Although I might postpone this letter for weeks until I had read or re-read all Sri Aurobindo's works, I don't suppose I could answer it better than by sitting down now - the first of the dark evenings of our winter when the extra hour of evening daylight is curtailed and I have the evening hours before me. I will make a few reflections and then turn to your letter and see where I get with that. It is a remarkable letter, full of eloquent, true, beautiful things. Many of these are inspiring and illuminating to me and I am privileged to receive such a letter and to be able to exchange thoughts, even in the role of the Devil's Advocate, with the imaginative mind of India which you represent. Also Professor Gokak sent me Aurobindo's Letters on Poetry where I find many true and beautiful things, and a scale of evaluation that surpasses anything in the West - the modern West especially - because it recognizes hierarchies, levels of consciousness, and that poetry may come from one or another of these. I find myself marking with approval passage after passage. I have just accepted for Temenos a short but full and beautifully concise paper from Professor Gokak on the Lord Surya and the six goddesses of poetry. I'm hoping he can provide some photographs of sculpture to accompany it, for if the philosophers and mystics discerned the Gods it was the craftsman who gave them their forms.

One is never aware of one's own cultural formation until one encounters another; and although I would no longer in any sense call myself a member of the Christian Church (although of course I regard the Lord Jesus as a Master, and especially the Master of my own civilization) I find that I am after all very Western in the sense in which David Jones (our

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great Catholic artist) called Christianity a very 'incarna-tional' religion, stemming of course from the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus in human form. We have indeed wonderful sculptures (Chartres Cathedral and hundreds of others) and the whole glory of Italian art and indeed you will at once understand what I mean by the Western tradition being 'incarnational'. Jesus did not teach any evolutionary 'superman' Way, but the discovery in mortal fallen man of the divine 'Presence'; and the love of all human beings, because in them is the imprint of the 'image of God' (as told of man's creation in the first chapter of Genesis) and the recovery and redemption of something already and for ever there, rather than an evolution towards some superrace. Our universe is the human universe, and loving our fellow-humans our task, in the light of the love of the Father who made us human, not superhuman. For some other race — superhuman if you wish - for indeed the angels, the animals, for every 'kind' its own universe and vision, but for us this universe, Blake's 'minute particulars'. So I tend to follow my culture in seeing rather in the degree of embodiment than in super-states the mark of achieved perfection. By contrast, you in India tend to aspire to 'higher' levels of consciousness which perhaps do not require the 'incarnational' dimension, or not in the same way, I know that to Indian metaphysicians fine distinctions and differences are clear as leaves on a tree and require no embodiment to be comprehensible. Sri Aurobindo speaks of 'higher' states of consciousness which I don't doubt he experienced. I don't doubt that Jesus also experienced these, but his Way was to feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, heal the sick and so on. He 'came down from heaven' and this runs throughout all Christian art. insofar as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto Me' - the Divine Humanity. You know Blake as well as 1 do.

The second stumbling-block to discussion is that in India I discern that the idea that a man may be gifted in one direction but not in another is not acceptable. That a Saint

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might be tone-deaf or colour-blind would not in Christian terms make him the less a saint. But you do not see a master in this way, and if he happens to write verse it must therefore be great poetry, because he is a great metaphysician or even indeed a saint. I see the logic of this - an illuminated Master has access to higher levels of consciousness, therefore his poetry must come from these higher levels and is above and beyond criticism as poetry. Nothing will ever make me see Sri Aurobindo's poetic writings as other than occasionally successful as poetry, but I see your point, that to question his poetic gift is to question all. It would not seem so to a Western mind at all, or necessarily cast doubt upon his metaphysical gifts. He was a brilliant, clear, and articulate thinker. Poetry is something else altogether, as music, dance, and sculpture are something else altogether. Or is that again the limitation of my Western mind?

I have for some days now kept at my bedside Ilion; Dick Batstone sent me the whole poem. It is of course a tour-deforce, reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter. But why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer? If I remember aright Valmiki's 'inspiration' came in the form of the metre in which he wrote the Ramayana. Homer may have used a metre current in his day or likewise have received that 'form', as the ballad metre is the expression of the Scottish border-ballads, or as the sonnet form came to the Renaissance mind with a kind of inevitability, as a thought-form appropriate to a certain way of thinking. Every culture has its music of verse. Why should Sri Aurobindo have written a poem in the metre of Greek epic poetry? Of course it can be done as an exercise - a piece of virtuosity (which Ilion is) but I do not find in that poem its raison d'etre, It is like a prize-poem set in a Public School or University, to write a poem in a certain language (Greek for example) and a certain metre. It is an imitation of poetry.

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not the newly created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'. Would Virgil have been impressed, or Ovid (not to speak of Homer) by some clever schoolboy or graduate's imitation of the Aeneid or the Iliad? There is an astonishing virtuosity (of course Aurobindo would have carried off the prize, whether from Eton or from Cambridge or Oxford) but would any true poet have given his time and energy to such an exercise? There are of course fine .things; the concept of the sun rising for the last time on the doomed city; some passages from the speeches of Paris, for example, are profound as thought and better expressed in his philosophic writings. Yet I realize that to you and to many Indian readers the picture is different. I know that Karan Singh is a follower of Sri Aurobindo; Arabinda Basu is a fine philosopher (though not necessarily an expert on poetry); with my own ears I heard Raja Rao speak of Savitri as a great poem; and Professor Gokak sent me the 'Letters on Poetry'. Sisir Kumar Ghose likewise. I am confronted with the possibility that all of you see something I don't see and that 1 am entirely wrong. But I cannot say that I find myself moved or convinced by Ilion any more (rather less) than by Savitri. Whereas with Tagore (neither metaphysician nor Perfect Master) I find great poetry, and the mind of a poet ever at work. He found in the people, in the trees and skies and animals and birds and people of his lime and place the reality of the here and now which is ever present to the true poet. The true poet does not await Utopia or a superpoetry but gathers eternal beauty from the dust and the light his eyes see daily. 'A fool sees not the same tree as the wise man sees.' Blake had no need to await Superman powers to see the sun as 'an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty*. I admit my own profound suspicion of what (perhaps only superficially) resembles the Superman thought of Nietzsche, and the evolutionism of Darwin is also antipathetic to me. But there I admit that I am probably understanding in Western terms what Sri Aurobindo in-

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tended in a very different sense - as the 'evolution' of the divine principle innate in every man. In that sense it would of course be true and profound. And I suppose that, given re-incarnation, there also would be 'evolution' throughout history. In that case what is the kali-yuga? It would seem that the clear vision of the Golden Age is progressively darkened to the Iron Age where we now are. But these are mysteries far beyond poetry. But it might seem that from the Vedas and the Psalms and the epics of all civilizations there is rather a decline than an 'evolution'. But here I may simply not have understood Sri Aurobindo's thought, and I am as you know no philosopher.

Before 1 turn to your letter I suggest another possibility -that is, that poetry is the proper language of this world of conflict and duality and not at all of a vision of Nirvana. This was Yeats's view (again, like Tagore, a great poet but not at all a Perfect Master, or with as mystical a vision as dear AE, who was only occasionally a poet even approaching Yeats). And in Yeats's poem Vacillation this is clearly stated. What after all would the Mahabharata have been without the Great Battle? Is it not the record rather of our quest than of its term that makes poetry? Again, I could be wrong - this, dear Dr. Sethna, is a possibility of which India makes me daily aware, and not only in the matter of poetry - but this is what Yeats wrote (I don't really need to remind you):

The Soul Seek out reality, leave things that seem.

The Heart What, be a singer born and lack a theme?

The Soul Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire?

The Heart Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!

The Soul Look on that fire, salvation walks within.

The Heart What theme had Homer but original sin?

or in A Dialogue of Self and Soul the soul says:

Such fullness from that quarter overflows

And falls into the basin of the mind

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That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,

For intellect no longer knows

Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known -

That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

Only the dead can be forgiven;

But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

- and again the Poet chooses life in all its multiplicity and richness and confusion:

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,

A blind man battering blind men;

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman, not kindred to his soul.

