Inspiration and Effort

INSPIRATION AND EFFORT

(A LETTER)

You hold that genuine poetry is written always by inspiration — effortlessly — as if in a state of semi-trance. A correct view, this, as regards fundamentals. But you take my breath away by adding that, because in my letter I used words like "tried", "attempted", "sought" when I spoke of producing poetry of a mystic and spiritual order new in many respects to the English language, you drew the conclusion that I wrote my poems with a manufacturing mentality which thought out with intellectual labour all the phrases, linked up the different parts like a mechanic rivetting joints and constructed artificially an unfamiliar out-of-the-way model!

Inspiration is a fact and it does come from a region that is beyond the muscular brain and the tense sinews of thought: it comes from a hidden fountain of force which is more spontaneous, swift, suggestive, vision-bright and harmonious: its outflow brings a condition of mind cleansed of a too external and intellectual and deliberately constructive activity — hence the semi-trance, as it were, of poetic creation. But poetry does not always rush through the mind in an unbroken and perfect river of light. The fact that sometimes it makes a godlike rush proves its source to be other than the wide-awake labourer brain, yet often the river is a series of spurts, jets, clogged clarities, fragmentary freshnesses — half-lines, scattered phrases, words that glow like separate drops unable to meet and move forward. The interrupted nature of inspiration is the lament of all poets. What they do when inspiration fails is at times to stop writing and let the mind rest, at other times to strain with the mind vaguely towards the missing music. This straining is not intellectual: it is an instinctive, intuitive groping, the response of some living iron in us to a mysterious magnet across unknown inner space. The poet feels hazily the direction in which he

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must go, he is drawn towards a point whose presence he has an inkling of, without any vision of its exact word-focus of meaning and suggestion. This intense yielding of the consciousness to the unknown fountain of inspiration must be distinguished from the brain's manufacturing labour. The poet lends all his powers of concentration to the yielding movement, he leaps into the unconceived with his thought, his imagination, his emotional being, his senses, and brings forth tentative words and lines, attempt on glimmering attempt to catch the final felicity of poetic speech. That is why there are so many versions before the right one is found, corrections and changes and recastings that frequently precede the full satisfying phrase.

No doubt, it is difficult not to use the manufacturing part of the mind in this groping for inspiration: and that is the reason why several versions are altogether defective, while in others a mixture takes place of the inspired and the manufactured — and, only after repeated trial, attempt and seeking, the winged beauty is captured without the least stain on it of the pedestrianism of prose. So the fact of deliberate concentration reinforcing the vague unease of the "soul-search" does not prove the resultant poetry to be less poetic. Nor is the process of correction an intellectual labour: correction must be done, as every poet knows — chiselling and polishing are often necessary for even the most inspired singers, and this implies effort. The poet consciously and deliberately sits down to alter what his instinct tells him is insufficiently "quintessenced". He sets about transforming the imperfect parts, alembicating the impure stuff; only, it must be understood that he does not chop and change with just a logical acumen: he brings to bear upon his work a creative sense, and all that he does is to try again to contact the source of his inspiration. He withdraws into himself, collects his mind, becomes unaware of ordinary thought-movements, enters to that extent into a semi-trance — you can't deny that his is an effort no matter if it be an effort to catch what is effortless or spontaneous or inspired!

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I may here dwell a little on a point which is never properly seized by those who do not write poetry. The point is Spontaneity. The ordinary notion is that spontaneity is the first flow of words when one starts writing or the flood that overwhelms one all of a sudden. It is frequently these things but it is not confined to them. The spontaneous word is that which comes from a certain source — the deep fountain of inspiration beyond the logical and ingenious brain: no more, no less. There is not the slightest implication that the initial flow of words is the most inspired: it may be so or it may not — everything depends on whether you are a clear medium or a partly clogged one. If you are not quite clear in the passage running between the creative source and the receptive self, the lines that come to you all of a sudden or at the first turning towards poetic composition are likely to be a mixed beauty and even a facile imitation of the beautiful. Consequently, you have to take a good deal of corrective pains or resort to a total rejection. It is of no moment how much you re-write; all that is important is whether at the first blush or at the "umpteenth" trial you catch unsullied the shining spontaneity of the secret realms where inspiration has its throne. Shakespeare never "blotted" a word; Keats "blotted" a thousand, and yet Keats is looked upon as the most Shakespearean of modern poets in "natural magic". Even Shelley, to all appearance the most spontaneous of singers, was scrupulous in his revisions. What still kept him spontaneous was that each time it was not intellectual hacking and hewing, but a re-vision, a re-opening of the inner sight on the hidden realms in order to behold as accurately as possible the lines and tones, the shapes and designs of those dreamworlds weaving their simple or complex dances.

