SOME PROBLEMS OF POETRY
(THREE LETTERS)
To D
Artistic intensity I have always stressed. It provides the key to a lot of problems connected with poetry. The problem of sincerity which you mention is one of them.
A poem is admittedly an art-medium and if an art-medium is chosen for what one has to say, artistic intensity is of paramount value. Once you grant this, it becomes pointless to speak, as you have done, of "simply an artistic value" in a spiritual poem. Perhaps you mean by "artistic value" decorativeness laid on from without or mere technical skill. But these things are not art. The former is in fact a fault which art must avoid. Technical skill is indeed necessary, yet it is not all that art comprises. A particular kind of force from within, a certain type of intensity, has to become technical skill if we are to have artistic value. Thus understanding artistic value we may state that in a spiritual poem, as in any other kind of poem, sincerity is worthless without it. If spiritual sincerity in a poem is to depend for its worth on anything else, what purpose can be served by selecting a form of art for its expression? Why not just blurt out what you feel? Why cast it into image and symbol, why attend to qualities of rhythm, why resort to metre and rhyme?
I am not asking you to be an art-for-art's-saker in the sense that so long as you create art it does not matter whether the art is spiritual or no. You are quite right, as a sadhak, to believe that you must produce spiritual stuff or nothing. But don't forget you are producing it in an art-medium. If you do, the quality of your work will suffer. I don't think you are oblivious of the paramount importance of artistic intensity. Otherwise, why should you pick and choose, as you do, from among your poems? All you write is
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spiritually sincere: yet you reject some poems and keep others. Your sifting is done because, no matter how sincere you may spiritually be, your sincerity will not be the sort necessary in poetry if you do not achieve artistic intensity.
Here you are likely to raise the point: "Is it not possible for a poem to come artistically intense, to be inspired in form, without being sincere?" Well, how is a reader of poetry to judge what poem is sincere and what insincere? He is not supposed to know how a poet has lived: he has only the poem to go by. You surely do not expect all your readers to be aware that you are a resident of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and are faithfully following in your Guru's footsteps? Lacking that awareness, will they be doomed for ever to doubt your sincerity? I put it to you that they will never fail to feel a poem to be sincere if there is artistic intensity in it, the inspiration of form. In the absence of this intensity they may feel that you are sincere as a man, but they will never feel that you are sincere as a poet. Conversely, they will feel that where a poet has artistic intensity he is ipso facto sincere.
Is this startling? It wouldn't be if certain misconceptions were removed. The first truth to bear in mind is that a poet is not bound to have an actual experience of whatever he says. When, for instance, you write:
O deep starry secrecy
Twinkling in my heart! —
are you stating a fact of your experience as a man? You may be, but you could just as well have written the lines without doing so. Certainly, you did have some emotion of what you said; but I doubt whether your psychic being actually experienced a mysterious vastitude, realised a divine cosmicity full of a myriad glimmerings and thrillings of intuition. What did happen, most probably, is that such an Immense existing within the hitherto unexplored profundities of your inner and higher self found you sympathetic to its presence, stirred your imagination and used you as a verbal medium. Of
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course, if one were possessed of the full experience one would be more frequently a verbal medium of its rare richness, but outbursts of regions of consciousness unrealised by the poet do occur pretty often in poetry.
The second truth to remember is that a man can have many sides to his nature and, while one side may have a turning towards God, another may have a penchant for the Devil: the work he does through the former is not insincere just because the latter has play in him too. Unless he rejects the devilish side, he will not create very often through the Godward side and his creative possibilities there will remain unfulfilled on the whole. Yet, what does come forth in poetry through the opening he somewhere has to the Divine can be as sincere as the work of a consistent spiritual seeker, provided the artistic expression is perfect.
