EN3263

Philip Holden (email: ellhpj@nus.edu.sg)
Chitra Sankaran (email: ellcs@nus.edu.sg)

[ Introduction and Description | Schedule and Readings | Assessment and Policies | Related Resources ]

Week 3: Early Poetry at the University of Malaya, 1950-1951

Make sure you have the reading done before the lecture in order to participate fully in active learning. Unless you have a laptop you will be bringing with you I recommend that you print out all the poems from Pulse and supporting essays and poems in the .pdf file. Even if you have a laptop and will bring it you need to find a way of making annotations and reading slowly and carefully: you can save the web pages in MSWord or mark up with Acrobat, but printing the texts out is still probably best.

In exploring the essays and poems, we will be looking at a different time frame from the short stories considered last week. In 1950 the Second World War was over, and most countries in Asia were either independent or moving rapidly towards independence. Poets such as Wang began to think what it might mean to write a Malayan poetry (remember that an independent Singapore was not a goal of any nationalist at that time, but that the city state rather was seen as an integral part of a furure independent Malaya).

Some Questions to Think Over

1. Which of the poems in "Pulse," if any, do you think is most successful in creating a distinctively Malayan voice? Why? Is it the content, the way in which the poem is written, or both?

2. Which of the poems in "Pulse," if any, do you think is most obviously a failure? Again, think why this is the case. Is it the content, the way in which the poem is written, or both?

3. Wang, uniquely among his contemporaries, was trilingual in English, Malay and Chinese. If you are familar with either Chinese or Malay poetry, explore any passages of Wang's poems that you think show influence from poetry outside the English tradition.

4. How do you think any of the articles from The New Cauldron relate to Wang's poetry?

NUS English Language and Literature

Last updated: 30 October, 2006