Before I go to your letter, though, let me say what delight I have found in the poetry, even in translation (I have several different translations, and many volumes) of Tagore, whom I am prepared to believe may be a poet equal to Yeats. And even in translations, Kalidasa; and Valmiki, and many other Indian poets. I have searched in vain for a complete translation of the Mahabharata but I am prepared even from the several abridgements I know to believe it surpasses Homer as the Himalayas overtop the Alps. But even there, the Bhagavad Geeta is spoken on the field of the Great Battle! Perhaps I am simply unable to appreciate Sri Aurobindo as a poet, or perhaps it is a contradiction in terms - as Yeats suggests - to be a Perfect Master and a poet.

Another point I would like to take up - again you may see in my standpoint the 'incarnational' Christian attitude - is your comparison of Sri Aurobindo's 'The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss. Drifting with burning wings above her days' with Tagore's 'morning sparrow'. I am totally un-

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moved and unimpressed by Aurobindo's super-bird. Tagore's sparrow performs perfectly the symbolic function (see Coleridge's definition of the symbol which reveals the eternal 'in and through the temporal'). The small, dusty humblest of birds is for the poet a daily epiphany of the mystery and miracle of Being, here and now, every moment. Or his little granddaughter who flings her arms round his neck in love, and in that moment of the Here and Now sweeps away all the melancholy reflections of all things passing away, the vanity of earthly existence when Tagore was considering the 'poet of Mohenjodaro' and the transi-toriness of all earthly things. It is the task of the poet to reveal such things, the daily miracle and mystery. As Blake did when he was able

To sec a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

That to me is visionary poetry, not Aurobindo's super-bird in superland. Or Blake's passage:

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance &

sport in summer

Upon the sunny brooks & meadows; every one the

dance

Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:

Each one to sound his instruments of music in the

dance.

To touch each other & recede, to cross & change &

return:

These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on

mountains,

The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the

darksom sky,

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Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to

the sons

Of men: These are the Sons of Los; These the Visions

of Eternity,

But we see only as it were the hems of their garments

When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous

visions

Blake neither wanted nor needed super-flies, and neither I think did Tagore, nor Kalidasa, for the task of the poet is to see the eternal in the world as each day creates the marvels daily before our eyes. To the 'Man of Imagination' (Blake's phrase again) 'Nature is one continued vision of Fancy or Imagination.' It has been unsurpassable,' Tagore wrote. Not so to Sri Aurobindo, he always wanted something better. To the poet's eye it is unsurpassable. Or to quote Traherne,

'Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every

morning you awake in heaven, till the Sea itself floweth

in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and

crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the

sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because

men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as

you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as

misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never

enjoy the world.'

This world, seen truly. What is the poet's task but to reveal that world, in the midge's dance, in Traherne's pebbles on the path, or in Tagore's morning sparrow?

As for that superwoman Aurobindo's Savitri, without citing Wordsworth's

Woman not too great or good

For human nature's daily food,

here is dear Edwin Muir's poem to his wife Willa,

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Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face

I in my mind had waited for this long,

Seeing the false and searching for the true,

Then found you as a traveller finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong

Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,

A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good. An eye

That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,

The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,

Not beautiful or rare in every part,

But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Or Tagore's Bengali peasant girls; or Kunti, like a wreath of faded lotuses' pleading with her disowned son Radheya; or the fiery Draupadi; or the Savitri of the Mahabharata rather than Aurobindo's superwoman. It's unimaginative (in the poetic sense) to need Utopias and superwomen and super-birds and a superworld reached through 'evolution' and to miss the daily celebration in the Here and Now, the 'minute particulars'.

Dear Dr. Sethna, you challenged me to state my case and not to side-step with cold civilities, and about poetry I cannot lie. Neither can you. 'Opposition is true friendship,' Blake also says.

Now to your really marvellous letter. I hope you have kept a copy, you should publish it. I am prepared to act as your foil, for I have not your fire, I am old and tired and to see beauty is always better than (like myself) to fail to see it in a particular work. For as Shakespeare says, 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if but Imagination do amend them'. I cannot of course speak for Herbert Read or say what he thought or did not think; I can be answerable only for myself. So, to begin about the point

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you make on your first page about the 'seer' and Aurobindo's claim that he does 'see' what he discerns in the invisible world, I would say that is what Yeats means by saying that poetry's theme is this world, not the 'higher' worlds where the enlightened seer may be at home, but lacks the concrete incarnational images. That world reveals itself through images and people (I return to my Christian 'incarnational' bias) and it does happen only rarely, I admit, and those 'bright shoots of everlastingness' that shine down, in Yeats's words 'That light / Though somewhat broken by the leaves'. You yourself give beautiful examples. But the passages you cite are one and all deeply tragic and human experiences, they are not supervision of the kind the Soul in the Yeats dialogue summons to, the pure vision of Nirvana. They are all rooted in the human condition, whereas Savitri attempts to evoke a superhuman humanity without that human paradox as old as the epic of Gilgamesh by which man is part mortal, part immortal.

You take issue (second point) about Milton's abstractions; Eliot, you will remember, criticized Milton himself for this. In the fine passage you cite I would suggest that the abstracts and negatives serve precisely the purpose of evoking 'chaos and old night' and must be read in the context of the wonderful concrete description of, say, Hell,

Anon out of the earth a fabrick huge

Rose like an exhalation, with the sounds

Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,

Built like a temple, where Pilasters round

Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid

With golden architrave; nor did there want

Cornice or Freeze, with bossy sculptures grav'n.

The roof was fretted gold. Not Babilon

Nor great Alcairo such magnificence

Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine

Belus or Serapis thir gods, or seat

Thir Kings when Aegypt with Assyria strove - etc.

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Not to mention L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, you know them too well for me to cite them. Or from Lycidas,

Under the opening eyelids of the morn

We drove afield, and both together heard

What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,

Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night...

Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use

Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,

On whose fresh lap the swart star sparsely looks,

Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes

That on the green terf suck the honeyed showers

And purple all the ground with vernal flowers,

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

The tufted Crow-toe, the pale Gessamine,

The white pink, and the Pansie freak't with jet,

The glowing violet,

The Musk-rose, and the well-attir'd woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flowre that sad embroidery wears...

I had meant to stop but those lines of superbly concrete and exact images draw one on with the superb music and perfect exactness of words. I find surely traces in the Ramayana ~ in the descriptions of the forest trees and pools that have the same loving evocation of the 'minute particulars' of an earthly landscape raised to the transmutation of a world of the imagination. The 'imaginal as Henry Corbin would say, the region where images take on meaning, and meanings become embodied in images. That surely is the poet's art.

Then, dear Dr. Sethna, you say what about me? What indeed can I say? You know my work so much better than I know it myself. I can but say 'Touche' or indeed 'Peccavi', can I not?

Then you go back to Aurobindo and mystic forms and bourneless changes, and I am lost again. I admit that 'A

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moment shorter than death, longer than time' is strong, 1 do cede to you that Sri Aurobindo conceived Savitri on a vast scale, it is a tour-de-force by any standard. I can but say that the 'superlife' does pass over my head. That may again be because I am an occidental and as 1 wrote earlier brought up in an 'incarnational' Christian tradition. Immeasurable heights and absolute bliss leave me utterly cold. Unimaginable depths too. And violent ecstasy. Perhaps in Sanskrit one could say what Sri Aurobindo wanted to say; but there again, I find the Vedic Hymns (as I know them only from Raymundo Panikkar's book) very wonderfully concrete.

You then speak of cliches in Milton! No. Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself. By the time all the minor Victorians had imitated Milton from afar, and Sri Aurobindo had received his education at an English school where at that time a highly artificial Victorian diction was the received mode of 'poetry' we are a very long way from Milton's welding and wielding of the very texture of language itself.

When you come to 'overhead poetry' I do grant you that this is an important element. I agree that there are many levels of poetry from the purely material (Auden who writes like an extremely gifted journalist) to Shelley, whom Sri Aurobindo discerns to be a poet with great translucence to the higher vision (and I deeply agree - in fact 1 find again and again Aurobindo's comments on the Romantics and other English poets highly perceptive and illuminating). I can but say I grant you all you say about the 'overhead poetry'. It is a very fine defence of that poetry you have written. I do however agree with AE's very interesting letter - he too couldn't take all those superlatives. I feel again and again that Sri Aurobindo tried to stretch the English language beyond its limits. It seems AE thought the same.

