The sophisticated shallow urban life that is at once mechanical and parasitical is enveloped by pretensions and fabrications. In his Collected Poems, Ramanujan expresses life style in the city as mechanical, exilic and no freedom at all. It is also one way of legitimizing his identity to escape from the burdens of identity crisis in Chicago. This is one of the ways of overcoming the burdens of the life lived in Chicago.
Living in the ambience of alien culture, Ramanujan has been constantly haunted by the memories of his experiences. One side, the metaphor of the family with its ineluctable inner filiations, and on the other, the self-forged prison of linguistic sophistication. His life is caught in the crossfire between the elemental pulls of his native culture and the aggressive compulsions of the Chicago milieu. Ramanujan's poetry intends to celebrate the vastness of life by considering the city and its associated images as the manifestation of body. Madurai and Chicago serve as the repository of his images, which not only render to his poetry a tensional quality but also reflect upon the pangs of being a poet, constantly haunted by the forces of the two worlds- one alien, the other native. Ramanujan, who lived in India and finally settled and died in the USA makes his poetry vibrant with the images of city. He was a poet, short story writer, translator, linguist and folklorist-all rolled into one. Though he has been living in the United States long since, he has not forsaken his Indian heritage and sensibility. He has left behind an illustrious legacy of his poetry with which he will always live as 'a poet of India' and more importantly simply a poet. While English is the language of his creative works, Tamil and Kannad are the media of translation. Ramanujan born in Mysore in 1929, is a trilingual writer who shows his mastery equally in English, Tamil, and Kannad. Caught in the crosscurrents of two cultures- the Indian and the Western-Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan, an American citizen with a deeply rooted Tamil sensibility is able to write of exile feelings in an idiom morphed by nativised sensibility and a homebound vision.
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