Inspiration and Effort

MOODS AND MODES OF POETRY

(TWO LETTERS)

1

You are right in saying that the true objective of poetry is not merely expression but also communication. A poet should not care solely to please himself or one or two of his own mind; he should try to establish rapport with the large number of cultured men who are receptive to poetry. Yet, to make easy communication his entire ideal would be unfaithfulness to his own inspiration, particularly if he happens to be a mystic. "Clarity winged with beauty" is indeed a fine thing finely stated and some of the world's greatest verse conforms to this type — but clarity is a relative term and what is clear to one may be obscure to another and what may be clear on one plane of consciousness may be on another pretty obscure, at least at the start.

If we take the mass of men as our criterion we confine ourselves to the mental plane which is at present our general status. There are many other planes deeper and higher than the little bit of individualised mind which homo sapiens enjoys, and they have their own concrete and harmonious and vivid contents — like Sri Aurobindo's

Sun-realms of supernal seeing,

Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss.

Why should poetry convert everything into a mental clarity? I do admit that poetry errs when it is undisciplined and has no moulding of significant form. Does it err, however, when it transmits a state of consciousness which is not familiar to most people, even most people of culture, and into which they cannot easily enter? — an Aurobindonian state, for instance:

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He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills

 Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,

Unrolls the form and sign of being,

Seated above in the omniscient Silence,

or

My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight.

Poetry has its obligations to men but it has also its obligations to the Gods: it is not altogether a man-made thing and so other planes than that on which man is normally at home have their rights of expression — and expression in their own modes and not just in the modes of the human intelligence. If we say Nay to these modes on the ground that they would not be found vivid and vibrant by us at the first blush, we set up a rather rigid and unnatural standard, besides shutting out influences that would evolve our consciousness by mingling with it the patterns and tempos of the ultra-mental in an undiluted form. Art is not only recreation: it is revelation too, and it need not be understood or appreciated easily. Even in recreation there is some strain: one does not hit a boundary or score a goal without the least fatigue! You have gone to the extent of conceding that poetry succeeds if its meaning can be even "dimly divined by anyone and everyone whose mind, imagination and spirit are in a sufficient measure capable of appreciating beauty and art." But don't you think the dim divination is somewhat arbitrarily defined as happening almost at once and without any strain? Of course if a poem remains a total Sphinx for ever and yields no significant suggestion to a cultured man in spite of his brooding on it and absorbing it and living with it, there is for all practical purposes failure. What I want to claim is that a poem should not be considered to have missed its objective if it does not yield immediately its purport. One must try to open oneself to it, let its figures and rhythms sink into one and stir layers of consciousness subliminal and

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supraliminal. I do not wish to defend the pretentious gibberish that is often written by modern poets and labelled Surrealism. Perhaps even those who style themselves Symbolists are also at times guilty of a mere musical mystification. I am pleading only for those who convey authentic figures and rhythms of the subliminal and the supraliminal — as Nishikanto does with

O Sleeping Lion in the caverned darkness

Of the rock-heart of every sentient thing!

Give us thy glance, if only for a moment,

Of a child up-gazing in its slumbering —

or Dilip Kumar Roy with

O deep starry secrecy

Twinkling in my heart

or Sri Aurobindo himself with

The dragon tail aglow of the faint night

and

Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering

winged through the universe!

I dare say I may thus give the benefit of the doubt to many an ingenious purveyor of abracadabra — but the insistence of the French savant you quote on "No Fatigue" and yours on simplicity and clarity of the mental kind run the risk of condemning what is beyond the mind's threshold in a genuinely inspired and beautiful way together with what is confused and chaotic, nebulous and nonsensical.

