Śṛṅgāra

The love in the context of esthetic experience is very different from the emotion that human beings feel at the empirical level. The empirical emotion of love consists in the intense desire in two persons of opposite sexes for each other and in the enjoyment of each other. It is the basis of social recognition of the couple as husband and wife. It is transient. It lasts only so long as the state of infatuation persists. The love, however, that is presented in the focus of the dramatic situation and is responsible for the rise of esthetic experience is persistent. It persists without break from the moment of its first rise till its full fruition. In it there is not even an iota of pain. It is entirely a blissful state of mind.

The experience of the empirical love and the possession of the residual traces of it are necessary for both the poet and the esthete, for the one to be able to present the situation and mimetic changes in his drama in such a manner that they may give rise to the...