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I shall examine the various structures of parallelism that operate within representative poems from a single volume of Sri Chinmoy's poetry: Europe-Blossoms. This volume of 1,000 poems was composed while the poet was travelling in Europe in 1974. The space of composition in this instance was three weeks-- implying a rapidity of execution challenging to our accepted standards. The clue to Sri Chinmoy's poetic creation lies in the term "oral poet" for, in effect, his is an improvised art form. The poems are created whole. They are the expression of the whole man at the moment of composi tion. By foregoing the practice of working from an "original" version of each poem to a final, perfected form a practice that is basic to most poets- Sri Chinmoy proclaims himself a member of the oral tradition in poetry. It is a tradition in which the moment of composition coincides with the performance of the poem. Within the bounds of a single act, the creative artist becomes by turns composer and performer.
The demands of improvised poetry are extremely high. A poet must have at his command not only a sufficiency of thematic content, but an extraordinary collectiveness of mind, a near faultless expression and an intensely active imaginative flame. The fulfilment of these conditions makes the office of the oral poet a truly epic one, for in his creative abundance he aspires to embrace the experience of the age. If successful, he attains the sweeping vision of :
the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart.[18]
The emphasis which Emerson gives here to the poet's "power to receive and impart" places utmost importance on the need for expression rather than on the search for originality. Hence, we find the oral poet developing a grammar of poetry which is characterised above all by its usefulness-useful words, useful phrases, useful patterns. The criteria of "usefulness in composition," Albert Lord affirms,
carries no implication of opprobrium. Quite the contrary. Without this usefulness the style, and, more important, the whole practice would collapse or would never have been born. [19]
