Editing Martin Wickramasinghe (section)

==Peradeniya school and poet==
Wickramasinghe was an early practitioner of the genre of poetry called ''nisandas'', which ignored the restrictions placed on poetry by the traditional prosodic patterns. It drew inspiration from the work of [[T. S. Eliot|Eliot]], [[Ezra Pound|Pound]], [[Walt Whitman|Whitman]] and other western poets and was part of a movement called Peradeniya School. Wickramasinghe's work was ''Teri Gi'' (1952).

The movement dissolved in the 1960s prompted by Wickramasinghe's contention that other writers of the Peradeniya School were not sensitive to cultural traditions and the Buddhist background of Sinhalese society. He accused [[Ediriweera Sarachchandra]], [[Gunadasa Amarasekara]] and others of imitating "decadent" western and post-war [[Japanese literature]] and of supporting a [[Nihilism|nihilistic]] look on life with cynical disregard for national tradition.