English

Most North Americans think minimal about American Indian culture and history. Researchers have concentrated such issues, yet they have not succeeded in broadcasting their decisions generally. Subsequently, it is as yet not generally realized that American Indians have epics, that they performed plays sometime before Europeans showed up, and that they practised politics and carried on the exchange system.

One way to gain a fuller appreciation of this rich culture is to examine American Indian poetry, for poetry is in all cultures the most central and articulate of the arts. It is especially important that we study American Indian poetry as this poetry can create a context that gives cohesive expression to the crafts, the artifacts, and the isolated facts that many Americans have managed to notice willy-nilly. Even a survey of American Indian poetry reveals a range of poetic thought and technique that defies easy generalization. Jarold Ramsey hazards a summary, however, which serves at least to give the uninitiated reader some sense of what American Indian poetry is like. Overall, he writes, it represents “an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form,” whose approach is to emphasize the “mythic and sacred” components of reality. It “flourished through public performances. by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories” and valued the performers for their “ability to exploit their material dramatically and to combine them? their stories? in longer cycles” rather than for their “plot invention.” Because this poetry belongs to highly ethnocentric tribal peoples, whose cultures “we still do not know much about,” it “is likely to seem all the terser, even cryptic.”

American Indian poetry has another feature that Ramsey ignores: it is always functional. Whether sung, chanted, or recited; whether performed ceremonially, as entertainment, or as part of a task such as curing a patient or grinding corn; or whether recited individually or by a group, it is always fully woven into the fabric of ordinary life.

For complicated reasons, American Indian poetry has basically been ignored by non-Indian cultures. Kenneth Lincoln writes that failure to hear American Indian voices results “partly.from the tragedies of tribal dislocation, partly from mistranslation, partly from misconceptions about literature, partly from cultural indifference.” Brian Swann suggests an additional explanation: tribal poetry is oral, whereas Europeans arrived in the New World with a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the written word. As a result, European settles found it hard to imagine that poetry could exist without written texts and thus that the American Indians had achieved something parallel to what Europeans called literature long before Europeans arrived. As a consequence, Europeans did not fully respond to the rich vitality of American Indian poetry.

What would be unconventional for American Indian Poetry, as per the given passage?

The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4) below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and choose the correct option.

1. His wide experience of men and things is manifest in the life-likeness and mature power of his poetry.

2. Chaucer's personality stands out in his writings plainly and most delightfully.

3. It accounts in part for the broad truth of all but his earliest work, which makes it essentially poetry not of an age but for all time.

4. It must be borne in mind that, like some others of the greatest poets, he was not a poet merely, but also a man of practical affairs, in the eyes of his associates first and mainly a courtier, diplomat, and government official.

Four jumbled up sentences, related to a topic, are given below. Three of them can be put together to form a coherent paragraph. Identify the odd one out.

1. As noted by the World Federation for Mental Health, the concept of optimum mental health refers not to an absolute or ideal state but to the best possible state insofar as circumstances are alterable.

2. Mental health is regarded as a condition of the individual, relative to the capacities and social-environmental context of that person.

3. Mental hygiene includes all measures taken to promote and to preserve mental health.

4. Mental arithmetic is the invaluable maths skill of doing calculations in your head.