Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Sethna's Wordsworth Criticism

Sethna has a sound theory of poetry inasmuch as he views the poem as an organic whole and accepts that poetry is a house of several mansions. Stressing the interdependence of form and content and the need to awake to the presence of the form in every poem, he observes: “You may have always been aware that poetry says wonderful things, but you must realise that the wonderfulness is bound up with the manner of saying: The words are such as draw attention to themselves either by their fineness or by their sensitive combination and the sounds are a direct power and both make a marked pattern exciting the eye and ear.”¹

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By form he does not mean the mere technique but what he calls the internal form.  Form is not something superadded for decorative purposes. The matter cannot be cut asunder from the manner:  "The how of expression originates in the how of experience or, to be more accurate, in the how of vision and emotion." (p. 6) While speaking of the poetic process, he realises the need to choose the via media between the Romantic and the Classicist notions. Poetry is neither total 'dream-work' nor total 'brain-work'; it is not merely the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings nor is it a simple product of intellectual labour: "But mere expression of emotion and imagination is not poetry; shudders and screams, fantasies and nightmares do not immediately make art. The aesthetic instinct and the intuitive sense have to work, at once intensifying and chastening emotion and imagination. Nor can we, who are not primitives, not Australian black fellows, bypass the intellect: We have to be both finer and subtler with its aspirations and acutenesses, even while avoiding its dry breath of abstraction." (p. 11)

What is the nature of poetic truth and how is it distinguished from scientific truth? Again, Sethna seems to have examined the views of I.A. Richards and others on the subject and arrived at a sane conclusion: "Poetry goes beyond the usual knowledge acquired by looking outward or inward. It plunges farther than the objective or subjective surface of being - without really rejecting this surface. It sees the surface as constituting symbols of a hidden reality and, as its intensest, it lays a hand however lightly on the body of that reality itself. In various ways it uses the surface of being, objective or subjective, as pointers, peep-holes, glimmerings of a secret Splendour or a magnificent Mystery." (p 14) The poet may not always fly away from objective facts but he does not stay locked up in them. On the other hand, he uses them as symbols to drive home to our souls his sense of that reality.

Many great critics including Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis at times committed ridiculous blunders in their estimates of poets and poems just because they failed to realise that there can be an endless variety of poems. Each of them was particularly fond of one type of poetry -

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romantic or classicist, realistic or transcendental, pure or didactic, atheistic or religious, good or great - and ignored even the best in other types. Sethna is aware of the loss caused by this folly: "Poetry is of an endless diversity and we shall lose much if we are too choosy." (p. 20)

There has been a wide spectrum of responses to the question, Who is a poet? He is a moralist, a reformer, a seer, a man talking to men, an unacknowledged legislator of the world or philosopher, a logician and a metaphysician all rolled into one. Rejecting the present Western concepts, Achebe, an African writer, made bold to claim that an artist has to be primarily a teacher. Sethna's description of the poet's role is unique.  He feels that the poet is what Satyavan is called in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: ''A wanderer communing with depth and image." The poet moves among a diversity of things but communes with the beyond and experiences profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. While picturing the poet's activity, Shakespeare speaks of the poet's eye which, "in a fine frenzy rolling", glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, as his pen gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Sethna's contention is that though the poet is fundamentally concerned with the activity of the eye, he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality as there has to be always something unfathomable about his vision. Combining Shakespeare's conception with Sri Aurobindo's insistence on "the eternity of the vision", Sethna declares "The Eternal Eye is at the back of all poetic perfection, and what this Eye visions is the Divine Presence taking flawless shape in a super-cosmos. To that shape the poet, in one way or another, converts the objects or events he depicts." (p. 25)

Given his eclectic theory of poem and his acquaintance with diverse types of writings in more than one literature, he may be expected to be objective and dispassionate in his estimate of any literary form or poet or period in the history of English literature. Not many critics who have undertaken to compare Shelley and Keats have been absolutely fair to both. Keats easily winning their sympathy and admiration for various reasons, Shelley would have to serve as the foil. In Leavis's uncharitable comparative

