Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Amal Kiran's Letter to Sri Aurobindo on Savitri

We reproduce in the following Amal Kiran's letter to Sri Aurobindo on Savitri as it appears in the Sri Aurobindo Circle (Special Fiftieth Number) of 1994. The editor's note, briefly excerpted, introducing the correspondence between them precedes the letter. Sri Aurobindo's reply as originally dictated to Nirodbaran is not reproduced here. — Editors

(Sri Aurobindo used to send by instalments, from 25 October 1936 onward for some time, a handwritten copy of his Savitri as it stood then to Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), and it grew an established, practice that the disciple would raise critical points and the Master consider them and give suitable answers. This practice continued in changing forms even when Amal Kiran was in Bombay in the forties. We are publishing one set of correspondence belonging to the Bombay-period... The disciple says to the editor of Sri Aurobindo Circle that, on re-reading his part of the exchange, he is surprised how Sri Aurobindo could allow him to write not only at great length but also in bold terms as if to an equal, and how the Master had the patience and the graciousness to deal in detail with all the topics proposed. Sri Aurobindo's reply is reproduced here as originally dictated to Nirodbaran and not in its final farm as included in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library Edition of Savitri.)

Hamilton Villa,

Nepean Sea Road,

Bombay.

1.5.1946

Sri Aurobindo,

Your patience with me is admirable and admirable too is the dear controlled force with which you express your views. You

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could have brusquely brushed aside my various reflections. Instead, you have considered them at length. And I have the feeling that you welcomed the points raised by me and the criticisms I had offered. Just as I do my utmost to appreciate and praise the merits of your poetry, I scrupulously mention all that seems to me a shortcoming no matter how slight and negligible in the midst of your abundant excellence. At times I may be helpful, more often I must be merely troublesome, but I hope my speaking my mind serves some purpose, draws your attention to certain things either for removing them or for clearing up issues of importance in relation to the sort of poetry you are writing and many of us are aspiring to write. If, however, you think that my method of subjecting Savitri to the keenest scrutiny in order that it may be wholly perfect is misguided altogether, I shall not submit any further suggestions for improvement but confine myself to what I can whole-heartedly praise - that is, nine- hundred and ninety-nine parts out of every thousand.

My phrase about unpurposive repetition might carry the unacceptable suggestion that a poet must have a conscious deliberate intellectually justifiable purpose in whatever he writes — and so I ought to modify it. I think what I should mean is this: repetitions in a certain kind of poetry do not seem to have a special meaning, a special point and do not even attract special notice, while in another kind they do not pass unnoticed and they strike one as serving some end, some end which the poet may not always be able fully to explain to himself but which he feels or intuits to be there. The reader too may not always be able to give an explanation, yet he is spurred to look for one because he feels or intuits a meaning and a point whereas, in dealing with the other kind of poetry, he is not spurred at all to do so. The latter kind gives the impression either that the repetition docs not stand out or that, if it does, it is right in its own place without needing to be considered in the relation of one part to another. There is no sense created, in the critical observing mind or even in the seeing and regulating instinct, that the successive parts bear the repeated word because of a particular purpose held by the inspiration and running through these parts and relating the first

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occurrence of a word to the second.

Your new version of the bird-passage does away with the slight weakness of the old besides avoiding the repetition of "delight" at the end of a line. It carries now a complex multiform image, perhaps more in tune with the general vision of the rest of the description you have given of Savitri. But there must be a comma after "breast" to make "haven" go with the second portion of the passage. One variant in the body of the new version suggests itself to my mind. I offer it not with the idea that it is definitely an improvement but just for your consideration. You have:

In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose.

Here, for what it may be worth, is a closer approximation to your original line:

In a safe haven of splendid and soft repose.

You say you cannot satisfy my demand for rejection and alteration of the lines about the Inconscient and the cloak. Well, I suppose you know your business best, and if after my criticism you still stick to your guns I must conclude that there's not much the matter with them. But I must say the line you have put after the one about the cloak does somewhat change the complexion of the case: you bring in just the suggestive mystical touch which, though not introducing a direct affinity in the image to what goes before and comes after, provides it with the common basis the various other images have and to that extent obviates my objection to it as being an intruder. As for the Inconscient and Ignorance, I am sure that sooner or later the inspired poetical exegesis or symbol will flash through your mind. For Ignorance waking from the Inconscient you have somewhere a splendid phrase - And the blind void struggles to live and see. I don't give up the hope that another such miracle will happen.

