Shahid Suhrawardy (1890-1965) was a man for all seasons: poet, translator, art critic, theatrical producer, academic, public servant, diplomat, man about town and bon vivant. This volume brings together for the first time his entire poetic output — two collections of his own poetry and one of his collaborative translations from Chinese. Beginning as a poet in the Edwardian manner, he quickly metamorphosed first a modern poet. He is the first modern poet of the South Asian subcontinent, and indeed one of the first generation of modern poets in the English language. His career spanned three continents and many countries and led him to witness some of the most dramatic — and traumatic — events of the twentieth century: the Russian Revolution, the fall of Paris to the Nazis, the Partition of the subcontinent. Kaiser Haq’s introduction provides the first ever comprehensive biographical and critical account of Suhrawardy’s checkered career and varied achievements.
Long neglected by scholars and critics, Suhrawardy is now being revaluated, and this volume ought to help substantially in bringing him due recognition as a poet. Scholars as well as common readers interested in poetry will be able to follow the evolution of Suhrawardy’s poetic talent, from the precocious juvenilia in a late Romantic mode collected in Faded Leaves through the symboliste exercises and ironic modernism of Essays in Verse to the crisp imagistic renderings of the Chinese poet Lee Hou-Chu. Suhrawardy is distinctive among modern poets for his use of a mock-comic persona that is a cross between Eliot’s Prufrock and an aging hedonist.
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