Nissim Ezekiel). Bride burning, illiteracy, unemployment, exploitation of the
weaker sections of society, untouchability, dowry system, etc. arouse the
conscience of a number of poets and provoke them into poetic utterances. The
search for self, for roots, and the problems of migration to other places have also
been handled by poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel and Parthasarthy. You
must read widely if you want to see for yourself how these issues have been
tackled by Indian poets, preferably those writing in English.
It is not easy to write good poetry on public themes. W.B. Yeats held the view
that out of our quarrel with others we made rhetoric, while out of our quarrel
with ourselves we made poetry. Uninspired verse on political themes often
becomes empty rhetoric. What does not come out of genuine conviction may fail
to carry credibility. Yeats was himself a great writer of political poetry. Poems
on political or public themes have been written mainly in two ways⎯either by
universalizing a topical occurrence or by giving topical relevance to a universal
experience. Poets who have succeeded in turning social themes into genuine
poetry have done so in different ways.
Read the following poem by Yeats on the political situation in Ireland:
September 1913
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bones.
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave. 85
Modes of Creative Writing The background to this poem is the fact that, in Yeats’s opinion, the people living
now in Ireland are not of the stature of the freedom-fighters of old. Behind the
sarcasm, there is here a sadness originating from an awareness of Ireland’s past
heroism. One notices the sharp contrast between ‘men’ born to pray and save’
and those who ‘have gone about the world like wind’. The two lines of refrain
reinforce the underlying folk rhythm. Yeats knew that the poetry of the masses
should keep close to the forms of collective thinking and feeling.
Sociological poetry need not always have a political bias. Furthermore, whether
a poet is for a particular ideology or against it, he can still write on sociological
themes. It is not easy to confine a poem to a mere sociological dimension, since
a poet may move on to another dimension, raising the poem to a philosophical
plane.
You may be familiar with the current penchant for ‘conferences’, ‘meetings’,
and ‘seminars’. You might have even experienced the exasperation of trying to
meet someone and failing, because he is always in ‘conference’. But did you,
like the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, put your thoughts down in a poem?
Read the following poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1922)
Conference Crazy
Scarce night’s transformed into dawn,
With the same daily sight I’m beset;
folks go forth to their offices⎯each to his own:
to glav,
to com,
to polit,
to prosvet,
Barely passing the establishment porter,
they’re piled with papers like snow,
Yawning and Yearning,
I meet the dawn with a dream of bliss;
Oh, for just one more decisive conference, concerning
The abolishment of all conferences!
The main idea of the poem is that conferences are the bane of the poets existence!

3.2.4 Romantic Themes

What is ‘romantic’? have you ever asked yourself this question? You must have
used the word a hundred times and more without giving much thought to it.
Perhaps it wasn’t necessary. But now you will probably be writing poems on
romantic themes (in fact, you may have already written some). So it will do you
good to be clearer in your mind about this very interesting element in our lives,
our temperaments, and our art. The difficulty with such abstract terms is that,
over time, several meanings and shades of meaning accumulate around them,
and it becomes hard to find a precise definition. There is also the question of the
common and the more specialized uses of such terms. Let us try to simplify
86 without forgetting the complexity.
Think of this, for example. When you say, ‘This house has romantic surroundings,’ Writing Poetry

or, ‘what a romantic scene!’ you are using the term approvingly, aren’t you? But
when you say, ‘O don’t be so romantic’, or ‘that poem is too romantic for me’,
you are referring to something undesirable. What is it? It is probably lack of
realism (in the case of the first remark), and lack of restraint (in the case of the
second). Remember these two things. They characterize what is undesirably
‘romantic’. We can use this lead, perhaps, to look at those elements of ‘romantic’
which are regarded as smacking of the second-rate in art, specially by the modern
writer. Stated simply, these are: excessive sweetness, excessive emotion,
sentimentality; a sighing, melting response to beauty (Oh’s and Ah’s); a tendency
to the vague and discursive, to be too soft or ornate; excessive use of adjectives.
Add to these what I mentioned earlier, lack of restraint and realism, and you will
begin to see what is meant by the kind of romantic that has to be avoided. Look
at the following poem on ‘The Snake Charmers’ by Sarojini Naidu:
Whither dost thou hide from the magic of my flute⎯
In what moonlight-tangled meshes of perfume,
Where the clustering keoras guard the squirrel’s nest
Where the deep woods glimmer with the jasmine bloom
I’ll feed thee, O beloved, on milk and wild-red honey
I’ll bear thee in a basket of rushes, green and white
To a palace-bower where golden-vested maidens
Thread with mellow laughter the petals of delight.
You can see here how the writer, in her scenes, desires to make them as ideally
beautiful as possible, renders the whole piece so excessively sweet that it cloys
our taste. Sugary epithets and phrases take away all freshness and authenticity
from it: ‘moonlight-tangled meshes of perfume’, ‘clustering keoras’, ‘wild-red
honey’, ‘golden-vested maidens’, ‘petals of delight’. Does any vivid and life-
like picture rise to your mind after reading this? In contrast, Blake’s single
phrase, ‘forests of the night’, in his poem ‘The Tiger’, makes the thick dark
forests suddenly jump to life in our imagination:
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night.
The ‘romantic’ is often mentally placed opposite another term, ‘classic’. In fact,
these two terms are an attempt to capture in language two primary attitudes of
the human mind. ‘Classic’ implies rationalism, control, proportion, regularity of
form. Romantic, on the other hand, indicates a sense of wonder, mystery,
subjectivity, emotional involvement, preference for the infinite as against the
finite, a desire to break the symmetry of form in search of freedom. Since these
two represent aspects of our nature, you can easily guess that there is bound to
be some overlapping of the two in both life and art.

