Page:Introduction to Tamil Poetry.pdf/10

 9 who sang and worked for the political independence of our country. He threw in his lot with the political sufferers of his time and spent 10 years of his precious life (he did not live longer than 40 years of age) in banishment at Pondicherry. It is there that he composed the bulk of his poems which led the people of Tamil Nad to glory and free- dom. He wanted to unfetter the Tamil Muse from the shackles of rigid grammar from which she was suffering and consequently wrote poems in a simple and readable Tamil, without caring very much for the cold and rigid rules of prosody and rhetoric. Before his advent, people were prone to judge that poetry which was obscure and unintelligible as the best. Bharathi was the first to give the death-knell to this kind of attitude and there are today several young and old poets who have followed him in the wake and whose contributions to literature are tending to be great and are promising. Kavimaņi Dēsikavināyakarn Pillai wrote exquisite poetry in a simple way and his poems have a special appeal to children. Nāmakkal Kavignar, Ramalingam Pillai, who had the honour of being made the Poet Laureate of the Madras State, also contributed great- ly by his poems to the onmarch towards freedom. Bharathi- dāsan, is a disciple of late Subramanya Bharathi, as is evi- dent by his very name. Sometimes, he out-Herods Herod by his compositions. His poems have a special appeal to those that are anxious about social reforms in our country. He writes about the common man, the tiller of the soil, the hewer of wood and the drawer of water rather than about the wealthy or the powerful. Yogi Suddhānanta Bhāratiar is also widely known as a writer of both poetry and prose. Many of his poems are capable of being set to music. Vāni- dasan and Mudi Arasan are two other budding poets of this time. Now, I shall give some extracts from poetry represen- tative of the various periods. The noble ideals for which one lived are mentioned by one of the poets of the third Sangam period (Pēreyin