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Although Sri Chinmoy had, by 1978, completed his 14th year in America (as a resident of New York City), his outlook had been shaped by his early years in India. As a consequence, he brings to his art and poetry an Eastern reverence for spiritual things over and above the material and marries it with the dynamism and intensity of the West. In his striving for perfection of both the inner and the outer man, the complete harmony of body, mind and soul in every phase of life, we see the combination of Eastern and Western values: the East, with its fundamental perception of vastness and universality; the West, with its abundant concern for proportion and exactitude. The East, with its inner poise and serenity; the West, with its intellectual acumen and reasoning capacity. This synthesis of East and West is seen by the poet as a most necessary advance for the modern world and it is an ideal that he has tried to realise in his writings and in his life. He writes:
The awakened consciousness of man is visibly tending towards the Divine. This is a most hopeful streak of light amidst the surrounding obscurities of today This is a moment, not merely of joining hands, but of joining minds, hearts and souls. Across all physical and mental barriers between East and West, high above national standards, above even individual standards, will fly the supreme banner of Divine Oneness.[46]
In October, 1979 Sri Chinmoy embarked on what has since proven to be his major poetic work: Ten Thousand Flower-Flames. In the year and a half that has lapsed since the dawn of this project, 13 volumes in the series have appeared, each containing one hundred poems. The genesis of this enormous undertaking, the range of themes and styles that the poems span and the poet's plenary power to give utterance to his realisation, are discussed in the final chapter of this thesis. When completed, this series of ten thousand poems taken alone will be greater than the sum of all Sri Chinmoy's previous poems. Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is Sri Chinmoy's consummate art form and its informing vision might well be called epic. Treading the ancient path of the seer poet, he would seem to draw all his creative powers togetherthe formal metrics of his early poems; the colour and visual impact of the paintings; the haunting quality of his melodies; the fragrance and subtlety of the lyrics; the looser, contemplative rhythms of the prose poems and the brief, compacted form of the aphorism-all blend in the fires of wisdom to create words of matchless power and simplicity.