Take an avowedly anti-romantic poet like T.S. Eliot. Eliot has said that the material
of poetry can be found ‘in what has been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the
sterile, the intractably unpoetic’. This is clearly an unromantic stance. In his
‘Preludes’, a string of four short poems, he takes us through unbeautiful images
of urban sordidness: ‘The burnt out ends of smoky days’, ‘The grimy scraps/of 87
Modes of Creative Writing withered leaves’, ‘stale smells of beer’, ‘the sparrows in the gutters’, ‘The
conscience of blackened streets’, and finally we read
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Can we say that the mystery here, the mystery of human life and suffering, the
word ‘infinitely’ twice used, and the word ‘gentle’ which makes such a demand
on our sympathies⎯can we say that all this does not in some way partake of the
‘romantic’? It has at least some of the elements that we have listed as qualities
of the romantic⎯a sense of mystery, of the infinite, of emotional involvement,
etc.
We have so far, in our discussion, realized two points: (1) the romantic is inherent
in human nature and has been an element of poetry in all ages. It need not,
therefore, be shunned by any one who writes or wishes to write poetry; (2) one
must guard against being excessively or weakly romantic, against being
sentimental, too emotional or unrestrained, too soft and ornate.
Check Your Progress 1
i) What social themes can be made the subject of poetry?
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ii) What difficulties can a poet face while writing on social themes?
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iii) What aspects of the romantic can be considered undesirable in a poem?
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(Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit.)

3.3 STRUCTURE OF A POEM

We know that in creative writing there are no ‘rules’ as such, no formulas. There
88 may be rules about the mechanics of writing (grammar, conventions, metrics),
but not for the composition of a poem. There is, of course, a part of it which is a Writing Poetry
matter of craftsmanship. This part however, can be easily overstated. To the
poet the whole poem does not occur. An idea or an image may occur, an experience
may suddenly take a more or less defined form, a line or more may occur, the
rest has to be worked out.
Now once you get the germinal idea or line or word, you are faced with the
question: where to begin and how? It should be clear that the inception of a
poem in your head and its formal beginning are two different things. They may
in rare cases coincide but usually do not.

3.3.1 Where to Begin

A poem can start with a statement indicating what is to follow. In other words,
the poem as it proceeds would be an unfolding of the initial statement. Milton’s
Paradise Lost starts with such a statement; so does Virgil’s The Aeneid: Let me
illustrate this point with a brief poem that can be quoted in full.
Indian Women
In this triple-baked continent
Women don’t etch angry eyebrows
On mud walls.
Patiently they sit
Like empty pitchers
On the mouth of the village well
Pleating hope in each braid
Of their Mississippi-long hair
Looking deep into the water’s mirror
For the moisture in their eyes.
With zodiac doodling on the sands
They guard their tattooed thighs
Waiting for their men’s return
Till even the shadows
Roll up their contours
And are gone
Beyond the hills
(Shiv K. Kumar)
The poem speaks of the timeless patience and passivity of women in rural India.
Their lack of resentment and protest is summed up and stated in the first three
lines (no ‘angry eyebrows on mud walls’), and later poetically enforced through
the vivid image of the women sitting ‘like empty pitchers’ by a well, doodling on
the sands until ‘even the shadows roll up their contours and are gone’. This
poem places the central experience at the source and moves outward from the
centre.
It is not necessary that you begin at the beginning. It is possible and likely that
you compose the ending first or the middle, and then work backwards to find a
beginning that accords with what has already been framed. I would like to draw 89
Modes of Creative Writing your attention to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ which seems extremely interesting from
the point of view of composition. In this poem Yeats speaks of the Easter Uprising
in Dublin in 1916, which for him turned ordinary men and women into heroic
beings. He is thus concerned with a transformation which he expresses through
the line ‘A terrible beauty is born’. It looks probable that this line occurred first
to Yeats with the idea of ordinariness taking a leap into glory. He puts this line at
the centre and at the end of the poem. He has now to decide how to begin and
where, and he does it with great poetic mastery, choosing to talk of men and
women whom he met every day and who had nothing striking about them.
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses
Until suddenly he finds ‘All changed, changed utterly’.

3.3.2 Development of Theme

The poetic process raises many questions. Is a poem an inspired thing, a
happening, over which the poet has no control? Or is it an artifact, a contrived
thing, which is pressed into form by the poet according to some preconceived
idea or design? We need not get embroiled in this controversy⎯inspiration versus
artifice, free-will versus predetermination. But whatever be the explanation for
the creative process, mysterious as it is, one thing is certain, that every successful
poem has a visible or hidden pattern of thematic development. A poet may have
consciously worked this design into his poem, or he may not be aware that this
poem, composed in ‘an inspired moment’, has still acquired a distinct mould of
organization. In the latter case, the poet may be as much surprised as his readers
as to how his imagination has invested his poem with a formal design. We can
say that a good poem is not a mere jumble of images or ideas. Every image or
idea is here dramatically related to the central theme which is enunciated,
developed and concluded in an organic form. In other words, a poet works,
consciously or unconsciously, like an architect, building his structure brick by
brick. We may even say that the crucial test of a good poem is that there’s
nothing redundant in it⎯not a word, phrase or line. The entire structure is
delicately, skillfully balanced.
The thematic progression in a poem may be achieved by the poet’s inspired use
of a single metaphor, instead of a series of similes or metaphors. Just as the
central metaphor unfolds its multiple meanings, so does the idea emerge as in
a sort of straight line ⎯ that is, moves forward from one phase to another like
a symphony that must travel through various movements to reach its finale.
Let’s understand this concept by examining closely a poem titled ‘A Lonely
Woman’.
It begins at the doorstep
After each day’s death-rattle.
First, the mirror in the hallway
That lets another woman in it
Stick out her tongue at me-
90
 Then the agony of journeying Writing Poetry

