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His early poetry has close affinities with the work of T.S. Eliot,
W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Rainer Maria Rilke. His poetry
renders contemporary themes of alienation, spiritual emptiness,
isolation and fragmentation with humor, compassion and irony. He
draws his images from the cities he has known intimately, Bombay
and London. He is a path-breaker in the use of modern speech in
the use of modern speech inflections within the framework of
formal verse patterning.
Eliot is not the only influence. Ezekiel had read Auden and the
other 30’s poets. Some of his poems were offered as social
criticism. Many of them were formally structured with rhyme and
stanzaic schemes. But the poems are a product of a highly
intellectualized metropolitan mind, exercises in cerebration and
arid word arrangements. Occasionally we notice flashes of
modernist irreverence in the same collection: he introduces the
modern idioms, the Americanisms of the beat generation. These
were the new found liberties.
His earlier poems are mostly expressions of his lonely state, his
separateness for his environment, his alienation- real or affected.
But later he threw himself into whatever is around him, Bombay,
India, as evidenced by the appearance of many India poems such
as “In India,” “Poet, Lover, and Bird Watcher.” A member of the
Jewish Bene-Israeli community- a marginal section of the Indian
population, and the son of a secular, rationalist father, Ezekiel
developed a unique ‘Indian-yet-outsider’ voice.
“Night of the Scorpion” and “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.”
are two of Ezekiel’s best-known Indian poems, the latter being in
Indian English. The Indian English poems are clearly entertaining
and meant to be funny. But once we accept the legitimacy of the
Pidgin English, all the fun seems to disappear. What remains
perhaps is the spontaneous good feeling that the speaker of the
dramatic monologue conveys. But on closer scrutiny we notice that
the virtues for which “Miss Pushpa” is being extolled spring from
the speaker’s selfishness, with occasional unintentional double
entendres. In trying to speak about Miss Pushpa the speaker
reveals more about himself than about her is as common in a
dramatic monologue. The Indian custom of addressing a woman
colleague with the honorific “sister” and such other small
courtesies, reveal the human face of India, warts and all.
CONCLUSION
Hence a comment like R. Parthasarthy’s in Ten Twentieth-Century
Indian Poets, “An important characteristic of Indian verse in
English is that it is Indian in sensibility and content, and English
in language. It is rooted in and stems from the Indian
environment, and reflects its mores, often ironically is something
you can grasp immediately. Ezekiel, from being an Indian-born
poet writing in English has achieved a stature by creating a body
of thought and writing combining the universal, global and home
ground with an élan that justifies his own stand that, “Poetry
translated into English from the modern Indian language does not
constitute English poetry written by Indians.”