Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Approaching the Poetry of Amal Kiran

THE Collected Poems (1993) of Amal Kiran appropriately takes the name of his very first anthology, The Secret Splendour. Over more than four decades, "the secret splendour" of Amal Kiran's poetry has been unveiled in a number of collections, now brought together for the benefit of poetry lovers: The Secret Splendour, Overhead Poetry, The Adventure of the Apocalypse, Altar and Flame, Uncollected Works, Eros/Known and Unknown and a selection from the earlier days named Images from Early Moods. A collection of this nature that spans practically a whole lifetime is bound to display variation in terms of quality. Only two of the sections, namely The Adventure of the Apocalypse and Uncollected Works, we are told, are chronologically arranged. Even these, when chronologically placed, may not quite conform to our stereotypical expectation of the "growth of the poet's mind" from adolescence to maturity, or if you will, different degrees of maturity. As always, here too, chronology may play tricks with the reader: Some relatively early poems or those from the middle period may turn out to be far more successful than the later ones.

But how does one determine the "success" of poetry of this kind in the first place, one may ask? "Elucidating" (T.S. Eliot's phrase) spiritual or mystical poetry is clearly not an easy task. True, all aesthetic judgment remains finally a matter of subjective experience. And trying to read future or futuristic poetry against the grain of current or conventional aesthetic standards and canonical practice is particularly fraught with risk. Old habits, predilections and mind-sets always persist and arc bound to impede a fair and judicious judgment.

On the other hand, reading spiritual poetry of this kind in terms of the sources and planes of poetic inspiration, when handled by a Poet-Guru or a Realized Being, could be rewarding. And this is what we see in much of the insightful comments, at

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tunes keenly critical, offered by Sri Aurobindo while assessing the "overhead” poetry of Amal Kiran. However, implicit in this approach that affirms various levels of inspiration such as the "Higher Mind," "Illumined Mind," "Intuitive Mind," "Overmind" (The Secret Splendour, p. 81) or the one that defines poetic speech in terms of "Adequate," " Effective," "Intuitive,” "Illuminative," "Inspired" or the "Revelatory" (The Future Poetry, p. 395, 1953) is the acceptance of a hieratic tradition and the authority of a Guru as the arbiter for critical discernmeni. This may well be a perfectly valid way of reading poetry. However, the difficulties in this are easy to perceive.  As Sri Aurobindo concedes, "the distinction that I am trying to draw here between the various powers of the always intuitive speech of poetry can therefore better be felt than critically stated". (The Future Poetry, p. 381) And again, elsewhere, commenting on Amal's poem Truth-Vision in Overhead Poetry he says: "It is exceedingly beautiful, one of the best things you have done. But don't ask me to analyse it. Things like that cannot be analysed, they can only be felt." (The Secret Splendour, p. 175)

While to the devout, the merit of this approach that relies on feeling cannot be denied, even the votaries will admit that for those without an equal access to heightened spiritual experience and realisation, such terms and standards, even with the help of the Arnoldian "touchstone" method, will remain finally abstract and imprecise notions. They will eventually make a plea to our faith and belief and will not take us far into a community of discourse and mutually shared vocabulary and standards. It will be unwise for futuristic poetry to create an exclusive idiom and lexicon whose sense is not clearly communicated to a large number of sympathetic non-believers. This cautioning is necessary because a number of poets, and movements especially of the occult and the symbolic kind, have unfortunately fallen into this pitfall in the past.

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It seems to me, on balance, therefore, that one good way of reading the poetry of Amal Kiran is to first try and formulate an approach in the light of the aesthetics proposed by Sri Aurobindo who serves as the poetic role model for Amal Kiran. Here, the last eight chapters of The Future Poetry, from "The Ideal Spirit of Poetry" to "Conclusion", will serve our purpose. In these chapters, as well as his letters on Savitri and on Amal's poems, Sri Aurobindo has outlined his poetics of the future. It is hoped that some of these will provide for us useful critical standards to help us judge the poetry of Amal Kiran.

