M.N. Paloor is one of those poets who were part of a major turning point in the history of 20 century Malayalam poetry, historian M.R. Raghava Warrier has said. He was delivering the keynote address on ‘The role of Paloor in modern poetry’ at a programme organised by the Kerala Sahitya Samithi to felicitate the poet on his winning the Sahitya Akademi award recently.
Dr. Warrier recited a poem by Mr. Paloor and said that his poems were very relevant in the contemporary scenario. His poems traced the sufferings of mankind involving all the complexities of a highly urbanised system. “He is part of a third generation of poets from the 20th century who used to set aside the problems and view the world in an optimistic light. Though the optimism dimmed in the later days, they did not lose their ferocity. They continued to write with embers of the old fire still burning in them and blazing out at times,” Dr. Warrier said. Though Paloor had been writing poems for more than half a century, he was not noticed for his poems, but for his autobiography ‘Kathayillathavante Katha,’ which was a ‘censored’ version of what he expressed through his firebrand poems. He was heir to a great heredity represented by the great poet trio of the century who used heredity to support modernity, Dr. Warrier said.
Samithi president P. Valsala in her address said that Paloor had poetry in his life blood and that he could write poems even amidst chaos. Paloor published many poems after his autobiography. This proved that autobiography was not the last step in the life of any artiste, she said.