Well, we could quote passages at one another for ever.

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You quote Emily Bronte as she writes 'though earth and men were gone' etc. But what about the passage in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Earnshaw weeps in heaven and begs the angels to bring her back to Wuthering Heights? Emily is not a good example in support of your argument. However, on the 'overhead' 1 do think you win: without those gleams that come through from the Light where would poetry be? And to you our western poetry must often seem very opaque. And in present day England I'm bound to say that Blake's 'limit of opacity' has just been reached. Yet we have had Yeats and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and David Gascoyne too. But the gleams have to reach the darkness.

But I can't go on. I respect so much what you have written about poetry. Particularly about the 'overmind' for I too believe, as did Blake also, in a divine inspiration that comes from beyond the individual conscious mind. Sometimes from the 'collective unconscious' in which many memories of human experience are for ever stored and upon which we draw whether or not we know it. And sometimes from a higher source, from something beyond our normal definition of human. Not from the vital or from the psyche or the collective psyche, but from the Holy Spirit who (according to the Jewish and Christian teaching also) 'spake through the prophets.'

There I must leave it for I can't 'prove' such points as whether or not any poet was or was not thus inspired. Who can say? It is clear that to some - perhaps to Indian readers -Sri Aurobindo's poetry conveys something which does go, as you say, over my head. Forgive me. Savitri I must look at again - the whole poem, the sweep and scope of it is prodigious of course, Sri Aurobindo must have been gifted with a mental vital or perhaps super-energy in all his writings and compositions that it is difficult to imagine or possible to explain otherwise than through a degree of spiritual enlightenment that passes beyond any discussion of literature or poetry. Of that I cannot possibly judge and in my guarded

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attitude towards the suspicion of Western influence (Nietzsche and Darwin) in some aspect of his thought I think I have certainly misunderstood him. I am not a philosopher, or a mystic, or even a poet in the sense of Yeats or Shelley or any of the poets I love. I have done Blake some service perhaps. I see from afar the light in which the saints and sages and mystics walk. Do not expect of me more than my cup will hold.

With warm regards, and it has been a privilege to correspond with you about poetry, which you love and understand so well. We in the West have everything to learn from India in matters of the overmind. And that, for me, must await my next incarnation (if any. Who can be certain of Soul's destination?). With again my thanks for the privilege of our correspondence.

(25.10.1987)

From K. D. Sethna

I am so glad your promise of writing at length when you would have time has been fulfilled so soon. Your letter is both truthful and sympathetic, even if what you say from the deep heart with a fine aptness of language does not chime in every note with what is felt within me and "voluntary moves", if not "harmonious numbers", yet adequate prose. Our differences seem to be due to dissimilarities of background as well as frontal life-experiences and they need not breed ill-will or any sense of monopoly of the ultimately right. Frank friendly exchanges are bound to do good to either party and some modification of view on one side or the other is always on the cards.

I thank you for the compliment you have paid to my letter. Yes, 1 have kept a copy for future reference by myself to what 1 have so voluminously set forth. My memory is not "pelmanised" enough to retain all the thoughts riding on the surge of my enthusiasm. You tell me that I have written things worth publishing; but if I publish them I will never do

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so without letting you too have your full say - provided, of course, I have your permission to put you in print

May J - like you - make a few general reflections before attending to your self-defence and counter-attack? It is a bit of a surprise to me that you should bring in Jesus and Christianity, even if you don't belong to any Church proper, to support David Jones's notion of the "incarnational". I don't think he knew much of Indian religion and spirituality, but you do sufficiently not to fall into the trap of believing that all in them points beyond earth and towards a bodiless Nirvana, as compared to Christianity's alleged emphasis on Blake's "minute particulars" here and now, as well as on "the discovery in mortal fallen man of the divine Presence". Aren't you forgetting that in the Christian tradition the world is not an emanation of God's being but an artifact of his, created out of nothing - at best a mere "image of God", as you quote the first chapter of Genesis as saying, and never God himself in however veiled a form, waiting for the veil to be lifted by the in-dwelling divinity. The soul of man is never said by any Christian thinker to be a spark of God: it also is made out of nothing at the time of conception or else of birth. There is always a gulf between the Divine and the human. No doubt, in Christianity God is immanent no less than transcendent but he is immanent only by his power and never by being secretly one substance with the world and the soul. Neither the Old Testament nor the New has any inkling of God as Pantheos and at the same time the Beatific Beyond. Where in them will you find anything answering to those utterances of the Upanishad which compass both these aspects? Here is the first aspect expressed (in Sri Aurobindo's translation): "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." The second aspect is voiced thus (again in the translation by Sri Aurobindo), "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings

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flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of his brightness and by his shining all this shineth." The Supreme Divine hidden in the human and realisable by looking inward is declared in the master-mantra: Tat twam asi - "thou art That". In the depth of us is the Divine as our own soul developing its potentialities through a series of lives. The Upanishad speaks of it: "The Purusha who is in the heart is no bigger than the thumb of a man, but he is like a fire without smoke and he is the lord of his past and his present. It is he who is today and it is he who shall be tomorrow. This is the thing thou seekest." Again, there is the enchanting statement about the Brahman: "Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; old and worn thou walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed." Aren't Blake's "minute particulars" here with a vengeance? The same multiple message about the "incarnational" divinity is to be found in the Gita: "Vasu-deva is all." And both in the Upanishad and in the Gita this divinity is to be realised not merely as an impersonal grandeur: he is also to be discovered as the One Person who is the truth of all personalities. And a special manifestation of that One Person the Gita calls the Avatar. The Avatar, as the Gita says, comes from age to age into our midst, a recurrent extraordinary "incarnation" - rather than just a single incarnate "Son of God" - to make life luminous and profound.

True, ever since Buddha and Shankara there has been a strong tendency towards the extracosmic in a large number of spiritual seekers. But the old intuition of life as God's happy play with man as man's Lord and Lover is still alive and Vaishnavism is more prevalent than any form of Mayavada in the Indian commonalty. And the whole drive of Sri Aurobindo is not, as you imagine, towards the supraterrestrial. As he has repeatedly pointed out, man's fulfilment is here on the earth. For the first time in spiritual history the ultimate is sought in earth-terms. In the past, even when life was taken as the field of God's manifestation,

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the final goal was always above. Only Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the full revelation of the Divine below. This revelation is to be compassed by calling the higher states of consciousness into the body. They have to be experienced not by spurning the body and flying into some spiritual ether. To rise beyond our normal mental condition is the means of bringing a greater power of knowledge and activity and beauty and harmony and love into our world. The Integral Yoga wants the embodied being on "this litet spot of erthe" to have

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

The "superman" Sri Aurobindo speaks of is the bringing forth of what is in divine seed-form within man. To make a contrast between the divine Presence in mortal fallen man and the human soul which, in Sri Aurobindo's yoga, has to evolve all its latent Godliness by entering into higher states of consciousness that are its own concealed possibilities - to drive a wedge between humanity as we find it and the super-humanity aimed at by Sri Aurobindo is to misconstrue his whole endeavour.

After saying you don't doubt that Sri Aurobindo experienced higher states of consciousness, you add: "I don't doubt that Jesus also experienced these, but his Way was to feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, heal the sick and so on." The strange implication is that Jesus never asked his followers to experience higher states of consciousness but simply to go on doing what is commonly called good. If that is all his teaching, it is difficult to believe he experienced those states. And if you hold that man can do what Jesus asked them to, without man's making any move towards higher states of consciousness, all history contradicts you. The true "charity" (agape) which St. Paul praises is impos-

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sible to practise unless the Divine within awakens. Perhaps you may not have noticed that in the great passage in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13 he has the curious sentence: "And though I bestow all my goods to feed 'the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." Here is a clear hint that agape is not proved by feeding the hungry, comforting the bereaved and healing the sick: it is a higher state of consciousness within one from which the works of goodness spontaneously flow. And indeed it is because people have not attempted to live in such a state that in spite of all moral injunctions religion has failed to make man act humanely. Not before the latent superman is evoked in man can the injustices, the cruelties, the selfishnesses that have been rampant in history cease. Just by himself being, by virtue of the higher states, the Divine Humanity, Jesus has no hope of leading successfully l'homme moyen sensuel to carry out that compassionate vision: "Insofar as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto Me." The Christian must be led to those states and made a mystic like St. Francis in order that the Word of this vision may become Flesh in him. The basic creative commandment is: "Be ye like your Father in Heaven" - "Love thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy body" - and from the realisation of it will come the ability to obey the other: "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Only by observing this sequence can the Christian religion be "incarnational" in the right sense - a "stemming" (to quote your phrase) "from the incarnation of the Lord Jesus in human form".

