Savitri

  SAVITRI: A COSMIC EPIC

      The distinction of a poet—the dignity and humanity

of his thought—-can be measured by nothing, perhaps,

so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives;

if he is supreme his vision, like Dante's,

always stretches to the stars.

                                                                                                  George Santayana

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      I

The Problem

      An American Professor of Philosophy, Raymond Frank Piper, has referred to Savitri as "probably the greatest epic in the English language" and has also ventured the judgment that, "...it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful, and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance...Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute."¹ Savitri is a great epic, probably the greatest in the English language; it has a cosmic range and comprehension, and a beautiful and perfect articulation; and its effect on the reader is to expand his mind "towards the Absolute".

      These are large claims which deserve to be carefully weighed and considered. Are epics possible at all in the modern world? Can we really describe Savitri as an epic? How does it compare with some of the great epics or epic compositions of the ancient and the modern worlds? What exactly is meant by a 'cosmic poem' or 'cosmic epic'? Is Savitri the last word yet in presenting in poetical terms the cosmic drama of the struggle between darkness and light, falsehood and truth, death and immortality, the drama of change and chance and defeat and victory? Does Savitri hew with the inevitability of art pathways to the Absolute, projecting before us the 'Divine Comedy' of the "yearnings and battles of mankind for eternal life", culminating in the victory, the certainty of "a greater dawn"?

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