Nissim Ezekiel: Poet of a Minor Literature

Abstract

It might be best to begin by explaining what I understand by the word “minor.” The word is out of serious use, since the value-judgment implicit in the dichotomy of “major” and “minor” has long been out of favor. Better, usually, to speak of “minority,” a term with political resonances that many can work with. And yet to approach the provenances of Nissim Ezekiel's work, we probably need to go back to those value-judgments and enquire into how they affected, and were even appropriated by, Ezekiel, and rewritten as a particular aesthetic. How conventional literary history or criticism decides who is a major or a minor poet depends partly on subjective assessment and partly, as present-day wisdom would say, on culture-specific biases. But let's second-guess what the assumptions of “being major” are. A major poet appears to be a practitioner who's crucially related to an epoch and to the zeitgeist, and our vocabulary formulates this relationship in a number of ways: that the major poet embodies the zeitgeist; that he or she actively contributes to shaping it; that he or she subverts or transgresses it; that the major poet occasionally remains unrecognized in the epoch they live in and anticipates a zeitgeist that's to come. The minor poet performs none of these tasks; he's not to be confused with being a bad poet – instead, he's one who is, in a sense, solely an aesthetic or literary figure, a faithful, competent, even accomplished adherent of the literary rulebook of his age, a practitioner who's content to be a producer of good poems. The minor poet doesn't aim – it would seem – to question the literary (or the assumptions surrounding it in the time he lives in) or put it to test. As a result he doesn't engender an oeuvre but writes good poems – at most, her or his oeuvre might be an agglomeration of individual good poems. The minor poet's oeuvre is not – unlike the major poet's – a mini-tradition or a parody of a lineage, a competitor with or a version of literary history and tradition itself.