Handbook of Classical Sanskrit Rhetoric /16

iv
 
A HandbooThe poet is called the second mak of Classicaler after God. Sanskrit Rhetoric
 
The poet is called the second maker after God. So Bharata comments

in his Nātyāsśāstra - Oh! very heavy is the burden of the poet (aho

bhāro mahān kaveḥ). Therefore, ameturism in poetry has been

frowned by the critics, who condemn kukavi or a bad poet in

explicit terms. False poetry or kukavitā, according to Rājasśekhara, is

next to suicide or death for a poet.
 

 
A poet is a master of language, creator of poetry which is

refinement of ideas, beautification of sound and sense or word and

meaning. There is no end to this process of poetic creativity for

which a poet makes use of his proficiency in grammar, phonetics,

metrics and rhetoric as well as experience in worldly knowledge. As

discipline (ie vinaya) makes a perfect government so academic disci-

pline makes a true poet. Therefore, AĀnandvardhana says that a

poetic composition is not merely a combination of choicest words

and agreeable meaning but it always supersedes the contextual

meaning and brings out a suggestive sense that directly appeals to

the aesthetic quality of the artistic mind. Modern critics of poetry

also have the same feeling and express the same idea in a different

way: Completion of a poem is the unfolding of a realisation, the satisfying

of a need to bring to the surface the inner realities of the psyche.
A poem
comes to birth with something like an organic body.
 
...
 

A poem
comes to birth with something like an organic body.
 
While explaining the aesthetic quality of poet's art AĀnan-

davardhana says that when we categorize an expression with a par-

ticular mark of a figure of speech, it is purely an objective identifi-

cation, a categorization of a wholesome beautiful object into parts

and, therefore it is entirely relative as well as incomplete. So he

observes that alamṃkāras are not made, but born; they come out

themselves through the poet's creative faculty. Before AĀnandvard-

hana most of the Sanskrit rhetors analysed the structure of poetic

language and tried to delve deep into the style of expression as well

as the artistic significance of the sense. The alamṃkāra school of lit-
erary criticism tried to analyse the poetic diction not only part by

erary criticism tried to analyse the poetic diction not only part by
part but by the complete expression and meaning also. In this con-

nection, it would be most relevant to give in brief the theory of

semantics as propounded by the Mīmāṇṃsā philosophy of word and

meaning. The complete meaning of a sentence, according to this
 
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