What you call "the second stumbling block to discussion" leaves me gaping with amazement. It suggests that I would accept as genuine poetry any piece of verse coming from a holy man. We expect a Master of Yoga to speak wisdom. We do not expect him to be a Kavi, a seer-poet. Utterance of spiritual truth does not necessarily involve being a true poet. I know that the poetic power does come at times with the growth in Yoga. John Chadwick, a fine intellect trained

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in mathematical logic to whom the famous Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad dedicated his book of acute exposition, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, turned a poet of remarkable insight and expressive force after a few years under Sri Aurobindo. Similarly, Dr. Nirodbaran, another disciple, became a greater expert at penning a sonnet than writing a prescription. But every medico here, by reaching out to higher inner states, has not automatically tapped the Pierian spring for himself while dispensing effective mixtures to others. How could you take me to be a fool assuming that simply because Sri Aurobindo embodied the Overmind or Supermind he would flood the world with poetic mantras? It is by using whatever aesthetic sense I may have and making a critical scrutiny with all available tones of the Muse flowing through my mind, starting with the morning freshness of "the well of English undefiled" centuries ago and ending with A Strange Evening today when

A little rain falls out of amethyst sky,

that I have listened to Sri Aurobindo's voice in rhymed or blank verse and felt in his work an abundance of what a line of his own sums up as mantric speech:

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

1 may be mistaken in my judgment but that would be due to my imperfect perception of the poetic accent. Surely you can't accuse me of not using at all an ear trained to appreciate the various ways in which functions the measured language of moved precision that is poetry? Do you really believe that I would just goggle at a God-man and never seek to ascertain aesthetically whether "the current passes" through, for example, a line like Keats's original draft of the beginning of Endymion -

A thing of beauty is a constant joy -

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or like his later version:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

In 1936 Sri Aurobindo, in response to an appeal from me, used to send me privately every morning a passage from Savitri. I would type it and make my comments. Mostly they were enthusiastic, for line after line brought

Words that can tear the veil from deity's face.

But now and then 1 pointed out whatever I thought fell short in imaginative subtlety or technical skill. My object was to anticipate all possible carping at this new poetry from the academic world. The perfectionist in Sri Aurobindo understood my motive. He never imposed any restraint on me and he answered every question. In the majority of cases he would show me where and how I had misjudged the "overhead" inspiration. Here and there he would modify a word or a phrase or else add a line. Years later I left for Bombay and our exchanges stopped. But when I visited Pondicherry for a few days he sent me again his writings through his attendant and scribe Nirodbaran. On getting back the recently composed matter from me he would ask Nirodbaran: "Is he satisfied?" This is the manner in which my relationship with Sri Aurobindo went on in the literary field. So I would request you to remember that when I combat your sweeping verdict - "Nothing will ever make me see Sri Aurobindo's poetic writings as other than occasionally successful as poetry" - I do it with a keen awareness of what poetry should be and not with any blind faith that if one is a super-yogi he must be omni-competent. The final decision will lie not between a wide-eyed critic-cum-poet from England and a blank-gazed devotee in India but between two readers who are lovers of poetry equally ready to bring to their task of appraisal as sharp an aesthetic discrimination as possible.

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Already my heart leaps up a little, glimpsing a faint rainbow in the generally void sky of your outlook on Sri Aurobindo. For, while meaning to be emphatically negative you have let in a small positive note - to the effect that on-some occasions, rare ones, Sri Aurobindo actually succeeds as a poet. This tiny concession assumes a huge significance against the background of your former stand that he is no poet at all. You couldn't help perceiving that here and there - in places however widely scattered - he manages to be one. Perhaps on getting more and more steeped in the kind of work which you are unfamiliar with, and even averse to, the small spot of appreciation will spread. A lover of Wordsworth like you must know that at times a poet has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. The very volumes in which such masterpieces as Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode appeared drew from Jeffries the crushing verdict: "This will never do!" Wordsworth has grown so much a part of your being that I am sure you will find nothing running against your grain in such a passage as the following from The Prelude (III) where he speaks of "turning the mind in upon herself" and feeling

Incumbencies more awful, visitings

Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul

That tolerates the indignities of Time,

And from the centre of Eternity

All finite motions overruling lives

In glory immutable.

Yet I am afraid you will see nothing save "abstractions" in a comparable snatch from Savitri which in fact is more shot with sight while treating a similar theme of inner experience beyond the common human range

In moments when the inner lamps are lit

And the life's cherished guests are left outside

Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.

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Invading from spiritual silences

A ray of the timeless glory stoops awhile

To commune with our seized illumined clay

And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

I am both charmed and encouraged by the picture you draw of your keeping for some days Won at your bedside. And the impression this poem has created on you verges on the One it made on Herbert Read. May I remind you of his pronouncement on this epic in quantitative hexameters? -"It is a remarkable achievement by any standard and 1 am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality." Now take your estimate: "It is of course a tour-de-force, reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter." Read alludes to an extensive stretch of genuine English poetry here: he does not make the least reservation in his praise and considers the work an "achievement" of a most noteworthy order. You refrain from any direct reference to poetic quality and in place of the word "achievement" you have the compound "tour-de-force" and suggest by it the play of a productive mind at astonishing tireless experimentation. Like Read you are impressed by the natural flow of English, but you cannot bring yourself to declare that it is much more than a manifestation of an immense experimenting power. You further grant a perfect skill in the technique of an English replica of the Homeric hexameter. Read makes no mention of the hexametrical mould: he seems to take it for granted that Sri Aurobindo's revival of this ancient mould is perfectly legitimate and is an authentic success. Your explicit pointing to it at the end has an inner connection with your labelling the poem as a tour-de-force at the beginning. Your very next sentence after the estimate lays bare the connection and the reason why you term Ilion a

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feat of strength or skill rather than a true poetic creation. For you ask: "but why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer?" And you continue: "Of course it can be done as an exercise - a piece of virtuosity (which Ilion is) but I do not find in that poem any raison d'etre... It is an imitation of poetry, not the newly-created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'."

I think you have raised a false issue. First of all, the criterion of "nowness" should have no relevance to any kind of creation. A poet picks out a subject which comes to him with a living force and such coming is the sole thing that makes his "nowness". Again, a poet feels a certain form as being the true body of this subject and it matters little whether the form is new-fangled and in fashion or belongs to a past tradition. All depends on the organic vitality with which he employs it. Has anyone a right to question Byron's use of the Spenserian stanza to vivid effect in his travel-narrative in verse, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, three centuries after The Fairie Queene - or Shelley's resort to it at the same distance of time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller though not poetically inferior scale, Stephen Phillips conjuring up the story of Marpessa, Idas and Apollo? In our own day, Kazantzakis has written at a gigantic length (33,333 lines) a sequel to the Odyssey and in a form loosely reminiscent of Homer's. The only pertinent questions are: "Does the adopted form come alive and move with the true gait of poetry? Does the subject weave a significant design in which the poet expresses problems vital to himself as dreamer and doer, values vital to la condition humaine, aspirations and insights vital to the world's future?"

Secondly, it is an error to say that Sri Aurobindo is

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repeating in English the Greek hexameter. Homer wrote his epics in lines of dactyls and spondees based not on stress but on quantity (the time-length the voice takes over a vowel). All attempts to transfer such lines into English which, though admitting a meaningful element of quantity, is principally a language of stress, have failed. Structures which refused to be naturally fluent have been the result. Or else a purely accentual hexameter has been constructed with a rather monotonous effect on the whole. Sri Aurobindo got the intuition, the inspiration of a true English hexameter in which both voice-weight (stress) and voice-stretch (quantity) would come into play in a distinctive organic harmony and which would provide in a strong yet supple, a sweeping yet diverse and multi-toned totality the mould for a profound vision of life and its vicissitudes and its interactions of various characters. Inasmuch as the mould is new in several of its modes, Ilion is an experiment, but there is no artificiality about it. An afflatus as natural to English as was Homer's to Greek carries both the form and the content forward. If you lay aside your prejudices about "nowness", you will find real poetic genius and not mere virtuosity of verse, the depiction of a vivid human drama along with the deeper workings of more-than-human agencies.

