Page 2
We praise Chaucer as the first of English poets, who delighted in words and who would seem to have breathed freshness and simplicity into every page. In the same sense, I have found in Sri Chinmoy an "original" poet of the language, a master of it in every respect and yet one who rejoices in it, as in a new discovery.
The frequency of rhetorical figures of speech in Sri Chinmoy's poetry places the critic in a challenging position, for modern critical idiom commonly equates rhetoric with unnecessary inflations of speech, a movement away from the flexible spoken language towards an artificial stiffening into certain mechanical forms. Rhetoric is seen as the province of the ancients, a highly contrived manner of reasoning, which continued to exist in partial measure in Shakespeare and Donne, through to Pope and Milton, but was finally disengaged from poetry by the Romantics. Even such eminent scholars of rhetoric as C.M. Bowra and Brian Vickers[2] argue for our sympathetic appreciation of a poetic fashion that. is understood to be something of a relic from the past.
What then are we to make of a poet such as Sri Chinmoy who turns instinctively to parallelism to add vigour to his emotional expression, who repeatedly uses inversions for effects of grandeur and who moves with ease among ascending and descending lists of qualities and attributes? The rhetorical texture of Sri Chinmoy's verse is everywhere apparent. Moreover, one gains the impression that this is not due to any deliberate attempt on the part of the poet to restore to English poetry the oratorical style of the Greek poets, but that rhetorical expression itself may in fact be the natural utterance of man under certain emotional and spiritual conditions.
