Nobody knows the whereabouts of a person who for the first time conceived of this bipolar division of poetry and prose. Nor are literary historians unanimous on the origin of poetic meters or the science of prosody. But man has continued to write both poetry and prose in due measures. The Greek dramas, Arabic Sab’ae Mu’allaqat, Persian Shahnamas and Mathnavis, Japanese Haikus, Shakespearian Plays and Urdu ghazal as they stand like the emerald hills in the city of art both inspire us and earn our respect and love on their own versatile merit. They continue to cast their splendor and never fail to mirror the socio cultural matrix in which these works of art were conceived. More importantly they continue to maintain their transpersonal and trans-historic character. Man has been assertive in one way or the other and has conquered nature both through science and art. Those realms where man failed to export his body, he exported his mind and this mental export always found its earliest expression in works of art. Nobody will maintain that the conquest of moon occurred on the basis of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” or Ibn-I-Arabi’s “Fatoohat-I-Makkiyah”, for both these works deal with celestial spheres. But we can discern the fact that both these works conceived artistically something that was going to be translated into reality by science and technology centuries later. Man is a creation and partakes God in his creative activity. This is what a leading Pakistani scholar Dr. Shahzad Qaisar describes as the metaphysical ontology of all art, poetry included. Thus, man writes, despite many of us know very well that we are suffering from “pseudo pregnancy of art”, but that doesn’t bow our courage –“the courage to be” and the courage to express this being in whatever way we can. Poetry is an opening of being into the infinite ocean of becoming and is one of the ways of overcoming our finitude imposed on us by our physicality. All poetry in its own frame of reference is great poetry, but seen from a universal frame, the poetry that “awakens the poet within us” is to be deemed as the greatest poetry. Any poetry that fossilizes thinking in a specific mould falls short of poetic caliber and falls down to the category of sermon and we need to beware that there is a possibility for sermon to be poetic but no possibility for poetry to be sermonic , for this process in its realization deprives poetry of its very essence. I maintain that if prose is actuality then poetry is possibility and any poetic attempt that fails to unveil further possibilities is incredulous and decays of its own, but great poetry (art in general) besides immortalizing itself confers immortality to the mind which conceived it first and makes an artist exclaim:-
“Sabbt ast bar jareeda-e-aalam dawaami ma”
Amir Suhail Wani is a freelance columnist with bachelors in Electrical Engineering and a student of comparative studies with special interests in Iqbaliyat & mystic thought. Besides being widely published in and outside state , the author is a guest columnist at Kashmir Pen.
