seshendrasharma

It is surprising that the western literature was for centuries ignorant about the poetics of Aristotle, as L.J.Potts observes in his introduction to the translation of poetics. It is therefore not surprising that the West was not interested for long stretches of time after the days of Greece and Rome, on this discipline of literature called POETICS-

I was keen for years in gathering knowledge about the endeavours of different peoples of antiquity who developed old civilisations, in regard to the development of a science on POETRY and literature. Though I came across the fragmentary efforts of the Chinese people on the question of the causes of poetry, even before the Tang period, (for example Lu Chi’s ‘Wen Fu’ in the 3rd century A.D.). There was no systematic evolution of a scientific work on the subject. May be my information is inadequate. However when I scanned across the Middle East on the corresponding periods and earlier, there was no evidence of any similar effort either in the Babylonian or Sumerian civilisations or the Egyptian. Perhaps much of the evidence of those periods has been lost irrevocably, leaving a vacuum up to the early period of Arab literature. The vacuum is amazingly, not confined to literature only but extends over the whole range of human thought, which means that the great civilisations of the middle east right up to the days of the fall of the Persian Empire and the Greek civilisation of the areas, have either sustained a serious loss of knowledge or did not produced such knowledge at all. However, it is quite reasonable to guess that in these areas in the periods corresponding to those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and Aristorchus and so on which is between the 5th and 2nd centuries
B.C., there should have flourished great knowledge in different fields and this body of knowledge could not have been any the less than what was witnessed in Greece and Rome in those periods. All historical accounts of those areas and around remaining today, indicate at this. And when I take into the range of my vision the entire land between Greece and china, my mind tells me that during those periods of antiquity when great civilisations flourished simultaneously, there must have been large intercourse of peoples and thoughts across their frontiers and human knowledge might have been evolved by mutual exchange of thoughts and influences. In the event of this probability, it may nt be correct to say that a certain branch of knowledge was developed in this country and was not in the other, and so on. I am inclined to presume that knowledge in those periods would have acquired the form of a long-chain of thought-influences across all these countries, as is witnessed also in our own times. If some of these countries show gaps today it is right that we should only infer that they lost that knowledge due to serious historical cataclysms but not that they did not develop those faculties at all.

My investigations in these matters did not for a long time yield any fruitful result; and it was either due to the paucity of material that I could secure or at times due to a more basic cause underlying the history of thought of the countries concerned. For example, the western literature for centuries I think has been ignorant of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle and was scarcely informed of any other works on the subject. Later on in the most recent centuries it has begun to centre around the single name of Aristotle for all the basic functions of literature, though in fact Aristotle was utterly inadequate to the developing literature of the modern centuries and some of the principles that came to be applied were merely imaginary and not even really Aristotelian, as T.S.Dorsch points out in the case of the three unities of Time, Place, and Action.

Reading John Keats by Douglas Bush I was startled to find mention of Longinus and his doctrines of Peri Hypsous. This was another name in the field of Poetics besides Aristotle, and what is more revealing is a remark that John Keats might have or might have or might not have known Longinus but the poetic axioms which Keats propounds read like a gloss upon some doctrines of Peri Hypsous’. My efforts at securing more information yielded satisfactory results in time and now I have a picture before me which reveals that Greece and Rome in their hey-day did considerable work on Poetics and Longinus surprisingly approximates to any of the leading literary critics of Modern Times.

As a matter of fact I consider Aristotle out-dated and out-moded compared to Longinus. Aristotle perhaps deals with literature in its early antiquarian stage and he has nothing to offer on the highly sensitive intricacies of the advanced minds of literature. There is a gulf of difference in the very methods of literary criticism of these two. Aristotle is content largely with laying down bare principles, seldom entering into illustrations, whereas Longinus besides laying down principles or expostulating theories, illustrated from great masters like Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sappho etc and presents satisfactory discussion explaining his principles and theirs in the light of such passages. The method of Longinus is not very different from the method in vogues in the modern literary criticism. Very often I wonder if there is any difference between T.S.Eliot discussing on Dante or any other classical poet and Longinus discussing on the Epic and classical poets of his time. From this point of view Aristotle presents an antiquated picture of himself. Perhaps corresponding to Bharatha of India. In both their cases, the literature they had in their view was that of the period when poetry and drama did not evolve into separate literary genres. So the bulk of the principles they enunciated were chiefly intended for drama and were partially applicable to poetry which was also in those days basically narrative in form and widely different from the modern trends. And that was perhaps the reason why their poetics were applicable to both poetry and drama. In the later centuries when poetry separated itself from the narrative content and evolved into a separated genre, Aristotle became insufficient and Longinus had answers to all the major questions of the new poetry.

Longinus is very near the most sophisticated thought available in the Indian poetics and in some respects even excelling. In his Peri Hypsous he offers clues to certain questions, which were not even raised in the Indian poetics. The principle cause of poetry according to Indian poetics is Pratibha (genius) which is a gift received from birth. The crucial question arising out this theory is whether a person who is devoid of genius, is disentitled from writing poetry and is poetry to be written b men of genius only. Strictly speaking there is no answer to this question in Indian poetics, which goes to the very roots of the justification for a science like poetics. Longinus on the other hand suggests solution in the 8th chapter of his treatise. He enumerates five sources of poetry and like India he also assigns the 1st place to genius among the causes of poetry. I would quote here from Longinus to enable better appreciation of that master, ‘ the first and the most important is the ability to form grand conceptions… second comes the stimulus of powerful and inspired emotion. These two elements of the sublime are very largely innate, while the remainder are the product of art-that is, the proper formation of the two types of figures, figures of thought and figures of speech, together wit the creation of a noble diction, which in its turn may be resolved into the choice of words, the use of imagery and the elaboration of the style.

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