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study, for example, Shelley appears to be a minor poetaster by the side of a major poet endowed with all enviable gifts. Sethna, on the other hand, is able to identify the merits and limitations of both with clinical precision: “In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings, of course, a difference in the texture of their work. Shelley's work is not so attention-drawing in details as is Keats's. It has more a general sweep of lustrous language, while Keats's has a specific, a distinct, an individualised sparkle in almost each step of the movement. There is no essential loss of particularity; yet the eye and car of the one are more in love with the parts while those of the other are more enamoured of the ensemble." (p. 348-9)

This is a far cry from Leavis's comparison of Shelley's Ode to a Skylark and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale in which he is all praise for the latter but fails to account for the enduring appeal of the former.

Sethna can be as just and unerring in his condemnation as in his approval. In his witty, penetrating and trenchant study of Hugo and Wordsworth, for example, he underscores their common weakness: "It is interesting to note that the central figures of both English and French Romanticisms were very flawed poets, superb on one side, dreary or windbaggy on the other. And the reason why so much of the dreary remains in Wordsworth and so much of the windbaggy in Hugo is the same: a huge conceit that led them to overwrite themselves. Hugo was a more tempestuous person, hence his conceit is louder in accent. Wordsworth was a more reserved man, hence his conceit is quieter in tone." (p, 72)

Even with regard to literary theories, Sethna is never deceived bythe reputation of any critic into uncritically accepting all his views. Many have spoken of aesthetic experience but I.A. Richards's concept of synaesthesis is a bold attempt at identifying the uniqueness of the experience of beauty inasmuch as it claims

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that this differs from other life-experiences not in kind but in degree. He is of the view that in the presence of an object of beauty many impulses are aroused but that there is a balancing and harmonisation of these leading to a state in which every impulse is allowed a free play and no impulse is suppressed. Aesthetics is not an alien territory to the Indian critics who can be proud of an older and richer tradition of this discipline than the Westerners. The corrective that Sethna provides to Richards's imperfect notion is indicative of the former’s mastery of the complex subject. He observes: "Poetry does not end with causing a happy equilibrium, as Richards contends, between the diverse impulses at play in our nature. Pleasure is there and a happy equilibrium is there; there is also much else. What is basic is our recognition of an irreproachable finality, an utter perfection that confers on every poetic statement a godlike power. Various poets make various statements, they differ among themselves, but each of them seems to bring the compelling touch of the ultimate and the absolute." (p. 343)

Sethna's contribution to Blake criticism is too well-known to demand reiteration. But, unfortunately, it has overshadowed his writings on other romantic poets. Though his observations on Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats are profoundly illuminating, it is Wordsworth who receives the warmest praise and whose poetry is quoted repeatedly with love and admiration. There is no full-length essay*on Wordsworth in Sethna's Talks on Poetry but it is not difficult to reconstruct one from the numerous comments, asides and explications of short passages scattered throughout the work. What is striking about his study of Wordsworth's poetry is that he nowhere slavishly echoes the views expressed by such great Wordsworth critics as Matthew Arnold, A.C. Bradley, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks.

To Sethna, Wordsworth is undoubtedly the central figure in the Romantic Movement in England, Even Coleridge's claim to this honour is rejected though the Indian critic concedes that The Ancient Mariner included in Lyrical Ballads is as organic to the new Romantic Movement as the poems of Wordsworth. As poet,

* Sethna's book on the subject concerned is awaiting publication. - Editors

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he is decidedly superior to Coleridge for more than one reason: "But Wordsworth was the more powerful, more comprehensive, was more hannonised poet and he is the more central figure and it was his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that constituted the first Manifesto of English Romanticism," (p. 72)

