Moraes's two volumes of autobiography, My Son's Father (1968) and Never at Home (1992), give a vivid account of his life and times. His "parents were one of the bright young couples of Bombay. They gave and attended expensive cocktail parties . . . both drank and smoked." They had a serious side as well, "and, unusual in Indian Christians, held nationalist views. They supported Gandhi and Nehru"; and indeed played an active role in the independence struggle: "the flat was always full of unshaven and furtive young nationalists who had either just emerged from prison or were hiding from the police."

The above atmosphere was a conducive one for the would-be poet and writer. The publication of a short story while still an adolescent brought Dom Moraes to the attention of his father's writer's friends: Mulk Raj Anand and G. V. Desani, the latter just back from London where his novel All About H. Hatterr had been praised by Eliot. There were others. As Moraes wrote:

(W. H.) Auden and (Stephen) Spender flew to Bombay... I went to hear them read, and could not believe it: there they actually were, physically present: Auden with a lined, expressive face, grave and heavy: Spender tall and stooped, with a white cloud of hair and large, intent blue eyes. I had thought of them as very young men, and was surprised: then a new idea of the poet came to me, the poet dedicated, apart, carrying his work on through a lifetime, wrapped in a vatic cloak.

Moraes's book of verses A Beginning won the Hawthornden Prize in 1957 while he was at Oxford. He has not won any other international prize, and a pattern seems to suggest itself: PrecocityEarly CelebrityObscurity. But perhaps that would be too pat. From the early success of A Beginning (while Moraes subsequently embarked on a career as a war correspondent; as the editor of magazines in different countries; for the UNO; and on documentary films), through Poems (1960), a Poetry Book Society Choice; John Nobody (1965); the American selection Poems 1955-65, there is some sort of development, albeit unsensational. Then comes an agonizingly long fallow period, the end of which is marked by a privately printed clutch of eleven poems, aptly titled Absences (1983). Slowly, Moraes's creative vitality returns: the Collective Poems of 1987 include enough new poems to make a slim collection on their own; Serendip (1990) is a sizeable new volume; and the recent In Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems (2001) again contains enough new work to make a separate volume. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary accolade. Moraes the prodigy and Moraes redivivus, then, add up to a substantial poetic career.

After a lifetime spent abroad, principally England, Dom Moraes returned to India in 1979 and now lives there.

Dom Moraes has not lacked for critics, who argue that he is a recherché figure, once promising but ultimately a performer--a fine performer, one has to admit--in a minor key. As witness the brief review of John Nobody by Ian Hamilton: Moraes is "a slave to the regular iambic line . . . melodramatising a parody version of the alienated, fierily Bohemian romantic artist." His poetry suffers from "the tepid adjective, the unrelenting rhyme-scheme, the over-all tendency of his language to seek out a level of polished anonymity and rest there" (The London Magazine, October 1965).

In India, Moraes's very English prosodic finesse and tone is generally regarded as foreign, a view expressed even by his early mentor Ezekiel, who wrote that while Moraes's Collected Poems is an "impressive collection" from which "much may be learnt . . . about the art," yet "It may argued that Dom has nothing special to offer those Indians who use English for creative purposes. He writes like an English poet, and does not reflect any significant aspect of Indian life. There are allusions to his life in India but they are personal, with no social and cultural implications".

Ezekiel has a point there, but one could argue that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt, for young Indian poets like Jeet Thayil and Vijay Nambisan have been helped in learning the craft of verse by Moraes's example.

Perhaps it's best to approach Moraes as an individual talent whoshould not be seen in the context of any group or national tradition. He is an interesting loner who defies fashionable labels like postcolonial or postmodern. As the early "Autobiography," in A Beginning, has it:

I have grown up, I think, to live alone
To keep my old illusions, sometimes dream,
Glumly, that I am unloved and forlorn,
Run away from strangers, often seem
Unreal to myself in the pulpy warmth of a sunbeam.
I have grown up, hand on the primal bone,
Making the poem, taking the word from the stream,
Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone.
The romantic stance, the rapid progress of images, the smooth polish of the verse, make up the Moraes hallmark.

Later, a breakthrough occurs in "Letter to My Mother," with its short lines of two or three stresses and its few scattered and inconspicuous rhymes. The tone is frankly confessional, the subject is the primal hurt in the poet's psyche, caused by his mother's prolonged mental ailment:

I address you only,
My lonely mother.

You do not understand me.
I am tidying my life

In this cold, tidy country.
I am filling a small shelf

With my books. If you should find me crying
As often when I was a child
You will know I have reason to.
I am ashamed of myself
Since I was ashamed of you.

The second section of the poem extends the view to take in the entire subcontinent. The speaker does not deny his umbilical connection with the land, even though he has exiled himself from it:

You eyes are like mine.
When I last looked in them
I saw my whole country.
A defeated dream
Hiding itself in prayers,
A population of corpses,
Of burnt bodies that cluttered
The slow, deep rivers, of
Bodies stowed into earth
Quickly before they stank
Or cooked by the sun for vultures
On a marble tower.

Here, at least, Moraes escapes Ezekiel's charge that he is without any larger cultural resonance. Here, and increasingly in his later poems, Moraes also escapes Hamilton's charge of formal conventionality.

It is no doubt a delicious irony that Moraes, who once believed he was English and has always written with an English accent, so to speak, should eventually find his literary niche in the context of the Indian subcontinent. His position in the canon of Indian poetry in English is secure, alongside Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Kolatkar, Parthasarathy, Kamala Das (now Suraiya), Mehrotra, Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali. Whatever caveats one might have, whether about his Un-Indian/English traits or his lack of a sense of belonging vis-a-vis India, the fact remains that the bulk of his readership is Indian. More importantly, as an influence on promising young poets, he rivals figures like Ezekiel and Mahapatra.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.