SOURCE: "The Poet of Sorrow," in The Melody of An Angel: Mirza Ghalib—His Mind and Art, Publication Bureau, Panjab University, 1981?, pp. 55-68.

In the following excerpt, Kumar discusses how Ghalib expressed the grief, yearning, and regret in his own life in his poetry and how his poetry, in turn, helped him overcome his sorrow.

Great art is mostly the product of frustration. Lips begin to sing when they cannot kiss.¹ It is the sick oyster that is said to bear the pearls. The poets "learn in suffering what they teach in song."² Keats went a step further:

 "None can usurp this shade", returned the shade, "
But those to whom the miseries of the world,
Are miseries; and will not let them rest."3 

Valmiki, the father of Sanskrit poetry and the author of Ramayana, has narrated how he saw a hunter shoot a bird while mating and the...