The unevenness of Wordsworth's poetry, which Sethna refers to as "Wordsworth's double poetic character" has been discussed by almost all major critics. Though Arnold expressed his firm belief that Wordsworth's achievement is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in English, he felt that if the romantic poet was to have general recognition

the first necessity was to separate his best from the mass of his inferior work.  Undertaking to do this separation, he included in his collection only three extracts from The Prelude.  He found the best of Wordsworth in Michael, The Fountain, The Solitary Reaper and ruthlessly dismissed his formal philosophy as it is set forth in The Excursion. There is, in his view, something artificial in Laodamia, and some fanciful and declamatory elements in Intimations of Immortality though the two poems are otherwise admirable.  As the four people from whom he learnt habits, methods and ruling ideas, Arnold mentions Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte Beuve and Newman.  In his essay on Wordsworth Arnold gives a leading place to the latter's moral interpretation but is unable to explain the salient features of his style and its characteristic defects. Failing to judge properly Wordsworth's mastery of blank verse, Arnold praises him for the healing power of the poetry in Memorial Verses:

Others will teach us how to dare,

And against fear our breast to steel;

Others will strengthen us to bear-

But who, ah! who will make us feel?

Arnold, in the essay entitled Heinrich Heinriche, finds fault with Wordsworth for having "plunged himself into the inward life," and cut himself off from the modern spirit. It is also to be noted that Arnold chose for his collection sixteen sonnets from "Poems

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Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty" portraying Wordsworth as a patriotic sonneteer.

Stressing the value of Wordsworth's philosophical poetry and the need to restore the visionary Wordsworth, A.C. Bradley in his very illuminating piece on Wordsworth argued that Arnold, in his overenthusiasm to make Wordsworth popular, represented his poetry as much more simple and unambitious than it really was and as much more easily apprehended than it ever could be. Dismissing Arnold's categorical statement that Wordsworth's poetry is the reality, while his philosophy is the illusion, Bradley demonstrated the Wordsworthianness of his philosophical poems in which philosophy comes as felt thought in the proper emotional context.

F.R. Leavis, on the contrary, claimed that any attempt at deriving a system of philosophy from Wordsworth's poem is bound to fail because it was far beyond Wordsworth's powers. Even if he had a philosophy, it is only as a poet he matters. Leavis's contention is Wordsworth had, though not a philosophy, a wisdom to communicate and that this wisdom has nothing to do with his 'nature mysticism' but with his preoccupation "with a distinctively human naturalness, with sanity and spiritual health", (p. 165) Wordsworth's primary interest, Leavis asserts, is in man whereas his interest in mountains is only subsidiary. Wordsworth himself, in the first book of The Recluse, stresses the mind of man as his haunt, and the main region of his song. What is more revolutionary about Leavis's essay on Wordsworth is its claim that Wordsworth's roots were deep in the eighteenth century and that the eighteenth century affinities of his verse are to be seen in his essential sanity and normality.

To one immersed in such criticisms of Wordsworth, Sethna's observations, original and insightful, do not appear to be trite or unsound. They cannot be dismissed as an easy achievement if we keep in mind the formidable stature of his rivals. He accepts that there are two voices in Wordsworth's poetry - one is of the deep, that "now roars, now murmurs with the changeful sea, now birdlike pipes, now closes soft in sleep" and "one is of an old half-witted sheep which blears articulate monotony". Though he subscribes to the common notion that there was a sudden decline

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in Wordsworth's poetic powers a little past his middle age, he rejects the reason given by Herbert Read for this catastrophe. Read's psychoanalytic reading of the phenomenon leads him to conclude that Wordsworth's love-affair with the French girl Annette Vallon created in his personality a split that deprived him of the emotional spontaneity which is essential for poetic health. Read feels that the submerged conflict caused by his desertion of the girl took its revenge by drying up the fountains of poetry. Condemning psychoanalysis itself, Sethna observes: "I believe that it overshoots the mark a great deal and in its preoccupation with the underworld of the subconscious, misses the inworld of the subliminal and the overworld of the superconscious which are the true sources of art and philosophy and religion and mysticism, however crossed here and there these things may be by miasmas of the subconscious." (p. 65)

One is reminded of the warning given to literary historians and critics by Jung himself against the possible abuse of psychology in his essay, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry: "A slight whiff of scandal often lends spice to a biography, but a little more becomes a nasty inquisitiveness - bad taste masquerading as science. Our interest is insidiously deflected from the work of art and gets lost in the labyrinth of psychic determinants, the poet becomes a clinical case and very likely, yet another addition to the curiosa of psychopathia sexualis."