To be involved in construction and precious in language are faults if one is these things for their own sake. However,

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if a certain state of being cannot be fully brought out in a simple and straightforward manner or with easy and ordinarily poetic words, hasn't one to be true to one's complex vision and to the atmosphere of a rich rarity that envelops that vision? You will perhaps declare that there is nothing that cannot be said clearly and simply. Well, some people declare that there is nothing that cannot be said sufficiently in prose. Poetry, in my view, comes in to say what prose cannot; and in poetry, complexity and out-of-the-way speech come in to do what simplicity and so-called natural speech cannot. When the vision is not complex and the atmosphere not a rich rarity and still the poet tries to make them out to be such, it is then that he produces spurious word-manufacture and mechanism instead of creation and organism. Not otherwise. And this holds for non-mystical poetry no less than mystical: poetry of the mental plane as well as of planes beyond the mind. I do realise that we must spare no trouble to bring our vision to a focus, we must not luxuriate in the hazy and the slipshod. The point I am trying to make is that there can be a focus in which several shades of light mingle and there can be a multi-faceted distinctness and a crowded accuracy. You mention Greek poetry as being the opposite of the involved and the complex. I must admit Greek poetry to be superb and to be in the main, despite Aeschylean and Pindaresque elements, "clarity winged with beauty". But I wonder what the Greeks would have thought of Shakespeare at his most Elizabethan, at his extreme of mercurial mood, metaphor-gorgedness, word-variety, protean syntax. More or less the same, I suspect, as what Voltaire did. The French have an intellect very much like that of the Greeks, though in other respects they are very different, and most probably Aristotle would have proclaimed like Voltaire that Shakespeare was a drunken barbarian. And would the Greeks have got hold of the Romantic Movement in its Shelleyan, ethereally entangled aspects by the right end? And would they have relished the bold and colourful intricacy that is so

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magnificent in certain portions of Francis Thompson? Would the Celtic twilight of Yeats with its labyrinths of vanishing iridescence have found any place in their subtle yet "sunny" consciousness? Intellectual criss-cross and sophisticated maziness are definitely objectionable in poetry — and I am of the opinion that it is these that Milton excluded when he talked of poetry being simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Milton himself — as compared to a poet like Homer — was far from simple. I don't believe his construction and his mode of thought were even as simple as Sophocles's or Euripides's. His "simple", therefore, I understand as "unforced" or "fresh" or "alive with a natural vigour": it is opposed not to "complex" but to "mechanically constructed" or "dryly devious" or "artificially abstract". To be "simple" in the Miltonic sense one must have authentic vitality, a force as of Nature. Is Nature or authentic vitality always simple in your sense? Is an organism uncomplex? Are the formations of the life-force quite straightforward? The important point appears to be that whatever the complexity there must be a harmonious working, a fine unity of effect — what the Greeks called the quality of being felt as a whole. The means for achieving such an end can be elaborate or ingenuous, multiply-wrought or plain-built, highly coloured or crystal-clear, remote in suggestion or of the earth earthy, precious in language or direct-dictioned: does it matter a hoot what manner of thought and word the poet employs so long as the manner is appropriate and there is the creative elan? Sometimes the impression of the involved and the precious is given us because an unfamiliar plane of consciousness" is manifested; the manner of thought and word may be in itself quite simple on that plane without seeming simple to the plane we commonly bring to poetry. But even when the expression is actually not simple and straightforward on any plane, I am disposed to think it has a right to exist as a legitimate manifestation of the poetic spirit; there is nothing in it intrinsically opposed to the play of genuine inspiration.