From one room to another

With the ghosts whispering around me
Like the summer flies.
If I break into whistle-
A coward’s strategy to ward off evil
In wilderness⎯the throat splutters like
The wick in an oilless lamp.
The terrace offers no escape either
For it exposes me to the moon’s malignant eye
And the stars’ grin.
It all ends in my bed’s mummy coffin.
Shiv. K. Kumar
Let’s take the poem itself. It’s obviously about the loneliness of a woman whose
life seems to be wrapped up in a dull routine. She’s perhaps a widow or a divorcee
–and without any children. Each day she confronts her loneliness acutely after
the day’s grind.
We may analyse the poem in parts, since it ends with a line standing apart from
the main text. On close scrutiny, there is a clear suggestion of a beginning,
middle and end⎯a sort of progression. Take, for instance, the opening line: ‘It
begins at the doorstep….’ And the concluding line: ‘It all ends in my bed’s mummy
coffin’. So the poem moves forward on two planes ⎯ of time and of space. In
terms of duration, the woman begins her day with going out to work, and returning
at sunset with ‘each day’s death rattle’. Then she goes to her bed which, we’re
told, is like a ‘mummy coffin’, a symbol of extinction and loneliness. But, in the
course of the poem, we encounter multiple images (and not just one single
metaphor only) ⎯ like the mirror in the hallway (in which she sees her own
reflection), the ghosts, the wick spluttering in an oilless lamp, the desolate terrace
and the moon’s malignant eye. So, as we have learnt already, a poet may amplify
his central theme not through one controlling image only but through a variety
of images. What is of crucial significance in a poem is the imperative need to
interblend everything ultimately so as to reinforce the dominant theme. Not a
single image or idea should fall off the centre of gravity ⎯ the core of the
poem.

3.3.3 Climax
Climax is that stage in the making of the poem which orchestrates the tense
effects of a poem to its highest intensity.
Poems of a progression pattern lead to a climax generally; poems of static pattern
do not. Their force is evenly distributed all through the poem. You cannot
anticipate the climax. There are no suggestions of expectancy or ‘suspense’.
Suspense is the prelude to climax.
Some poets deliberately introduce flatness in earlier lines to slowly work up to
an inevitable climax. Let us look at a famous poem ‘Ozymandias’ by Shelly.
91
Modes of Creative Writing Ozymandias

BY Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

The poem begins with the flattest line ever.

But slowly, the poem develops strength. The traveller tells him of a broken
statue with a face that the sculptor had depicted so well: ‘The wrinkled lip’, ‘the
sneer of cold command,’ ‘the frown’. There lies a broken head detached from
the statue, so realistically carved ‘The hand that mocked them (the sculptor’s)
and the heart that fed’ (the king's). Obviously the king is an arrogant tyrant.
Then comes the double-edged climax: on the pedestal are carved these words:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye Mighty, and
despair!’ What the king meant was, ‘The mightiest cannot achieve more glory
than I did!’ but in the present condition of the statue, it means, even the mightiest
are ruined like this monument. The second sense is reinforced in the last three
lines: ‘nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ That is fine rounding off,
re-emphasising the desolation or futility of worldly glory.

3.3.4 Ending
It is difficult to say how often it happens that a poet gets the ending first into his
head. In most cases, a poem is well on its way before the question of how to end
occurs. The painters, Van Gogh and Picasso, for example, have spoken of how
the whole picture had been in their mind before they started painting, by which
they meant the primary vision, not the picture as it finally appeared on the canvas.
This applies to poetry too. A poem is not born, like Aphrodite in the classical
myth, full-grown. It grows, and, as it does so, the poet ponders the question of
where to end and how. Partly, it is a question of form. The manner and the point
at which you end a poem determines its form. Of course a poet may be writing in
a given genre, ode or sonnet, for example. In such a case he would be working
within well-defined limits. The sonnet form would settle the question of where
to end, but how to end would still remain an open question.
92
Traditional forms, however, are rarely used today, but the question of form still Writing Poetry
remains alive and is relevant even when you are writing free verse. No poem
can be amorphous. However bizarre its theme, it cannot be bizarre in form.
The old Aristotelian concept of structure – a beginning, a middle and end – is
still not obsolete. Of course, each poem can be said to have a form which is in
a sense dictated by the requirements of the poem itself. This would mean that
you as a poet sense the direction a poem is taking and guide it to a natural
culmination.
Theme, technique, the total vision, the responses one is able to evoke from
language, all determine at what point a poem should terminate. All these can be
subsumed under what may be called poetic discretion and this throws you back
on your own judgement. You have to ask of yourself the question whether or not
the poem is sufficiently advanced to embody whatever you have wished to embody
– an experience, a mood, a feeling, an observation, a truth – and whether taking
it further would help or hinder its effect.
Turning to particulars, one way of ending a poem is to repeat the opening line or
lines. This makes the poem contained and gives the reader a feeling of having
arrived. Often the repeated line/lines acquires a new dimension, the result of the
reader having passed through the middle of the poem. Let us look at a brief poem
by William Carlos William called ‘The Dance’ which uses a similar technique.
The poem depicts in words a painting by a Flemish artist, Pieter Breughel,
representing a local Dutch dance at a church fair, called the Kermess:
In a Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as thick-sided
glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds,….swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.
The same line at the beginning and at the end has the effect of having the picture
framed.
All these are rounded endings and the poems, in their formal aspect, can be
called closed poems.
Against this contrasted is what might be called the open ending in which the
poet, while about to wind up, opens a new window, a fresh vista. A classic
example is Matthew Arnold’s last lines in ‘Sohrab and Rustom’. Such an ending
is rich in suggestion and takes the reader on a trip across the fields outside the
poem itself⎯as also in Milton’s ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’ at
the end of ‘Lycidas’. In Shiv. K. Kumar’s poem quoted earlier, the last lines are
suggestive of the passage of time as against the fixity of the squatting women.
93
Modes of Creative Writing Check Your Progress 2
i) Consider the importance of climax to a poem.
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(Check your answer with that given at the end of this Unit)

