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PMS HENRY KISSINGER, CARE MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL, DLR

BOSTON MA

OUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU. AFFECTIONATELY

TED AND GRACE ANN KOPPEL

1734 EST

NNNN

W.U. 1201-SF (R5-69)

30 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, N.Y. 10112

Room 5600

247-3700

DEAR HENRY,

I am so hopeful that you have not already read this and will enjoy it.

With our very best wishes for a good and rapid recovery - but not any faster than the doctor orders

May & EdwardKNAPLY

book

"The Biography of Teddy Roosevelt"

*not of philosophy

The
University of Oklahoma

Department of English

Shiv K. Kumar, Ph.D (Cambridge)
FRSL

Distinguished Visiting Professor of
English

Dr Henry Kissinger
Massachusetts General Hospital,
Boston, Mass

February 24, 1982

Dear Dr Kissinger,

I wonder if you'd recall an Indian delegate to your Harvard International Seminar for the summer of 1953. I enclose an excerpt from CONTEMPORARY POETS which may furnish some information about what I have done since then.

I felt greatly concerned to read about
your illness in the papers, and I send you my very
best wishes for a speedy recovery. If I didn't write
you earlier it was to let you settle down to your nor-
mal routine - health and vigor.

May God bless you!

With every good wish,

[L.C]

The University of Oklahoma 760 Van Vleet Oval, Room 113 Norman, Oklahoma 73069

From: CONTEMPORARY POETS (St Martin's Press, New York, 1980)

CONTEMPORARY POETS

KUMAR

KUMAR, Shiv K(umar). Indian. Born in Lahore, Punjab, 16 August 1921. Educated at Forman Christian College, Panjab University, Lahore, 1941-43. M.A.; Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, 1953-56. Ph.D. 1956. Married Madhu Kumar in 1967; one son and one daughter. Lecturer. D.A.V. College, Lahore, 1945-47, and Hansraj College, Delhi, 1948-49; Programme Executive, All India Radio, Delhi, 1949; Senior Lecturer and Chairman of the Department of English. Government College, Chandigarh, Punjab, 1953-56; Reader in English. Panjab University, Hoshiarpur, 1956-59; Professor and Chairman of the Department of English. Osmania University, Hyderabad, 1959-76. Since 1976, Professor and Chairman of the Department of English, and Dean of the School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad. Visiting Professor, Elmira College, New York, 1965-67. Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, 1968, and University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, 1969; Cultural Award Visitor, Australia, Summer 1971; Visiting Professor, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, 1971-72. Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, 1972, and University of Kent, Canterbury, 1977-78. President, All India English Teachers Conference, 1975. Recipient: Smith-Mundt Fellowship, 1962. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1978.

Address: 2-F/Kakatiya Nagar, P.O. Jamia Osmania, Hyderabad 500 007, India.

Member Advisory Board (English), Indian National Academy of Letters, Juror, Neustadt International Prize for Lit. Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oklahoma Uni. (1980-82)
PUBLICATIONS

Verse

Articulate Silences. Calcutta. Writers Workshop, 1970.

Cobwebs in the Sun. New Delhi, Tata-McGraw Hill, 1974.

Subterfuges. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Woodpeckers. London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1979.

Play

The Last Wedding Anniversary (produced Hyderabad, 1974). New Delhi, Macmillan, 1975.

Novel

The Bone's Prayer. New Delhi, Arnold-Heinemann, 1979.

The Release (under consideration)

My Funeral (MS novel ready for submission)

Beyond Love and Other Stories. New Delhi, Y, 1980. (Stories published in Canadian, Australian & Indian mags) - also broadcast over BBC (London)

Virginia Woolf and Intuition. Hoshiarpur, Vishveshvaranand, 1957; Norwood, Pennsylvania, Norwood Editions, 1978.

Virginia Woolf and Bergson's Duree. Hoshiarpur, Vishveshvaranand, 1957; Folcroft, Pennsylvania, Folcroft Editions, 1977.

Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. London, Blackie, 1962; New York, New York University Press, 1963.

Examine Your English, with M. M. Maison. New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1964.

Editor, Modern Short Stories. Madras, Macmillan, 1958.

Editor, Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. New Delhi, Eurasia, 1962.

Editor, Apollo's Lyre. Madras, Macmillan, 1962.

Editor, The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. New Delhi, Eurasia, 1964.

Editor, British Romantic Poets: Recent Revaluations. New York, New York University Press, and London, University of London Press, 1966.

[lc]

861

KUMAR

CONTEMPORARY POETS

Editor, with Keith McKean, *Critical Approaches to Fiction*. New York, McGraw Hill, 1968.

Editor, *British Victorian Literature: Recent Revaluations*. New York, New York University Press, and London, University of London Press, 1969.

Editor, *The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton*, by Daniel Defoe. London, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Editor, *Indian Verse in English 1970*. Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1971.

Critical Studies: "An Essay on the Poems of Shiv K. Kumar" by R. K. Kaul, in *Osmania Journal of English Studies 11* (Hyderabad), 1, 1974; "Beyond the Empiric Point" by M. Sivaramkrishna, in *World Literature Written in English* (Arlington, Virginia), November 1975; "Towards an Idiom of Sincerity" by K. Venkatachari, in *Journal of Indian Writing in English* (Gulbarga, Mysore), July 1976; "Between Kali and Cordelia" by T. G. Vaidyanathan, in *Osmania Journal of English Studies 13* (Hyderabad), 1, 1977; "Resonant Bones" by J. Birje-Patil, in *World Literature Today* (Norman, Oklahoma), Autumn 1977.

