SOURCE: "Kuntaka's Critique of Kalidasa as a Master of Sukumara Style," in Vishveshvaranand Indological Journal, Vol. XXIII, June-December, 1985, pp. 267-79.

In the excerpt below, Gupta places Kalidasa's work in the sukumara or "delicate" style, which is characterized as being free from affectation and growing organically out of the poet's imagination.

Although Sanskrit poetics is characterised by a rare richness of poetical theories or doctrines of literary criticism, yet at the same time it is, unfortunately enough, very poor in representing, in a real sense, the practical aspect of literary criticism which is hardly traceable, in a noble form, in the long range of works on poetical theory excepting in the Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana (c. A.D. 875) and the Vakroktijivita of Kuntaka (c. A.D. 950). Of these two works also, the Vakroktijivita represents this aspect of literary criticism in a more comprehensive form and with greater critical insight than...