Convergences of Modern Poetry in Iqbal and Afterwards

Abstract

We find similarities among modern Urdu poem writers in terms of topics and forms, along with ideological repetition. These poets have imbibed the standards set by their illustrations predecessors, and have also impacted their contemporaries in a positive manner. Sometimes they share the same thoughts and in other instances, we find similarity of outlook as far as word play and symbolic descriptions are concerned. The writers of Urdu poems who were contemporaries of Iqbal and those who came after him, were in a way victims of similarity for they were products of the same decadent political, social and economic order. In poems of Iqbal, Meeraji, Majeed Amjad, Sahir Ludhianvi and Akhtar ul Iman, we find discovery of splendid cultural edifice and glory of the past. In these poems, out of the vestiges of Mughal architecture, we find descriptions of a dying culture and erosion of sound values. These poets have partaken influences of western poetic traditions, influences which have impacted their poetic forms. Iqbal and successors of Iqbal, these poets were aware of revolutionary ideas of both the East and the West and were cognizant of the underlying factors behind the fall of nations. These poets have given full appreciation to the grandeur of royal architecture, but have in its wake, also lamented their erosion and erosion of values associated with those times. The poems under present consideration, bespeak of a myriad of convergences.