Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Locus of K.D. Sethna's Poetry

IN 1927 a young Indo-Anglian poet drawn by the new spiritual philosophy of Sri Aurobindo came to his Ashram in Pondicherry. The name of the young man was K.D. Sethna. He was twenty-three and two years earlier had published a book of poems. He was not happy with the life he had been leading; he had felt that he "had waited overmuch in the ordinary life".¹

In the presence of Sri Aurobindo he found what he aspired to. Sri Aurobindo does not teach a world-shunning life-negating spirituality.  "It is an error," he says, "to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life."² And Sethna knew that this yoga was the "settled course" for him; and following this he could fully develop "the fine forces of the world's life".³ Poetry would henceforth be an integral part of his spiritual seeking, and he would be, under the guidance of his Master, a "poet of the spiritual life".⁴

The poet of the spiritual life is not just a 'literary man'. In fact, according to Juan Ramon Jimenez all true poets are to be distinguished from literary man. A literary man is conscious of his writing, he knows what he is up to; whereas a poet is only a mouthpiece of truth.  Therefore "literature is a state of culture, poetry a state of grace, before and after culture."⁵ Sri Aurobindo makes a distinction between the yogic literary man and the ordinary one. The first is what Jimenez calls the poet. "A yogic 'literary man'," says Sri Aurobindo, "is not a literary man at all, but one who writes only what the inner Will and Word wants to express. He is a channel and an instrument of something greater than his own literary personality."⁶ To be a true poet, a yogic literary man, one has to abandon the notion of oneself as the creator and listen to the "inner Will and Word", that is to say, the Will and Word of the Soul, for as Sri Aurobindo says, the intelligence, the imagination or the ear are only channels and instruments, "the true creator, the true hearer is the soul."⁷

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One of the main endeavours of Sethna has been to develop his poetic soul, and in this endeavour he has constantly been helped, advised and encouraged by Sri Aurobindo. There is a huge correspondence in which Sri Aurobindo comments on many poems of Sethna, shows him the different sources of poetic inspiration, proposes variations, defines poetry of the kind Sethna wants to write and opens before him new vistas of poetic vision and expression. This correspondence is now available for anyone who is interested in it.

Sethna himself speaks of the "training"⁸ that he got under Sri Aurobindo.  He asks in a letter: "Please tell me how I am to manifest an absolutely genuine and at the same time new exquisiteness in poetry ?”⁹ In another he writes: "You have made me believe in my poetic destiny. But I want as soon as possible to outgrow the remnants of the decorative and rhetorical level...."¹⁰

Sri Aurobindo replies with patience and helps the soul-poet to grow so that he can receive the poetic inspiration from ever-higher regions of the Word.  When asked to give some general rules about the writing of poetry Sri Aurobindo replies, "Avoid over-writing; let all your sentences be a vehicle of something worth saying and say it with a vivid precision neither defective nor excessive. Don't let either thought or speed trail or drag or circumvolute. Don't let the language be more abundant than the sense. Don't indulge in mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them."¹¹ This can be a guideline for all poets.

Sethna's poetic soul grew in close kinship with Sri Aurobindo's vision and poetic creation. Here we may wonder whether such closeness with a tremendous poetic personality as that of Sri Aurobindo is not detrimental to the free growth of other poetic personalities. The danger of imitating the stronger personality is very real. But Sri Aurobindo has always encouraged free flowering of each individual self. When Sethna wanted to compare his achievement with the achievements of other poet, Sri Aurobindo admonished him: "What have you to do with what others have achieved? If you write poetry, it should be from the standpoint that you have something of your own which has not yet found full expression.... Measure what you do by the standard of your

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own possible perfection...."¹² Sethna was thus encouraged to develop what was his own. Imitation in creative arts never fulfils any essential purpose. As in yoga, so in poetry, one must follow the law of his own self, svadharma;  to want to follow the law of another's self is dangerous.¹³ Every soul is unique. Sri Aurobindo has not imposed his own views and methods on Sethna, but has stimulated him to explore and discover his own poetic soul and allow that soul to speak for itself.

Thus, in spite of his intimate association with Sri Aurobindo's poetry Sethna has a voice that is personal, although his poetic personality is formed by his Master. A disciple is not he who apes the ways, speech and thoughts of the master, but he who accepts to be shown his own way, be encouraged to walk on that way independently and firmly. This does not mean chat Sethna is not influenced by Sri Aurobindo. He is. And we shall see, when we try to determine the locus of Sethna's poetry, that the locus lies in the vast world revealed by Sri Aurobindo.  Influence is not imitation. In a poem called Sri Aurobindo Sethna writes:

...only shadowless love can breathe this pure

Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity.

