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He whose inner vision embraces both temporary and spiritual worlds, who is ever climbing to new heights, discovers that this very vision is instinct with the impulsion to create. As poems continue to pour from Sri Chinmoy's pen, it is clear that the dimensions of his work force us to revise our genre-based definition of the epic mode. Thomas Greene is one critic who writes with an enlarged understanding of the epic:

The first quality of the epic imagination is expansiveness, the impulse to extend its own luminosity in everwidening circles.[14]

The epic universe created by Sri Chinmoy is comprised of small poetical units rather than of a single narrative tale. It is an efflorescence of the imagination which has scaled the heights of mystical experience.

A second feature of these poems-wisdom-is again one that a Western critic might not value to the degree of an Indian writer or critic, for our poets lean more to expressions of feeling than of thought, more to the personal epiphany than to impersonal or absolute truth. in the context of Indian literature, however, wisdom is cultivated at all levels and is the mark of a fully integrated person. As a man grows through experience, so his wisdom deepens and he comes to subscribe to a total view of life. In early youth, Sri Chinmoy announced his devotion to "wisdom literature" in a poem which began:

Arise, awake, 0 friend of my dream.
Arise, awake, 0 breath of my life.
Arise, awake, 0 light of my eyes.
0 seer-poet in me,
Do manifest yourself in me and through me.[15]

Ten Thousand Flower-Flames is the ultimate fulfilment of this invocation. Here the poet's plenary sense of what he would say has yielded words of force and fire.