Your Yeatsian view of poetry as "the proper language of this world of conflict and duality and not at all of a vision of Nirvana" will be fully satisfied here. Such a view need not rule out the role of what I have termed more-than-human agencies side by side with or at the back of crisscrossing men and women. You will be surprised to learn that Sri Aurobindo is not the poet only of the legend and symbol and philosophy that are Savitri. In addition to the different kind of poetic creation which Ilion represents, there are three long early narratives of greater "human" interest developed in another cast of blank verse: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou, the last-named a martial episode of the time of the great Mahratta leader Shivaji. Then there are dramas ranging over many epochs and types of human culture:

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Perseus the Deliverer, Rodagune, The Viziers of Bassora, Vasavadatta, Eric. The translation of a play of Kalidasa's, under the title The Hero and the Nymph, may be listed too. We have also a good number of short poems where the earthly scenes we know and the moods earth-creatures pass through are depicted.

In passing, may I quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's early work dating to 1899? I shall begin with this glimpse of morning in a wood:

(He) felt slow beauty

And leafy secret change; for the damp leaves,

Grey-green at first, grew pallid with the light

And warmed with consciousness of sunshine near;

Then the whole daylight wandered in, and made

Hard tracts of splendour and enriched all hues.

Take now this burst of emotion, in which my ear traces a Shakespearian elan:

For what is mere sunlight?

Who would live on into extreme old age,

Burden the impatient world, a weary old man,

And look back on a selfish time ill-spent

Exacting out of prodigal great life

Small separate pleasures like a usurer,

And no rich sacrifice and no large act

Finding oneself in others, nor the sweet

Expense of nature in her passionate gusts

Of love and giving, first of the soul's needs?

Next, I invite you to relish the psychological subtlety of word and rhythm, where to a basic Shakespearian note is added a sensuous felicity peculiar to Kalidasa:

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"Priyumvada!"

He cried, and at that well-loved sound there dawned

With overwhelming sweetness miserable

Upon his mind the old delightful times

When he had called her by her liquid name,

Where the voice loved to linger. He remembered

The chompuc bushes where she turned away

Half-angered, and his speaking of her name .

Masterfully as to a lovely slave

Rebellious who has erred; at that the slow

Yielding of her small head, and after a little

Her sliding towards him and beautiful

Propitiating body as she sank down

With timid graspings deprecatingly

In prostrate warm surrender, her flushed cheeks

Upon his feet and little touches soft;

Or her long name uttered beseechingly,

And the swift leap of all her body to him.

And eyes of large repentance, and the weight

Of her wild bosom and lips unsatisfied;

Or hourly call for little trivial needs,

Or sweet unneeded wanton summoning,

Daily appeal that never staled nor lost

Its sudden music, and her lovely speed,

Sedulous occupation left, quick-breathing,

With great glad eyes and eager parted lips;

Or in deep quiet moments murmuring

That name like a religion to her ear,

And her calm look compelled to ecstasy;

Or to the river luring her, or breathed

Over her dainty slumber, or secret sweet

Bridal outpantings of her broken name.

All these as rush unintermitting waves

Upon a swimmer overborne, broke on him

Relentless, things too happy to be endured.,,

Surely quite a lot of the earth-contact, the human touch

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that you miss in Savitri is here? Not that these things are really absent there. Deep concern for earth, poignant eagerness to make the heart of man find true bliss are the basic motives but what is built spaciously on the base and set vibrant in the inner being through canto after canto lessens their impact. Over and above the mighty adventure of love's conquest of death and its transformation of terrestrial life into a life divine by means of a new power brought from higher states of consciousness, an ample penetration and detailed impression of planes beyond the terrestrial are the aim of Savitri. I see no reason for rejecting such an aim as alien to the nature of poetry. I have already said that poetry essentially is the measured language of a moved precision. The theme to which this language applies itself can be anything in which the author is interested, anything about which he can be passionate. And whether we are directly interested or excited we should be able with our aesthetic sense to enter into his world and respond with delight -provided he brings to us those three desiderata Sri Aurobindo has emphasised: intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm. Conflict and duality and "original sin" are certainly legitimate to the poetic spirit, but can we confine this spirit to a traffic only with them? If Yeats meant us to do so we should have to put aside much of his earlier creation, his Celtic-twilight phase with its "sweet everlasting voices" and "the host riding from Knocknarea" and "calling":

Away, come away:

Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand;

We come between him and the hope of his heart.

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Even Yeats of the later open-eyed phase of the intellect balanced against the inward reverie does not limit poetry, as you seem to suggest, to "The folly that man does / Or must suffer..." To press powerful poetry out of conflict and duality is not all of Yeats's aspiration. What about that grand invocation? -

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Here the words "mosaic" and "artifice" are I suppose, characteristic of the later Yeats, conscious of art moulding everything for the imperious mind. But the old longing to pass beyond the deed of his striving hand and the hope of his hungry heart is still looking afar for freedom from what in his non-Celtic days he often celebrated: "the fury and the mire of human veins".

If that fury and mire alone made poetry or were the sole themes for it, where would your own poetic work find a place? Like the other Cathy you have your keen earthward turn, yet not all or most of your poems are charged with it: the materially real is often a forefront of the invisible, the mysterious. As a reviewer in the TLS long ago remarked: "Miss Raine seems to value the actual mainly because it reminds her of 'those great presences who were not there'." As typical of the true You he pointed to lines like:

High, high and still

Pale water mirrors

Thin air and still the high

Summit at rest in white

Water-spaces empty as thought.

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Mention of the other Cathy brings me to your disapproval of my enrolling her creator, Emily Bronte, on my side. To counter my quotation of the lines in which she writes 'Though earth and men were gone" you ask me: "What about the passage in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Earnshaw weeps in heaven and begs the angels to bring her back to Wuthering Heights?" And you remark: "Emily is not a good example in support of your argument." Well, you have me there to some extent. I say "some extent"; because you are talking of a fictional creation in prose while 1 have in mind the personality revealed in the best of the poems. No doubt, these too originally belonged to the Gondal sagas, dramatic narratives Emily used to compose with her sister Anne, but it is to be noted that when she published them she removed all traces of the sagas as if what had been fictionalised had at its back a real-life movement. We have two almost opposite parts in Emily, a dichotomy of urge in which the Pennine moors and "the World behind the world" stand as keen rivals. It is not any Heathcliff who is finally figured as coming to the thought of Cathy's maker:

A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,

And offers for short life eternal liberty...

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;

Its wings are almost free - its home, its harbour found,

Measuring the gulf it stoops, and dares the final bound.

Oh, dreadful is the check - intense the agony -

When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;

When the pulse begins to throb - the brain to think

again -

The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the

chain.

In the face of the spiritual passion in these lines, as direct as

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the very wind on her wild moors, would you assert that I lose entirely in citing Emily as an example in my favour?

Now to your references to Milton. A rather complex situation they present to me. His "abstractions" and "negatives" you seek to excuse by saying that in the fine passage on Satan's flight across the void they "serve precisely the purpose of evoking 'chaos and old night'..." I have never doubted their poetic function nor do I overlook the concrete sense we have of an almost physical plunging of Satan through the abyss. I drew your attention to the same kind of sense Sri Aurobindo conveys in relating the experience his Aswapathy undergoes. And I submit that "Unimaginable depths" and "immeasurable heights" are exact expressions not only of Aswapathy's sudden overwhelming mind-boggling impressions of his rise and plunge into spiritual spaces but also of the actual infinity those spaces represent. As for "bourneless change", it is the exact result, both in feeling and in kind, of those ups and downs brought about by the Might and Flame and Beauty of the soul-grasping and bliss-enforcing Unknown in its own illimitable being. All that Aswapathy goes through may leave you "utterly cold", but that does not mean Sri Aurobindo is indulging in a grandiose verbosity. My whole self responds intensely to the picture of "the magnitudes of God's embrace" and perceives the utter aptness of each word to the reality poetically evoked.