Sethna has his own reasons to offer for the loss of Wordsworth's creative power.  In his reading of the situation, Sethna turns Leavis inside out and upside down.  If the British critic claims that Wordsworth's interest in nature is only secondary to his concern for man, the Indian feels that the deepest essence of Wordsworth the poet is his intuition of the One Spirit within the physical universe as well as within the mind of man and manifesting its presence through both Nature and life, the intention which finds its grandest expression in the following lines of Tintern Abbey:

                                                                ...And I have felt

                                          A presence that disturbs me with the joy

                                         Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

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Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things,

If Leavis is of the view that Wordsworth derived his strength from his eighteenth century roots, Sethna contends that Wordsworth could find his genuine poetic voice only when he broke off from the eighteenth century under the influence of the new ideas that emanated from France and that he lost his Romanticism when he lost his ideal of political liberty as a result of his disillusionment with the French Revolution when it gave rise to a dictator like Napoleon. The visionary poet and Nature-lover in him yielded place to the dry intellectual and prosaic moraliser of the Augustan age; the beautiful blend of Pantheism and Transcendentalism that had grown in him was replaced by a faith in the Orthodox Christian Church. He became obsessed with the role of a teacher and ceased to be a poet.

Sethna's account of the making of a great romantic poet's mind and its degeneration is more convincing than Read's or Leavis's, because it does not indulge in any wild conjectures or approach Wordsworth's poetry with any preconceived notions regarding its ideal role. If Read has been misled by his psychoanalytic approach, Leavis misses the mark as he tries in vain to demonstrate that man and not nature is the central concern of Wordsworth's poetry and grossly underestimates the poet's nature-mysticism. Sethna, on the other hand has been able to pinpoint accurately what is essentially Wordsworthian in Wordsworth's poetry and to give a logical explanation of his later failure taking into consideration all relevant sociological, political and biographical factors.

What is more interesting about Sethna's Wordsworth-criticism in his assertion that the characteristic Wordsworthian speech that brought a new note into English poetry is essentially Indian and

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fundamentally Vedantic.  He claims that there are two kinds of English poetry - one that is charged with the sense of England and the other that is independent of the country and that the second kind has two varieties, one filling with a foreign air and the other belonging to the universal mind in some aspect or other. According to him, both the English countryside and foreign scenery in Wordsworth get "washed in the Upanishadic light".²

To drive home his idea Sethna gives a few remarkable illustrative examples. Citing two extracts from the Immortality-Ode, he adds that the old Rishis find voice in the phrases "the fields of sleep" and "thy immortality broods like the day". In the first passage "the fields of Cumberland on a‘sweet May-morning' are still there, but the breath, simultaneously vague and powerful, of Supernature has broken out through them and wakened in the poet the thrill of some ultimate soul-scape".³  In the second passage about the brooding immortality, "a strong life-sense of the same Super consciousness is again felt, now not in its secret inspiration so much as in its lordly and luminous revelation of the inherently Deathless poised on its overhead plane and silently nourishing, protecting, ruling, enlightening the child-soul which is still aware of its divine source and of that source's all-seeing immensity".⁴

Approving of Sethna's insightful remark that Wordsworth in some of his great poems is the voice of the spirit most potent in the ancient Indian scriptures, Kathleen Raine wrote to him: "Your illustration of the resonance of Vedantic utterance from Wordsworth gave me great delight.  Surely that is the very quality in him that is great and I am glad you find in Wordsworth something of the Indian soul."⁵ In his analyses of individual poems and while estimating their quality, Sethna makes a judicious use of Sri Aurobindo's profound concept of poetic inspiration which, according to him, can hail from one of the following planes: (1) The Subtle Physical, (2) The Vital, (3) The Creative Intelligence, (4) The Inner Mind, (5) The Psychic, (6) The Higher Mind, (7) The Illumined Mind, (8) The Intuitive Mind, (9) The Overmind. For example, quoting the lines

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To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,

he comments: "The idea here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition." (p. 275)

Though he can exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating, he makes it clear that further research has to be done to find out if the levels of style correspond to the levels of inspiration in the sense of planes.