If you have followed me so far with a nodding head — I mean nodding in agreement and not in dozing boredom — I should like to take you a little further into the business of "trial" and "attempt" and "seeking". Just as there may be various versions, some tinsel, others half-lit, before the aureoled authenticity is found, so also there are various

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kinds of the poetically authentic — not merely more inspired or less inspired but different types of perfect inspiration. Byron's famous stanzas beginning

She walks in beauty like the night

are flawless in their own manner, while Humbert Wolfe brings another mode of sight, speech and rhythm equally flawless:

Thus it began. On a cool and whispering eve

 When there was quiet in my heart she came,

and there was an end of quiet. I believe

that a star trembled when she breathed my name.

One may stress the difference in terms of attitude or terms of style, but I think a subtler classification is possible in terms of plane of consciousness. Each plane, like each attitude or style, is capable of an equal poetic excellence: still, the cast of vision, mould of utterance and movement of music are dissimilar. On one plane you may have a lot of attitudes — secular or sacred, sensual or spiritual; Swinburne's frenzy of the flesh in Anactoria and his part-Greek part-Norse part-Indian pantheism in Hertha function on an identical plane as regards essential qualities of sight, speech and rhythm. On one plane you may have also a host of styles: a colourful vitality whose impact is on what Sri Aurobindo calls the nerves of mental sensation prevails among the Elizabethans, ranging through styles that can be distinguished one from another — Marlowe's explosive energy, Chapman's violent impetuousness, Shakespeare's passionate sweep, Webster's quivering outbreak. But beside Milton, however, they all seem kin and offer a contrast to the no less powerful yet more purely reflective or ideative voice heard in Paradise Lost. A contrast by plane can be drawn even between the several portions of one and the same writer's work: occasionally the lines of the very same passage belong to different planes.

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Thus when Wordsworth says:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky and in the mind of man —

he begins with a fine poetic statement of a mystical perception on the mental level, then towards the close of the third line shifts to a level intermediate between this and some other that has a thrill of more than the mind acting the mystic — an intermediate zone which ends with the word "interfused" and leads completely to the ultra-mental in the verse:

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

Here the change is not merely in the coming forward of the visual faculty: such a faculty is clearly at work also in the two lines that follow — without altering their mental-mystic imagination to the sheer spiritual-mystic vision that is aglow and athrob in that single verse with a magnificent straining of sight towards secrecy and with an in-tone and overtone and undertone of intimate yet immeasurable suggestion of some deific grandeur.

Now, a mystic poet who is active on several planes may feel that one of them provides the most precious and profound embodiment to his divinations. Therefore, while not always discouraging the other planes, he may prefer to write more abundantly from that which affords him the greatest sense of fulfilment. To do this, he will have to turn his mind in a particular direction, concentrate on a special type of utterance, even reject other types just as excellent in poetic quality and aspire always to pluck his words from a certain depth or height of consciousness and give all his

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thought, emotion, sense-experience the value and figure and vibrancy that come from that selected centre behind the commonly conscious being, whence flows what he deems his most spiritual expression. So, guided by his pointing instinct, helped by his discriminating intelligence, carried by his exploring intuition, he dedicates himself more and more by a conscious aesthetic yoga, so to speak, to special mystic sources in the Parnassus of inspiration. By intensely seeking to lift all his powers to the revelatory rhythm of such sources as let out lines like that Wordsworthian rarity, he may create, en masse, types of word-vision and word-vibration found hitherto in stray lines and passages both in himself and in the poets who have gone before. There is effort here, and attempt, and choice between alternatives, but nothing that goes against the basic nature of the Muse, the spontaneous creativity of art. Because the poetry he writes is of an unusual order and derives from a psychological fountain difficult to tap with the normal human way of being, however poetic that normal way, he has to sift and select, revise and remould, fix himself in one sole ever-widening variety-disclosing direction. Yet, inasmuch as his goal is the mystic Divine, the Superconscious beyond man, all his effort and attempt are towards sinking himself much more into a state of semi-trance than is needed when composing the ordinary types of first-rate poetry. Hence, more than any other kind of poet, he fulfils the ideal posited by you.

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