Love Lyrics (The Clay Sanskirt Library Series)

Book Description
The short lyric poem appears with great frequency in Sanskrit collections and displays a wide range of themes. Bhartrihari is the most famous composer. Amaru and Bilhana also offer excellent examples.


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"Amaru's sophisticated seventh-century CE "Hundred Poems" are as much about the social aspects of courting, betrayal, feminine indignance and masculine self-pity as about sensuality. Bhartrihari's anthology "Love, Politics, Disenchantment" is the oldest of the three, from the fourth century. Interwoven throughout his three hundred idiosyncratic stanzas is a constant sense of skepticism about sensuality and love, economic and social power, and rejection of society and culture." In the eleventh century, Bilhana composed his intense "Fifty Stanzas of a Thief," a thief's rhythmic remembrance, in the moments before his execution, of robbing a princess's affections, and the clandestine pleasures of their love in both separation and enjoyment. The flavor of all these poems is the universalized aesthetic experience of love.


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