An example of how wonderfully concrete Milton could be is offered by you in the rich description of "a fabric huge" in Hell. Quite a number of passages in Savitri bring equally rich descriptions of strange realities which may be termed supernatural "fabrics". Just because they are alien to your poetic vision they do not strike you as wonderfully concrete. Let me put one of them before you in the hope that it may at least impinge on your imagination's eye even if your intelligence cannot make head or tail of it:

A giant order was discovered here

Of which the tassel and extended fringe

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Are the scant stuff of our material lives....

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time.

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and

hues

Climbed back from Time into undying Self,

Up a golden ladder carrying the Soul,

Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes....

A hierarchy of climbing harmonies

Peopled with voices and with visages

Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods

From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.

Above were the Immortals' changeless seats,

White chambers of dalliance with Eternity

And the stupendous gates of the Alone...

You touch on Milton once more to prove me wrong in my attempt to match from him just the kind of phrases which you dubbed "cliches" in Sri Aurobindo. You answer: "No, Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself." A little later you allude to "Milton's welding and wielding of the very texture of language itself". I am afraid there is some mis-seeing of Milton's linguistic creativity. The English language was sufficiently developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant development had preceded him in prose also, starting with Bacon and Raleigh and culminating

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in the Authorised Version (1611) which not only showed how much English had grown but also served as an unparalleled new-maker of it for centuries. "Cliches", in the strict sense, may be a misnomer; the more appropriate term would be "dignified common currency". What 1 meant was that Milton was full of expressions similar to the ones you criticised in Sri Aurobindo. And, to be sure, one does not need to be a mint-master to coin verbal turns like "deep despair", "dreadful deeds", "dire event", "foul defeat", "horrible destruction", "high Supremacy" (almost a stately tautology). I would agree with you that these combinations of adjective and noun are precise inasmuch as they communicate the nature of a situation correctly, yet on a level of correctness which can hardly be honoured with the compliment: "original". Originality is apparent in your quotations from Lycidas. At nearly every step felicities meet us. Such striking, out-of-the-way gem-work is rarely found in Paradise Lost. There are profoundly moving passages where glimpses of Nature like

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill...

Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose...

are woven in to memorable effect, but when we examine them separately we miss the impression of the new-minted. Though Milton's ear for rhythm can convert even the commonplace or the conventional into a charm, yet magic and music do not often merge as they do in the Lycidas-invocation to "Ye valleys", which you have quoted.

It is as if in Paradise Lost Milton deliberately chose to be simpler, more natural, less outstanding in individual locutions and depended rather on the strength of his thought and the poignancy of his emotion and the splendour or delicacy of his verbal or metrical rhythm to create an overall impact of originality. Obviously he is putting into practice his conception of epic writing. It appears to be in the very

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character of such writing that a poet does not hunt after the rare, the jewel-like in speech: an epic poet achieves a wide flow of verbal energy directed towards a general novel totality. In composition of this sort we must not focus on individual phrases lest we should run the risk of making them look almost like cliches.

In Paradise Lost, Milton's "welding or wielding of the very texture of language itself consists in something quite different from what you suggest. Outwardly it lies in a frequent Latinisation of English as in the last word of this exclamation of Adam to Eve after she has eaten of the forbidden fruit:

How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,

Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!

Many sentence-structures may also be considered Latinised. Then there are the expansive architecture of his paragraphs and the organ-music in them with a host of internal variations of assonance and consonance. All this outward moulding of the English language was done by the hands of a genius attempting, as Sri Aurobindo tells us, "to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetical expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form". Inwardly, "the texture of language itself was affected by Milton through an importation of the manner of Greek and Latin epic creation into English, the expressive mode of the classical as contrasted to the romantic spirit. Milton - in the words of Sri Aurobindo - "has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it, adding at the same

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time that peculiar grandeur in both the soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the rhythm which belongs to him alone of poets."

Not that the Elizabethans who preceded Milton lack in thinking. Thinking in abundance goes on in them, but it is not thought in its own right: Elizabethan thought rises out of the surge of passion and emotion: there is little of detached controlled intellectual activity. The Life-Force throws up ideas from its quivering entrails, as it were. Even Donne, with his metaphysical wit, is a semi-Elizabethan. Only with Milton comes the pure Mind-Force. We can easily mark the difference between the Life-Force and the Mind-Force by juxtaposing Shakespeare and Milton. Here is Claudio in Measure for Measure:

Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world.

Now Milton's Belial advising his fellow-rebels, who have no hope of victory and are reduced to "flat despair":

we must exasperate

The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage.

And that must end us; that must be our cure,

To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity,

To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

In the wide womb of uncreated Night,

Devoid of sense and motion?

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I have wandered not through eternity but too far afield and must come back to Savitri. A word, however, before I do so. It is a bee in your bonnet that when Sri Aurobindo received his education in England "a highly artificial Victorian diction was the received mode of 'poetry' " at that time in a poor imitation of Milton at a distance - and so Sri Aurobindo learnt to write in a Victorian style. If you have read carefully the passages I have cited from the blank-verse narrative Love and Death (about 900 lines) he wrote in 1899 you will notice how little is any Victorian diction present in them. The old convention of putting a noun between two adjectives lingers here and there, but that is Miltonic no less than Tennysonian. Even in the earlier Urvasie, composed in his twenty-third year, no Victorian diction comes in to artificialise the poetry. Always there is a vivida vis - and it persists in Savitri, though this poem differs in general mould and temper from those narratives.

Perhaps it differs for the worse, you may opine, because it is wanting in so-called human interest, Savitri being, as you say, a "superwoman", unfit "For human nature's daily food" and never addressed by Satyavan in the manner of Edwin Muir's "poem to his wife Willa". But is the manner so very different? Doubtless, Edwin and Willa had a more down-to-earth relationship than Satyavan and Savitri. But, ultimately, is not Muir poetic by the visionary gleam with which he reaches the truth and the beauty in his wife? And, if that gleam calls the heart beyond the human to a divine arch-image, do we pass out of the realm of poetry and find our souls unseized? Is the ethereal passion of Shelley's Epi-psychidion less inspired than any Muiresque love? We should be capable of attunement to all possible notes of the poetic gamut - aware at least that there can be genuine poetry even though what is said and the fashion of saying may not appeal to the mood in which we habitually live. One may aver that Savitri with its constant vastnesses and strange intensities of a new inner life does not make an immediate appeal to us. Still, we should answer to it aesthetically

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enough to grant that a future humanity is sure to appreciate it. Dante, in the last Canto of his "Paradiso", invoked the Supreme Light, high above our imagining, to lend his memory and his tongue the power to leave but one sparkle of its "magnificence to future men". Because the "Para-diso" was wanting in the human interest with which the "Inferno" had teemed, it was much less popular if not often neglected except for its grand last line -

L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle

(The love that moves the sun and the other stars) -

which is likely to be understood by many of us as a pre-Shelleyan Shelley-revelation instead of what it actually is: a philosophical vision based on Aristotle and Aquinas, which takes the universe as moving towards God by the love arising in it for His irresistible beauty. Yes, "Paradiso" has never gripped the majority and possibly even now it waits for "future men". But its poetry is as marvellous as anything in the "Inferno". 1 hold that Savitri is no less a poetic marvel and the time to come will realise the fact. Even we of the present, who have stirred to Vaughan and Wordsworth and AE, can respond to and rejoice at its spiritual art. All Yogic experiences, explorations of all the subtle planes of existence with their forces and denizens and supernatural sceneries, are delineated in living detail. Sri Aurobindo has not let his imagination soar or dive from a merely human consciousness working as poet-artist. His consciousness has passed beyond the human range and known directly hells and heavens and the dynamic silences beyond them. We can say of him as he does of his Aswapathy:

Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;

The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences

Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.

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In our ordinary moments we may not care very much for Sri Aurobindo's penetration and elucidation at full length of the hitherto "unmapped Immensitudes". But many of us have mystic hints and these may guide us at some hushed hour to open Savitri. Or else the increasing failure of human devices and all mind-made "isms" may drive us to this book of knowledge filled with winged words that go from the earth to the empyrean and sweep back to earth to give our familiar cosmos and our historical process a novel significance. This significance is not, as you may fancy, a sort of transmogrified evolutionism caught from Darwin or Nietzsche; it has its birth beyond their ken, they were only vague prefiguring signs of a forward-looking epoch prepared by a secret Time-Spirit which was to manifest the Avatar of the Supermind whose heart-beats spelled out the scripture of the ever-progressive Divine in the human and, charged with becoming its mouthpiece, had no real need to con The Origin of Species or Thus Spake Zarathustra.

