SOURCE: "Pastoral and Kalidasa's 'Cloud Messenger': An East-West Generic Comparison," in Literature East & West, Vol. XXI, Nos. 1-4, January-December, 1977, pp. 112-120.

In the following essay, Walker compares Kalidasa's Cloud-Messenger to the Western notion of pastoral poetry.

The Cloud Messenger (Meghaduta), perhaps the masterpiece of Kalidasa, the greatest of the classical Sanskrit poets, has long been familiar to Western readers through numerous translations. Goethe sent a copy of Wilson's to a friend in 1817, and alluded to the gift in the following verses [quoted in Walter Ruben, Kalidasa, 1956]:

 Und Meghaduta, den Wolkengesandten,
Wer schickt ihn nicht geme zu Seelenverwandten! 

Yet it has always proved a difficult work to classify generically. An American Indologist concluded recently that the Cloud Messenger "to all intents and purposes stands alone & It is such a chef d'oeuvre that it must be considered a genre by itself [Edwin Gerow, "The Sanskrit lyric: a genre analysis," The...