Inculcating a Poetic Kind of Sensibility through Curriculum in
the Wake of Increasing Terrorism and War Technology
Hasanuzzaman Biswas
Research scholar
Department of Humanities & social sciences
IIT Patna
India
Abstract
In the paper under consideration I will try to speak of the need to investigate into existing
education system and sociology with a view to inculcating a poetic kind of sensibility through
curriculum in English language and literature in the wake of increasing intolerance, terrorism
and war technology worldwide. While clarifying my notion of poetic sensibility, I will
highlight the background of the present scenario of high intolerance and increasing terrorism
to foreground my sense of the earnest need to inculcate poetic sensibility through a
compulsory kind of curriculum in English language and literature. To explicate my position
in this situation I will cite some poetic pieces loaded with a heavy sense of apathy towards
such heinous activities like war and terrorist attacks for the sake of human sensibility, and not
just safety or security, which invites another conflict between self and the other.
Key words: War, Terrorism, Intolerance, Poetic Sensibility, Curriculum, Literature.
Why haven’t you left the city?
Isn’t nuclear war a real possibility?
Isn’t Delhi a prime target?
These are some of the remarkable questions asked by certain western journalists to Mrs.
Arundhati Roy (writer of the Man Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things) in
the wake of nuclear test conducted both by India and Pakistan in 1998. Thanks to “The
Theory of Deterrence” that “cornered the credit for having prevented the Cold War from
turning into the Third World War.” But the assumption of the theory that what deters ( The
fear of annihilation) one will deter one’s enemy has failed in many of the recent cases of
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exceeding violence, cruelty and brutality caused by meaningless dance of death and butchery
of war and terrorist activities. Recently I was watching the documentary about the bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of WTO. We have
already witnessed the inhuman operation run on Palestinian Gaza by Israel. The recent
terrorist attacks in Mumbai or Paris are some of the most condemned ones in human history.
After the event of 9/11, the whole western ideology has undergone a sea change and the
Theory of Deterrence has proven an ultimate failure as in the case of the “suicide bomber
psyche” of the pilots who attacked the World Trade Centre (11 Sept. 2001 ). It is
undoubtedly hard for ordinary Americans to accept such a sudden tragedy in their lives. Yet
the event can be considered an augury of the Americans indifference to the Third World
countries who are an outcast in the New World Economic Order controlled by the American
Corporate Globalisation, a process or force, which Mrs. Roy, in her essay Power Politics,
personifies as a new kind of king:
Powerful, pitiless and armed to the teeth. He is the kind of king the world has never
known before. His realm is raw material, his conquest emerging market, his prayers
profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear. To even try and imagine him, to
hold the whole of him in your field of vision, is to situate yourself at the very edge of
sanity, to offer yourself up for ridicule.
The following is a list of countries that America had been at war with since the Second World
War (1939-45) : China( 1945-46, 1950-53 ), Korea ( 1950-53 ), Guatemala ( 1954, 1967-69 ),
Indonesia ( 1958), Cuba ( 1959-60 ), the Belgian Congo ( 1964 ), Peru ( 1965), Laos (196473 ), Vietnam ( 1961-73), Cambodia ( 1969-70 ), Grenada ( 1983 ), Libya (1986 ), El
Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99),Bosnia (1995), Sudan
(1998) and Yugoslavia (1999). And how can we delete Afghanistan from the list!
The operation by which America, now the most powerful country in the world, had been
bombing Afghanistan was initially called “Infinite Justice”, which is indeed a meaningless
term having nothing to do with legal procedure. This beastly revenge operation was later
named as “Enduring Freedom”, referring to its capacity to last or survive an ordeal. In an
ironical sense, “Enduring Freedom” only describes what the Afghanistan population are now
suffering. They are “enduring” what the White House and Pentagon called “Freedom”. Mrs.
Roy, in her essay “War Is Peace”, has explicated the injustice done by the White House to
Afghanistan:
Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by
religious Fundamentalists, private militia, people’s resistance movements—or
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whether it’s dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The
bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet
another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that
is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died
in New York and Washington.
Very recently the ugly western hypocrisy concerning the nuclear-weapon-deals with both
India and Pakistan has been exposed to the world. Yet Kashmir remains a rabbit that both
these countries pull out of their hats every time they need a rabbit. Unfortunately it has
become a radioactive rabbit now fanning the flames of communalism along the entire northeast of India, or for that matter in Assam, Tripura, Manipur, Jharkhand and so on. The newly
formed BJP Government at centre now tends to consider Kashmir a solution rather than a
problem while dealing with Pakistan. In such a scenario of appalling brutality all around the
world and rising communalism between Indian, Pakistan , Bangladesh, China and other
neighbouring countries of our motherland, the Third World War (see the pun referring to
the poor countries) is looming large with the paws and claws of radioactive nuclear weapons.