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(By the way, there seems to be a prepositional mix-up in your sentence: "I take my stand on my own feeling and experience about them as Keats did about his on truth and beauty." Shouldn't "about" and "on" at the close change places? I hope you don't mind my mentioning the slip.)'

In the passage about the "errant marvel", I agree that the line beginning "Orphaned..." cannot be omitted, and I see also that there is not sufficient reason for you to alter anything in deference to the reader's difficulty in getting at the grammar. After all, every passage need not yield its grammatical pattern very easily — and provided suggestions are there to lead him to the right reading of it he should not grumble. Your passage has these suggestions, as you point out. Perhaps passages like this are part of a long poem's attractive features - they give critics occasions for discussion and elucidation. So long as genuine poetry is not missing, there should be no demurring at grammatical or symbolical "toughness" here and there.

Your picture of the Johnsonian critic is both effective and amusing. I suppose most of us who have not gone beyond the intellect into a deeper and higher consciousness have him in some form or other lurking within us. I try my best to keep at bay whatever remnant of him is still in me — and I think my various essays on poetry in general and on your poetry in particular, indicate this trying. That does not mean he never crops up - but I am not unaware of his menace. Besides, I myself have written poetry which would send him howling mad: especially the poem called Agni, which begins:

A smile of heaven locked in a seed of light

and which you once described as "super-Aeschylean" in style, out-vedas the Veda in its reckless association of disparate images to figure supramaterial and occult entities and significances!

The Hamlet-lines you quote from Shakespeare are a good instance of the liberty with images which romantic poetry takes — to the complete flabbergasting of the Johnsonian critic. I believe,

1. In his reply Sri Aurobindo admits the slip. - Editors

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however, that romanticism is not only the cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery — that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls, as you once remarked, between two stools - the vital afflatus and the mental inspiration — but these two poets have a certain affinity in their treatment of language and metre, their manner of thinking out a theme, their attitude towards images. Imagery is with them functional, it is a means of thinking and feeling, they think and feel in a sensuous fashion. Their imagery is not something added to the thought and the emotion; the adding can be most beautifully and harmoniously done, but it will still remain more a pictorial and artistic value than a direct and native mode of intellectual significance and emotional suggestion. Shakespeare's images often run into one another because he is not always trying to present a coherent pictorial description but rather to give flashes of the aspects of his thought, the turns of his emotion. His similes, and metaphors are less to be realised in their sensory properties than in their meaning and mood. The sensory proper- ties remain a little hazy - not in individual picturisation but in collective effect: hence mixed, fused, changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase:

Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself?

Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, very rare in Milton for all his compact force.

I am not quite clear as to what conclusion I should draw about the nature of poetry from your paragraph about aesthetics and the Overmind. Of course it is plain that ordinary aesthetics cannot be equated with the Overmind's poetry. But is not the latter what it is because of an extraordinary type of aesthetics and not because it is concerned with spiritual truth? Don't you mean

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the same thing when you say: "In all poetry a poetical aesthesis of some kind there must be in the writer and the recipient; but aesthetics is of many kinds and the ordinary kind is not sufficient for appreciating the Overhead element in poetry." In the sense in which I have understood the term in my last letter, aesthesis is the sine qua non of poetry: there are many other elements but they can exist without necessarily producing poetry, while no poetry at all can there be either of the Overhead or the non-Overhead variety in the absence of aesthesis. If the poetic expressions from the diverse planes are to be brought under a general heading, the common factor in them must be considered their essence and this factor can only be a many-moded aesthesis. It is subtle-physical aesthesis that makes Homeric poetry, vital aesthesis that makes the poetry of Shakespeare, mental aesthesis that makes the poetry which is Miltonic and Overmind aesthesis that makes the Aurobindonian poetry. Knock Overmind aesthesis out of Savitri and we shall have The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga in the guise of a Legend and a Symbol. Truth will still remain, but not poetry proper. As soon as aesthesis functions on the Overmind level, we have the poetry of Truth since, as you say, the Overmind in all its dealings puts Truth first. All the same, the fact that the characteristic dealings of a particular plane cannot help entering into all its expression does not give to the expression which is poetical on this plane any other essence than aesthesis. Neither the mental nor vital nor subtle-physical plane is solely concerned with aesthesis: they have their own typical dealings which enter into their poetry, even as those of the Overmind enter into its — and yet it is not these typical dealings which constitute their poetry. Similarly, the Overmind’s concern first and foremost with truth supplies merely the most important feature by which its poetry is to be distinguished from that of the other levels of consciousness: this concern does not render anything else except aesthesis the essence of the Overmind's poetry. Am I wrong in thinking that, though the Overmind cannot be equated with aesthetics in the ordinary form and it is concerned with many other things than even an extraordinary form of aesthetics, its

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poetry must in essence be equated with what you have called "a greater, wider and deeper aesthesis which can answer to the transcendent and feel too whatever of the transcendent or spiritual enters into the things of life, mind and sense"?

