Adventures in Criticism

The Poetic Experience

If poetry is to glow with true beauty it must rise from living experience. This is not to rule out the Ariels of song: imagination may weave rainbows upon a delicate air, but the rainbows must be a genuine revelation and no coloured falsity. In other words, poetry is not confined to facts of mere earth: it can float in more tenuous regions, but it must create an impression that these regions, however incredible to the normal mind, do exist behind or beyond the familiar and tangible loveliness. The sole criterion, therefore, is: Does poetry come with an authentic power or no? Keats's magic casements may be only the eyes of daydream, they may exist only in his brown-study and in no recognisable room; yet his art is such as to create a feeling of their reality. Our minds are charmed into what Coleridge called a suspension of disbelief. The imagery and the music go home with an inevitable sense of truth. Somewhere, we seem to tell ourselves, these wonderful apertures are to be found; the rhythmic language in which they are described is like a current generated by the poet's touch with their strangeness to produce a television in our own soul. The experience is proved by this convincing spell thrown on us. We must not ask if an emotion or an object poetised is part of common life; we must only inquire whether it lives in its own way with a convincing beauty and appears real, even though its reality be remote from our ordinary perspectives.

Nor is it necessary for a poet to pass completely through the inner experiences recorded by him of subtle realities. A mystic surge may convey to us a thrill of God's presence or a superb spiritual phenomenon like

The lonely waters of eternal ease

with such a strong mood-atmosphere that we pass into that very state of rapture; and yet there would be no reason to

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believe that to the poet the substance of his writing was equally intimate. When a Vedic Vishwamitra rolls some gorgeous hymn to the Truth-Sun wherein the Self of self has its being, we are aware that he is voicing an experience, but that is because we have the independent knowledge that Vishwamitra was a Rishi. If we did not have this knowledge we would not be justified in arguing from the sense of reality implicit in the poem to an experience on the poet's part. All that can be said is that the poet who could bring so assuring a vibration of mystical ecstasy had an extraordinary imagination open to spheres of reality which transcend the reach not only of the average man but also the average poet of the first rank — say, Homer or Shakespeare. For, in poetry the main factor is imagination: we should never forget this central truth if we are to gauge rightly the nature of inspired utterance. Emotion makes poetry throb: it is the animating flame behind all idea and figure, but this emotion is not necessarily what is felt in the accustomed human way. It is a thrill, a warmth, an enthousiasmos of the imagination. And what the imagination, as a rule, does is to take suggestive hints given by actual experience, outer or inner, and then transform them into a power of measured beauty by reflecting or transmitting the response from some centre of consciousness beyond the normal human nature: that is to say, the imagination is a medium.

Some poets are close to their own experience-stuff; still, they too reshape it in order to embody as perfect a glow or gusto of beauty as possible: depths are plumbed, associations explored, velleities stressed rendering the new substance different from the old. In art the demand is for the beautiful, and if changing the stuff of experience brings out a heat and a light which deepen and accentuate beauty, the poet will not and should not hesitate to do so. His purpose, his ideal, is obviously not to photograph the mere outer life; it is not even to be faithful to his own inner life; he is essentially a revealer of shines and shadows from a supernormal plane. All poetry is a marriage of known symbols with unknown modes of

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being. When the Elizabethan poet writes that tall trees, struck by the first gleam of day,

Dandled the morning's childhood in their arms,

a supernormal perception goes quickening the sight of familiar objects; he has unveiled, without relinquishing his hold on these objects, a vision not of the earth-life as we daily contact it. And the supernormal vision increases as the poet becomes a channel of yet rarer subtleties, the culmination being the sheer mystical afflatus. The point, however, is that his sole concern is to be an instrument for perfect aesthetic creation, without stickling after so-called probability or needing to live out inwardly the full substance of the poetic work.

What, then, of sincerity in art? It is necessary to admit and emphasise that a poet who goes against his nature's aesthetic idealistic trend by living quite in disharmony with it is liable to diminish the frequency no less than the strength of his inspiration. The afflatus will hesitate to visit him and instead of producing masterpieces in abundance he will bring forth sovereign speech as a rare rush of light amidst shimmering vacuities. Poetry is a grave occupation, and though we may not convert it into an ostentatious ceremonial it does not bear being trifled with. The crown of utterance, it calls for a high seriousness in the instrument chosen by the gods. The old conception of the Muse is psychologically correct: the poet does appeal to something higher than his quotidian consciousness, he strains and poises himself and rarefies his mood in order to catch the inevitable phrase, the authentic rhythm, the real-sense of inspiration. Sarojini Naidu, after a brief spell of delicate music, grew dumb because she was not jealous enough of the gift bestowed on her: the drum and trumpet of politics deafened her to those flute-voices of her young delight which had given us poem after tremulous poem shot with tones of flame and faëry. A poet has to recognise his vocation, his destiny, and not fritter away the

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precious soul-stuff which takes images from beyond the ephemeral surface life. However, we must not impute insincerity to him even if he wastes his energy, provided the work he occasionally offers us pulses with the secret heart-throb of creative imagination. For then it is a cry from the lips of the gods, and the significant form that makes its beauty is the luminous ever-living body of the Muse. Fundamentally, the Muse and not the man is responsible also for the creative work of a life spent in tune with the aesthete and the idealist in one's nature.

