I don’t know that who will receive this letter. So, this makes a little hard or strange.

I am
writing letters from last 5 years regularly but never wrote one to a stranger so I don’t know
what to write. so, do you read poems? I hope you do, because I am going to talk about that.
Many times, in a day I feel like there is only one thing sane on this earth and that is poetry, if
poetry vanishes from this planet than without any second thought I will consider this world
insane or not fit to live. One can argue with me that it is not true and there are plenty of other
things to live for, and I agree that there are plenty of other things. But I believe that it is
poetry that bring those other things closer to us. I mean how can one talk about nature
without talking about without the poems of Robert Frost and Rudyard Kipling. How can one
talk about romance and love without reciting poems of Keats or couplets of Ghalib. How can
one compliment his lover without using lines of Faiz (Teri aankhon ke siva is dunia me rakha
kya hai?) I think no one ever will be able to compliment another human in better form than
this.
I like poetry but not every poetry, I believe in that kind of poetry which John keats advocated,
his view of poetry was that “poetry must come to you as leaves comes to the trees”. I never
found better definition for poetry than this. Every day we come across poems written for the
sake of writing, people sit down to write poems. There are online/offline classes for learning
how to write poetry. I don’t think it is something that you can learn, one can improve poetry
but there is only one way and that is reading more and more. Reading poetry can never be
enough. To write a single poem in urdu one must understand the growth from Mir , Ghalib,
Zauq to Faiz, Iqbal, Eliya, Parveen Shakir and downfall of urdu poetry after that. Same is the
case with every language.
In the Indian context I believe very few English poets were able to leave their mark. My
personal favourite are Walter Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Frost, Keats, wordsworth,
Bronte sisters, Jane austen. List is very long, cant name everyone.
I am sorry if my this letter does not make any sense. I hope we can continue this discussion
further. At the end I want to write sonnet 18 of Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal an breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
I am reading this poem now every day. I believe if William Shakespeare was an Indian he
would have never compared this person to a summer’s day lol . What do you think?
Goodbye and take care of yourself and your family and friends during this pandemic.
Regards-
Sanjay Poswal.