Sarang Bhand
I would like to humbly disagree with the idea of a person/poet and poem being separate in the first place. Borrowing an analogy from Vedanta’s teaching of ancient seers, I would like to state that ‘As one cannot separate clay from the earthen pot, one cannot separate a poem from the person/poet.’
A person is the sum total of their ego which is limited to their experiences in life. It is these experiences of life that nourish thoughts and these thoughts in turn act as the catalyst that germinates a poem. Whether it is melancholy or joy, the degree of it is unique to the person experiencing these and the person/poet expresses these emotions in their unique voice in the form of a poem.
Maybe there is an element of commonality in the themes of experiences experienced by different persons and there is a commonality of emotions that we all experience as humans. Maybe that’s why we perceive a piece of poetry to transcend beyond the person/poet when it gets related by others. But the language used, the selection of words to craft that poem, and the intended meaning conceived within the poem still belongs to the person/poet who chose to express them under specific circumstances of their life experiences. And thus, in my humble opinion, a poem cannot be separated from the person who crafted it. A person/poet and the poem are inseparable as fire & heat. A poem cannot begin where the person ends.
It was an interesting prompt and almost instinctively I chose to respond on how I felt about the statement. I wanted to have an objective approach to support my instinct and thus I attempted to deduce the relation between a person/poet and their poetry. Keeping it brief was a bit challenging but then brevity is the sharpest arrow in a poet’s quiver.
Sarang Bhand is an entrepreneur working in the clean-tech space. When he is not troubleshooting projects, he likes to explore writing, photography & painting. See his bio here and writings here.
Briefly Write 