If a mystic poet, for instance, were to claim that his work invariably mirrored his inner experiences, he would be an insincere fraud. But his poems themselves are neither insincere nor fraudulent: if they are inspired, the "I" of each poem is not the human ego but some entity which has an experience on a superhuman plane and sends down its self-expression through a human medium, coloured in a certain measure by the medium's personality yet not vitiated by it. The vitiation takes place only when there is a capricious fanciful play or a dry intellectual interference. So long as there is a moved precision in language, an assured lift of rhythm, a masterful harmony in the whole, a poem is a genuine echo to some subtle reality behind the poet's imagination. It remains a revelation of the real, though its author may have experienced nothing — nothing except the joy of the creative labour, which gives him mostly a mere sympathetic thrill. If people do not understand this paradox and attribute the described experience in its complete form to the man who serves as an instrument, it is after all their own fault. The reaction they undergo on discovering that the man did not have the entire experience is to believe that the poem is a tissue of falsehoods and that poetry is worthless since it does not depict truth. They must understand that both idolatry and iconoclasm are extreme errors.

The test here of sincerity, truth, authenticity, value is, first and last, Inspiration — Inspiration working through any part of man's nature. The outward-going body-conscious

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mind of Homer describes Apollo's descent from Olympus with an intense atmosphere of the god's subtle physicality of power. Shakespeare passes a sudden voice from spiritual heights through the life-force's peculiar thrill and colour and we get

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

Sri Aurobindo intuits in a self-transfiguring lift of the pure mental consciousness the supreme Spirit's

Force one with unimaginable rest.

In all these expressions the inspiration is absolutely unmarred. Sri Aurobindo has experienced the very state he poetises, while Homer never knew Apollo's deific puissance nor Shakespeare the world-soul's profound reverie; yet their language when filled with a mystic intuition has not suffered the least weakness in imparting a real-sense. For each has conveyed with an aesthetic finality in the terms of his own habitual colour a superhuman magnitude; the perfect inspired beauty which bears evidence of truth behind the veil has been equally present. And this is all that matters.

No doubt, the examples I have mentioned are in a certain category of style which is exceptional — a style in which even poets of the pre-eminent order do not always write. They write in the main with a simple lucidity, a vivid vigour, a shining richness or, at their rarest, a spelled exaltation; no more than a few snatches we have in them of all these styles, distinct or mixed, reaching not only their own perfections but at the same time a special quality for which we have no name. And it is possible to argue that, given an identical measure of poetic capacity, one who has himself gone through high spiritual experiences is more likely to produce a large amount of work irradiating their influence than the man whose imagination only has been inspired, and to get more often their full depth and movement by means of this

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unusual mode of style. Still, it must be remembered that to write in another mode does not cast a shadow of insincerity or untruth over a poem. A poem may not reflect or echo the very stuff of Spirit but it can have a mystical genuineness of its own: the Spirit now is not felt in a language instinct with its essential vibration, it is felt with a true receptivity through a different poetic manner. And, in art, any style can attain the extreme pitch of sincerity, of inevitableness, which marks out the masterpiece. Take these lines from Yeats where he says that he has seen

In all poor foolish things that live a day

Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.

Yeats is a listener to occult footfalls, a singer haunted by unearthly presences, but not, like Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who has climbed the ultimate summits; and his words and rhythm in the couplet above do not voice the Spirit's substance with the direct grandeur of Sri Aurobindo's. Nor can they fill us with the same quantity, so to speak, of spiritual meaning as would an utterance by Sri Aurobindo couched in a similar style-key:

Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.¹

Nevertheless, who will call Yeats's lines inferior poetry? Who can miss in them the inspiration and the beauty that give some kind of authentic touch with a superhuman realit? It is a different kind of touch from what Sri Aurobindo manifests;

1. "Rose of God", Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, Vol. 5), p. 584.

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yet to question its sincerity and truth would be tantamount to saying that to feel a body naked with the hand or through a transparent fabric proves actuality whereas a contact through a silk robe does not. When the inspired perfection is there, it is as much an error to level the charge of falsity at a mystical phrase for being in a particular style with a particular content as for being written by a man like Shakespeare to whom mysticism was quite a terra incognita.

Suppose even the Spirit experience of a high plane gets completely changed in the transmission; then too the result is no falsity but a new interpretative vision, the symbol of one level fused with a significance of another. An illustration is Cleopatra's rhapsodical words to Antony:

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven.

Though a tremendous love-thrill between two human beings has usurped here for its own glorification a mystical light, one cannot declare that, because Cleopatra was not a mystic, Shakespeare has made her play a hypocrite's role by using spiritual language for an apotheosis of intense passionate rapture. Mystic or no, the upshot is a ring of utter genuineness, a poetic splendour absolute in its intense yet restrained sincerity of emotion. The real-sense is perfect — since art deals with realities on various planes and is not ostensibly preoccupied with conveying the Spirit by sight, sound or significance. Any mood-thrill imparted through any species of style by any poetic temperament bears the stamp of authenticity if that one sine qua non is found — the unanalysable but ever unmistakable force from subtle worlds we know as Inspiration, the living experience whose sole sign of truth lies in whatever figure reveals itself of a beauty that is intrinsic and not meretricious.

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