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Discussing the works of Pascal, Patricia Topliss draws particular attention to this functional aspect:
Pascal's style has indeed a strange, compelling beauty of its own; but it was not fashioned with aesthetic intent. Its raison d'etre--to express his convictions and impose them on his readers-was situated outside literature. It was a natural style because it was a functional style: it used words as tools or weapons, and restored to figures of rhetoric that had long been thought of as ornaments, their original function as instruments of persuasion.[26]
This style of aphorism, based on conviction and dependent upon the rhetorical effects of repetition, hyperbole and interrogation to increase its emotional efficacy, epitomises the boldness and forthrightness of Sri Chinmoy's poetry of statement. He does not endeavour to overwhelm the reader with an over-extensive cognitive content but rather by the sheer power and intensity of his thought. There is, one must admit, a kind of imperiousness in the way he is able to capture the reader's imagination with the mere mention of an abstract noun, such as heart or soul, and sweep it out into the infinity of space, the realm of the everknown.
Perhaps these poems of statement will be charged with a degree of didacticism. On the other hand, perhaps, we forget that much of what we now mislabel as didactic poetry was born of a need to address the community at large, to speak for all men. Rare is the poet who dares, as Emerson put it, to "chaunt our own times. "[27] Much of our modern poetry is anti-propositional, dominated by the search for purely emotive or psychological truth. And yet many critics perceive the need for a return to the breadth and expansiveness of poetry that reaches beyond this personal domain. Donald Davie, for example, stresses that the need has arisen once more for "a poetry of urbane and momentous statement. 1118 One sees in his appeal a lingering belief in the Shelleyan idea of the poet as "the unacknowledged legislator of mankind." Sri Chinmoy's words, with their subtle, dignified generality, their candour and clear wisdom, aspire to fulfil that ideal. They are enlightening, penetrative and, as in the following poem, often prophetic:
