Nature, Season, and the Romantic Sublime in Hari Singh Gour’s Poetic Landscape
Wordsworthian Inheritance, Colonial Displacement, and the Landscape of the Self in Random Rhymes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56062/Keywords:
Hari Singh Gour, Romantic nature poetry, sublime, ecocriticism, postcolonial poetics, Cambridge, nineteenth-century Indian writing in EnglishAbstract
In this paper, the nature verse of the book Random Rhymes by Hari Singh Gour (1892; rpt. 2024) will be analyzed, emphasizing how eight poems — by the Cam, a memory of a May-week, twilight, winter, a memory of a winter evening, echoes through the woods, a night scene, and spring time — mediate between the conventions received by the British Romanticism and the demands of the uniqueness of a colonial subject in its positionality. With references to the theoretical perspectives of ecocriticism, postcolonial literature studies, and Romantic scholarship, the paper holds that Gour does not merely imitate the Wordsworthian-Keatsian tradition but is not completely outside of it. Rather he operates within that tradition to document modes of alienation, desire, and introspection which cannot be exactly analogized in canonical Romantic verse. The discussion is conducted using a close reading, placing each poem into its intellectual and biographical background, and relying on the works of Abrams (1971), Bate (1991), Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989), and so on. It concludes by suggesting that the landscape poetry of Gour is a small yet truly separate addition to the later nineteenth century long dialogue between British Romanticism and colonialism experience.
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