Influence is this fragrance of eternity that does not prevent the soul from flying freely. One cannot imitate the fragrance, what one can imitate is the outward form, idiosyncracies of style, of word-usage, of metaphors and other formal aspects of a poetical work. It would be interesting to study how Sethna was influenced by the poetry and philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, but in this article I shall consider Sethna's poetry in itself, as far as possible.

Sethna defines poetry, in an essay on Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius, as "a window opening through Form on the Divine, on a realm of archetypes".¹⁴ This description, we can safely assume, also describes his own poetry; or, in any case, the ideal of poetry which he himself strives after. Apparently, form is the essential element in poetry. He seems to agree with Paul Valéry who holds that poetry is an art of language - "un art du langage" - but goes deeper. Valéry had learnt from his master Mallarme that a poem

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is not made with ideas but with words. Sethna too says that the poetic window opens to the Divine "through Form and not Matter". But there is an essential difference between Sethna and Valèry, and that difference is the Divine. The goal of poetry, for Sethna, is the suggestion - more than suggestion — the revelation of the Divine. The Form reveals the hidden Divine in things.

"...by form," continues Sethna, "we must not understand exclusively the turn of phrase and the movement of rhythm: the language-mould is all in all but it comes fused with a cast of consciousness - a form of vision and a form of emotion. Metrical speech without that vivid cast is the ghost of poetry. Neither does mere substance of consciousness, however weighty or profound, make on us the art-impact that is revelation: the consciousness has to take a particular pattern before it can become the poetic word."¹⁵

The generally accepted definition of poetry in ancient Indian poetics is that it is the "togetherness" of sound and sense, śab- dārthau sahitau. What Sethna says is something very similar. The language-mould is the product of this togetherness or fusion. He clearly says that form is not "the turn of phrase and the movement of rhythm",¹⁶ which belong exclusively to the field of sound, but that it is fused with a cast of consciousness, which belongs to the field of sense. But in poetry it is not possible to think of the one without the other. For Sethna the product of the fusion is the form, but he analyses this form into two kinds, one the "metrical speech", the other "a form of vision and a form of emotion". In our search for the locus of Sethna's poetry we have to bear in mind this fusion but at the same time remember that there are two aspects of the form. By locus I do not mean that about which a poet writes. It is the complex poetic field of vision-and-expression. We can also see it as the intersection of the poet's language-field and the experience-field. Both these fields are vast; and only a part of one field fuses with a part of the other to become poetry. The nature of the fusion and the nature and substance of the parts of the fields determine the kind of poetry one writes.  Sethna's is spiritual-mystical poetry. The experience-field in it belongs mainly to the world of the spirit and the

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elements of the language-field are those that are most congenial to the expression of the spiritual experience, such as symbol and rhythm.

The spiritual poet also uses, like other poets, the linguistic devices of alliteration, metaphor, repetition, metrical measure, etc. In the fusion with the substance of consciousness, when the fusion is successful, these devices become fit vehicles of the Spirit.

We shall now try to analyse these two fields of the locus, knowing fully well that this is only an exercise of the intellect and that after the analysis, we will have to return to the fusion.

First, the poetic language. In the short scope of this article it is not possible to investigate all the linguistic factors involved. We shall concentrate our attention mainly on two things, the symbol and the rhythm which are, Sethna tells us, the two great expressions of ananda, "beauty's mirth".

...the art where sight and sound mingle their fates

By symbol and by rhythm sharing one birth

Out of that deepest thrill of beauty's mirth.

(Art of Arts)

The poetic language is not a "transcription" of our thoughts, feelings or perceptions but an "incarnation". It is the essence of the thing seen embodied in a sound-form. Ordinarily the words we use are "minted by mind",¹⁷ but for poetry what we need is a different kind of word, we have to "plunge into a language of pure symbols and mystic values of speech".¹⁸ The poetry which is not a simple versification, the poetry which tries to reach beyond the world of sense-perceptions and intellect needs a language that is not a menial fabric. “A poetry," writes Sri Aurobindo, "whose task is to render truth of the Spirit by passing behind the appearances of the sense and the intellect to their spiritual reality, is in fact attempting a work for which no characteristic power of language has been discovered, except the symbolic...” ¹⁹