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2

Your original position which amounts to saying that mysticism is an affair unusual enough and that its poetry, if not simple and clear, becomes useless to the world at large is quite definite though open to serious dispute. What puzzles me is the qualifications to it you are prepared to make. Besides adding that at least dimly the mystical poet should make himself understood you affirm that even this he should do at not necessarily first sight. Your "at least dimly" and much more the lease of time you are ready to grant a poem for delivering its purport — don't they take away the edge of your formula of "simple and clear"? A poem which gives a dim sense of its drift at the start and especially a poem which gives it only after effort by the reader through a period of time can never be called clear or simple. Intricacy and complexity and preciousness are admitted as soon as you relax the demand for crystalline disclosure and quick communication. It is just this relaxing, on behalf of a certain type of inspiration, that I was asking for in my letter. Where then do our ways part? Do they part solely in that you personally prefer clear and simple poetry while conceding a firm locus standi to the other sort and that I enjoy the two sorts equally in general while personally preferring the latter when it is the result of allowing planes higher and deeper than the mind to speak straight away in their own mode of consciousness? Perhaps the crucial parting lies in one thing alone: the native speech of the ultra-mental planes.

In the light of your relaxing your demand, your reference to the frustration and irritation most readers feel with a great many modern poets acquires a special meaning: their work must be such as to yield nothing at all to the bulk of readers although it may be studied again and again. And since your discouragement of the native speech of the ultra-mental planes is almost in the same breath as your reaction against those modern poets, I take it that according to you the communication by this speech to the bulk of readers is nil

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and hence this speech must be eschewed, no matter how deep and high it may be, until humanity has evolved beyond its present level by means of the poetry which converts mysticism into terms mentally understandable.

But is it true that here general communication is nil? What I declared to be naturally lacking was "mental clarity", the absence of which is not the same as the mind's hold reduced to zero. The speech I am talking of may not be clear to the mind, but it does give some hold to our mental awareness: a dim hold at the outset or a hold dim or otherwise after effort by the reader. It differs from intricate or complex verse of the mental type not by denying the mind any hold but by addressing its appeal to layers of consciousness in us that are hidden at present and by making their response a condition for the development of the hold afforded. In the appreciation and absorption of all poetry, to see and feel and intuit are as important as to understand: in fact, understanding has to be brought about by them instead of vice versa. It is because of this that rhythm with its strangely moving, subtly suggestive potencies and metaphor with its impact on sight, on imaginative association, on "empathic" powers in us have been regarded as so vital since the dawn of literary history. The peculiar mode of poetry would lose its raison d'etre if mental understanding which is the arbiter of prose were deemed the chief recipient of impressions here. Now, what the direct poetry from planes higher and deeper than the mind does, while giving the mind a small initial hold either immediate or after effort, is to push through the more important avenues of seeing and feeling and intuiting towards the ultra-human background in us; stirring that background, it supplies the understanding mind with a species of revelation which on analysis satisfies the demand for significance. Communication, therefore, to the mental understanding is not nil. It is achieved after difficult contact with secret forces accessible to the seeing and feeling and intuiting side of us — secret forces which, in the case of the large run of poetry, are never substantially stimulated but which in a kind of surface-

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projection are always evoked by all genuine poems of the mental plane since it is always on what we vaguely name the soul that poetry presses for essential appreciation and absorption.

"After difficult contact", I have said. Counterbalancing the difficulty of communication, however, is the value of it. For the contact with the ultra-human background is of the utmost use in our progress beyond our present level. Though you admit the need of progressing to the planes deeper and higher than the mind you consider the best method to be mental instruction in the matter of them. I believe that one of the most important methods is to expose, through poetry, humanity as much as possible to them in their own original form instead of "mentalising" them. The responses called forth by such exposure are dynamic in a manner that nothing else can equal. Mental explanation and elucidation and interpretation of the mystical Beyond by poetry can be helpful in preparing humanity for a step inward and upward; yet we cannot dispense with the help of a direct touch of the In-world and the Over-world. The two helps are something like the Guru's precept and his example, his teaching and his personal influence, his putting us in the way of his books and his permitting us to sit at his feet in meditation.

