'A poet is humbled by the cosmos, experiencing it in poet's glory. Once the poet becomes aware of this greater reality, he lets go of his lesser desires and this unables his conscience. A poet has an important role to perform in a community. He not only has to continue with the discovery of his own deeper self, but also educates the hearts of others, which are continuously at war. Educating and sensitizing people's senses is his responsibility. He has to make others experience peace by enjoying the beauty of the soul delivered by his poetic sensibility. It is important that a poet can inculcate emotions in an untitled heart so long as an individual accepts the fact that he is bereft of culture and inner emotions. But it is difficult to sensitize a person who is complacent in his cultural and emotional literacy.

The coarseness of human existence, like the beauty of the human soul, is a vital ingredient of life and should be truthfully depicted in art. A poet should look at the squalor of human life and experience it as he would look at terrific beauty and not be merely resigned to it as a fact of life'.

About the dangers that art faces today he says, 'Consumen'sm dwindles the stature of an artist's expression and artists who indulge in it are being untrue to their own creative power. An artist is a receptor of inner knowledge. He delivers to the world both the beauty and the sadness of the soul. He gazes not only into the light of lights but also at the terrible prophecy beyond the beautiful'.
 Keshav Malik has published m  than a dozen volumes of poetry, a book of prose, and
edited five anthologies of poetry  in translation from Indian languages into English. He was the editor of
Thought from 1963 to 1975,Indian Literature and  Art and Poetry. He was the poetry editor of Youth
Times. and edited the Poetry Bulletin of the poetry Society of India, of which he was the first president.

Malik has been for many years the art critic for the Times of India, New Delhi. He wrote five monographs on different Indian artists published by the Lalit Kala Akademi, and the Andhra Pradesh Arts Akademi.

He has served on the Executive Board of the lalit Kala Akademi, and has-been honorary editor of its journal. the Contemporary.

After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree from Kashmir University, Srinagar, he was the literan' assistant for the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. After a year he was awarded cultural scholarships by the governments of Italy and France, and from 1950 studied in those countries as well as in New York City and London until the late 1950s. He received the Padmashri award for literature in English in 1991.