Within our own homeland the seed of intolerance and communal disharmony is threatening
to destroy our Indian Identity and civilisation from human history very easily.
Under such circumstances, we are at a loss as to what to do, and it’s very natural to seek
refuse in the secure world of poetry that explains truth and reality in the words of love and
beauty. The nationalistic or religious ideologies have failed to solve several terroristic or
border conflicts. We can take a turn towards a humanistic sensibility to be inculcated
through a compulsory kind of curriculum worldwide that may incorporate such poetic
pieces of immense apathy toward such heinous activities. By such humanistic or poetic
sensibility, I mean a certain quality of mind which will help us to understand the present
human predicament very clearly. This quality of mind is very important to understand our
fellow human beings in different situations of complication, in which human language
becomes just a dangerously deceitful technology incompetent to express our minds and
feelings. So this quality of mind which I consider to be a poetic kind of sensibility may well
be related to the famous American sociologist C W Mills’ notion of sociological imagination
in his preface part titled as The Promise to his epic book The Sociological Imagination
(1959). Mills talks about that quality of our mind to be our sociological imagination which
will help us to perceive how our personal lives are actually trapped into the structure of social
problems. Again the kind of poetic sensibility I am talking about here can remind you of
Keats’ concept of Negative Capability, a quality of mind that is earnestly needed at the
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present situation to remain content with the mysteries, uncertainties and dualities or
dilemmas of human life where we always remain far away from truths and realities. Some
poetic extracts are highlighted hereunder to explicate the case. Shakespeare (1564-1616) long
ago spoke of the immortalising power of art to perpetuate love and beauty against
“Devouring Time” and devastating war:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Tennyson (1809-92) formulated the best Victorian compromise for the conflict between
science and religion in his poem Ulysses (1842), which embodies the speaker as the modern
aspirator for knowledge and power. But Ulysses’ attitude in this poem contrasts sharply with
his mariners in the Lotos Eaters (1832), where the mariners are all for idleness and rest and
they find no meaning in war and endless struggle of life in view of death that closes all:
Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labor be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence—ripen, fall, and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
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All that was failed about “the eternal note of sadness” in view of war between England and
France was brought in its greatest perfection in the most philosophical lyric by Matthew
Arnold (1822-88), that is his Dover Beach (1867). The poet contemplates on listening to the
spray and roar of pebbles sucked in by the waves and feels the melancholy and misery of
human kind suffering from the conflict between faith and doubt and enduring the battles and
struggles of life:
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century there flourished a group of poets who wrote
poetry about war either realistically from their first hand experiences as soldiers or
romantically from their ideals of war as something glorifying. The romantic war poets
include Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Julian Grenfell (1888-1915), Edmund Blunden and
so on. The realistic war poets of this era are specifically remarkable in the history of English
poetry. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Isaac Rosenberg
(1890-1918) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917) are some of the most accomplished war
poets of this generation.
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The Owl by Edward Thomas speaks about the miserable conditions of the soldiers and the
poor and the poet feels pity when he listens to the melancholy cry of the bird from inside the
inn, where he is provided with food and shelter:
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Wilfred Owen rejected the romantic notion of war when he says in the preface to his Poems
(1920):
Above all, I am not concerned with poetry.
My subject is war and the pity of war,
The poetry is in the pity.
In Strange Meeting, Owen describes two soldiers, who have killed each other, meeting and
recognising “the pity of war”:
“Strange, friend," I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
“None," said the other, “Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
After joining the army, Owen was killed on Nov 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice, and
nowhere the butchery of battlefield is described well than in the concluding lines of the
poem:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
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Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .”
Sassoon survived the First World War to write his prose Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man
(1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officers (1930). In the poem The Hero, Sassoon exposes
the hypocrisy that surrounds war through the description of the colonel to the old lady about
the death of the coward soldiers at the wicked corner in the battlefield.
Then the generation of inter-war poets emerged, who wrote their poetry after the World
War I and before the World War II. This group includes poets like Edith Sitwell, Ezra
Pound, T S Eliot and others. Modern poetry attained its peak in the hands of Eliot (18881965), whose The Waste Land (1922) viewed the post-war disruption of the European
civilization. Some find a sense of hope and Christian reconciliation in the poem. But this is
not the main impression gathered from this “heap of broken images”; rather it shows the
bare emptiness life without belief. During this period, as the value for human person fostered
by Christianity and liberal humanism weakened, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, the fathers of
modern atheism, were read. Experimentation with the post-war disillusionment and trauma
is a common feature of this era and modernism sought to single out a common formula for
this fragmentation and disillusionment.