3.4 SUMMING UP
In this Unit we spoke about some of the themes that you can choose to write
poetry on. We also spoke about how to structure a poem i.e. how to begin a
poem ⎯ take it to a climax and then bring it to a plausible end.

3.5 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
i) These have a wide range: poverty, oppression, injustice, inequality, idealism,
freedom, social change etc.
ii) Such themes can be dry and may develop into mere rhetoric. They may lack
personal conviction and so on.
iii) These are sentimentality, lack of restraint, too much emotion, excessive
sweetness etc.
Check Your Progress 2
i) The climax gathers into itself the full force in a poem and represents its
tensest moment.

94
 Short Story Writing
UNIT 4 IMAGERY AND SYMBOLS
Structure

4.0 Aims and Objectives

4.1 Introduction
4.2 Imagery
4.3 Symbols
4.4 Metaphor
4.5 Language and Diction
4.5.1 Words in Poetry
4.6 Metrical Structures
4.6.1 Rhyme
4.6.2 Meter
4.7 Innovations
4.8 Summing Up
4.9 Answers to Check Your Progress

4.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This Unit explains the use of images and symbols in writing poetry. It also shows
you how to use diction/language to achieve the intended effect. By the end of
this Unit you will be able to understand how:
• an image is at the root of all poetry
• images can be conveyed by symbols, similes or metaphors
• you can use symbols to express intense feelings
• to identify symbols in poems, which by extension will lend greater depth to
your own poetry by the effective use of symbols,
• to use language in a manner which will enrich your writing and
• metaphors can enhance the effect of your poems

4.1 INTRODUCTION
The terms ‘image’ and ‘imagery’ have a wide range of meaning and correlations.
An image need not signify a mental picture alone. Images can be literal, perceptual
or conceptual. Again, they can be visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, abstract or
kinesthetic. That is why the term, ‘imagery’ is used to suggest the representation
of sensory or extra-sensory experience through the medium of language. Poets
may fuse different kinds of images to produce the desired poetic effects. Indeed,
the images in a poem may not be readily classifiable, since they may merge into
one another or even overlap. All poetry works through images. It is through
images that a poet depersonalizes and universalizes his experience. No matter
how personal an account, a poetic statement, because it works in and through 95
Modes of Creative Writing images, becomes a general statement. An image thus acts as an interface between
the reader and the poet.
The term, ‘symbol’, is derived from the Greek work, ‘symbolon’ meaning mark,
token or sign. It is an animate or inanimate object signifying or standing for
some other thing. It is different from an allegorical sign in that whereas a symbol
exists, an allegorical sign is only arbitrary. For instance, the lion symbolizes
strength and courage, and a dove peace. Likewise, even actions and features
such as a clenched fist, and arms raised above the head symbolize aggressiveness
and surrender. A symbol helps the poet to express complex, mixed or intense
feelings. Since a poem is essentially a symbolic mode of expression it is through
symbols alone that a poet articulates his feelings. They should, however, be
used judiciously, because their excessive use can also harm a poem, dissipate its
impact on the reader’s mind.
Diction is a writer’s particular choice of words and style. This choice is especially
difficult in poetry where words often take on additional meanings depending
upon the context. For most of us, English is a second language, so we should be
specially aware of the precise meanings of the words we use. We should aim at
lucidity of expressions rather than obscurity or complexity. The idea is to use
words in such a way that your thoughts are exactly transferred to the mind of the
reader.
The simplest definition of metaphor, as also the oldest one, is that it is a shortened
or an implied simile. A simile makes explicit comparison between two unlike
things indicated by the words, ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘than’. When we say, ‘Arjun fights
like a lion’, we are using a simile in which a comparison is made by using the
word, ‘like’. Where such a comparison is made without using such words as
‘like’ or ‘as’ ⎯ as in the following example, ‘On the battlefield Arjun is a lion’ –
we are using a metaphor. In other words, when a speaker says that something is,
or is equivalent to, something in most ways actually unlike it, he is using a
figure of speech called a metaphor. In other words, it is a description of one
thing in terms of another. Comparison between two things, unlike each other, is
the basis of both simile and metaphor. The point(s) of analogy must be logically
clear, whether the comparison is explicitly stated, as in a simile, or only implied,
as in a metaphor.