Deeming ultra-mental poetry to be an immense aid to human evolution, I hesitate to stop trying my hand at it side by side with mental. And I feel sure that if you who have so keen and sensitive yet critical an approach to the Muse gave closer thought to the question you would discern all the abyss that gapes between this class of verse and the product of the high-brow coteries from whom you seceded during your literary life in England. I myself am no apologist for the various schools of dadaists, surrealists and futurists nor the intellectual contortionists and abstractionists and those who elaborately manufacture private symbols. I think it is these men you refer to in your interesting account of the change of outlook undergone by you — writers who tap the chaotic side of the subconscious in one mis-shape or another and

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who employ the ingenious outer brain with this or that faddist penchant. Not only is no small initial purchase permitted by them to the mind in the midst of their obscurity but even the obscurity they go in for is cut off from the roots of inspired living, is sterile, is haphazardly intricate or deliberately recondite. The vital breath is missing in such obscurity — there is not the afflatus and the enthousiasmos without which poetry can never make us see and feel and intuit. Authentic mysticism is very far indeed from the cult of the modern unintelligibles. It is a mode of intense living, charged with the concreteness and directness of warm throbbing intimate experience. Even the peace-aspect of it is not arid and artificial and unfructuous but fresh, fragrant, all-enfolding and most creative by stilling the diverse petty confusions that hinder and impair the founts of spontaneity. The obscurity of authentic mysticism has an atmosphere of wide reality — it is not haughty or exclusive or self-satisfied — it does not stand apart from vital springs. Neither the chaotic side of the subconscious nor the ingenious outer brain can produce art. Authentic mysticism comes with a fire in the emotions and a light in the imagination and a golden glow in the intuitive self, it strikes harmonious chords in our being and finds a most natural outlet in artistic activity. It is entirely different from the "modernism" from which you broke away. The latter is incapable of being truly inspired and consequently has no evolutionary value. Wanting in that value, it has no justification for being obscure — nor, I should add, the power to overcome the neglect into which it may fall, for only when an obscure work is inspired the possible neglect of it by people will pass because of its innate drive towards their seeing, feeling, intuiting faculties. Sooner or later it is bound to become a force in the general life of the world and deliver the illumination which is hidden in its apparent obscurity.

I do not aver that all mystical art should be ultra-mental or that, when the ultra-mental confronts us, there will always be difficulty in getting through its "door of dreams". I am

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just putting my finger on the merits of the ultra-mental art; they are undeniable, be the difficulty what it may. One of the most profound merits is in connection with the meaning you give to the term "democracy": the basic brotherhood of man. I agree that the universal acceptance of the spiritual principle of human brotherhood is not assisted by the esoteric doctrines, narcissism and intellectual snobbery characterising the work of the modern exponents of poetry among whom you began your literary career and whose inadequacy and wrong-headedness you soon realised. But to be intellectually democratic does not travel a long way. It is, no doubt, a worthy thing — yet if it occupies the whole domain of literary endeavour it becomes a menace by shutting out still more puissant agents. Together with it, there should be the direct sweep of the ultra-mental planes. For, on these planes alone the brotherhood of man is no sentiment or idea but an actuality of experience, a burning truth of our very being. There the Self of selves is found — and even further than the human formula the spiritual basis extends, underlying all living creatures, unifying the entire cosmos. The inmost throb of the world's oneness is there, a universal unity of conscious existence as natural and indefeasible and immediate as our present sense of distinct individuality. Understanding and sympathy, intellectual democracy and ethical fellow-feeling are fine as far as they go. But they have serious limits: the beast in man and much more the devil in man are too strong to be changed by them. Even mentalised spirituality is not enough; the planes where oneness is an automatic experience must invade us in their own original form. And part of the grand invasion must be through the sort of poetry I am advocating — poetry like that invocation by J. A. Chadwick who was known in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram as Arjava:

Immortal wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,

Shine in the clear space of holy noon

On all the upland hollows of the mind:

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May every shadow-harbouring thought be strewn

With solar vastness and compelled

To feel all fear and all self-limits quelled.

Such poetry, more than any other, creates in us the turn of consciousness which opens into the Upanishad's One who has gone forth and grown many.

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