Psychoanalytic Poetry Analysis

Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. In 1920’s a very wide-spread form of psychoanalytic criticism emerged, and procedures of which were established by Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Freud’s application of psychoanalytic theory to literature was imitated and then modified by numerous critics. Several writers of poetry and fiction have relied on Freudian models.Some psychoanalytic dramatists are Mahesh Dattani, Girish Karnad and Vijay Tendulkar. Psychoanalytic poets are Kamala Das, Shiv K. Kumar, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia, Sunita Jain and Gauri Deshpande.Shiv K. Kumar’s poems are born out of his own personal experiences. His own personal experiences form the basis for his poems. He underwent a lot of sufferings and faced several crises of great intensity as a Psychoanalytic poet.
Suffering is as integral to life as death. Mulk Raj Anand believes that, “Suffering is born of the experience is being plunged in the world in which there are senseless killings.” (Vijay 75). As a psycho analytic poet Kumar is moved by the contemporary reality around the society. The sufferings of the poor affected him and so he wrote poems like Sounds of Hunger, Street

The pain and agony which he had experienced made him feel lonely even when he isamidst crowd. That feeling is reflected in A Lonely Woman. The suffering of a lonely woman becomes phantasmagoric as she moves from room to room in vain hope to find someone to converse with her. Her aloofness becomes nauseating and irritating, “like the summer files” (9) in her loneliness any effort to whistle amounts to “a coward’s strategy to ward off evil’ in wilderness” (11-12). Under these circumstances, she feels that her, “The terrace offers no escape either/ for it exposes me to the moon malignant eye, / the stars’ grin”.