4.2 IMAGERY
Whatever else they share in common, prose and verse use images differently in
their narrative and lyric modes. Imagery in prose rarely, if ever, attains to the
power of a general statement with universal significance, as it does in poetry.
This is partly due to the fact that the lyric mode functions in and through images.
Often, an image is dismantled and reassembled in the course of a single poem;
equally often, the reverse procedure is adopted. The greatest master in the use of
images, among prose writers, Franz Kafka, seems to actually feel and think
through images: with the result that they assume an allegorical universality that
most other symbols used by other prose writers cannot even begin to pretend to
emulate: The Castle, The Trial, ‘Metamorphosis’ The Country Doctor and the
killing-machine in ‘In the Penal Settlement’ are some good examples. Consider
the following lines from A.K. Ramanujan’s ‘Of Mothers, among other things’:
96
 ………… Imagery and Symbols

But her hands are a wet eagle’s

two black pink-crinkled feet,
one talon crippled in a garden
trap set for a mouse. Her saris
do not cling: they hang, loose
feather of a onetime wing.
The image of the bird is one of the images woven into the complex tapestry of
this beautiful poem. We come to these lines after a fine and complex image of
rain; hence the wet eagle. See how it’s broken up into a crippled talon and ‘the
loose feather of a onetime wing’. By the end of the poem, all the relevant bits
and parts of the main images have fused to form a composite whole, and are not
and cannot be, separated from one another. In fact, the structure of the poem is
indistinguishable from the dismantlement/reassembly of the main image(s) of
the poem.
Consider this poem:
In this triple-baked continent
women don’t etch angry eyebrows
on mud walls.
Patiently they sit
like empty pitchers
on the mouth of the village well
pleating hope in each braid
of their Mississippi-long hair
looking deep into the water’s mirror
for the moisture in their eyes.
with zodiac doodling on the sands
they guard their tattooed thighs
waiting for their men’s return
till even the shadows
roll up their contours
and are gone
beyond the hills.
(Shiv K. Kumar)
This beautiful poem is given to us in its entirety in three short and intense
sentences. Consider the simple use of simile (like empty pitchers) and metaphor
(Mississippi-long hair) which form part of a complex pattern in the lyrical use of
imagery. Take the water motif: the ground is prepared for it in the very first line
of the poem (‘in this triple-baked continent’) which will later bring the poem to
a close (‘roll up their contours/and are gone/beyond the hills’). The women sit
like empty pitchers on the mouth of the village well; barren, empty, dry, as-yet-
unfulfilled and waiting for their men’s return. The water image now passes from
the pitcher and the village well to pleating hope (the waiting, the hoping) in each
braid of their ‘mississippi-long hair’. Here the imagery of water is transformed
to its reflective qualities so that it mirrors or gives back the image of tears in
their eyes. 97
Modes of Creative Writing Notice how this intricately calibrated image of water is married to a growing
complexity of concepts like light and dryness, emptiness and waiting, guarding
and hoping, and shadow and darkness. And this graceful movement is brought
to a close in these short sentences. The poem as a whole would seem to symbolize
a certain feminine patience.
Also, examine these groups of images: ‘tattooed thighs’, ‘doodlings on the sands’
and, ‘angry eyebrows on mud walls’; all the images are related to women; see
how inextricably they are woven into those words in the poem which carry a
heavy emotional load.
Check Your Progress 1
i) What is the relationship between an image and various figures of speech?
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(Check your answer with that given at the end of the Unit)

4.3 SYMBOLS
Poetry, like music, conveys ‘feeling’. We all experience half-expressed feelings⎯
intense jubilation, deep despair, hair-pulling, vaulting ambition, dark depression,
high exaltation in our own lives. But if we are asked to express our feelings,
most of us will just mumble. We find language too inadequate to express, to the
exact degree, our feelings. But poets somehow manage to find words to express
their feelings. They use various devices to catch the intensity ⎯soft rhythms for
soft feeling, jagged rhythms for intellectualized feeling, exalted rhythms for higher
exaltation, lilting and cooing for courtship, etc. etc. Naturally, the reader will
miss a good deal if he does not keep pace with the suggestive rhythm of the
verse. But some feelings are lawless. They are too complex to keep to the rhythm.
Symbols, float between a very concrete image at one extreme end and a very
intense feeling at the other. A symbol half-reveals and half-conceals its meaning.
It employs a concrete image only to hide an intensity of meaning which has
become too hurtful to state explicitly. It draws on the conventions of language.
For instance, a ‘wolf’ is conventionally believed to be a killer; unlike a fox who
is believed to be a slinker, though he could also kill. In other words, a symbol
employs ‘association’, not direct meanings, to carry out its double function of
half-revealing and half-concealing its meaning. A good symbol enriches the
meaning by concealment. The cleverer the concealment, the richer the meaning.
Look at these lines:
The paper is whiter
For these black lines.
(Wallace Stevens)
98
This is an image without specific meaning; nevertheless, it has a sufficient Imagery and Symbols
meaning complete in itself.
I shall show you fear in a handful of dust.
(T.S.Eliot)
Such self-sufficience of meaning is a mark of the highest creative genius. How
a concrete image becomes meaningful is hard to explain; but we can vaguely
explain the process as ‘suggestion’ ⎯what our Poetics has described through
terms like ‘Dhwani’ or ‘Vjyanjana’. Most poets are aware of a faculty which
can see meaning in inanimate objects, e.g. ‘stone’ for hard, cold, dead
unresponsiveness. They employ these meanings by strengthening the force of
the context. But not always!
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm….
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,….
(Blake)
There is here no contextual support. Yet, this poem seems to sum up the sickness
of the world. The word, ‘rose’, is an image of health, freshness and hope, sufficient
in meaning. It is an ‘image’, yet acts as a symbol.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, the curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
(Andrew Marvell)
The paradisal experience is revealed in the recurrent images of simple natural
rural pleasures. The consistent, reiterative, repetitive images of natural joy create
(‘evoke’) an atmosphere (‘context’) of well-being. No single image is a ‘symbol’,
but cumulatively they create (‘evoke’) a whole context of a paradise on Earth.
The passage thus becomes ‘symbolic’.

