News at Eleven: Akam dealt with 'that which is inside' or

'the inner world'--in other words, love poems, written in highly structured forms. Puram's themes were on 'the outer world', and dealt with public life, with war, death, and the glory of kings. These poems laid the foundation for Tamil poetry, a tradition so strong that it was only from the nineteenth century onward that poets began to struggle to break, as the translators say, "free (from) traditional and prescribed forms of prosody . . . (and) speak with new voices and address a wide audience in the modern political and social world."

from The Daily Star: Tamil Poetry: akam and puram

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