Exploring the Anxiety of Eliotian Influence in Agha Shahid Ali’s Literary Creations

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), the first poet to write in English from Kashmir, was introduced to T.S.Eliot’s works while he was pursuing his graduation degree at Sri Pratap College, Sirinagar during 1965. Once introduced to the Eliotian world, Agha Shahid Ali could not move out of the charismatic influence of T.S.Eliot for the rest of his life even when he became disillusioned with Eliot’s anti-Semitic political stance. The extent of Eliotian influence can not only be evaluated from his academic choice to write his doctoral theses at the Pennsylvania State University evaluating T.S.Eliot as an editor: T.S.Eliot as Editor, but can also be located in his literary creations like Bone Sculpture: Poems (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1974), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1993), and The Country Without A Post Office: Poems 1991-1995 (1997). Manan Kapoor, the biographer of Agha Shahid Ali, notes in his book The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (2021) that how “Shahid’s friend Saleem Kidwai remembers that when he was teaching at Delhi University, Shahid ‘spoke about Eliot all the time, incessantly’” (39). Kapoor also notes that the two Eliotian catchphrase ⸻ ‘tradition’ and ‘impersonality’ ⸻ acted as a guiding principle for Agha Shahid Ali throughout his poetic career. This paper therefore proposes to explore not only the Eliotian influence upon Agha Shahid Ali but also the anxiety of this influence as reflected in the literary creations of Agha Shahid Ali.