Sri Lankan Poetry Analysis

Modern Sri Lankan Poetry in English first appeared as an entity before the general reading public when the Journal of South Asian Literature, published at Michigan State University, devoted two issues in 1976 to Sri Lankan Poetry and Poets, Sri Lankan translation of poetry from East and West and reviews of important poetry publications within the island. Yasmine Gooneratne quoted from a preface, she contributed as editor of that issue, in which she attempted to place Sri Lanka’s modern poetry in its proper historical, social and cultural perspectives. Sri Lankan Poets, whether they live in Sri Lanka or Abroad, write in one of the country’s three languages: Sinhala, Tamil and English. The English Language was introduced into the island in

The work of Modern Sri Lankan, Indian and other Asian Poets is unknown in the schools land universities of Sri Lanka. The literary training dispensed in Sri Lankan educational institutions is, therefore, disappointingly one – sided and while it has bred good teachers and some sensitive critics of English Literature, it has produced very few writers of poetry who have been able to work their way towards an individual or truly Sri Lankan, poetic

Gita Govinda into English a few years later, he did Sri Lankan Poetry another service by releasing into English ‘new’ concepts of metaphorical expression and also by breaking away entirely from the example of earlier translators of Classical Indian Poetry, who had put verse translation into rigid metrical shackles for an unnecessarily long time. Many Modern Sri Lankan Poets have found Keyt’s path to be their own: first the exercise of translation, then the writing of original poetry. The writing of English Verse by Sri Lankans had developed in the nineteenth century in a colonial society that was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of money and trade. Literature had become a leisure – time distraction from what were thought of as the ‘realities’ of colonial life and there were few people with leisure either to enjoy or promote it. The English Verse of early twentieth century Sri Lanka is not only derivative and imitative of a whole range of European Writers, but limited in its themes and these limitations stem from a crippling concept of genuine poetry as being the product of other cultures rather than of one’s own, as well as from a severely restricted view of the function of literature as a