Celebrated my 25th birthday this month. Let me be true I dont like b’days any more, not after my 25th year. It reminds of Milton’s poem on his 21st b’day, T.S.Eliots piece of advice given to poets: “the historical sense is clearly indispensable to anyone who continues to be a poet beyond his twenty fifth year”, a writer’s advice: “call yourself a poet only after your twenty fifth year”. May be I’ll understand now why all of them stressed on the number twenty five. The burden that may fall from such an understanding might be unbearable.

What does it mean to be a poet after the twenty fifth year? Is it only after twenty five years of experience can you transform any creative work from expression or overflow of powerful (lets add personal too) feelings into what Eliot called Impersonal Poetry, free from self-indulgent emotionalism? Is it that between the sort of experience which makes a person and the sort of experience that makes a writer there lie a twenty fifth year, when she/he is metamorphosed from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a writer who might be of some value, who may make his/her personal feelings into Universal experiences?

I dont know if the years now will allow me to be a poet, a writer who can transform silly, sentimental, egotist sensations into universal emotions, into something worth reading; if ill be able write with history in my bones, here starts my journey.