Confessional Mode in Poetry of Kamala Das Essay Example For Students

Confessional Mode in Poetry of Kamala Das Essay Confessional mode of writing has its virtual rolling In the melds In America. It Is hybrid mode of poetry which means objective, analytical or even clinical observation of incidents from ones own life. Confessional poems are intensely personal and highly subjective. There is no persona in the poems. l in the poems is the poet and nobody else. The themes are nakedly embarrassing and focus too exclusively upon the pain, anguish and ugliness of life at the expense of its pleasure and beauty. Confessional poets did not follow any tradition nor respected any conventions. They wanted to be unique and not a part of the conventional social set up. This conflict with society leads them to Introspection. In the course, comes a breaking point when they could not compromise with themselves. They lose themselves helplessly in the battle and start searching for the lost self. This conflict has given birth to a number of beautiful poems. The sensitive poem cannot take failure for granted. At this Juncture, life becomes unbearable and the call of death becomes irresistible. They are more than convinced that death can offer them more solace than life. Born on March 31, 1934 Kamala Dads was major Indian English poet and at the same time a leading Malaysia author from Kraal, India. At the age of 15 she got married to bank officer Madhya Dads, who encouraged her writing interests, and she started writing and publishing both in English and Malaysia. She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair family having royal ancestry but she embraced Islam in 1999 at age of 65 and assumed the name Kamala Surreys. On 31 May 2009, gagged, she died at a hospital in Pun, but has earned considerable respect In recent years. The confessional poet does not accept restrictions on subject matter, though they re usually personal. He may write as freely about his hernia as about his sweet heart. Anything within his private experience may form his theme. He takes the help of an open language for an uninhibited expression of his emotions, and by open language is meant free verse or blank verse, as opposed to rhymed verse. It does not suggest, however, that the confessional poets are wild in their emotional outbursts. Personal failure as well as mental illness Is his favorite theme. Keeping in mind the above specifications about confessional poetry and poets, It would be not wrong to hierarchies Kamala Dads as a confessional poet in the true sense of the term. She is the most prominent confessional Indian English poet of our time. In the confessional poets, the subjective element has become the chief characteristic of their poetry, and Kamala Dads is no exception. Her poetry has a strong note of subjectivism. B. K Dads says that Like Sylvia Plate, Kamala Dads interests In the various places is very much personal and subjective. Most of her poems In the collections Summer In Calcutta, The Descendants and The Old Playhouse and other poems are confessional In tone ND subjective state (Comparative Literature 109). She writes in the mode and pattern of several new American poets like Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plate, W. D Snodgrass, John Ferryman and Theodore Rotten. She has chosen poetry as her genre to express her intense feeling, as it gives her a lot of scope. She started writing her life story to distract her mind and to recover herself from Illness. Confessional confession; by peeling off layers of pretence they try to regain lost values. Dads urge to peel the layers of herself to reveal the terrors, pain, miseries, frustrations and exactions is obvious here. She realizes that an understanding of the true self is possible only by doing away with the pretensions and superficiality that human beings are usually surrounded by. Whatever she has disclosed about herself does not carry any sense of guilt or shame. Disclosure makes her feel easy. She doesnt like to hide anything. She would like to disclose all her secret thoughts and feelings. She shares everything with her readers, good and bad, about her life with all the secrets that should not be openly expressed in her society. She chooses to confess everything by writing rather than going to a priest. She has to create a place for herself in a public world, in her home and even in her own bedroom. Kamala Dads shocking confession about the theme of love has startled equally the critics and the laymen. Some of her confessions about various love episodes have shocked the readers. It is stranger because such kind of poetry is coming from a traditional Indian woman who is mostly considered to be shy, silent and introvert. Her search for independence in sex and other subjects is exceptional in the tradition of Indian rating in English whether written by women or men. Her confessional poetry is an attempt to end the war between passion and reason, flash and spirit, body and soul. Nostalgia for childhood is one of the characteristic qualities of confessional poetry. As confessional poet, Kamala Dads has drawn vivid pictures of their childhood in her poems. She can be termed as child prodigy. She was barely six, when she started writing her poetry. She wrote tragic poems about her dolls that lost their heads and limbs. Each of her poems about her dolls made her cry. Failure in love as a theme is ore powerful in the poems of confessional poets, than its consummation. She is unhappy about her marriage. She appeared to be a puppet, the strings of which being held firmly by her parent she wasnt given a free choice to select an ideal lover. Her preference was not considered by her parents. Dads expresses: l was burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long. Therefore with the blessing of all, our marriage was fixed. (My Story 82) Kamala Dads has thus, a strong grievance against her husbands infidelity and lust. He knows only he physical kind of