ALAMGIR HASHMI

POETRY

SALIENT FEATURES

SUBMITTED BY: GHUFRAN AHMED

3214

ENG-319
PAKISTANI LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

BS-ENGLISH

SEMESTER-VTH

FALL-2019

SUBMITTED TO:
PROF.ADNAN ASHRAF WARRAICH
 Alamgir Hashmi’s poetry salient features:
Abstract:

Nature has been the main source of poetic figures both in the East and West right from the beginning of
poetry writing. In the ever changing phenomenal world of poetry it has played several, a god haunted or a
goddess herself, an unreal world of appearance.

The attitude towards nature kept on changing with the changes of the spirit of the ages. During the
English renaissance, the general motif was the overthrow of nature, physical nature being stubbornly
involved in the moral world.in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, nature is symbolic full of personal-
social-physical-theological correspondence. King Lear is the supreme example of correspondence
between man and nature.

Aurangzeb Alamgir Hashmi who has spent many years living abroad graduated from Government
College Lahore and then completed his M.A in English literature from the University of Punjab. He started
publishing poetry in the seventies, when he was at Government College. When his poetry appeared in the
College journal, the Ravi, a critic, Shoaib Bin Hassan, commented as follow:

“From pastiche to poetry, from an affair with language and technique to an affair with the day-to-day
experiences is Alamgir Hashmi’s development and achievement to-date…..“

Salient features:

 Hashmi’s early poetry is better than his latter poems. In the latter, he is complex, obscure and
Avant grade in a pretentious manner, whereas in the early ones he is evocative and expressive.
 Hashmi has complete mastery over the English language, and is fully conversant with the
contemporary western poetic tradition. He express emotion obliquely and without maudlin
emotionally. A good example of this is his poem ‘Grandmother’.
 Hashmi’s poems are seldom kinesthetic; they don’t move us to feel, but rather to think. Their
movement is away from concreteness, even when the poem is provoked by sensory
experience…1
 Hashmi cannot fully escape the thought mode of the Urdu tradition, and that his poetry has its
root in the Persian-Urdu literary tradition.
 Hashmi’s poems are, no doubt, about unrequited love, but his beloved is modern and Western,
not medieval and oriental. Hashmi is not at all influenced by the ghazal or by any other oriental
tradition of poetry.
 Hashmi’s symbolism is private as are private as are those of Western poets. Hashmi’s obscurity
and his abstract metaphors, they are not influenced or borrowed from the ghazal but are
influenced by the Western poets. When abstract metaphors style succeeds he produces
powerful and original poems and when it fails, he produces brain-teasers.
 Hashmi’s favorite themes seem to be the impact of the unusual an event, a personality, death,
intense emotions on the mind. And the response of the latter takes us into the secret areas of
the psyche.
  The Theme of the complacence of heroism, securely fortified in its ego, is successfully
symbolized by Ulysses and no empty words are used express it.
 Those poems that are at least effective are the less controlled and allusive, where the reader
has to work overtime, but with little prospect of enlightenment……2.
 Hashmi’s poetry is that kind of poetry in which the imagery seems forced, as if the poet had
tried too hard for an idea, but Hashmi need not work ‘too had for an idea as his good poems
shows. Hashmi will be better poet if he purges his poetry ruthlessly of all that is pretentious,
abstruse and merely fashionable,
 Poems in several collections usually rhyme and are puerile imitations of romantic verse, they
also contains social criticism but not in propagandist or obtrusive form.

Conclusions:

In all his poetry, Alamgir Hashmi’s tone is slightly cynical, not maudlin as it was in the youthful verse of
the 1970s, and he has developed a style that has become modernist, abstruse and slightly cerebral at
places. In this, he is like the other good English language poets of Pakistan.

References:

1. This was noticed by JANNAT POWERS GEMMILL, reviewer of OATH & AMEN

TARIQ REHMAN’S

AN INTRODUCTION TO PAKISTANI LITERATUE IN ENGLISH>>>POETRY>>>ALAMGIR

HASHMI>>>PAGE#215-PAGE#219