4.4 METAPHOR
The command of metaphor has been held to be the hall mark of a poet and so its
importance to the creation of a poem cannot be overemphasized. Metaphor is
not a mere rhetorical device⎯ a figure of speech⎯but a means of making a
poem highly evocative and thus enlarging its significance and power. The issues
that the use of metaphor in poetry raises are complex in that the metaphor, in the
modern view, is a ‘stereoscope of ideas’.
Although, superficially, the distinction between simile and metaphor looks simple,
it is not really so. They differ in significance. Simile merely joins two separate 99
Modes of Creative Writing entities. The metaphor, on the other hand, attempts an identification or fusion
of two objects to make a new one that shares in some degree the attributes or
qualities of both. While in a simile the comparison is straightforward and often
prosaic, in a metaphor an altogether new kind of association is created by
discovering and combining resemblances between two otherwise dissimilar
objects. Simile being more explicit than metaphor is, therefore, less evocative.
However, it must be remembered that a metaphor has its origin in a simile.

It must also be noted that the traditional definition of metaphor as an abbreviated

simile has been undergoing a subtle change. It is difficult nowadays to find
many examples in poetry of metaphors which are derived from simple, logical
comparisons as in the following poem by Sir Walter Raleigh:

What is our Life?

What is our life? a play of passion;

Our mirth, the music of divisions;
Our mother’s wombs the tiring-houses be
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
The poet compares our life to ‘a play of passion’. ‘Play’ here is the metaphor for
life, and since the two terms are basically unlike, the poet underscores in the
lines that follow the qualities ‘life’ and ‘play’ share in common. The brevity and
triviality of stage-plays has been compared to the brevity and triviality of life⎯
‘this short comedy’. In order to further emphasize the points of analogy between
the two, the poet refers to human laughter as equivalent to musical accompaniment
and wombs as dressing rooms. The ‘play of passion’ has finally been called ‘this
short comedy’ to suggest that life, after all, is not as serious a business as we take
it to be.

If we compare the poem of Sir Walter Raleigh given above with the following
poem by Emily Dickinson we will notice that, while in the former, metaphor has
been employed for merely noting of a likeness between life and a stage-play, the
latter uses the metaphor ‘Iron Horse’ for train as the central concept of the poem:

I like to see it lap the miles

And lick the Valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at Tanks;
And then prodigious step
Around a pile of mountains,
And supercilious peer
In Shanties by the sides of Roads;
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
And crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down Hill….
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 Imagery and Symbols
4.5 LANGUAGE AND DICTION
Before we get into the intricacies of rhythms and metrical structures, it is important
to understand what exactly is implied by the word ‘diction’. The choice a writer
makes of words and the particular style with which he uses them in his poetry is
what may be broadly termed diction. Let us first take a look at some of the
preliminary problems of diction that arise when we write verse.
For most of us, English is an acquired language a second language. It helps if
we are conscious of it, particularly when we lapse into using it like a library
language, stiffening the edges of our thinking with bookish words. We are not
totally relaxed in it. So keep a vigilant eye open for the lived experience that
words always stand for, by not just knowing or understanding a word, but by
feeling and experiencing it.
Lucidity and intelligibility are objectives to strive for in poetry as much as in
prose. Poetry in no way gives us a license to be obscure; so guard against unclear
lines of thought as also an impulse to indulge in complexities of expression that
may not be easy to handle initially. It is good to write a poem that is clear and
easy to understand, for it will win over many readers for you.
Speech indicates movement, flight, even a quickening of the mind, all of which
get somewhat congealed in writing. But when it comes to poetry, the language
may still bear all the directness of speech. English is a stress-based language
and a skilful use of this will lend phonic and rhythmic patterns to the language.
Words, otherwise familiar to us, take on an altered colour in poetry.
Words are the components of language and vocabulary is something that needs
to be built steadily and cumulatively over a period of time. There is a common
belief that the more one reads books the richer is one’s vocabulary. This, however,
is only a half-truth, for personal experience is invaluable. We learn new words as
we encounter new situations and experiences, and we begin to realize these words
more sharply than before. In a higher degree than prose, poetry exudes a strong,
personally-realized experience, brought about by ‘self’ (or the ‘I’) of the poet,
which gives an authenticity, if not reality, to the poem. But you may wonder
how within the span of a single life, one can experience all that life holds out for
us.
This brings us to the question of ‘surrogate experience’ or substitute experience,
a kind of ‘second-hand’ experience that calls for some training and imaginative
cultivation. You can learn to participate imaginatively in experiences that are
otherwise remote from everyday life. For instance, even areas such as yachting,
trekking, or abstract mental activities like philosophizing, bring with them a set
of words that belong exclusively to the domain of those experiences. You should
be able not merely to understand them but relate to them as well, although you
may be culturally remote from them.

