A Trajectory between Interior and Exterior: A Study of Psychoanalytic Self and Ecological Self rendered in the Poetry of Shiv K. Kumar

Abstract

Among the Post-Independence poets writing in English, the immeasurable contribution of Shiv K. Kumar with his free poeticism, clichés, archaism, and metrical concepts sets himself a post modernist. His poems speak about his pain, desire, parting, waiting, neurosis, and as he says ‘his troubles and agony.’ His poetry, therefore, is born of grief and suffering as a result of his severe personal trauma. Kumar is trying to share his personal experience with his poems. It would be a rewarding study if it deals about the poems of psychological exploration of his inner self. Besides, the exploration of the Psychoanalytic self Kumar has shown awareness about nature and environment with his Ecological self. Many scholars have discussed the realistic and modernist aspects of Kumar, though his ecological concern did not receive the kind of critical attention it deserves. The intention of this study is to fill that void and to discover the complex and conflicting relationship between the environment and literary sensibility of Kumar. Many of Kumar's poems have a pyramid structure as his earlier collections reflect his psychoanalytic self and become a foundation for bringing him to the top of the structure to see the outer world and its present condition. The ecological self ultimately begins to unravel. Hence Kumar's complete poetic beauty rests on the trajectory between his mindscape and landscape.