In one of his most complex and deceptively crafted verses, Mirza Ghalib says that the poet’s pen vibrates with the frequency of Gabriel’s wing:

Teri raftaar-i-qalam jumbish-i-baal-i-Jibril

Viewed in the environment of the entire two-line verse, what Ghalib seems to be saying is that the pen brings into poetic manifestation something from the world beyond — a world not bound in space and time, for Gabriel is a transcendental entity, intangible, existing in what for us is the incorporeal realm.

And more, Ghalib talks about the source of his ideas repeatedly in different shades and in a multiplicity of voices. Thus, for instance, at another place, he is quite explicit —

These ideas of mine come to me from the unseen [ghaib]
O Ghalib, the pen’s scratching sound on paper is the voice of the angel Sarosh

Indeed, writing poetry is a creative process, and a great poet creates an alternative universe, juxtaposed with the one in which we find ourselves.

Of course this doesn’t mean that poetry has no relationship to concrete reality — yes, it inevitably does arise out of the experiences, events and contingencies of the real world but, in the hands of the poet, all of this undergoes what may be called a creative transmutation — a transmutation that might bend or even distort reality.

If this is not the case, and if actual facts are presented accurately as they are, then what we get is not poetry but a versified news report: this is good journalism but not good poetry. Here (with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s spur) we once again recall Shakespeare’s character Touchstone in As You Like It saying, “The truest poetry is the most feigning.”

All of this is perhaps much too abstract — my main concern in this article, incidentally. Allow me to make a painful observation at this point: it seems to me that critics and commentators of Urdu poetry are becoming more and more unable to handle abstract ideas. Any emotion, any spectacle, any human disposition that arises purely in the world of imagination is becoming inaccessible to them, unless they are causally connected directly to a concrete event or situation in real life.

Thus, if the poet expresses joy, he must be happy at the time of writing his poetry; and if he expresses melancholy, he must have been sad due to some specific event in his life. This means reading poetry as biography, something that is called “the disease of conceptual deprivation” [bē-taufeeqi] that “cannot be cured”, according to Shamim Hanafi’s ruthless prognosis.

There is an unfortunate tendency these days to relate a given verse or a poem causally to a particular historical event in the life of the poet, no matter how tenuous or implausible this causal connection happens to be.

The fact is that sad poetry can be written at a time when the poet is comfortable and happy in his life; and happiness in creative expressions may emerge at moments of intense discomfort. This inability to grasp poetry without placing it in the world of sense perception is a serious intellectual and psychological ailment, a phobia of the abstract.

So there is an unfortunate tendency these days to relate a given verse or a poem causally to a particular historical event in the life of the poet, no matter how tenuous or implausible this causal connection happens to be. It is for this reason that commentators — unlike Shamsur Rehman Faruqi or Shanul Haq Haqqi or Shamim Hanafi — are steering clear of writing about poetics; they write social histories of poetry instead.

So we read: “Faiz wrote this poem because a crowd started to follow him when he was being taken from his prison cell to the dentist”, or “Ghalib wrote this because he was deeply perturbed by the failures in his pension case.” To tell the truth, much of this flies in the face of historical facts, if we examine these claims closely. This is embarrassing.

This column, even though it is wider than the others in Books and Authors, does not give me much space to elaborate my locutions, so let me point out two characteristics of Urdu poetry to reinforce the observations that I state above.

First, bending or distortion of reality in creative constructs. Faiz, for example, gives naturalistic attributes to pure metaphors — so, he speaks of “the tired voice of the moonlight” or “the hand of longing” or “neck of the moon” or “dreamless doors.” Or “the cry of blood” or “the load of silence” and so on. None of this exists in natural reality. What we have here is an alternative universe created aesthetically by the poet.

Second, this tendency of causally relating poetic expressions to specific experiences of the poet. Again, let me turn to Faiz. In his very first collection Naqsh-i-Faryaadi [Remonstrance], which contains poems that were written before the birth of Pakistan when Faiz was a very young, happy man in his twenties, unmarried, unencumbered by the burdens of a family life. In this collection, one finds deeply melancholic poems:

Roof and door crushed by the weight of silence
From the heavens a river of pain flowing

“River of Pain”? This is, in actual reality, a happy youngster speaking.

Let me give the final word to Ghalib. He says,

It is the heat of the joy of imagination that makes me sing
I am the bird of the garden that has not even been created.

The columnist teaches at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 8th, 2026