Literature.......who inspired whom ?

*    We all love reading literature of different countries and different cultures. And often we wonder, who were the inspirations behind those excellent authors who wrote such lovely books that continue to inspire generations.

*     All modern authors ought to have got inspiration from one of the great writers of the ancient or medieval world.

*   Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) were greatly inspired by their countryman, Shakespeare.

*   William Shakespeare (1564-1616),   English literature's greatest icon and arguably the giant of the western world literature, was  inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400).

*    Geoffrey Chaucer, another great seemed to be inspired by Virgil (70 – 19 BC).

*      Virgil, a Roman drew inspiration from Greek author, Homer (8th century BC).

*        Homer, the first poet of the West, remains to this the greatest. His two great poems, The Iliad and the Odyssey, are the first masterpieces of Western World literature and even after 3,000 years their power, vibrancy , influence and allure have not diminished.  Today they rank second only to the Bible among the western literary classics.

*     Hold on ! Before you arrive at the judgment, read this.  

*    And the greatest epic wasn't written in the western world but in the ancient India by Ved Vyas, a sage, who wrote 'the Mahabharta' between the 8th and 9th century BC. The Mahabharata is the longest Sanskrit epic, which consists of over 100,000 shloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of another epic 'the Ramayana'.

*   Surprised ! well we ought to be. East or West. The Mahabharta and the Ramayan remain the greatest epics in any literature and their appeal universal.

*   So, the greatest writer of all times and all cultures remains 'Ved Vyas'. Sadly the West, obsessed with their superiority in everything, often fail to accept this fact.