What is a symbol ? It is a polyvalent word-sign. It is through this sign that the vision becomes embodied in language. It is not a fixed unequivocal relation as in the allegory,²⁰ nor is it based on

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conventions. The symbol is felt to represent, to make present, the object of experience. The symbol may seem, and often does seem, to the uninformed reader as an enigma, but to the reader with empathy, the sahrdaya of Sanskrit poetics, the enigma does not obstruct the apprehension but stimulates and provokes it. To the seeing eye all finite things can become symbols of the infinite. Let us take Sethna's lyric A Poet's Stammer:

My dream is spoken,

As if by sound

Were tremulously broken

Some vow profound.

A timeless hush

Draws ever back

The winging music-rush

Upon thought's track.

Though syllables sweep

Like golden birds,

Far lonelihoods of sleep

Dwindle my words.

Beyond life's clamour,

A mystery mars

Speech-light to a myriad stammer

Of flickering stars.

Sri Aurobindo's remark on the poem is revealing: "It is certainly the inner mind that has transformed the idea of stammering into a symbol of inner phenomena.... "²¹

What are the inner phenomena ? Can we interpret the symbol ? The symbol being a polyvalent sign it is impossible to exhaust its meaning and comprehend it, that is to say, seize it completely. It is a “gateway”²² opening to unknown mysteries. We feel that what the poet says lies far beyond the physical stammer.  Something that appears as the eternal silence behind the mind, the

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muteness of nirvana perhaps, hinders the rush of music, the joy of Brahman, to express itself. More personally it also suggests that what the poet expresses in words is only a partial, distorted thing compared to the truth that is seen. These interpretations are only mental efforts to grasp the meaning; but the inner phenomena remain ever elusive.

This poem is an excellent illustration of the symbolic method which is as old as the Veda. "Mystics," writes Sri Aurobindo, "were and normally are symbolists, they can even see all physical things and happenings as symbols of inner truths and realities, even their outer selves, the outer happenings of their life and all around them."²³ Here too a physical thing has become the gateway to something immense.

Sethna resorts very often to symbols. Some of them start as metaphors and allegories and then gradually deepen into symbols.

The forest cathedrals are tolling their loud leaves.

This line is quite clear. The trees of the forest are compared to cathedrals, their leaves are the bells, the rustle of the leaves is the tolling. But the next lines go beyond this comprehension and retrospectively transform also this line into something more suggestive.

A blue wind blows through the green towers of trance,

Waking them to a song of secrecies

Between the dark earth and the dazzling sun.

(Forest Cathedrals)

The symbol can penetrate "either direct or through strong unveiling images" - in the first instance it penetrates directly, in the second through a metaphorical expression — "to the highest truths of self and soul and the largest seeing of the Eternal.”²⁴ It is one of the most potent forces of the language of spiritual poetry. Another is the rhythm. The symbol incarnates the Eternal's truth, the rhythm incarnates the Eternal’s joy. The rhythm is the joyous force, hlādinί sakti of the Divine. It is, says Sethna, "the thrill of

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the consciousness translating itself into sound-vibration".²⁵

To the mind this seems rather vague. Naturally; for, rhythm does not belong to science or reason, only a subtle soul-sensibility can grasp it. Even Aurobindo admits that it cannot be explained. "It is a matter of the ear, not of the intellect. Of course there are the technical elements...But it is not a matter of technique only; the same outer technique can produce successful or unsuccessful rhythms (live or dead rhythms). One has to learn to distinguish by the ear..."²⁶ but "it is more a matter of the inner ear than the outer ear."²⁷ This subtle rhythm is in most cases supported by the metrical rhythm and other sound-effects like alliterations, assonances, rhymes, etc. These sound-effects do not by themselves guarantee the inner rhythm which is the "subtle soul of poetry".²⁸ It is the dhvani as defined by Anandavardhana, kāvyasyātmā dhvanir iti."²⁹ Born of an illumined emotion, rhythm imparts the power of suggestiveness to language. Behind the purely sound-value of words there is a value of vibrating silence heard by the silence of the soul. It is the soul of song.

Glowing behind

The singer's mind,

A mystery journeys forth to meet

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

Its own unplumbed repose.

(Soul of Song)

The mystery journeying to meet its own repose. But we should remember that in poetry it never really reaches the absolute silence, for that would be the end of poetic expression.