Shiv K. Kumar comments:

Although I scribbled some verse during my undergraduate days, it was only at the age of 49 or so that I wrote my first serious poem. Since then poetry has been one of my most continual sources of joy.

A poem comes to me as a phrase or a line or a nebulous image which then gets crystallized into a cluster of words. An idea never starts it off - I seem to have an innate distrust of statement. I believe that a poem achieves its most effective articulation when it emerges from the intensity of a writer's lived experience. It may not be "a kind of locked trunk of confessions" (as Gabriel Pearson puts it), but it acquires its sharp identity from the poet as a private person.

Of course the poet must never forsake the artistic distance and control which mould the disparate elements of experience into a pattern. Nor should a poet allow any kind of intellectual discipline to ossify his sensibility. My dual role as critic and writer has made me particularly conscious of this dilemma, but I agree with Anthony Thwaite that one's activity may "fall into different compartments and that the one doesn't influence the other."

I don't think I have been influenced by any poet, though I greatly admire the work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Ultimately each poet has to work out his own credo of life and imagination - "we perish each alone."

Do I consider the use of a language I am not born to a serious impediment to my creativity? No. I feel that it is as much the language that chooses its writer as the writer who selects his medium. In any case, I have grown up with the English language, and cannot write in any other, so I have no alternative.

It has sometimes been remarked that one of the recurring themes in my poetry is cultural interaction, a preoccupation with the polarities of East and West. But this preoccupation must be unconscious. Maybe I have stayed too long in the West, and my Indian sensibility keeps assessing my western experience. Fundamentally, I guess, I am something of a "primitivist" who may never overcome his nostalgia for prelapsarian innocence and simplicity. What hurts me most is any kind of regimentation - political, social, intellectual, or religious. I feel that poetry is an impassioned testament to man's inner freedom. I have done other kinds of creative writing, but it is the poem that satisfies me most because it summons forth my imagination in its intensest form. In the beginning was the word, and that word was the poem - man's profoundest experience articulated through cadence and harmony.

Although it was only in 1970 that Shiv K. Kumar appeared on the Indian literary scene with his first collection of poems *Articulate Silences*, his subsequent work has established him

862

CONTEMPORARY POETS

KUMIN

as a major Indo-anglian poet. He shares with some of his contemporaries (Dom Moraes, A. K. Ramanujan, and Nissim Ezekiel) a crisis of personal identity, an agonising search for some *locus standi* between East and West, between an irrepressible nostalgia for prelapsarian innocence and the compulsions of contemporary civilisation.

Educated at Cambridge, and frequently invited as Visiting Professor of literature at various American and British universities, he has remained an exile as much in his native country as elsewhere. This tension between his two warring selves lends his poetry a rare ironical thrust. "There is," says Roger Iredale, "in his poetry, a pervasive, ironic humour that is missing from the work of other Indian poets" (Quest, November-December 1975). It is irony that he uses to expose the smug complacency of his native Hindu culture. In his sequence poem "Broken Columns," he describes his adolescence: "At dusk Father shuffles us all/about on the coir-mat to pray./We spout chants from the Gita. 'Feed not thy desire on objects of sense./But like a tortoise/folding up its limbs within the shell/withdraw into supreme wisdom.' " But "a puff of wind rustles through a girl's skirt/and two tender legs/gyrate the air into fuzzy yearnings." Again, he evokes the image of a Hindu crematorium, with a vulture cogitating "upon human avidity - flesh offered/to the flames, bones and ashes/to the Ganges. No leavings/for the living."

"It is assumed," observes Birje-Patil (in *World Literature Today*, Autumn 1977) "that Indian poetry in English is essentially a post-Independence phenomenon.... Today we seem to be poised for a break-through and something that may be truly Indian is being written." Kumar's distinctive achievement, he avers, lies in his ability to convey "the experience of being Indian instead of the experience of feeling like an Indian." Kumar is at his best in his crisp, tautly controlled short lyrics like "My Co-respondent," "My Son," "My Mother's Death Anniversary," and "To a Prostitute." All such poems quicken into meaning through a subtle inter-play of images (for instance, a young Mango-Vendor revealing "through the slits/of her patched blouse/one bare shoulder/two white moons/pulling all horses/off the track") and a juxtaposition of polarities (affirmation and denial, intuition and logic) in a language that is supple and evocatively cadenced.

A striking feature of his poetry is his preoccupation with physical experience: sex, indeed, is almost a mode of perception for him. Even his nature imagery (sea, sky, wind, sun, fish) often implies some kind of sexual play. "The preponderance of erotic images is explicable not only in terms of an uninhibited delight in all sensuous things, but also in terms of the primacy of 'the religion of the blood'" (M. Sivaramkrishna, in *World Literature Written in English*, November 1975). Kumar's poetry, however, is marked by an intellectual distrust of pure emotion as though he were chary of giving himself away ("Cerebral Love").