Even as all of them consciously attempted to Malayanise, and so de-Anglicise their writing, they could not break free of the English poetic tradition. For one thing, their medium of expression and communication was still English, and firmly of that variety promoted by colonial educators. It seemed impossible then to retain the medium without carrying a substantial part of its content. For another, having had their education entirely in English, they were unable, with very few exceptions, to turn elsewhere for guidance, especially where forms and techniques were concerned. What eventuated was not so much a displacement as a replacement of one set of models by another. The figures celebrated in school anthologies gave way to the modern and the contemporary, whose writing seemed more relevant, striking resonant chords.
Echoes of Elizabethan, Romantic and Georgian voices were still audible, but the new voices were irresistible. Eliot dominated the background of everyone of the university poets. At the same time the Pylon-Romantics Spender, Auden, Day-Lewis and MacNiece affected Puthucheary, Woodhull and Loh, and indirectly, Wang and Ee, though the last two were generally eclectic. Wong Phui Nam seemed to prefer primary sources in prose, turning mainly to Frazer's The Golden Bough, Winstedt's Malay Magician, and Frye's mythopoeics. Here the influence was profound, as was the impact of Eliot, Yeats and Pound on Thumboo. [10]
in English came almost unadulterated from some English anthology of verse, in particular through the works of Goldsmith, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare,John Masefield and W.H. Davies. These 'nature poets' supplied the texts rather than the inspiration for the local writers' conception of nature as an external reality comprising the heavenly bodies, climate and topography, flora and fauna; as a source of images and symbols; as a universal spirit, or as a living backdrop to human action. Even the sentiments held to be appropriate for addressing the spirit and various faces of nature flowed from the same literary fountain. The original efforts amounted to little more than a substitution of local names for what was believed to be the original equivalents. [20] It was in the major poem in the volume that he undertook a tortuous route for 'the mind with its Book of Questions.' Although a lament on the death of a friend after a motor-cycle accident, 'For Peter Wee'[91 provided the occasion for the poet's speculation on the meaning and purpose of life. It was intended to be a symbolic journey of his selfdiscovery. In Section 1, the first four stanzas consist of a series of questions turning on death and the after-life, the Christian tradition of Sprayer and faith, and its converse�the consequence of doubt, and on jhe negative Nirvana of a Buddhist enlightenment. The fifth stanza ends on a sceptical note, which nonetheless does not altogether rule out the hope that some answer might turn up in the future: 23 Section 11 asserts respectively that the intellect alone cannot question the reality of pain and illusion as given in Hinduism and Buddhism, or the Third Eye disclosing this fact, or that reality is ultimately a personal, subjective construct. Section 111 introduces a persona that would form a continuity through his poetic development. Here, however, the young poet dismisses Ulysses, his alter ego, for presuming that knowledge was attainable through the voyages of life. The Ulysses here is Tennysonian, the underlying criticism being directed at Tennyson's hero whose motto was 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' Thumboo felt that | Ulysses underestimated the power of the gods for whom humans are l but flies to wanton boys, a faint echo of the moralising in King Lear. 24 37: differed from those in force in Malaya where the Malay was given special rights by virtue of his being regarded as the son of the soil, and after Independence, as bumiputra ('prince of the earth'). r Koh Tai Ann has argued that much of Singapore poetry in the sixties| and seventies was in its tone consistent with the prevailing mood of the l English 'Movement' poets typified by Philip Larkin. Even as local poets i came up with a gallery of types spawned by their immediate environment, they tended to be wary of being 'caught with the heart exposed, of courting betrayal and disillusionment;' consequently, the poetry tended to be satirical rather than Iyrical, and displayed a distaste for the national identity as embodied in the emergent human types (Tham 1981: 174). ~ Thej satirical element was already a noticeable feature in 'The Cough of Albuquerque'[2], as was the search for and a commitment to the wider I 44 58 The poet concludes that despite its variant forms, English remains powerful as the language of international communication, fellowship and creative writing. The first three stanzas and the last are evocative of the genesis, distribution and wealth of the English language: the linguistic and literary tropes are unusual but consistent with the general theme and texture of the poem