Sri Aurobindo regards the metrical form as a support of the soul of poetry, "the right physical basis for the poetic movement".³⁰ Sethna too holds the same view³¹ and in his poetic practice, he says that his "own penchant is for metre...."³² He uses a variety of metrical forms, as the substratum of "Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deep."³⁹

The true rhythm, the soul of poetry, can only be seized by the trained ear. We can speak of the metrical structures but the subtle

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rhythmical phrases can only be tentatively suggested: every reader must find for himself whether or not there is a "live rhythm". Here I shall quote two passages from Sethna's poetry, on the first Sri Aurobindo has lavished high praises.³⁴ I do not know whether he has said anything about the second.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,  

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For ‘tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

(This Errant Life)

The metrical structure of the lines is iambic with admissible variations. There is an intricate structure of assonances, consonnances, alliterations and rhymes which can fruitfully be analysed in order to determine the substratum of sound-effects. However, the real rhythmical force can only be perceived intuitively. If our ears are prepared we will see that the vibrations of the lines touch the innermost core of our being. The rhythm is subtly subdued, almost muted.

The other passage, written seventeen years later, has a close rhythmic resemblance to the first. The tonal pattern, the metrical movement and the syntax are quite similar. The lines are very beautiful, yet it seems to me - although I may very well be wrong - that the latter passage lacks the depth and the high intensity of psychic suggestion of the former. The rhythm is less haunting, less magical.

I raise to thee my flickering hands of clay,

Lean from thy dome of diamond secrecies,

Quench the pale longing of my dwarf despair,

Blow a great wind of mystery on small eyes,

Drive my diffuse blood-heat to the hidden heart

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For one intensest ache to plunge in thee,

O nectarous night of superhuman trance!

(Nectarous Night)

This is also written in predominantly iambic feet. There are assonances, consonances and alliterations; but the lines are unrhymed. Does only the absence of rhymes make the difference?  I leave each reader to decide for himself.

Now I shall quote a few other lines which have a luminous rhythm that vibrates in the soul:

The roots of rapture sucking the infinite sky.

(Beneath, Above)

...rhyming its small throb to the vast thrill.

(Milk in Almighty Breasts)

Full of wide wounds like rubies proud and warm,

Cut from life's immortal core of mystery.

(Gulfs of Night)

Burst of vermillion surprise

Even to gold omniscient eyes -

{The Adventure of the Apocalypse)

I think these few passages illustrate the meaning and importance of rhythm in poetic language, along with the use of symbols.

We shall now broach the question of experience-field which is the other element of the poetic locus. This field consists of the substance of consciousness. Symbol and rhythm express something, they belong to varnana, expression; the experience-field belongs to darsana, sight. It is "where the Meanings are".³⁵

In the spiritual-mystical poetry the experience-field is the world-ground, the eternal Brahman, which it is impossible to

grasp with the mind,

To the mind Eternity is "mythic".³⁶ When the mind's dome that covers the face of truth is trampled down, Eternity reveals

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itself. Both philosophy and myth show only truth's dead image. The dreams of the mind are "gilded".  The ancient sages said that "the face of Truth is covered with a golden lid". This lid being the mind, the gold is not real, myth and philosophy are truly glided dreams "arching a false / Heaven for life's sad longing".  "Under an unseen dancer’s / Timeless foot", says the poet, the mind gives way, it is the "tearing of thought". And the Real is revealed.

How are we to conceive this Real ? Is it the silent Brahman ? "I believe," says Sethna in a letter to Kathleen Raine, "that, while beyond the earth are the vast liberating Silence and Absolute, there is beyond them the earth again in a supreme sweetness and archetypal glory of the One at play with the Many.”³⁷ In fact the earth beyond the silence is the same earth seen with liberated eyes. He writes in a poem that to gain Infinity, we must

Merge in quiets that are never

Bound by birth,

Then with eyes of dreaming distance

Look on earth.

(Turn Your Back)

In the Vedic tradition as developed by the Upanishads we find that Brahman that is unknowable becomes isvara, the personal God, the divine Beloved- The next manifestation is hiranya-garbha, the Golden Seed, the World-Soul that becomes, by dividing itself into two halves, the heaven and the earth, the eternal parents of all creatures. And finally It becomes virat, the totality of all existence.³⁸

In a poem Sethna invokes this fourfold Brahman:

O Void where deathless power is merged in peace!

O myriad Passion lit to one self-fire!

O Breath like some vast rose that breaks through form!

O Hush of gold by whom all truth is heard!

