Soman Ragavan

AnalysisByPerplexityAI-Volume 45--OnMe-21Dec2025-Batch 1

BATCH 1

SOMAN RAGAVAN

 21 December, 2025

Subject : On Google (Gemini) Deep Research - On me

  Analysis by Perplexity AI

     (Artificial Intelligence)

               Volume 45

 (1)

Soman Ragavan :

Hello. I will post : (a) a list of books I published, (b) research done by Google Deep Research on me on the Internet.  Could you please comment extensively. In a first stage, I will post the list of my books.

At college in 1968, I studied some poems of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Samuel T. Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Robert Browning (1812-1889), Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) and some other poets of that era.  Make any comments or comparisons you wish on my poems. Say if there are other contemporary poets who write as I do and compare my poetry with theirs. I live in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. 

(2)

Perplexity AI : 

Your poems consciously continue the English Romantic–Victorian line you studied—Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning—while transplanting that tradition into a Mauritian, postcolonial, Hindu-inflected world.mypoeticside+1​

Links to the poets you studied

• Like Wordsworth and Goldsmith, your work often uses clear narrative, moral reflection, and accessible diction, but you add explicit social and political critique (COVID policy, workers, governance) that those earlier poets usually veil in pastoral or anecdotal form.mypoeticside+1​
• Your occasional archaic lexis (“methought,” “shalt,” “ne’er”) and steady metrical, rhymed stanzas echo late 18th–early 19th century practice, so the tonal register can feel closer to Coleridge or early Tennyson than to most twenty‑first‑century free verse.mypoeticside​
• The dramatic intensity and direct address to readers or imagined interlocutors (for example in pieces on death, cremation, or family) recall Browning’s dramatic monologues, though you usually remain closer to a personal lyric voice than to a fully dramatized character mask.mypoeticside+1​
• Your frequent turn to moral exhortation and “lesson‑drawing” links to Arnold’s and Tennyson’s didactic strain, but you set these in very specific contemporary Mauritian situations (water security, COVID funerals, governance), which gives them an immediacy those Victorians tend to sublimate into more generalized cultural debate.mypoeticside+1​

Distinctive features of your poetry

• Cultural and ritual focus: Poems on cremation, funeral rites, ashes, and songs like “Zindagi ka safar” embed concrete Hindu and Indian‑diasporic practice into English verse in a way that is still relatively rare, even in broader Commonwealth poetry.mypoeticside​
• Structured, classical form in a contemporary setting: While global COVID and geopolitical poems often choose free verse or fragmentary forms, you insist on regular stanza shapes and rhyme, so crises are “disciplined” into almost 19th‑century containers; this tension between order and upheaval is one of your signatures.mypoeticside+1​
• Essayistic and analytical framing: Many pieces appear as parts of numbered “Volumes” or as themed analyses on geopolitics or public policy, so the poems sit inside a quasi‑essay framework that encourages readers to treat them as both art and public argument.mypoeticside+1​
• Persistent themes:
  • Mortality and legacy, especially poetry as what survives when body and ritual are threatened.mypoeticside+1​
  • Postcolonial and small‑island vulnerability (water security, “unequal war,” global power imbalances).mypoeticside+1​
  • Familial piety and grief, as in “Papa!”, where private mourning meets broader ethical reflection.mypoeticside​

Contemporary poets with affinities

There are not many contemporary poets who combine overtly archaic English diction, formal stanzas, and detailed Indian‑Ocean ritual the way you do, but some overlaps exist in theme and stance:

• Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia): Shares the island setting and postcolonial imagination; his long lines and mythic scale differ from your tighter stanzas, yet both of you re‑inscribe colonial languages with local sea‑scapes, labour histories, and spiritual textures.mypoeticside​
• Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados): Also an island poet of history and dispossession; where he experiments with typography and broken forms, you keep to regular metres, but both foreground the afterlives of empire and plantation systems.mypoeticside​
• K. Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra (India): Their work similarly binds Hindu ritual, family memory, and English verse, though they move within more modernist or free‑verse frameworks, while you remain closer to Romantic/Victorian formalism.mypoeticside​
• Some pandemic‑era poets worldwide: Many wrote about mass graves, disrupted rites, and anonymity in death, but usually in free verse and with less explicit cultural detail; your COVID poems stand out for tying those global experiences to precise Mauritian and Indian ritual imagery.mypoeticside​

How your work reads in the wider field

• Within Mauritian and Indian Ocean literature, your poems form part of a sustained, multi‑volume project—over 600 posted pieces and prose books of stories and criticism—that chronicle social, political, and spiritual life on the island in English from a Hindu‑Mauritian vantage point.uom+3​
• In Commonwealth poetry, the combination of older English poetic manner, contemporary geopolitical content (for instance, in your work on India and geopolitics), and your ongoing collaboration with multiple AI analyses gives your oeuvre an unusually self‑reflective and archival quality.mypoeticside+2​
• For readers familiar with the poets you studied in 1968, your poems can feel like a kind of late‑Romantic or Victorian monologue transported into the 21st‑century Indian Ocean, where sugar estates, pandemics, crematoria, global warming, and great‑power rivalry replace English lakes and moors.mypoeticside+2​

When you share the list of your books in detail, it will be possible to align each volume more precisely with these traditions and to comment on how your prose and poetry together construct a long, interlinked Mauritian life‑work.

1. https://mypoeticside.com/show-poem-202137
2. https://mypoeticside.com/user-53418
3. https://mypoeticside.com/show-poem-199541
4. https://mypoeticside.com/show-poem-200103
5. https://mypoeticside.com/show-poem-203410
6. https://mypoeticside.com/show-poem-208823
7. https://library.uom.ac.mu/libero/WebOpac.cls?VERSION=2&ACTION=DISPLAY&RSN=10236562&DATA=UOM&TOKEN=P5W9ademp07353&Z=1
8. https://library.uom.ac.mu/libero/WebOpac.cls?VERSION=2&ACTION=DISPLAY&RSN=10236735&DATA=UOM&TOKEN=P5W9ademp07353&Z=1
9. https://library.uom.ac.mu/libero/WebOpac.cls?VERSION=2&ACTION=DISPLAY&RSN=10237611&DATA=UOM&TOKEN=3R10VFpOJe1869&Z=1&SET=1
10. https://mypoeticside.com/all-the-ownpoems-53418-6 

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Continues in Batch 2