Critical Considerations

Abstract

This chapter takes up some of the literary, theoretical issues of the poem: the potentials of figurative language, the use of the Cloud as the poem’s semiotic axis of conversion, the place of the “image and imagination” in literary poetics, the centrality of loss and longing (viraha), the depths of Kālidāsa’s “tantric sensibility,” the understanding of “place,” the poem’s vision, of nature, and the centrality of memory as recapitulation. All of these considerations are taken up in the context of the Indian aesthetic tradition as well as in Western post-structuralist poetics that are strongly resonant with the rasa-dhvani poetic tradition of classical India.