Eliot had many imitators but no direct successors. W H Auden (1907-73) headed the socalled “Auden group” or the Radical poets of the 1930s. This group included Auden’s
Oxford friends like Stephen Spender (1909-98), Cecil Day Lewis (1904-72) and Louis
MacNeice (1907-63). Guilty of privilege, the idea of equality, even of revolution, had an
appeal to this generation brought up under the threats of German Nazi ideology under Hitler
or Italian Fascism under Mussolini, this group engage themselves to the political
commitment of communist worldviews. Auden’s Shield of Achilles brilliantly depicts the
barrenness of the battlefield and the hidden intention of the war-mongers:
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
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Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
The Second World War was remembered in fiction rather than in poetry, as in the case of
Napoleonic wars. It was because of the German bombing which meant that the “home front”
was the part of the battle zone. The front was the scene of two memorable war poems:
Naming of Parts by Henry Read, which is partly a parody of Auden’s
1.
Spain.
2.
In Westminster Abbey” by John Betjaman.
Besides, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas also wrote fine war poems. Literature
at this time played a very crucial role in the war activities through such eloquent speeches as
by Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who encouraged the Britons on 18 June, 1940 to “their
finest hour”:
I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the
survival
of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the
long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the
enemy must very soon be turned
upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break
us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and
the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then
the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new dark
age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted
science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if
the British empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say,
“This was their finest hour”.
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According to many critics, Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote the animal poems like Hawk in the
Rain (1957) and Hawk Roosting (1960) in order to denounce the dictatorship of the Nazi
Government in Germany or Fascism in Italy. The dictator “hawk” in Hawk Roosting aspires
to say ; “I kill where I please because it is all mine.”
Both the First and Second World Wars were nuclear wars and the nuclear bombs are now
constantly fanning the hidden flames of the Third World War (see the pun ),which is just
knocking at our doors. These nuclear weapons are the most evil of all the human creations.
This will not only destroy the human civilization in a few seconds but also make the
elements of nature (earth, air, water and fire) turn against us as our worst enemy. The
world has never had to face such a global confusion. The only dream worth having at this
moment is “to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re
dead...”
Only a return to nature, love and beauty can provide us with the solace that we earnestly long
for at this moment. Such a solace is explicitly sought in Arnold’s eloquent but philosophic
lyric “Dover Beach”, which begins with nature at its calm and quiet peace:
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
The Australian poet Judith Wright has also given an eloquent expression to the feelings of a
soldier-lover while he departs from his beloved in the wake of World War II in The
Company of Lovers:
We meet and part now over all the world;
we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,
remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely.
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Death marshalls up his armies round us now.
Their footsteps crowd too near.
Lock your warm hand above the chilling heart
and for a time I live without my fear.
Grope in the night to find me and embrace,
for the dark preludes of the drums begin,
and round us round the company of lovers,
death draws his cordons in.
But the actual and ultimate solution comes from faithfulness, sincerity and commitment
among the lovers, as in the final verse-paragraph of the poem :
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Thus, to sum up, we can say that it is only through faithful and reciprocal love and
commitment among us and the pursuits of simplicity and beauty to be inculcated through a
curriculum in English language and literature that we can survive the horrors of the wars and
terrorism that are looming large before us. It is further explicated by Mrs. Arundhati Roy
herself in her The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001):
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to
the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the
saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or
complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To
try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
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Works cited:
 Roy, Arundhati. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. New Delhi, Pearson, 2013.
 Roy, Arundhati. Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, New Delhi,
Penguin, 2013.
 Ousby, Ian. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, Hertfordshire,
CUP,1992.
 Palgrave, F. T. The Golden Treasury. New Delhi, Rupa Classics, 2006.
 Alexander, M. A History of English Literature. New York, Palgrave Macmillan,
2011.
 Evans, Ifor. A Short History of English Literature. New York, Penguin, 1990.
 Drabble, M. And Stringer, J. The Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
New York, Oxford, 2007.
 Evans, G. B. The Sonnets (The New Cambridge Shakespeare). New Delhi, Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
 Weeks, A.R (Ed.). The Odes of John Keats. Kolkata, Books Way, 2010.
 Lucas, F.L. Ten Victorian Poets. Kolkata, Books Way, 2010.
 Wilson, F.P. Elizabethan & Jacobean. Kolkata, Books Way, 2010.
 Dobree, Bonamy. The Lamp & the Lute. Kolkata, Books Way, 2010.
 Eagleton, Terry. The Meaning of Life: A very Short Introduction. New York, OUP,
2008.
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