surprising. For nearly all the bad things, and many of the good things, in Western thought can be traced back to Plato. From his theory of the Essences, he derived the theory of Imitation, placing the poet on the same level as an artisan. These ideas cast such a spell on literary theorists that M.H. Abrams sees all European literary theory after Plato up to the eighteenth century as a struggle to explain poetry in terms of the Platonic metaphor of the mind as reflector of Essences.2 Even though Aristotle's Poetics is supposed to be an answer to Plato, Aristotle's failure to effectively refute the theory of imitation, rather his confirmation of its fundamentals, only helped to establish the fact that Plato was sceptical about the social and intellectual value of poetry. This resulted in literary theory always being on the defensive: it could not refute the theory of Mimesis, and yet it had to find justifications for poetry. Replies had to be found to Plato's contention that philosophy, not poetry, was directed to ultimate truth. All Western defenders of poetry, from Aristotle onwards, set about to prove that poetry was not only "pleasant, but also useful to States and human life," that if an imitation, it was an imitation of the "sensory experience of life on earth"--which changed and had a history, or that poetry was invloved in life, by being criticism of life. This last, though generally true, is no special charec-teristic of poetry. Yet it has held great sway throughout the history of modern Western ideas on poetry. Even Auden, who angrily remarked that poetry was not something like a city which could be "done" by a tourist, or a novel which could be condensed, fell prey to it. Commenting on a line of Hardy's, "I never cared for life, life cared for me," Auden retorts: "Never cared for life? - Well, really, Mr. Hardy!"3 One should have thought that when the poet takes care of the poetry, life takes care of itself. But Plato's ghost still frightens many of us with the threat of excommunication.
The complications that Western poetics created for itself were unknown to the classical Urdu poetry whose character remained medieval until about the beginning of the twentieth century. All efforts to understand it outside its own poetics have resulted in serious miscomprehension or woeful misjudgement. Hali, writing in the last years of the nineteenth century, condemned Urdu poets for their lack of realism, their immorality, their lack of interest in social reform, and despairingly said that the unholy pile of poetry stank worse than a public latrine. Hali found many good things to say about Urdu poetry, and he did say them, but he was unhesitating in condemning it as "useless." For according to the lessons of the Protestant ethic that he had learned, the fruit of labor was always sweet—and there was no other fruit—and Urdu poetry did not seem to exhort people to labor and action.4
A few decades after Hali, the Progressive critics found Urdu poets sadly lacking in social awareness and living in an unreal world of their own. They were angry at them for not rebelling against the oppressive society and politics of their times. Later, when the fashions somewhat changed and the Progressives found that their own poetry needed both justification and strength from classical roots, they looked for and readily found protest and social comment even in the Sufistic or lyrical utterances of those very poets whom they had earlier
12