with proving or disproving the veracity of fabulous accounts that have grown around literary origins and lives of poets. The books which I have found to treat in a satisfactory manner the concept of Nature among the ancient Tamils, are P. T. Srinivas Iyengar’s Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture and History of the Tamils from the Earliest Timesto A.D.600.10 The author’s main sources for the history of that period are the very ones which are th e texts for the present study. He has studied them to some extent from the historical angle. It now remains to examine them from the point of view of the literary critic and the literary historian. Professor M. Varadarajan in his book TheTreatment of Nature in Sangam Literature has made a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the texts concerned.11 For a book intended for foreign readers on this subject, I have paid greater attention to Akam poetry as revealing the more original aspects of Nature poetry in Tamil. It has not been my intention to crowd into this study abundant details, or make it heavy reading with a multitude of quotations, and reference to single objects of Nature as mountains, rivers, trees, flowers, animals, or single forces of Nature, as lightning and thunder. Where other literatures are concerned, ancient and modern, this province of literary criticism has attracted a satisfactory number of scholars. While there have been several works on the interpretation of Nature of individual poets like Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley, or the entire literature of single nations, world literature itself has been the subject of research in this interesting aspect. Schiller led the study with his Über die naive und sentimentale Dichtung (1794), followed by Alexander von Humboldt, who in his Kosmos, a work of encyclopaedic information, discussed Nature in the poetry and landscape painting of the Indo-European races. Ruskin in the third volume of Modern Painters has interpreted the Nature of Landscape art in classical, mediaeval and modern times. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10The author makes several useful observations which if developed will contribute greatly to Tamil research. His chronology, however, is debatable. His book is referred to as H.T. in these pages. 11These pages were written before the publication of M. Varadarajan’s The Treatment of Nature in Sangam Literature, Madras, 1957. |