Jayanta Mahapatra: A Study Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet has so many sides and aspects of his poetic personality,
Many-sided and multi-dimensional,
What is he not
And his base not the base of literature
Of emotion and feeling,
Sentiment and sentimentality.

It’s also a fact as there was none,
So his first venture too started getting a breakthrough
So smoothly
Otherwise the things are not,
Just the shorter pieces of verse,
Dealing with imagery, not meaning at all.

There are several moot points of his poetry,
Quite researchable,
Jayanta as a myth-maker, an imagist, a realist, a feminist,
A historicist,
A poet regional, national and international.

Jayanta is a poet of silence and quietude, but the myths private and personal
Disturb the peace of mind
And he gets swayed away,
A poet of selfish love,
Man-woman relationship
Seen on the pillars of the Konark Sun-temple,
The sculptures in erotic love-making.

And he mesmerizes it all, the sensual love and its gratification
With art, sculpture and philosophy,
Hunger, the hunger of the belly
And the hunger of the body,
A very coquettish and conceited poet.

His poems are also the lyrics of silence,
Silence captured and capsuled in,
Cocooned
And he dreaming, taking visionary glides,
Opening one door after another.

As a poet historical, he is very regional and cartographic
As he describes Orissa,
Its scenes and sites,
Temples and their architectural splendour;
Our rich heritage and culture.

He is national as for his grappling with the things
Of humanistic ordeals,
The taking of welfare works
Which we have not done for
The old men and the poor,
Women, children and widows.