(Invocation to the Fourfold Divine)

The Void is the silent Brahman, and the next three are respectively virat, hiranya-garbha and isvara.

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The silent Brahman cannot be part of the poetic locus, for it is unmanifest. The other three are, in various degrees, in various measures, the experience-field of poets. In a letter to Kathleen Raine Sethna writes, "...though essentially the theme may be one - 'the Divine Beloved', as you put it - I have tried to include as great a variety as I could of treatment and technique."³⁹ Yes, the locus of all spiritual-mystical poetry is dominated by God, the Divine Beloved, isvara who stands "Behind the myriad marvels- ...the Marvellous One". (Single without a Second)

The poet sings variously this Marvellous One, calls him by many names:

Name after name I give to God:

Sweet or sublime are they -

More magical than birth of stars,

Mightier than death of day.

(Name after Name)

But he also sees 'the myriad marvels' that arc nothing but the becomings of the Marvellous One. The One God, eko devah, as hiranya-garbha, becomes the All. Some say that this All is not marvels at all, it is nothing but illusion, maya. But for Sethna, disciple of Sri Aurobindo,

Behind the false glow dreams the epiphany.

(Maya)

The vast world of God is not unsubstantial, unreal. He writes,

Vain is the immensity of the one God

If all that vast is but intolerance

Of time and life and earth's long cry for love!

(Eternity)

The All, the world is not an illusion; for there is

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The golden smile of the one Self everywhere!

(The Sannyasi)

God, as World-Soul, I have told above, has divided himself into

the heaven and the earth, and into all dualities, - Beneath and Above, Near and Far, Without and Within, - and has thus become virat, the manifoldness of the universe.

In the Katha Upanishad⁴⁰ virat  is imagined as the world-tree whose roots are above and branches below.

Sethna takes up this ancient image:

The tree is an Omniscience at blind play —

Not from beneath but from above it grows,

The murmurous leaves a power of green gloom

Hurled downward for new self-discovery,

The roots a rapture sucking the infinite sky!

(Beneath, Above)

Virat divides the One. But the poetic vision sees beyond all divisions the eternal oneness of God: Earth and Heaven that appear to our unregenerate view as separated aspire to join in a blissful hierogamy:

Omnipotence,

Infinitude,

Eternity of splendour -

All are subdued

To a virgin breath

Calling the far

Earth-glooms of pain to marry

Its soul of star.

(Above All Roses)

But the union is yet to come. We are still creatures bound to the lower reality. Even when we know that we are the children of the eternal parents, that everything belongs to "the inviolate ether",

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our existence, as well as that of all things here below, appears as a prison. The poet sees:

All the world's outlines framing prisoner souls:

Each jagged boulder a god who groans to no ear.

(Grace)

This fall of the gods is not the Biblical fall, but sambhuti, the multiple becoming of the One, or "involution". The imprisoned souls are the sparks that are sown in the earthly clay. But in the course of evolution the soul-sparks will grow towards the supreme light and surpass even the heavenly gods. This is what the poet symbolically says in the following lines:

The shredded silver and the shrunken gold,

Caught by this dark divinity of clay,

Shall laugh and blossom brighter than the unmarred

Roses of heaven rooted in sapphire hush.

(The Fall)

This blossoming is not a thing that is to take place in some “heaven of quiet” or fade away in the earth-negating Void. Following Sri Aurobindo's vision of the divine life Sethna says:

  ...Omnipotence

Would shine through and the finishing touch be given

To make, of earth's light, harmonies of heaven.

(The Missing Touch)

Such is, in brief, the experience-field of the locus of Sethna's poetry. This vast vision has many consequences and many off-shoots which find expression in various poems.

The locus of poetry is one. For the sake of understanding we have broken it into fragments.  Before we conclude we must reunite the parts to see poetry as a "togetherness" of sound and sense, of body and spirit. "All great poetry," writes Sethna, "has a body that is divine, but mostly the soul of it is divine with a

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human mask; the mystical poet's work is the unmasking of the divine Spirit in that divine body."⁴¹ Great poets like Kalidasa and Shakespeare have given poetry a body that is divine, but the substance of the experience-field is human. However the human is not the negation of the Divine; in the Vedantic vision all is divine, but in the world-existence the divine is mostly masked. What Sethna means is that the mystic poet's task is to remove the human mask and show the divine within. And the poetry that is able to do so is what Sri Aurobindo calls the mantric poetry.⁴³

It is in the mantra that the two fields of the poetic locus are fully unified.