4.5.1 Words in Poetry

Semantics (meaning) cannot give us absolute assurance over the intrinsic meaning
of words because they can be elusive and take on colours from the surrounding
words. Words denote when they indicate light meaning and connote when they 101
Modes of Creative Writing suggest a meaning in addition to the fundamental meaning implied by the word.
For example, the related words, ‘empty’, ‘blank;’ and ‘vacuous’ all denote varying
shades of vacancy, while the last word ‘vacuous’ also connotes inanity and
obtuseness. In the skilful hands of a poet, even denotative words can take on
additional dimensions and layered implications by the scent and smell they carry.
‘What do you mean?’ ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be….’. all too often in life, we
come across such statements that seem to hang indecisively in mid-air. This is a
problem that relates to meaning, because we always take words for granted and
expect them to transfer thoughts from one mind to another. In this context,
meaning could sometimes get distorted or even lost. An effective poet deepens
the levels of meaning and offers fresh insights. For, ultimately, what a poet
means in the parts is so crucial to the understanding of the poem as a whole that
even an intelligent reader will be put off by blurred meanings. Much of the
charge of obscurity commonly leveled against modern poetry, and of its being
‘difficult’ to understand, can probably be attributed to this sort of a failure in
conveying meaning.
Words have their own mortality and what is valid for one period fades in
significance for the subsequent periods. Besides, the use of anachronistic or
obsolete words would date you and it is a flaw not forgiven easily by the
discriminating reader. Words like ‘brethren’, ‘beware’ and ‘abide’ , alongwith a
host of other words, have outlived their utility and should therefore be avoided.
When in doubt, do consult a modern, updated dictionary which will give you a
clue about a word’s obsolescence.
Like archaisms, clichés are to be avoided too, for they really make for a tired
language that shows up a mind that is too lazy to think originally. It is difficult
now to eradicate clichés totally because mass media have unleashed a fresh torrent
of clichés and empty phrases.
Language involves storing the knowledge that comes with words. Like a bee
storing honey, one has to hive knowledge and put it away in a storehouse where
it will mature. We also acquire language as an inheritance, a kind of a legacy
and all it takes is a vigilant eye and ear for words, even those words that may not
be immediately put to use. What is important, particularly for poetry, is the
dynamic quality of language and the free play a poet gives to it, even within the
control of his discipline. Let us look at the tremendous force of these lines from
‘Leda and the Swan’ by W.B. Yeats:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bills
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast
How can those terrified, vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Here the language explodes outward as the meaning struggles to free itself of the
102 fetters of words. What predominates the scene is a great sense of verbal force.
Language here reaches out almost like a gesture, tangibly felt, just as Blake’s Imagery and Symbols
poem ‘The Tiger’, in a very different way, transports the reader into a fearful
world of touch where he feels the sinewy power of a tiger.
Check Your Progress 2
i) What are the characteristics of good diction?
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(Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.)

4.6 METRICAL STRUCTURES

4.6.1 Rhythm
While both poetry and prose call for an organization of thoughts, diction, mood,
emotions and tone, we find that this is more highly controlled in poetry. The use
of language in poetry involves putting sounds together to make a suggestive
sense. In prose, the sounds of words do not matter as much as their meanings.
That is why in prose a rhythm seems to occur almost like an accident. Moreover,
prose does not offer any measuring rod for its rhythmic units, if any. If the smooth
flow of well-written prose is comparable to easy walking, poetry can be compared
to marching to a set beat.
Poetry is undoubtedly a gift that could be cultivated. It calls for a certain training
and constant application as much as music and dancing do. For poetry, one needs
to train and sensitize one’s ears to the natural beat and resonance of a language
⎯ any language⎯ the natural rise and fall in human speech, the tonal nuances
that human emotions bring about. One has to acquire also a certain way of
perceiving or have the ability to perceive an otherwise mundane-looking reality
around us through images apparently diffuse and elusive, and, therefore, beyond
our control. Poetry helps to sharpen these impressions through various means,
including rhythm. Let’s first consider some of the elementary measures employed
with skill by poets to bring about the rhythmic movement that is so pleasurable
in poetry.
Although the term ‘rhythm’ is often quite loosely used in poetry, it presupposes
recurrence and regularity. Just as we tend to take the life around us for granted,
so also we tend to take for granted the dormant rhythms in language, and the beat
that is exclusive to that language. It is all there for us to grasp, but what happens
is that in our ordinary, day-to-day life, we are so used to making a functional use
of language that we look for such information from any kind of written discourse.
Prose discourse, naturally, offers a hardened kind of language while poetry takes
us away from our mechanical responses and removes the stale crust to establish
fresh connections between sound and meaning. In addition to this, poetry offers
a new experience, even discovery, if you will, and all this with a distinct auditory
pleasure difficult to ignore. The pleasure comes, too, from having participated
and shared with the poet the intended rhythm of the poem; ‘intended’, because 103
Modes of Creative Writing rhythm is a consciously, carefully undertaken selection of sounds calling for
great discipline on the part of the poet. Rhythm is of two kinds⎯rising rhythm
and falling rhythm.

