Discuss Kamala Das as a confessional poet.

Write a short essay on Kamala Das’s confessional poetry.

Ans.

Kamala Das has been called a poet in the confessional mode. The confessional poets deal in their poetry with personal emotional experiences which are generally taboo. There is ruthless self analysis and a tone of utter sincerity. The facts are not always true, but there is no deviation at all from emotional truth. What a confessional poet gives us is the psychological equivalent for his or her mental state and it is such ‘psychological equivalent for his or her mental state, and it is such ‘psychological equivalents’ that we always get in the poetry of Kamala Das, and in his respect she is to be compared to such confessional poets as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Roethke, Berryman, Judith Wright and others.

E.V. Ramakrishnan rightly stresses that, in her poetry, Kamala has always dealt with private humiliations and sufferings which are the stock themes of confessional poetry. The crucial factor in all confessional poetry is a matter of tone. The free verse of Kamala Das, by carefully avoiding all cliches of expression, has perfected a way of treating the most intimate experience without ever being sentimental or having any trace of pathos. Indian critics have found in her poems the voice of the new liberated Indian women without realizing that she never speaks on behalf of anybody but herself, Jet alone any class or section of Indian society. Her frank admissions and bold treatment of private life have nothing exceptional about them and are perfectly in keeping with the natures and themes of the confessional poets.

Kamala Das is concerned with herself as victim. Sexual humiliation becomes a central experience in her autobiography “My Story” in which she says, “In the orbit of illicit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence, “The Old Playhouse” is a variation on the same theme: “you dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed my poor lust with your bitter sweet juices.” All her quests for love end in disasters of lust. The sterility and the vacant essays that accompany “The Dance of the Eunuchs” correspond to her own feeling of persecution and inadequacy which live in her as a continuous state of personal crisis. The image of the body as a prison which recurs in her poems may be traced to this deep existential anxiety that pervades all confessional poetry.

Confessional poetry is a struggle to relate the private experience with the outer world and it is such a struggle which finds expression in the poems of Kamala Das from a very early stage. In “An Introduction” she struggles to keep her identity against “The Categorizers who ask her to ‘Fit in’. Having refused to chose a name and a role she feels it necessary to define her identity.

I am saint, I am the beloved and the

Betrayed. I have no joys

Which are not yours, no

Ache which are not yours, no. I too call!

Myself I ……………..

The painful assertion, “1 too call myself I”, comes from the predicament of the confessional poet. Her experiences are common and ordinary in fact them, she insists, is separate and unique. This, to her, is the only way to retain her sense of personal worth in the world of categorizers; she sees the outer world as hostile to the world of the self.

This hostility is given full treatment in her “The Suicide” which, with its title, poetic mood, and theme, carries the most vital elements of confessional poetry. Here the conflict is between the world as it is and the personal experience of the poet given in terms of the symbols of the body and the soul. The poem is a monologue addressed to the sea; since the poet cannot disinherit either the body or the soul and live with one of them, the, climax of the poem is reached in the idea of suicide where the agency which can take away one of them is the sea, an old symbol of timelessness.

To Kamala Das, death has none of the charms of a mystic experience. She finds death desirable because, for her life is not going to be redeemed, or made new. The escapes she seeks in physical love are also suicides in the sense that, they can affect a temporary merging of the dualities within oneself.

Confessional poets court death and disintegration, so that a high level of perception may be possible. They long for death and disintegration as well as for psychic wholeness and insights. This tension between two opposites is reflected in the constantly shifting moods of confessional poetry. The moods of a confessional poet are diverse and constantly shifting. One of the longer poems of Kamala Das’s, composition, embraces such diverse mood as passionate attachment, agonizing guilt, nauseating disgust and inhuman bitterness. While celebrating her most sublime experiences she becomes aware of the-most mundane as its counterpart. She does not attempt to idealize or glorify any part of the self. The same strategy may be noted in “Blood”, where self-questionings and self-assertions intermingle to form the dominant confessional tone. Images of deep involvement in the physical act of love are followed by those of physical rotting, disgust, and sickness in poems like “The Old Playhouse”, “in Love” and “Gino”. An extreme point is reached in “Loud Posters” where she distrusts the very medium of poetry and laments its artificiality.

A poet who expresses herself in this way has nothing to learn either at the level of craftsmanship or in terms of ideas from others. Such poetry over flows from a bursting experience and the poet’s main concern is to achieve a new objective correlative which is not possible other wise or through a sensibility that engages traditional rhetoric for its expression.

Confessional poetry is all autobiographical, it is rooted in the personal experiences of the poetess. T.S. Eliot stressed the impersonality of poetry. But confessional poetry is intensely personal. However, a great confessional poet, like Kamala Das, achieves impersonality of poetry. But confessional poetry is intensely personal. However, a great confessional poet, like Kamala Das, achieves impersonality in another way. From the personal and particular, she rises to the general and the universal; she transforms her intense personal experience into a general truth. Thus Kamala Das is both personal and impersonal.