love, without trying to make any emotional and spiritual contact with her. She mentions in My Story Before I left for Calcutta, my relative (her future husband) pushed me into a dark corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth. Advice To My Son by Peter Meinke EssayThe reasons she gives for not getting a divorce are noteworthy. Dads observes: My parents and other relatives were obsessed with public opinion and bothered excessively with our society reaction to any action of an individual. A broken marriage was as distasteful, as horrifying as an attack of leprosy. If I had at that time listened to the estates of my conscience and had left my husband, I would have found it impossible to marry me, for I was not conspicuously pretty and besides there was the two-year- old who would have been to the new husband an encumbrance. My Story 102) She does not want to be domesticated because her real self will be vanished. Thus dissatisfied in married life, the woman is unconsciously drawn towards illicit relationship in search of pure and true love. The poem Glass states clearly that finding no emotional identity or satisfaction with her husband, she is driven into others arms: I entire others Lives, and Make of eve ry trap of lust A temporary home (Dads) Behind the back of her husband, Dads discovers her own ways of finding love. She goes to her secret rendezvous and tries to find love outside marriage. Her pursuit of love has driven her to the doors of strangers to receive love at least in the form of a tip. In My Grandmothers House, the following lines click: . I who have lost Receive love, at least in small change? (Dads) Consequently, her failure pure love degenerates into unwanted lust and her emotional urges remain unfulfilled. Every time she finds face of repulsion and horror. Each relationship only intensifies her disappointment faced with the sense of absolute frustration and loneliness. Her poetry is all about herself, about her desires for love, her emotional involvement and her failure to achieve such a relationship. Like a confessional poet she has written poems on decay, disease and death. At various occasions, death seems an easy escape for Kamala Dads from the loneliness of life. O sea, I am fed up I went to be simple I want to be loved And If love is not to be had, I want to be dead, Just dead. (The Suicide) She was haunted by he idea of suicide because death seems like a mystical experience which she finds desirable because life is not going to be made new. She considers death a reward for all her pains in surviving upon the earth. A. N Divvied says In An Introduction she mentions that she will have no escape from her pitiless husband and that she will find her rest, her sleep, her peace, and even her death only in his arms. (Kamala Dads and her Poetry 47) Dads autobiography gives ample evidence to her idea of death by water, drowning oneself in the sea. The relevant passage reads thus; Often I have eyed with the idea of drowning myself to be rid of my loneliness which is not unique in any way, but is natural to all. I have wanted to find rest in the sea and an escape from involvements. My Story 210) Most of her poetry concerns itself with the poets intensely felt need for declaring her autobiography to the world. Her poetry is cries- crossed by soul searching, self analysis, introspection and looking deep into oneself, which is why she is called one of the best Indian English woman poets of modern times. Her poetry in itself was reflection of her life, the way she saw it and experienced it. The confessional poems depend upon the honesty of the writer and Kamala Dads has Justified it by being self in her poetic works. She was fascinated by love and to her it meant being honest. Kamala Dads analyses man-woman relationship from an anti-romantic angle and protest against womanhood suppressed by ethics and taboos. As she has mentioned in almost all poems her husbands contact with her was usually cruel and brutal. She grew revengeful towards him and reacted in a non-traditional fashion in love-making. She is the voice of feminism. Her voice is the voice of feminism. Kamala Dads poems voice not only her own resentment against her husband but, by implication, the resentment of other women who find themselves in a similar predicament. Each fragment of her poetry is grasped with the thought of femininity. She stands as the revolt against male dominance over female. She revolutionizes the demands, the rights, advantages and the privileges that a woman must get but is deprived due to the over powering activities of men and their dominance over female. Viewed dispassionately we might in conclusion state that, confessional poetry is a monopolistic field for poetry by women and such a mere requires passion to liberate oneself from the complexity of life and male domination towards a life of hope, liberty and meaning. Kamala Dads was hated and criticized by many people for doing an exceptional thing for an Indian woman, she becomes very successful. She becomes a mirror for the other silenced women. All in all, Kamala Dads is one of the pioneering post-independence Indian English poets to have contributed immensely to the growth and development of modern Indian English poetry. She is one of the modernist writers to assert her femininity as a human in Indian literature; she has been something of a cult figure in her home state ND a source of great inspiration and emulsion for women with literary aspiration. To conclude, Kamala Dads is a typical confessional poet who pours her heart into her poetry which is largely subjective and autobiographical, anguished and tortured, letting us peep into her sufferings and tortured psyche. There is strong autobiographical touch in it, which makes Mrs.. Dads a confessional poet of the first order. Kamala Dads may or may not be serious about womens emancipation from male domination, but as a poet she is seriously and creatively concerned with her own identity as a woman.