4.6.2 Meter
Rhythmic patterns make a poem move onward and it is the function of meter to
effect this rhythm. As meter occurs in the course of our reading or reciting, let’s
call it an ‘event’. However, this even, by itself, may not register in our minds.
Only a repeated succession of these stimuli, like repeated pulses of energy, will
help us discern a regular rhythm.
Once it is established, it builds up a momentum of its own and the verse is impelled
onward by the force of this rhythm. A rhythm in this way creates an expectancy,
a metrical expectancy to be precise, and you gradually grow accustomed to the
syllabic runs and pauses and find yourself actively participating in the rhythmic
pattern of the poem. You also begin to recognize the rhythm as something that
contributes a tangible ‘body’ and ‘form’ to an otherwise abstract looking poem.
If verse is said to march, it must be marching with a measured or measurable
stride which, in prosody, is called ‘the foot’. Before we learn to measure the
foot, we need to distinguish the syllable which is the smallest unit of language.
Each syllable corresponds to a chest pulse which may be either weak or strong.
The relative strength of the chest pulse is responsible for the stressed and
unstressed syllables.
Four kinds of meter
These are the commonest metres in English verse. The analysis of metrical
patterns, is known as scansion. The fundamental unit, that is the foot, is composed
of one accented syllable in combination with (usually)one (or more) unaccented
syllables. A typical example in English verse would be: ‘Is this/the face/that
launched/a thous/sand ships?’ This particular line is in iambic pentameter because
it is composed of five iambic feet, each iamb being a metrical foot consisting of
an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable.
Other types of feet are:
Anapaest, which is composed of two unaccented syllables followed by an
accented syllable
The word, anapaest, itself is used to give the impression of swiftness, and even
of action as in the following line:
‘With a leap/and a bound/the swift/anapaests throng’ (Coleridge)
Trochee, which has one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable
as in hardly Dactyl which has one accented syllable followed by two unaccented
syllables, as in merrily.

4.7 INNOVATIONS
In the 20th and 21st centuries there has been a great deal of experimentation in
104 poetry as well as in music and in the other arts. It is a reflection of the revolutionary
discoveries and new ways of thinking and looking at our world. From Freud’s Imagery and Symbols

and Jung’s discoveries, scientific discoveries and explorations of the most startling
kind, technological innovations that changed the dimensions and possibilities of
our physical universe, the impinging of Hindu and Buddhist thought and
consciousness, the sense of doom created by the threat of nuclear war, experienced
in limited but horrifying form by the inhabitants of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the
feminist revolution⎯all these have been unprecedented developments in our
time. These have had the effect of making artists and writers seek new forms,
new ways of stimulating their vision and the fragmentation to which they have
been subjected by them. They have advocated the use of ‘the subjective image’
(an image drawn from the unconscious which defies logic). In painting, the
work of Picasso spelt a new way of seeing things⎯shape, form, light, objects,
figures ⎯ that led to a new kind of expression. Cubism, and later Surrealism
(whose most influential exponent was Salvador Dali), also had an enormous
influence on literature.
One of the first expressions of this new, ‘liberated’ way of seeing was the tendency
to reject traditional, classical verse forms and metrical patterns. Poets began to
write Free Verse. They have now come to rely on ‘natural speech rhythms, of
stressed and unstressed syllables’, instead of any regular meter or line-length.
Along with Free Verse, many other experiments were attempted. The poets have
even stopped using formal punctuation and capital letters at the beginning of a
line or a new verse paragraph. One of the poets who became famous for this
kind of writing was the American poet, E.E. Cummings, who always signed
himself e..e cummings. He died in 1962, but his influence has been considerable.
Consider the following lines:
My father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am; through have to give….
Even their grammar and sentence-construction seem strange. Yet, somehow, we
understand the poet’s meaning. He makes us share his fresh, ecstatic, lyrical,
song-like language. Cummmings and some other poets feel that punctuation and
capital letters give only formal importance to a line or a word.
An Indian poet who drops formal punctuation, so as to reinforce the hypnotic
and incantary quality of his experience and expression, is Arun Kolatkar, who
writes in both Marathi and English. In a poem called ‘The Boatride’, he makes
us see the smallest details with heightened perception, and creates a hypnotic
quality in which the seer sees more rather than less. Consider the following
lines:
two sisters
that came
last
when the boat
nearly started
seated side
by side
athwart 105
Modes of Creative Writing on a plank
have not
spoken
hands in lap
they have
been looking
past the boatman’s
profile.
splicing
the wrinkles
of his saline
face
and loose ends
of the sea.
You would have here noticed the absence of punctuation, capital letters, rhyme
schemes, etc. Kolatkar avoids them to express his own inner compulsions and
his unique vision, which is surrealistic⎯ a term signifying an attempt in art and
literature ‘to express the workings of the unconscious mind’ and in which
imagination and reality are fused, in which contradictions in logic are acceptable
to the imagination, ordinary concepts of time and space do not operate, and
everything is seen with an innocent eye. This kind of innovativeness which
springs from inner need is genuine. It is not an attempt to attract attention or be
different, but is a genuine way of seeing, feeling and being different.
Poems now simultaneously disclose and conceal their meanings. Some poets
have experimented with ‘the decomposition or breaking up of language, the
dismantling of normal syntax and word usage, so as to create a new language
field’. In a way, you may say that life is like this, with all sorts of different things
going on at the same time, and coming together, or separating.

4.8 SUMMING UP
In this Unit we’ve spoken about the importance of using symbols and images to
enhance the poetic effect. We’ve also spoken about metrical structures and how
innovations in poetry are experimenting with form and content of poetry.

4.9 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
i) The images are often conveyed by symbols, similes and metaphors which
have the effect of enlarging their meaning and significance.
Check Your Progress 2
i) Diction is personal, therefore, it varies from person to person. But good
diction implies appropriateness and the avoidance of clichés and archaisms.
106 It also uses metaphors and symbols for effective poetry writing.