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A Handbook of Classical Sanskrit Rhetoric
The poet is called the second maker after God. So Bharata comments
in his Nātyāsāstra - 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 Rājasekhara, 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, Anandvardhana 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.
...
While explaining the aesthetic quality of poet's art Anan-
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 alamkāras are not made, but born; they come out
themselves through the poet's creative faculty. Before Anandvard-
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 alamkāra school of lit-
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 Mīmāṇsā philosophy of word and
meaning. The complete meaning of a sentence, according to this
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Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
A Handbook of Classical Sanskrit Rhetoric
The poet is called the second maker after God. So Bharata comments
in his Nātyāsāstra - 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 Rājasekhara, 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, Anandvardhana 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.
...
While explaining the aesthetic quality of poet's art Anan-
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 alamkāras are not made, but born; they come out
themselves through the poet's creative faculty. Before Anandvard-
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 alamkāra school of lit-
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 Mīmāṇsā philosophy of word and
meaning. The complete meaning of a sentence, according to this
Digitized by
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN