INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

COMPLETE WORKS OF DR K.C.VARADACHARI – VOL10
and poets are admired precisely for their ‘fidelity to
nature’. We call that word-painting.
Thus it is clear that though men are aware of this
distinction between svartha and parartha it is only the
parartha that is socially valuable and in a truer sense a
test of perfect knowing. Musical critics who cannot sing
or songsters who cannot sing or execute their
inexpressible songs are species of non-knowers-
arrested knowers-arrested half way to knowledge of
their subjects. So also painters who cannot paint or
artists who are just art-critics and nothing more are of
this category.
A poet combines the genius of the artist with the
vision of the reality which he sees much more than the
ordinary seer or observer. He observes more than the
ordinary man, who sees the peculiar identities which
are not within the province of the ordinary logician or
scientist, though it would be profoundly good for the
latter to accustom themselves to see the unities and
identities of a different order, and the correspondential
which is possible to a trained imagination. The true poet
is the poet of truth not merely of imagination, for
452