1 who have lived in close warm contact with an actual Superwoman like the heroine of Savitri and with a living and breathing Superman such as Savitri envisions as the fulfilment of every evolving soul - I have not the least doubt that this epic dear to both the poetic dreamer and the Yogic doer in me and enshrining in a many-contoured art a mighty legend, symbol, philosophy and via mystica, may safely look ahead to "an audience" more than "few" and eager to be "fit".

The privilege of our correspondence is not only yours: it is also mine. Hence gratefully, with very cordial thoughts, I close.

POSTSCRIPT

You write apropos of AE's letter: "he too couldn't take all those superlatives. 1 feel again and again that Sri Aurobindo tried to stretch the English language beyond its limits. It seems AE thought the same."

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If you re-read the letter you'll see that AE didn't rule out the "superlatives": he merely wanted them to be spaced out: the great highlight words have to be reserved for special effects. You are also off the mark in attributing to AE the impression such as you have that Sri Aurobindo's spiritual poetry overstretched the English language. He was speaking of my poetry, not Sri Aurobindo's. There too, there is no question of his thinking like you. If he thought I was stretching the English language beyond its limits, he would not have written to Mr. Roy: "The verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic quality." One example - "The song-impetuous mind" - out of the two he picked out for praise, adding that there were many fine lines like these, is from a poem of 24 lines which contains all the words against whose overuse he cautions me: "immensity", "omnipotence", "inexhaustible", "limitless" and the like. As four or five poems had been sent to him, we don't know whether the warning was aimed at this particular piece or applied in general. However, this piece by its excess of the highlights should serve as a test-case: "Is it a success in spite of that over-abundance? Did AE consider it such but, while doing so, wanted me to be on guard against the notion that such a feat could always or often be carried off?"

Here's the problematic composition:

NE PLUS ULTRA?

(To a poet lost in sentimentalism)

A madrigal to enchant her - and no more?

With the brief beauty of her face drunk, blind

To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure

The song-impetuous mind?

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy

To be denied its winged omnipotence.

Its ancient kinship to immensity

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And dazzling suns?

When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,

When all creation is a rapturous wind

Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal,

Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?

Shall he - born nomad of the infinite heart!

Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!

Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart

Across the terrible night

Of death to conquer immortality!-

Content with little loves that seek to bind

His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he

Remain confined

To languors of a narrow paradise-

He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes

The gods behold, overawed, the unnamable One

Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?

Whatever the verdict on this extreme packing together of your bites noires, I wonder if your feeling about Sri Aurobindo's attempt with the English language is justified. One has to be judged in such a situation according to both the nature of the medium and the ability of the artist. There is no questioning the extraordinary flexibility of English. Its proof is the very variety of the individual voice in English literature, the profusion of distinct manners strikingly answering to diverse moods, as though each author had his own tongue, an English exclusive to himself thrilling out of the mass of a common heritage and receiving with an intrinsic ease the stamp of his personal vision. The sense of an endless potentiality in "the tongue that Shakespeare spake", along with a host of fellow-poets who could turn their vocables this way or that as the fancy took them, prompted those lines of amazement at the multifold glory into which Elizabethan English had grown:

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Or who can tell for what great work in hand

The greatness of our style is now ordained?

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command?

English certainly appears to lend itself to a lot of stretching. How far it can go rests with what degree of genius handles it. Not quite in the sphere with which we are concerned yet relevant in the general sense is Milton's bending of his expressive instrument to a Latinised shape for the purposes of his epic. At times his sentences have a structure which markedly strains the native idiom to follow Latin syntax. But except very rarely the effect created is dignified and serious, not gauche or artificial. His versatile genius is responsible for the triumph. Can we refuse a transforming genius to Sri Aurobindo in the sphere of spiritually poetic utterance? You have granted him a prodigious sweep and scope in Savitri and seen him as "gifted with a mental, vital or perhaps super-energy... difficult to imagine or possible to explain otherwise than through a degree of spiritual enlightenment". Can the extremely plastic English language have any limits for such a dynamic master of mysticism who is also admitted to be a master of this medium?

(3.11.1987)

From Kathleen Raine

You will by now I am sure have received my own poor attempt to reply to your most interesting letter on poetry. I have begun to learn from India perhaps the most valuable lesson life has to teach, that there are many things I do not know or understand, and that I MAY BE WRONG.

I shall be delighted to receive your book on Mallarme. It has not yet reached me. I had forgotten that the Isha Upanishad by Sri Aurobindo had in fact been your gift and had indeed thought it must have been an old friend who died some years ago who had possessed it with other books of hers I inherited at her death. I certainly enjoyed re-reading

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it. Also the Letters on Poetry which Prof. Gokak sent me. I agree so often that I have made endless ticks in the margins. Sri Aurobindo was very perceptive on modern English poetry and its limitations. Things are worse now. After all I did start Temenos in order to reaffirm the spiritual roots from which the arts must spring. I also liked Sri Aurobindo's recognition that each level of consciousness can have its appropriate poetry - the vital, the psychological, the archetypal (which he calls the over-mind) and so on. I did also -forgive me for reverting to our old dispute - find a passage in which he says he is not primarily a poet. This is what I have always felt about Sri Aurobindo, that he was a most remarkable man but not a poet. For not to be 'primarily' a poet is not to be a poet at all. May I even suggest that it is a matter of Dharma - even a matter of caste - the following of the 'leading gift' - and that Sri Aurobindo writing poetry was not in his case to follow his leading gift; and like Drona on the field of the great Battle who suddenly understood that he, a Brahman, however gifted in the use of arms, had no right to assume the role of a warrior? I don't think Tagore would have said he was 'not primarily a poet'. Or Shelley. Or any poet. Not to be primarily a poet is not to be a poet; as I understand it. But I am glad to have been made by you and my other Indian friends to read the letters on poetry, and other of Sri Aurobindo's writings on philosophy -spiritual philosophy that is - which have all the beautiful clarity his poetry seems to me to lack. The fact still remains that but for a line here and there I don't respond to it at all.

No, I have not read Thomas R. Whitaker's Yeats book. I have finished my work on Blake and Yeats and don't follow the field now - next year I shall be eighty. He appears to be an American and I find it hard to believe that any American can write a 'greatest hook on Yeats's poetry'. But there again I MAY BE WRONG. I have not in this case read the book. I have just received George Mills Harper's 'monumental' two volumes on the Making of Yeats's A Vision. I have not yet looked at it very closely. At my age one must be

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clear about priorities. Like Yeats I am setting my soul to study not what the professors write but what they write about. I did read an interesting book by John Drew on India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford) with many valuable things about Shelley's indebtedness to India. (After all he called the soul-figure of Prometheus Unbound 'Asia', did he not?)

Yeats the Initiate was not a systematic book but papers written over the years. But I think WBY would have liked it.

(4.11.1987)

From K. D. Sethna

It is always a pleasure to hear from you. From the time which you are giving me I may guess that you don't mind receiving long discussions by me. The themes are of deep interest to both of us - the nature of poetry, the expression of the poetic vision, the various levels of the poet's matter and manner. Your detailed reply to my letter came several days back and drew from me a little lengthier response on "minute particulars", but much shorter than its predecessor. It must be in your hands now - perhaps while I am writing this aerogramme you are poring over my script.

