On Oct. 16, the Department of English welcomed Sri Lankan poet and Harvard professor Vidyan Ravinthiran to campus.  As The Gund’s Community Foundation Theater filled with students and their visiting parents, the audience received packets containing several John Keats poems, as well as one of Ravinthiran’s own poems, “Autumn,” that expertly replicates Keats’ style. As Assistant Professor of English Kathleen Fernando glowingly introduced Ravinthiran, she noted, “In the process [of his poetic criticism], [Ravinthiran] transforms criticism from a solely analytical and objective endeavor to one that is pressured by the personal and the political. In this way, reading and writing about the poems become the vehicle through which he arrives at a sense of himself.” 

 Ravinthiran’s journey of discovering poetry feels nearly fated. In his memoir, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, he describes his experience as a child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants growing up in England. Ravinthiran goes on to highlight the stress he felt to be a high achiever and remain academically focused. While his sister gravitated toward theater, Ravinthiran would sneak into his parents’ office and pick English texts off the shelves before burying his nose in them for hours. Once he began formally studying literature, Ravinthiran familiarized himself with and consequently found solace in Keats’ work, so much so that he now teaches Harvard courses on the famous poet. 

  During his talk on Thursday, Ravinthiran read Keats’ “To Autumn” aloud. The poem deals with the inevitable passage of time and the cyclical nature of life and death, themes that Ravinthiran zeroed in on and connected with. “What I’m trying to get at in the memoir is how you have these thoughts and these feelings in this canonical Romantic poet,” Ravinthiran explained, “but they also speak to all sorts of anxieties amongst those of us [who come] from very different backgrounds.” Following this observation, Ravinthiran smoothly linked Keats’ perspective on his own poetic mission with the aforementioned Sri Lankan Tamil tendency to raise successful and accomplished children. In this way, Keats’ drive toward productivity aligns with Ravinthiran’s experience dealing with high expectations from his parents. 

 Next, Ravinthiran turned his attention (and audience members turned their packet pages) to an excerpt from Keats’ “Isabella, Or the Pot of Basil.” Before reading the lines, Ravinthiran summarized the poem: The sister of two rich brothers falls in love with a poorer man, whom the brothers then decide to kill. Ravinthiran noted how Keats’ use of the past-tense “murdered” dooms the poor man to his fate before the deed is done. After reading the excerpt aloud, Ravinthiran focused on that particular poetic trick and its similarity to the makeup of Sri Lankan culture: “There’s [a connection] to my family and this combination of Hindu fatalism with a kind of Sri Lankan Tamil learned helplessness. … These tiny verbal details [within poetry] have haunted me ever since I was a child.” 

 Before covering the last of the three encounters with Keats, Ravinthiran described a trip he and his family took to Sri Lanka during which they visited Jaffna Library, met with protesting Tamil women and saw a Hindu temple that still bore the marks of destruction left by a 2004 tsunami. After telling this story, Ravinthiran directed the audience to the last page of the packet, where his own poem, “Autumn,” was printed. “I’ve been trying [to write a poem in Keats’ form] my whole life.” Ravinthiran confessed. “I think it was moving to the U.S., teaching Keats for years, working on the [Harvard] lectures and my trip to Sri Lanka that all came together. … Using [Keats’] form, I was able to make sense of what was going on at that time to me and my family.” 

“Autumn” is a masterful culmination of Ravinthiran’s passion for writing and critiquing poetry and his deep connection to Keats’ work. Preceding the audience’s awed applause at the end of the discussion, the poet read aloud the skillful piece that models his muse’s work: “To sing, to fly, migrate, are curious verbs; / beauty, like happiness, frailly reliable, / has nothing to do with why there are wings, / why birds build nests and sing their songs, / or why barbed wire’s besotted with its barbs.”