Here a new point arises: when you employ the epithets "greater, wider, deeper" what exactly are we to understand in relation to poetical quality? If poetry's essence is some kind or other of aesthesis, is the Overmind poetry superior, qua poetry, to the creations of the Muse from the mental, vital or subtle- physical planes? The epithets used by you would seem at the first blush to imply superiority for it. But I believe that they refer to the spiritually greater, wider and deeper nature of the plane from which this poetry leaps out. In other words, the Overmind aesthesis functions from the plane of the transcendent or spiritual which is more great, wide and deep than the rest of the planes, yet in thus functioning it produces not superior poetry but poetry from a level of being which has spiritual superiority - a superiority that does not add to the purely poetical quality: You have said somewhere that, in spite of the Mahabharata and Ramayana being greater, wider and deeper creations than the Iliad and Shakespeare's work, Vyasa and Valmiki, though not inferior, are not superior poets. Doesn't this amount to saying that neither the plane nor the scope nor the theme of a poetical creation makes any difference to the purely poetical quality? But what then constitutes greatness from the standpoint of poetry proper? All poetry is an outbreak from within: taking any subject and adopting any view, it comes from the inner being from any plane. But the inner being on each plane has a gradation of temperatures. Poetry can be created from any grade; still, the inner being acting the poet from a lower temperature creates small beauty, brings an aesthesis that is narrow in its thrill - from a higher temperature a beauty that is great, a far-thrilling aesthesis. Though the result in both cases is truly inspired and distinguishable from mere constructed brain-work, there is a degree of difference between the two, which can be perceived if we compare the intensity manifested in lines like these from Nashe,

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Beauty is a flower

Wrinkles will devour,

to that embodied in the following from the same poet,

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

The former lines are Nashe writing with inspiration from a lower temperature of his inner being, whereas the latter are the inspired outbreak from a higher one. For another example, take Pippa's song by Browning:

The year's at the spring,

The day's at the morn;

The morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's at the thorn;

God's in his heaven,

All's right with the world.

This is flawless in its own way, the inner being has put forth beauty, but that being has not risen to the top-grade of temperature possible to the particular mood it has taken up. The same mood, essentially, of happy faith in the Divine's presence and in his work in the world can be made to yield a far-thrilling intensity: the expressive outcome will then be perfection of great poetry instead of a perfection of small poetry. Compare Browning's

God's in His heaven,

All's right with the world

with Dilip's

It is His will that overarches all,

His sentinel love broods o'er the universe,

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and you will see at once what I mean. It may be said that Dilip is drawing upon a very lofty Overhead plane and is therefore "greater", but I opine that quite apart from this there is a difference in the temperature of imagining and feeling and in the temperature of word and rhythm. A similar difference is also perceived if we consider non-Overhead lines with an analogous drift revealed from another angle — Francis Thompson's

The angels keep their ancient places; —

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendoured thing.

A man does not need to write from his inner being's depth at this temperature in one manner or another in order to be an admirable poet; to be a great one he certainly does.

The subject of poetical greatness is not exhausted by what I have said above. It can be approached in a more complex fashion and several other points brought up. I hope, however, I have put my finger on the heart of the matter. Also I hope I haven't tired you by my digression.

I was much interested by your finding the Overhead touch in the lines:

I spoke as one who ne'er would speak again

And as a dying man to dying men.

What exactly is introduced by the Overhead touch here? Could we hold that somehow a subtle "spirituality" comes in? But how are we to characterise the "spirituality"? If, as you say, the touch gets in through a passionate emotion and sincerity, what nuance of them catches the sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive on the Overhead planes? Is there anything Overhead in the emotion of Wordsworth's

And never lifted up a single stone

or Shakespeare's

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Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story

or a modern poet's

Sad eyes watch for feet that never come?

Your observing that when I was typing an earlier draft of the first books of Savitri you were passing through a transition-stage between the habits of an old inspiration and technique and the new that had begun to come removes the puzzlement on my part at seeing you take a laxer view of repetition than at one time.

I have sent Premananda a list of the ten or eleven mistakes that have crept into the generally excellent printing of my huge article. Please ask Nirod to consult that list and enter the corrections in your copy.

With love,

AMAL

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