SOURCE: "A Satirical Neoformalist," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCIV, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. lxiv-lxvi.

An American educator and critic, King has written extensively on Indian poetry. In the following review, he discusses The Humble Administrator's Garden in relation to postmodernism.

There was a radical populist form of postmodernism in the 1960s in which modernist high art was seen as the enemy of immediacy, self-expression, and fulfillment; more recently a conservative neoformalism has challenged modernist poetics. Vikram Seth, whose The Humble Administrator's Garden won the new Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia, reports on surfaces and the trivia of life in purposefully clichéd language, stereotyped ideas, using such forms as the sonnet, quatrain, and epigrammatic couplet. While some poems are written in free verse, Seth usually writes a monosyllabic, regularly stressed line. A refusal to look inward, a celebration of simple pleasures and of survival, and a half-serious resort...