You may or may not agree with what is attributed to Thomas Hood:

“What is a modern poet’s fate?

To write his thoughts upon a slate;

The critic spits on what is done,

Gives it a wipe — and all is gone.”

But you would perhaps agree that rarely does a poet have such highly developed critical faculties and such a high standard of sincerity as to spit on the slate himself and wipe out what he has written.

Ghalib was one such poet. He ruthlessly discarded his early works in Urdu and what now we have of his poetical works in Urdu is but a slim volume.

But sometimes a poet is a scholar and a critic himself and though he may not have to discard his works, his critical acumen guides him through his creativity and his work reflects his critical sense. Aziz Hamid Madni was one such poet.

While remembering Aziz Hamid Madni, in an issue of ‘Qaumi Zuban’, Asif Farrukhi quoted Zia Jalandhari and Hameed Naseem as saying: “Among the modern Urdu poets, Madni stands apart and his voice is totally different. He uses the diction and terminology of the 20th century. His thoughts are synchronized with his times. Only the history will decide Madni’s standing as a poet but his prospects are limitless. He has an overflow of emotions but understands as well the perils and the possibilities of our times. He is trying to relate the absolute values with the present day circumstances and if he succeeds in this, he would be the poet to whose name the next era of Urdu poetry would be dedicated.”

This may sound a bit too optimistic to many but the fact that Madni was one of the great poets of our times is often ignored or people simply do not know enough about him. It was his lack of social interaction and his pathological abhorrence to the limelight that kept him from becoming a celebrated poet in his lifetime. Otherwise, he had all the ingredients that make a poet genuine and appealing to many. If he had a different kind of personality, outgoing and opportunist, that is, he would have cashed in on being a high official in a government department, a qualification that appeals not only to fans but also to some critics who might just drop in someday looking for petty favours, only casually referring to what they had written about the official who, by sheer coincidence, happens to be a ‘great’ poet as well. It is a pity that not enough has been written about Aziz Hamid Madni, who was a poet with modern sensibility and a deep sense of classicism.

This publicity-shy scholar-poet was an exquisite critic too. As Asif Farrukhi wrote: “His poetry and critical writings complement each other and while reading them one feels creativity is blended with criticism.”

Aziz Hamid Madni was born on June 15, 1922, in Raipur. His father, Mohammad Hamid Saqi, was Shibli Naumani’s student and Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar’s classmate and a member of his cricket team. Madni Sahib migrated to Pakistan in 1948 and settled in Karachi. After doing his Master’s in English, he had brief stints in teaching and journalism and later joined Radio Pakistan as programme executive.

A voracious reader and scholar by nature, Madni Sahib was sometimes so engrossed in reading that he would forget to eat and sleep. Much erudite as his hugely vast reading had made him, he would talk on Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot, Hafiz, Firdousi and people would listen in rapt silence. A reticent and unassuming person, though Madni held a high post at Radio Pakistan, his poetry was rarely, if ever, recited on the radio as he did not like it and had issued strict instructions to that effect.

‘Chashm-i-Nigraan’, ‘Dasht-i-Imkaan’ and ‘Nakhl-i-Gumaan’ are collections of his poetry. ‘Jadeed Urdu Shaeri’ is a two-volume critical survey of Urdu poetry, published by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu. ‘Aaj bazaar men pabajoulan chalo’ is an overview of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry.

His unpublished works include translations of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. Madni had rendered translations from French poetry and the versified translation of Rilke’s poem ‘The Calling of Muhammad (PBUH)’ is just one of them but most of his French translations into Urdu remain unpublished. Recently, ‘Jareeda’, the journal of Karachi University’s bureau of compilation and translation, published some of Madni’s unpublished works.

Aziz Hamid Madni died in Karachi on April 23, 1991.