I am glad you are appreciating Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism so much and reading it with great attention. But I don't think that in the course of your conning it you first came across the bit about his not being primarily a poet. It occurs in the middle of my "elephant" of a letter. There I quote Sri Aurobindo as writing to me that a poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament and taste and the rest he condemns or ignores, whereas Sri Aurobindo's case is different "because I am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would". Anticipating that you were likely to misunderstand this statement I put a footnote to the quotation, explaining what Sri Aurobindo had meant. He had meant that at the

Page 112

time he wrote that sentence he was first and foremost a Yogi who used poetry not for its own sake but to express his spiritual realisations more and more adequately in terms natural to poetry. He put himself at the service of the supreme truths compassed by his Yogic experience and not at the service of the merely poetic imagination which would give voice to whatever stirred it and would not make it a point to go in always for the mystical: your "world of conflict and duality" would be perfectly welcome to it. To Sri Aurobindo the Master of Yoga the situation would be what he depicts in the following stanzas from his poem "Descent" written in Sapphics:

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions,

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

Sri Aurobindo the Poet would be the mouthpiece only of Sri Aurobindo the Master of Yoga: the latter and not the former would have the primacy. This sense was all that was intended: there was no question whether Sri Aurobindo was a born poet or not. Surely a born poet can become a Master of Yoga and turn his innate gift to a Rigvedic or Upanishadic or Gitaesque use? In a vein similar to that of the pronouncement on which you have mistakenly fastened, Sri Aurobindo has declared that he was not a philosopher in the current connotation. There toe you may mistake him, for he has said that he is one who has employed intellectual language just to put together in a systematic form the comprehensive world-vision his many-sided Yogic experience has brought him. The sole difference is that in this context he has said

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that he never was a philosopher: he has not anywhere said he never was a poet.

There was a time when he could have affirmed like Yeats:

I am but a mouthful of sweet air,

and possibly, as a mere poet may do, he failed to recognise as sweet the mouthfuls different from his. To be more than such-a mouthful is not to be mouthless: it is to set the mouth at the disposal of the realised Divine in oneself rather than of "the human, all-too-human" (a term from your bugbear Nietzsche) invoking the Muse from a distance. Of course there is the doubt you sometimes entertain whether being the Perfect Master may not exclude being a poet. But you immediately contradict yourself if you accept as I am certain you do that poetry comes from a world of the Gods to which Homer and Virgil and Dante and Milton appealed for their inspiration. The furor poeticus is also the enthousiasmos, the "God-entry", To reach the world of the Gods is to be more directly capable of great verse. I do not mean that every attainer of it is necessarily a poet. But the chances are that he may miraculously flower into one. In any case, if one were already a poet he would become a greater one instead of finding his tongue a stone.

Sri Aurobindo has always accepted poetic activity as natural to him from the start. If you were to read his work from even his earliest days you would never venture your present view. The kind of poetry he wrote in Savitri is not to your taste. There is, too, your preconception that beyond our world is nothing save Nirvana. Actually one finds also -as I say in a poem of my own -

Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line

Where passion's mortal music grows divine.

(12.11.1987)

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From Kathleen Raine

It cannot be otherwise than that we differ about Sri Aurobindo as a poet, but let it at least be said that we respect one another's knowledge and love of poetry. I have read through Sri Aurobindo's letters on poetry, sent me by Professor Gokak, with the greatest interest also and much agreement. But I note that he himself does not claim to be primarily a poet but a yogi. In the hierarchy of things a yogi is doubtless higher than a poet (as Gray said of Shakespeare, 'Beneath the good how far, but far above the great') but the leading gift is a man's 'caste' surely, were he a carpenter or a musician or a yogi. It is really futile to go on arguing about Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether it be like Milton or like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson, for my point about 'nowness' is that a poet should work with language as it comes to his own time and place. I find his style full of linguistic clutter -'well-loved', 'overwhelming sweetness', 'the voice loved to linger', 'half-angered', 'a lovely slave rebellious who has erred', 'touches soft' - the whole passage seems to me linguistically artificial and false - 'dainty slumber' - the whole thing so strikes me, but it impresses you otherwise and finally the discussion cannot be continued 'where you read black where I read white', to go back to Blake. Doesn't Yeats complain that all Indian writers wrote of 'beauteous maidens' where he writes of 'pretty girls'? 'What shall I do for pretty girls / Now my old bawd is dead?' I'm afraid I find in the passage about Priyumvada the sort of rather nauseous sentimentalizing of a romantic situation that Yeats's Crazy Jane would have had none of! 'Prostrate warm surrender' for example can be said perfectly simply in plain English - in perfect dignity and grandeur -

'Three dear things that women know,'

Sang a bone upon the shore;

'A man if I but held him so

When my body was alive

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Found all the pleasure that life gave':

A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

The grandeur of the useless body of love is amply created in the context of the death of that body. I would have thought Yeats's vision is more Indian in that respect than the passage you quote from Sri Aurobindo which is more a piece of sentimental romantic eroticism than of a new super-spiritual vision of love. Besides, Yeats does it by the images he uses -the Bone on the shore (with all the implications of the oceanic vastness of life) and the intimacy of brief bodily love. I find Edwin Muir's love more spiritual also with its respect for Willa's human imperfection than any superlatives could have made the poem 1 cited.

Of course what is 'incarnated' comes from the spiritual source. Nature is the 'signature of eternal things', 'as above, so below', or the cabbalistic tree in which the divine circulates through the four Worlds and ten Sephiroth, the same divinity at all levels. It is when 'that which is below' becomes cut off from 'that which is above' that the lower world becomes trivial and a nihil, and the world 'above' a vacuum.

When I spoke of Christianity as an 'incarnational' religion I was not thinking of the doctrine of the Incarnation as such - of course there is the Lord Krishna and the Lord Buddha or some holy man, or indeed Indian thought does not limit incarnation to a single incarnation (which is indeed absurd) but culturally speaking the European-Christian emphasis has been incarnational, and whatever is sublime in Christian art has respected the 'minute particulars'. So indeed has much Indian art and I was thinking specifically of Sri Aurobindo who does not it seems to me respect those minute particulars, but rather sweeps them aside. I enclose a photocopy of a review I wrote of a recent Tagore translation from which you will see that I by no means apply to all Indian poetry this judgment.

I really feel that there is nothing more I can say to justify

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or damn myself as it may be in your eyes. As 1 wrote in my last letter, India confronts me so constantly with the fact that I may be wrong'. Indeed I have been freed from the burden of my Christian upbringing and the dualism of that religion by the slow process of learning however little from India.

One small P.S. about my own line that you quote, 'A little rain falls out of amethyst sky'. I must say that the line seems to me good just because of its exactness. Rain does not normally fall when the sky is 'amethyst' but from gray clouds. The fact that there was only 'a little rain' is likewise specific - not a downpour. One of these magical strangenesses that nature sometimes produces. One might turn to that greater poet Shelley's 'locks of the approaching storm' -

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm....

Shelley was being exact - he knew about electricity as well as Maenads - and one can sometimes see a cloud with tufts as it were pulled out, just as he describes, before a thunderstorm. And it is also exact because the hair of the Maenads may well have risen in their state of Dionysian inspiration. So the metaphor is exact both on the physical level, and as applied to the spirit of inspiration represented by the wind. There is a Vedic hymn to the wind very like Shelley -

Oh, the Wind's chariot, its power and glory!

It passes by crashing.

Out streak the lightnings, dust rises on earth.

The wind passes.

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The hosts of the wind speed onward after him,

Like women assembling,

The king of the world lifts them up in his chariot

Through lofty regions.

(I quote Raimundo Panikkar's translation.) I find there also the images exact and specific. No attempt to surpass 'the unsurpassable' - as Tagore describes this life.

To return to Jesus and his teachings, of course he did not reduce human duty to practising the commonplace virtues, for those acts we are told to perform are the incarnation of the divine holy spirit in terms of human life, 'inasmuch as ye shall do it to the least of these little ones, ye do it unto me'. This corresponds to the Christian prayer 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'. That is the goal. No different there indeed from one form of Indian teaching, and you place Sri Aurobindo in that tradition, although I do nevertheless find him with little love of the minute particulars -the sparrow, the eye of the peacock, 'our humble mother the dust' - all of which Tagore loved and valued, for these are the forms worn by the mysterious self of the Bhagavad Gita and other texts of course. I feel that if you were to show Sri Aurobindo a sparrow, he would say, 'That's nothing, I will show you a super-bird.' To which I, Tagore, William Blake, would reply, 'I don't need a super-bird, this is the Creation that God found good.'

Meanwhile your book on Mallarme arrived yesterday and I look forward very much to reading it. I only dipped last night before sleep overcame me at the end of a busy day but I can see how much I am going to enjoy it.

(14.11.1987)

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