as a whole. The fourth and fifth stanzas however, read like the index of an introductory textbook on linguistics The poem may be contrasted with 'RELC'[62] (UM, 20). Where the Regional English Language Centre serves as a meeting ground of the various national languages in the Southeast Asian region, enabling the respective nations to find their common roots, 'Language as Power'[801 maintains the significance of English primarily 'Victoria School'[71] collates the poet's youthful experiences, combining the domains of history, sociology and biography. A similar set of weaknesses turns on the writer's reluctance to distance his writing from biographical data, seen in the dutiful naming of several former schoolmates and a pious sentimentality towards his alma mater Nevertheless, his historical sense is quick to relate a past Latin motto. Nil Sine Labore ('Nothing without Labour') to a constant maxim of the former Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, that nothing is for free, that nobody owes Singapore a living. The sociological element features in the educational backdrop, highlighting the multi-racial composition of the English school system and a curriculum similar to that of a grammar 66 , u Responsibility and Commit~me In summary, Rib of Earth is a young poet's construction of a reality, embracing the metaphysical and the sensuous, the religious and the assthetic domains. Operating in this universe involved an imaginative re-creation of nature as physical, external reality and a~ reservoir of symbols. References to Nature in earlier MalaysiaQ Singaporean writing were patently imitative, an effortless substitutiei of local names for English flora and fauna. Allusions and images were merely ornamental, or fairly predictable pathetic fallacies. Thumboo achievement here was in drawing attention to the immediate environment, to rural and coastal Singapore, to Malaya and the wider region as the mood took him, as often as to the English literary landscape and Europe. The local landscape was given a fresh breath of life, tangible and a mythical existence. Similarly, symbolic meanings were sometimes derived from the original traditions, or refurbished, in different contexts; at others they were distinctively the writer's inventions. The change was evolutionary in point of time, yet radical in its consequences and implications. That it overturned some previous assumptions at the root was seen in the innumerable references to the notion of fundamental change. The way to diversity, he argued, was by 'refracturing the political, social, religious and cultural issues and themes;' the major writer 'reaffirm(ed) the continuities of literary tradition and the central life of society;"progress, an awakening from servility, illiteracy, to a new sense of dignity, pride and legitimate expectations,' entail(ed) a 'redesignation' from 'the masses' to 'the majority;' grammars of interest (were) framed by 'reconstructions of the past,' among other issues (p.27). The point about 'reaffirming the continuities of tradition' might suggest a conservative stance, a maintenance of the status quo; however, it was qualified by the reference to the present reality, and, in any case, would confirm that Thumboo was not a revolutionary, certainly not in his political judgement. The reality of the Singapore situation would preclude this. On another level, the readjustment could be viewed as a learning process in a continuing self-education, a reconstruction of one's mental and emotional schema in response to changing stimuli. In essence, these 'reconstructions of the past,' and 'rehabilitating [of] the psyche' entailed the 'reconstitution of cultural, social and other institutions and energies on a broad front' in the full education of the whole person. There is an aspect of the West that Edwin Thumboo has 'skirted' | successfully, to use a metaphor Irom 'Ulysses by the Mertion' t6t I . This is the counter-culture that rejects the functional view of society, the rationality underlying its social arrangement, and the application of technology as an efficient means to desired ends. On this view, the artist is enjoined to adopt an anti-rational stance, a solipsist moodj a A literary tradition depends for its health and survival as much on the nourishment of critics and readers as on the creativity of writers. One can agree here with Peter Hyland's observation that 'the sheer intimacy of the situation in Singapore disables any critic from writing honestly or dispassionately;' and one can even go further with him when he suggests that 'a thoughtful, informed criticism...must come from outside, but not from critics brought up within mainstream literature' (143; 144). Unfortunately, the two outside critics he cites, T. Wignesan andJan Gordon, have not been the disinterested critics Singapore's writers can hope for, as Hyland readily admits, and this brings up even more acutely the 'risk' the writers have to take. Insofar as the problem lies in the perceptions of critics and readers, there are clearly many barriers to be overcome. p. 4