Why Should I Write a Poem Now

Download or read book Why Should I Write a Poem Now written by Graziano Krätli and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1949 the poet William Carlos Williams received a letter from a young man from India who was studying engineering at Stanford University but wanted to write poetry. Williams was intrigued enough to write back. Their intense epistolary relationship, lasting almost a decade and little known up to now, is chronicled in this edition of their letters. Rayaprol returned to India and lived a quiet life as a civil engineer. Yet his commitment to poetry, spurred by Dr. Williams’s long-distance mentoring, never faltered, and the three collections he published eventually gained him a lasting position in the canon of postcolonial Anglophone poetry in India. Rich in personal details, feelings, and moods, the Rayaprol-Williams correspondence is particularly significant as it provides valuable information about transnational literary modernism in the context of American cultural influence during the Cold War as well as the role played by US philanthropic organizations and their relationship to overt and covert CIA operations in India.