The poetic aspiration of Sethna has been to write mantric poetry. "The target of all mystic and spiritual poetry," he writes in a letter to Sri Aurobindo, "should be, in my opinion, the mantric utterance. At least the target of my own poetry certainly is.”⁴³

It is beyond my capacity to say if Sethna's poetry, or part of it, is mantra as defined by Sri Aurobindo. Mantra, he says, "is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition."⁴⁴ Sri Aurobindo has assigned to many poems by Sethna the levels of their inspiration.⁴⁵ I can do nothing better than quote a few lines with the remarks of Sri Aurobindo regarding their source of inspiration:

Waves of primeval secrecy broke white

Along the heart's shores, a rumour of deathless love

Afloat like a vast moon upon the deep.

(Rishi)

Make even my darkness a divine repose

One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose —

The slumbering seasons of my mortal sight

A portion of the unknowable vast behind

Thy gold apocalypse of shadowless mind!

(Orison)

About both these passages Sri Aurobindo says that they come

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from the Illumined Mind with the touch of Overmind Intuition.⁴⁶

Sethna, we conclude, has always tried, under the guidance of his master, to widen the locus of his poetry, pushing its frontiers to regions normally unknown to the thinking mind. When we read his poems with an attitude of spiritual empathy we are amazed to discover that in his best poems:

Words have not come to measure things that are;

They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen....

(Words)

RANAJIT SARKAR

Notes and References

1. The English Language and The Indian Spirit. Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry, 1986, p. 2,

2. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayoga, Birth Centenary Library, Pondicherry, Vol. 3, p. 346,

3. Raine and Sethna, p. 2.

4. K.D. Sethna (ed.), Overhead Poetry. Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments, Pondicherry. 1972, p. iv.

5. See, Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 105.

6. Nirodbaran, Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry. 1983, p. 61.

7. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Birth Centenary Library, p. 10.

8. K. D. Sethna, 1972, p. 89.

9. Life, Literature, Yoga, Some New Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry, 1952, p. 28.

10. Ibid., p. 42.

11. Ibid., p. 84.

12. Ibid., p. 30.

13. svadharme nidhanam sreyah para-dharmo-bhayavahah, Bhagavadgita, 3.35,

14. K.D. Sethna, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, Bombay, 1947, p. 86.

15. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

16. Here it seems to me that the word "rhythm" is used in the sense of metrical or prosodic rhythm, which is only the surface structure, something that is technical. We shall see later that rhythm has a deeper psychological sense.

17. G.Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life, London, 1958, p.225

8. Ibid., p. 337.

9. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, p.114

20. The opposition between symbol and allegory was invented and elaborated by the German Romantics. For a detailed study, sec Tzvetan Todorov, Theories du symbole, Paris, 1977, pp.235-260.

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21. K. D Sethna. Overhead Poetry, p. 91.

22. "All that we meet is a symbol and gateway." Sri Aurobindo Ahana, Birth Centenary Library,Vol. 5, p. 531.

Only the poet with wide eyes that feel

Each form a shining gate to depths beyond….

Sethna. (God's World)

23. Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fin, Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 11, p. 12.

24. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, p. 114.

25. Sethna, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. 1947, p. 94.

26. Nirodbaran, Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 1153.

27. Ibid., p. 930,

28. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, p. 145.

29. Anandavardhana, Dhvamyaloka, 1.1.

30. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, p. 18.

31. Sethna. Sri Aurobindo- the poet, Pondicherry, 1970, pp. 215-217.

32. Ibid., p. 217.

33. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 383.

34. For Sri Aurobindo's comments see Overhead Poetry, pp. 6-9.

35. Emily Dickinson, "There's a certain slant of light".

36. See for what follows Sethna's Poem Earth's Roof.

37. Raine and Sethna, p. 5.

38. See Ranajit Sarkar, In Search of Kalidasa's Thought-World, A Study of Kumarasambhava, Lucknow, 1985, pp. 23-24.

39. Raine: and Sethna, pp. 11-12.

40. Katha Upanishad, 2.3.1.

41. Sethna, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, 1947, p.88.

42. Sri Aurobindo, Life, Literature and Yoga, p. 43.

43. Sethna, Overhead Poetry, 1972, p. 12.

44. Ibid., p. 12.

45. For a general view of these levels see Sethna's Introduction to Overhead Poetry.

46. Ibid., pp. 49, 80.

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