Poetry and rasa
I was recently added to a group on Facebook called Devotional Poetry , where a few devotees have been sharing their compositions and their love of language (English only, of course). I am not a compulsive poet, nor a regular practitioner of the craft. If I am a poet at all, it is more of an impulsive one, who occasionally is driven by some inspiration or emotional turbulence to express myself. So I haven't written a great deal, and when I do, it admittedly tends to the maudlin because of the excessive charge of immediate, unprocessed feelings. But without the charge of personal feeling, if a poem is only repetition of another's thoughts, or didactic/intellectual alone, then it loses its edge or capacity to produce rasa . In these cases, what we get is bhāva , not rasa . The thing about writing, poetry or any kind of literature or artistic production, according to rasa theory, is that it takes emotions ( bhāva ) out of the realm of the purely personal. Personal experie...