Faiz And Me

(Aamir Mehmood, Lahore)

Faiz was acknowledged long ago as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Even those who were critical of his progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position, although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a good man should have fallen among the Communists.

He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

His Critical essays, written mostly during his formative years, are a testimony to the fact that he had arrived at, and formulated clearly the essential elements of the poetics necessary for our age, the age of the masses.

Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants. Faiz, having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods in this process, the subject of his poetry. He is concerned, above all, with the experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of revolutionary struggle.

And yet love is the leit motif of his poetry. Faiz is one of the great lyricists who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion than love.

Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to others.

That is why, apart from being a great revolutionary poet, he was a great love poet, and there was no distinction between the two, love and revolution had become identical in him.


AWARDS OF FAIZ

The real award for a poet is the love and appreciation of his fans. Faiz stands among those who enjoy both at one and the same time. Besides he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, as the first Asian poet. Before his death in 1984 he was also a nominee for the award of Nobel Prize, but his association in later life, with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Movement, and the Editorship of Lotus, deprived him of the award because the Zionist element in the controlling body of the Nobel Prize is strong.

Books written By Faiz

Naqshe Faryadi, 1941
• Daste Saba, 1953
• Zindan Nama, 1956
• Mizan, a collection of literary articles,1956
• Daste-Tahe-Sang, 1965
• Sare-Wadiye Seena, 1971
• Shame-Shehr Yaran, 1979
• Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981
• Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984
• Pakistani Culture, Urdu & English

FAIZ AND ME

I have posted two articles about faiz this would be the second one i strongly recommend you to read faiz poetry with its meaning and context i asure you that you would start loving him this will also impact your personality with way of thinking but before you enter this paradise you have some basic knowledge about faiz, his writtings, how he thought, what are the emotional storms under which he has created his poems alowely you will enter his castle of love and start loving him. To me faiz is not a poet when i feel dipress when i fail to do some thing which i want to be strongly done in my life and when some one herts me faiz poems give me sport.

Thanks


 

Aamir Mehmood
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