There is merit and justification, Sri Aurobindo tells us, in the rebellion of the modern poet, his bold experiments in verse form, indeed his temporary discarding of this form in favour of vers libre. For sticking too mechanically or blindly to the forms and modes of the past could only be debilitating in the long run. The answer to literary atrophy is not to be a slave to fashion, to be a habitual innovator or a ritualistic iconoclast, merely for the sake of novelty,

Sri Aurobindo firmly believes that rhythm is essential and integral to all poetic speech. This was the major achievement of early poetry in most languages. No period of poetic excellence in the East or the West could therefore eschew rhythm and produce poetry of a long-lasting order.  An absence of this all-important element would only turn poetry into insipid prose. The chief goal of poetry, Sri Aurobindo maintains, is to depict Truth through Beauty. The problem of the form, and the content too, is easily resolved. It is the power of poetic inspiration that usually manages to discover its own characteristic form of expression. For indeed "the essential and decisive step of the future art of poetry will perhaps be to discover that it is not the form which either fixes or reveals the spirit which makes out of itself the form and the word". (The Future Poetry, p. 369) Similarly, talking about the subject matter of the future poetry, Sri Aurobindo declares that not just the drama of the outer life but a concern with the many realms, both inner and outer, will constitute the

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legitimate interests of such poetry. As he declares:

What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his backlook upon the past, his sweep of vision over the present, his eye of aspiration and prophecy cast towards the future, his passion of self finding and self exceeding, his reach beyond the three times to the eternal and immutable, this is his real life. (The Future Poetry, p. 325)

However, Sri Aurobindo takes care to explain that in this attempt to recapture the wisdom of the past, the poet of the future will not equate spirituality with either morality, ethics, philosophy or religion. For, there will clearly be no point in returning to the grooves of the past and recovering old forms and spirit in a new guise. As he explains succinctly:

The meaning of Spirituality is a new greater inner life of man founded in the consciousness of his true, his inmost, highest and largest Self and Spirit by which he receives the whole of existence as a progressive manifestation of the Self in the universe and his own life as a field of possible transformation in which its divine sense will be found, its potentialities highly evolved, the now imperfect forms changed into an image of the divine perfection, and an effort not only to see but to live out these greater possibilities of his being. (The Future Poetry, p. 354)

A major hurdle that the poetry of the future, especially of the kind Amal Kiran attempts, is how to ensure "a new luminous and joyful fusion and oneness" between thought and life. This is one issue that engages the serious attention of Sri Aurobindo in The Future Poetry and his remarks on this topic are also to be found in The Secret Splendour. The problem simply is that at this turn of our social evolution, the intellect of man, despite all its flaws, has become the governing principle of life, and paradoxically managed to cripple it.  Discarding this obsession with the Mind, what D.H. Lawrence called the "Cerebral Consciousness" in

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favour of organic life does not appear to be a viable option. For indeed, we cannot recede into the past. As Sri Aurobindo remarks, "life, action, vital powder arc great indispensable things but to get back to them by thinking less is a way not open to us in this age of time even if it were a desirable remedy for our disease

of over-intellectuality and mechanised existence”. (The Future Poetry, p. 320) Differently put, we might says that the synthesis between philosophy and poetry remains a key requisite for the poetry of the future. In his comment on Amal's poem Orison in Overhead Poetry, for instance, Sri Aurobindo offers the telling example of Keats. "Keats," he tell us, "was the most romantic of poets, but he could ‘write to philosophise I dare not yet’, he did not write 'I am too much of a poet to philosophise'. To philosophise, he regarded evidently as mounting on the admiral's flagship and flying an almost royal banner." (The Secret Splendour, p.146)

This is a very significant viewpoint that finds parallels in radically different artists as well. For instance, talking of the novel of the future, in his provocative essay "Surgery for the Novel or a Bomb", D.H. Lawrence said:

If you wish to look into the past for what next books, you can go back to the Greek Philosophers. Plato's dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and notion got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristorte, Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So, the novel went sloppy and Philosophy went abstract – dry.  The two should come together again - in the novel. (Phoenix, p. 520)

