Quantcast
Channel: Poetry | The Guardian
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘All non-western literature is wilfully underrated’

0
0

The author on the importance of DH Lawrence, how Alice Munro inspired him, and early memories of reading Ladybird books in Bombay

The book I am currently reading
Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays. Her insights, though recorded during times so different from our era of unrepentant celebration and moral vigilantism, feel unsparingly true, and are expressed with musicality. To choose one at random: “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it upraised. Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene.” For the present age, we should add “awards” to “commendations”.

The book that changed my life
Since life is change, how to claim that it changes at one moment and not another? All the “life-changing” books I read as a teenager I have forgotten. Books advertised as “life-changing” I avoid as I would a new vitamin or holiday package. There are books, poems, and essays that have opened my eyes though. DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers made me see that great themes are of secondary importance to the writer; what is of primary interest is the accident of existence. “Nothing is important but life,” he said in “Why the Novel Matters”, and Sons and Lovers is for me the first modern work that declares this unapologetically. The great critical essays in Tom Paulin’s Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation-State were published at a time when critical theory seemed to have invalidated an aesthetic response to writing. Paulin’s essays showed us with revelatory force how literary pleasure and political energy were enmeshed with each other. Finally, I have in mind Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on Bengali nursery rhymes, written in 1895, probably the first expression of modernism anywhere, in which he uses Bengali words for ‘stream of consciousness’ and argues that Bengali nursery rhymes accommodate random associations in a way that linear adult thinking doesn’t.

When I was 17 I thought Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was pretentious. At 24 I thought it astonishing

Continue reading...

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images