     Inspite of his mastery of Western critical approaches and knowledge of great Western critics, Sethna would like to respond to many poems in a refreshingly Indian manner. But wherever there is a need, he does not fight shy of using alien tools. Of these, the one advocated by Ezra Pound seems to have captured his heart. Pound's classification of melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia, by which he means "song-making", "image-making", and "word-making", enables Sethna to discuss the striking features of the works of numerous European poets. A fusion of Pound's concept with Sri Aurobindo's ideas on the nature of poetry yields interesting insights into even the classics that have been exhaustively probed:

"Milton has not only song-music, he has also symphony- music." (p. 133)

"He (Yeats) stands supreme in modern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia." (p-144)

"Phanopoeia rather than logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry." (p. 277)

"Among European poets the most successful in chiselled logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante." (p. 277)

"Shakespeare... is a king of phanopoeia, his very mind moves phanopoeiacally." (p. 282)

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In Sethna's view, Wordsworth achieves phanopoeia of an extremely high order in the phrase he uses to describe the face of Newton in the statue of him at Cambridge:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

And he adds praising the image employed here: "The metaphor of 'seas' is too open to let phanopoeia become subdued. If only the word 'voyaging' were there - a word which signifies in general English a travel over water - we should realise that seas were intended, but there would be no clear phanopoeia quality. If a less specific work like "travelling" were employed, the phonopoeia quality would be still less in view; a suggestion of concrete movement would be still unmistakable, but it would not call up any precise picture." (p. 272)

And on more than one occasion Sethna demonstrates that the New Critical Analysis of poetic passages is not far beyond his competence. The word-by-word examination encompasses the sound, the sense and the aura of each word in addition to the interlamination that takes place when the right word is placed in the proper context. While subjecting the passage by Wordsworth:

The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

to a close study, Sethna writes: "There the sense of an immense burden which baffles the mind is clinched by those three 'w' s of 'weary', 'weight', 'world'....In the midst of the aspirated 'h’ the reiterated ‘y’, the several ‘l’-sounds, especially when combined with other consonants, the long six-syllabled adjective 'unintelligible', the three 'w' s create an extensive massiveness." (p. 415 and p.274)

Knowing as he does the value of comparison as a critical tool, Sethna does not stop with this verbal analysis but goes on to compare the lines with a short utterance by Hamlet:

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Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life?

“Wordsworth is speaking, as it were, from the grey cells. They are changing the urgencies of an oppressed existence to philosophic values. Shakespeare is speaking from his guts: They stir the brain only to render coherent the being's instinctive shout of recoil and rebellion.” (p. 385)

If a single example is to be given to illustrate the distinctive nature of Sethna's approach to poetry in general, and to Wordsworth's in particular, we have to compare the critical comments on Wordsworth's much-discussed poem A Slumber did my Spirit Seal.  Leavis, in his Revaluation  praises the poem on the ground that Wordsworth by merely juxtaposing two stanzas, which seem to present the facts barely, is able to generate a powerful emotion in the reader's mind.  Cleanth Brooks, claiming that irony is subtly present even in Wordsworth's lyrics, observes that though there is a simple juxtaposition with no underscoring of the ironical contrast, it cannot be denied that the contrast has its ironic potential in the poem.  Sethna's pithy statement on the poem is that here is a poem in which the English language is charged with and moulded by a non-English and profoundly Indian spirit as Wordsworth here has actually expressed "with a deep intimacy his own spiritual trance of identification with the earth's being".⁶

Though the three critics employing their characteristic strategies have tried to establish the greatness of the short poem in different ways, no Western critic can contend without being perverse that the Indian's view has not added a new dimension to the poem.

P. MARUDANAYAGAM

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References

1. K.D. Sethna, Talks on Poetry, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1989), p. 6. This book contains many of the critical essays discussed here and further references to it will be from this edition and pagination will be incorporated into the text.

2. K.D. Sethna, The English Language and the Indian Spirit, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986), p. 38.

3. Ibid., p. 20.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 29.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

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