III

Many of these concerns and injunctions of Sri Aurobindo regarding the poetry of the future find a reflection in the searching correspondence Amal Kiran had with Sri Aurobindo,

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as well as in his many attempts at writing the poetry of a new kind. The '"self-introductions" that the many collections in The Secret Splendour carry, bear ample proof that Amal Kiran was a very conscious and conscientious artist of the new mould. His pronounced affinity for the shorter poem clearly exemplifies the Aurobindonian dictum that "It is... in the lyric nearest to the freshness of an original impulse that a new spirit in poetry is likely to become aware of itself and feel out for its right ways of expression and to discover with the most adaptable freedom and variety own essential motives and cadences...." (The Future Poetry, p. 364)

The themes in The Secret Splendour are many and variegated. They illustrate the fact that as a poet of the future. Amal Kiran's sweep embraces a wide spectrum: from the Kingfisher to a close companion like Minnie; from Seascape, Daybreak to literary figures like Helena, Dante, Carlyle and Arnold. But naturally, given his primary interests and preoccupations, it is not surprising that most of the poems that find place in the entire corpus are of a spiritual or- mystical kind. It is difficult to escape mysticism or spirituality, especially when one is writing "Over- head Poetry", As he explains in his Introduction: "Mysticism and spirituality are bound to pervade, openly or by implication, our poetry as in the overhead poems in the present collection. Also perhaps, the overhead will not function poetically on an extensive scale without importing the spiritual note." (The Secret Splendour, p. 61)

Regardless of the themes that Amal Kiran handles, the attempt invariably is to probe beneath the surface of the actualities and to reveal the inner significance of events, personalities and phenomena.  As Sri Aurobindo strikingly remarks: "The poetry which voices the oneness and totality of our being and Nature and the worlds and God, will not make the actuality of our earthly life less bur more real and rich and full and wide and living." (The Future Poetry, p. 328) Consider, for instance, a poem of autobiographical significance called The Parsi.  The opening stanza, makes multiple allusions to the fact of "homelessness" of the Parsi and offers a rhetorical beginning:

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What country shall I take as mine ? Iran

Is but the perfume of a rose long dead;

While India that has moulded me a man

Whose heart goes throbbing with a sunset-red

And straining towards a mystery beyond eyes

Makes deeper yet the homelessness of me.

Hither and thither, settles on no sea

Guarding and lulling one dear land alone.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 544)

The fact of homelessness does not lead to a sense of despair or disorientation as with much of the modernist poetry. For the experience of rootlessness is amply compensated by the discovery of a larger bond and kinship that binds all people together. This experience comes not in the form of a cerebral matter of fact statement but emerges powerfully, aided by vivid images that capture this feeling of oneness while retaining the uniqueness of each civilisation as well:

Fire-cult that neighboured the Greek world of thought

Burns through my Persian blood to Europe's large

Earth-richness; India's infinite Unknown

Lures up the same fire-cry ~ both stay uncaught.

My country's a future where all dream-lights merge.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 544)

In contrast to the earliest experience of emotional and psychological deprivation, the second stanza now conjures up a series of images suggestive of strength and potency. Instead of the earlier sense of loss ("the perfume of a rose long dead") and the feeling of a languorous sadness accentuated by a continuation of words like "throbbing" and "straining" that finally culminates in signalling a pathetic lack of direction ("A stranger whose horizon flies hither and thither, settles on no sea"), we now have in the second stanza, an effective counter-point. The word "neighboured" very vividly captures his dynamic and organic links existing among the

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different cultures of the world. In this sense "neighbouring" is more than an appropriate geographical expression. Linking all the lines of the second stanza is the dominant allusion to the "fire cult".  Fire is the emblem of life and aspiration . "Persian blood" is physically most apt (the persona is a Parsi) just as "Europe's earth-richness" and "India's infinite unknown" are the quintessential qualities of these civilisation. The face that "both stay uncaught" adds of course to the elusive character of the personal search. The search is no longer agonizing however, for there is the happy vision of a country "where all dream-lights merge".

