Question

Describe the beauty of nature in Jayanta Mahaputr's poem Chandipur on sea?

Answer 1

It has often been commented that Jayanta Mahapatra stands tall, above the shoulders of others, as the father of Indian poetry, while some scholars have given him the honorary title of the grandfather of Indian poetry.  Born in 1928 in Cuttack, India, Mahapatra is still alive and writing great poetry. He is a physicist, as well as a poet. Whichever way we perceive and approach the writings of Mahapatra, whether we see him as the father or as the grandfather of modern Indian poetics, either way his writing is imbibed with the spirit of Romanticism. Mahapatra’s Romanticism is on par with Whitman, Wordsworth, and Keats, but particularly Wordsworth.  It is not surprising that a physicist should find the natural environment as cause for poetic investigation; for, science and art overlap more than most people believe. What perhaps is somewhat unexpected is that a physicist-turned-poet should not paint the world as modernly mechanistic, but rather come nearer to approach older forms of Romanticism. This is not to say that we do not find a strong sense of the deterministic in Mahapatra’s poetry; for, we do.  Nature is a deterministic medium in Mahapatra’s poetry, but it is not a mechanistic medium. That sense of determinism, or of the inevitable, is never a straightforward denial of beauty, of the sublime, or of the spiritual; to the contrary, Mahapatra’s determinism is qualified by aesthetic admiration for the sublime as found in the natural world.