Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.49

v2.c83.49

The true poetry, the *dhvani-kāvya*, is divided into two broad classes, viz., *avivakṣita-vācya* and *vivakṣitānyapara-vācya*, which two designations, clumsy as they are²³, respectively indicate their nature. In the first case, the expressed sense is not meant; in the second case, it is certainly meant but ultimately amounts to something else, viz., the unexpressed. The first is obviously based on *lakṣaṇā* or Indication, which the poet employs with the conscious purpose of bringing the unexpressed into comprehension; and the question involved is about words and expressions which are taken not in a literal but in a transferred sense. This poetic transference, as we have already noted before, is at the root of metaphorical expression generally, the importance of which both the Alaṃkāra and Rīti schools amply recognised and industriously examined, and which Daṇḍin specifically included in the *samādhi-guṇa*, and Vāmana treated under the special figure *vakrokti*. As such, therefore, it could not be very well ignored, and by including it, as the *dhvani*-theorists did, in one of the principal divisions of good poetry, they rightly assigned to it a prominent place in the new system.