Ezekiel Showing the Importance of Craftsmanship:
Ezekiel's technique of writing these and other poems may aptly be described as sophisticated though we may have to qualify this view. Ezekiel is perhaps the first Indo-English poet to show consistently that craftsmanship is as important to a poem as its subject-matter. Ezekiel regards a poem as an organic, integrated composition; and so, the form, the structure, the words and phrases used by a poet become very important and a matter of vital concern to the conscientious poet. Ezekiel's attitude to the writing of a poem is the same as the attitude of that beautiful woman who said: "We must labour to be beautiful." In other words, Ezekiel does not regard the writing of a poem as a casual affair. For him the writing of a poem involves a lot of toil and even more of patience, though he certainly wants that the final product should appear to be spontaneous and to have been an effortless affair. In his poem entitled “Poet, Lover and Birdwatcher”, Ezekiel clearly says that "the best poets wait for words" like a birdwatcher sitting silently by the flowing river, or like a lover waiting for his beloved till she can no longer resist surrendering to him. Ezekiel has also expressed the view, in a poem entitled “Portrait”, that what matters in poetry is "not the words that are found/But the singing counts." And the singing, to be really effective, has to be in proper words.
Clear and Direct Poetry, Written Largely in a Colloquial Style:
Ezekiel's avowed aim has been to write clear and direct poetry, resulting from a continuity between the life lived and the poetry written, the same thread unravelled from flesh and blood on to the page. Apart from a few poems in the volume entitled “The Exact Name", Ezekiel has been adopting a conversational style. The frequent use of a colloquial idiom imparts to these poems a fine combination of the clarity of expression and a cogency of argument. Poets, he has said in one of his poems, are not counterfeiters and cannot afford to cheat their readers with words. The last poem in the volume called "The Exact Name" has the title of A Conjugation, and it pleads for an end to pretense.
The Role of Imagination and Suggestion in Ezekiel's Poetry:
Ezekiel is perfectly aware of the significance of suggestiveness in poetry and he feels that the imaginative faculty should be allowed to play its role. At the same time, he is always eager to celebrate the "ordinariness" of most events; and his characteristic mode remains simple, colloquial poetry of statements. Even when he becomes suggestive, he does so through a statement. He feels certain that the exact name can be found only in simplicity. We come across his characteristic aphoristic wisdom in lines like the following: “Not all who fail are counted with the fake;" "The use of nakedness is good;" "The first baptism is not in water but in fire;" and "Home is where we have to gather grace."
Economy and Spoken Language:
According to a critic, the following lines from Ezekiel's poem, “The Egoist's Prayers” show Ezekiel's poetic language at its best:
“No, Lord,not the fruit of actionis my motive.But do you really mindhalf a bite of it?It tastes so sweet,and I'm so hungry."
According to the same critic, the telling economy and directness of these lines make them really memorable. Ezekiel has tried to bring the idiom of poetry closer to the spoken language. Sometimes his lines read like lines from John Donne's poems. He claims to have written much simpler poetry than others; and in this connection he has said: "Even the most complex of my poems are relatively simple and direct, judged by the norms of difficult poetry properly so called." His poems like “Philosophy” and “Perspective” do contain some abstract thoughts and vague expressions like "myths of light" and "parables of hell"; but most often his phraseology, like his ideas, possesses the quality of concreteness.
Imagery and Sound-Effects in His Poetry:
Ezekiel's best poems have an undeniable pictorial quality and, therefore, show an obvious affinity with the visual arts. This is a perfectly just observation. In his poem entitled “In India”, for instance, Ezekiel has given us concrete and vivid pictures of Bombay which he calls a "barbaric city, sick with slums". The poem entitled “On Ballasis Road” evokes a vivid picture of a whore standing beside a red-coloured letter- box in her purple saree and yellow blouse. And, some of his poems owe their effectiveness to his manipulation of sound effects.
A Sophisticated Style, But Not All the Time:
Thus, Ezekiel's style or technique is not so sophisticated, after all. "Sophisticated" does not mean the same thing as simple, direct, and colloquial. "Sophisticated" means complex, subtle, involved, and having deeper layers of meanings. Now, Ezekiel has certainly written poems in a sophisticated style. Examples are Enterprise, Philosophy and The Visitor; but his poems in the direct and simple style out-number them. Thus, we may conclude that he shows an equal command over both these styles and that in some poems he even mixes up the two styles