Underlying this and similar poems of Amal Kiran is the realization of the power of poetic language and its ability to concretely bring forth aspects of reality before our waking consciousness. A stanza from his poem Words for instance, very vividly portrays the power of this new poetry:

Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:

The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,

But he who marks their moving mystery

Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings

Their passage here and how intangible

They float for all their close and massive shapes.

Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,

Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,

Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart

Puts forth in every line of the wide form

Spanning the silences with pinion-song.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 276)

A poem that I particularly like is Night. As can be clearly seen, neither the title of the poem nor its content deals with an overtly "spiritual" theme. It does not stand, as elsewhere, for either Ignorance, Inconscience or Falsehood. Night is a simple landscape poem referring to a certain passage in time. And notice how even such a commonplace theme is a able to acquire in Amal Kiran's hands a lasting poetical treatment. The critical comments have been already offered by Sri Aurobindo but the lines are suggestive and worth quoting:

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No more the press and play of light release

Thrilling bird-news between high columned trees.

Upon the earth a blank of slumber drops:

Only cicadas toil in grassy shops -

But all their labours seem to cry "Peace, peace"

Nought travels down the roadway save the breeze;

And though beyond our gloom - throb after throb -

Gathers the great heart of a silver mob,

There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars

The very quiet business of the stars.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 167)

As Aurobindo aptly explains, images like "thrilling birdnews”, "grassy shops", "silver mob" are "an ingenious discovery'', while "quiet business of the stars" enables inspiration to lift it “beyond itself and out of the conceitedness by the higher tone". (The Secret Splendour, p. 167)

Wherever these poems succeed, they are able to apprehend a given reality and present it in a highly arresting manner. Sri Aurobindo observes in The Future Poetry: "It will do this not merely in a symbol of greatened human magnitude, as the old represented the gods, or in lives of romantic glamour or in far-off light of a mystic remoteness but with me close directness and reality that comes from intimate vision and feeling, net make these things a part of our living experience." (p. 358)

One of my favorites of such poetry of Amal Kiran is a short poem called Ape on fire. The evolutionary account of self-exceeding and the process of transformation of the ape into a higher being is described in the poem in a matchless manner, a perfect fusion between thought and life:

Fuelled with forests I come, an ape on fire,

A brown beast burning towards the unbarred Blue,

Fierce brain that feels suddenly the skull blown off,

Blind belly crying to be an abysm of stars!

Helpless with flame that snatches them from earth,

My terrible arms strain reddening in mid-air -

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Love that has lost the ecstasy it can grasp,

To embrace the bourneless body of the beyond.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 171)

On the other hand, where the force of inspiration is weak, the poems tend to lose their impact.  Take for instance, the following early poem Turn Your Back (1948). The poem, in my opinion, does not have the vivid power of sight, nor do the lines carry a sense of inevitability that often comes with a kind of simplicity or bareness of expression. Instead, the poem seems to offer a series of exhortations:

Turn your back on everything

Utterly -

There’s no other way to wing

Infinity.

Spirit's grandeur cannot brook

Compromise —

Once for all you must surrender

To the skies...

(The Secret Splendour, p. 320)

But such poems are exceptions rather than the rule. Elsewhere, for the most part, the poet is quite effective. Consider the short poem Ojas, for instance, that refers to the mastery of sexual energy from its downward flow for procreation to its sublimation for creative and spiritual use. There is a remarkable fusion in the poem between the idea and the image:

Rise upward, stream of passion in the gloom!

Rise where lone pinnacles mate with heaven's womb!

Earth drags you down, but all your shimmers know

The stars' enchanted fire calling you home.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 159)

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IV

It is heartening that while others remain content in "a continual bringing of changes in the spinning of the intellectual circle which leads nowhere," (The Future Poetry, p. 353) Amal Kiran has chosen to compose alone, away from the literary and institutional patronage. In devoting his entire life and poetic career in such an exemplary manner and carving one a path for himself, Amal Kiran has made a lasting contribution to the creation of the poetry of the future.

SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY

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