Prison Days and Other Poems

<p><b>'These poems have appealed to me greatly. They have stuck in my mind . . . And so I commend these poems and perhaps they might move others as they have moved me'</b><br><b>Jawaharlal Nehru</b></p><p>Agyeya was jailed as a revolutionary by the British authorities in the early 1930s-an experience that indelibly shaped his literary output. The verses in this collection vividly conjure the horror and tedium of imprisonment: the sound of iron gates clanging shut and the shadows cast by the bars of a cell. But Agyeya's vision never descends into bleakness. Even quarantined he is constantly aware of the pulse of life radiating outside the prison walls-the lotuses in bloom the gushing breeze the mighty seas-as well as the solidarity and compassion that unites those in captivity.<br>Written between 1933 and 1938 <i>Prison Days and Other Poems</i> astutely captures the mood before Indian independence when freedom was still merely a dream. <br> <b>'The grand old man of Hindi literature . . . [Agyeya's] poetry and fiction were only the logical culmination of a multi-faceted career' </b><br><b><i>India Today</i></b></p>