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means oriented; or rather, they were convinced that any discussion of
the ultimate purpose of poetry falls into equivocation and overextension
unless it states the purpose within the intentional structure proper to
poetry, and presents that aim as the nature of the expressive potency
which is the very life of poetry. Austin Warren, discussing the Crocean
emphasis on the creative process and its tendency to overvalue discovery
at the expense of formulation, says: "The painter sees as a painter;
the painting is the clarification and completion of his seeing. The poet
is a maker of poems; but the matter of his poems is the whole of his
percipient life. With the artist, in any medium every impression is
shaped by his art; he accumulates no inchoate experience."5
INTRODUCTION
From the very beginning the speciality of poetic speech was, in the
Indian tradition of criticism, understood most characteristically as the
figures of speech (alamkāra). Traditional Indian scholarship has em-
phasized the importance of the figures to the point of giving the name
alamkāraśāstra to the whole study of poetry. Uneasy at seeing the subject
so degraded, historians have generally explained this usage as a historical
survival. The first, more primitive and less discriminating writers, it is
argued, described the alamkāras exclusively or in the main; and despite
later progress and development in poetic insight the name, being old
and therefore hallowed, stuck. The figures, in this interpretation, though
they give their name to the study of poetry, are in fact its least important
part. They are haphazard lists of purely extrinsic embellishments irrele-
vant to the poetic problem. The present Introduction will suggest, and
the following Glossary in part establish, that such a view as a theory of
the figures is false, and as history is perverse and hypothetical.
Oddly enough, the important place that the figures have occupied in
most Western poetics is overlooked by the historians of Indian poetics,
though indeed contemporary poetics does not on the whole find much
use for the figures. The writers on Indian poetics of whom we speak
appear to wish to reimpose this modern de-emphasis on the Indian
subject matter, a severe distortion of the classical tradition which reserves
for the study of the figures a place of honor. The alamıkāras not only
[paperback ed.], 1956), p. 175: "These [sensuous particularity and figuration] are both
characteristics, differentiae, of literature, in contrast to scientific discourse."
5 Ibid., p. 74. Cf. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism, A Short
History (New York, 1962), p. 513.
* De, HSP, II, pp. 32-34; Dasgupta and Dey [De], HSL, p. 517.
7 Cf. Wimsatt and Brooks, p. 102, pp. 142-143, 233-234; also Wellek and Warren,
pp. 187ff.
means oriented; or rather, they were convinced that any discussion of
the ultimate purpose of poetry falls into equivocation and overextension
unless it states the purpose within the intentional structure proper to
poetry, and presents that aim as the nature of the expressive potency
which is the very life of poetry. Austin Warren, discussing the Crocean
emphasis on the creative process and its tendency to overvalue discovery
at the expense of formulation, says: "The painter sees as a painter;
the painting is the clarification and completion of his seeing. The poet
is a maker of poems; but the matter of his poems is the whole of his
percipient life. With the artist, in any medium every impression is
shaped by his art; he accumulates no inchoate experience."5
INTRODUCTION
From the very beginning the speciality of poetic speech was, in the
Indian tradition of criticism, understood most characteristically as the
figures of speech (alamkāra). Traditional Indian scholarship has em-
phasized the importance of the figures to the point of giving the name
alamkāraśāstra to the whole study of poetry. Uneasy at seeing the subject
so degraded, historians have generally explained this usage as a historical
survival. The first, more primitive and less discriminating writers, it is
argued, described the alamkāras exclusively or in the main; and despite
later progress and development in poetic insight the name, being old
and therefore hallowed, stuck. The figures, in this interpretation, though
they give their name to the study of poetry, are in fact its least important
part. They are haphazard lists of purely extrinsic embellishments irrele-
vant to the poetic problem. The present Introduction will suggest, and
the following Glossary in part establish, that such a view as a theory of
the figures is false, and as history is perverse and hypothetical.
Oddly enough, the important place that the figures have occupied in
most Western poetics is overlooked by the historians of Indian poetics,
though indeed contemporary poetics does not on the whole find much
use for the figures. The writers on Indian poetics of whom we speak
appear to wish to reimpose this modern de-emphasis on the Indian
subject matter, a severe distortion of the classical tradition which reserves
for the study of the figures a place of honor. The alamıkāras not only
[paperback ed.], 1956), p. 175: "These [sensuous particularity and figuration] are both
characteristics, differentiae, of literature, in contrast to scientific discourse."
5 Ibid., p. 74. Cf. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism, A Short
History (New York, 1962), p. 513.
* De, HSP, II, pp. 32-34; Dasgupta and Dey [De], HSL, p. 517.
7 Cf. Wimsatt and Brooks, p. 102, pp. 142-143, 233-234; also Wellek and Warren,
pp. 187ff.