The third truth to keep in view is that a poet has the power of entering into some sort of communion with anything and everything — even those things which are far removed from his trend of life and run counter to his general disposition or character. A dramatist may write a play to illustrate his own vision of the truth of the universe, but one of his dramatis personae can be somebody who holds a diametrically opposite vision and this vision can be expressed also with poetic perfection in the course of the play. You don't suppose Shakespeare was a murderer or even in sympathy with murdering: still, the speech he puts into the mouth of Lady Macbeth invoking the powers of evil to aid her in killing Duncan is one of the peaks of the Shakespearean Parnassus. And it has not one false note, it is absolutely sincere, a potential murderess seems actually speaking.
I have written at some length merely to help you look at poetry in the right way. My remarks are not meant to dissuade you one whit from cutting yourself off, for the sake of your personal sadhana, from certain poets and feeding more and more on certain others. But what I have written can assist you to distinguish grades of artistic excellence in the
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poets you like and not accept everything as equally good. Also, I hope some parts of this letter will help you in intensifying your own inspiration and guiding yourself along the correct path in your self-criticism.
I cannot say that the path indicated by your friend in his letter is really desirable. If we went by the criterion of the same recognisable Force which is behind all your poems, there would be no need to weed out anything: all your poems bear the mark of an Aurobindonian sadhak and, judged in that light, they must without exception be preserved and published. But to lump everything together would be to serve ill even the Force your friend speaks of: that Force is best served in poetry by what is poetically intensest.
To R
We must not underrate in the poetic phenomenon the importance of form. When you respond to poetry, words and rhythms seem to remain for you a little in the background. I do not deny that to write with striking phrases and euphony and effective metre without any inner word-life and rhythm-movement getting expressed is to construct verse rather than to create poetry. But, conceived as inwardly animated and determined, form cannot occupy "a secondary place" and for the obvious reason that without it there can be no poetry at all. The bhava, the living sense, which you speak of as being the primary value to care for, cannot function poetically in its absence. To miss form in the connotation I have given it is to miss poetry. The bhava has to be there, or else we shall have gibberish; but side by side with it we must have form to produce poetry or any artistic work. If you are only after bhava, you are going to art not for its artistic qualities but only for its idea, its sight, its emotion, and if you do not attend to those qualities you will get these things in just a general way and not in their individual character and force. The general idea, sight and emotion in Browning's
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God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world
is almost the same as in Dilip Kumar Roy's
For 'tis His will that overarches all,
His sentinel love broods o'er the universe.
And yet what a gulf of difference between the individual character and force of the one and that of the other! The vision is merely skimmed in Browning: it is caught with its depths wide open in Dilip Kumar Roy. Both thought and feeling in Roy are luminously and rapturously mystical: they have in Browning no turn or tremor beyond a lightly lyricised religious outlook's. The profound glow and rapture in Roy can get realised by us only if we respond in full to the form of his expression, if we let his words and rhythms play upon us. Change the words, alter the rhythms and though the general bhava may stay the same, the beauty has vanished and with the beauty all individual character and force.
Maybe you will argue that once you comprehend the idea and grasp the image and stir to the emotion, it is not necessary to let the values of words and of their order and of sounds and stresses hold the consciousness: the feel of the language, of its movement and of its music may seem to you secondary if not negligible. But in that case any words so arranged as not to be without concrete import and correct grammar would do just as well for conveying Roy's substance, and prose would be as effective as poetry. Surely you cannot imply this? And if you do not, then form is of extreme use. And in form the elements which you regard as very minor — long and short syllables, assonances and consonances, basic beats and modulations — count a lot. You may not pause to notice them and the poet may not have paused every time to manipulate them, but they are there: the inspiration working through the poet has intuitively attended to them and we must attend too, though not with a
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schoolmaster's dry-as-dust mind. We need not start analysing them, but we do need to give them their proper realisation: if we mispronounce and misaccent, we shall mar the music and prevent the subtle suggestions borne on the music from filling out those of the words taken as intellectual pointers. If you go to art and do not respect form as much as what you call bhava, you fail to draw from art the specific values and powers it has to offer.
By the way, your observation that no great poet thinks of stresses and feet and long and short syllables while composing his poem is erroneous. Inspiration coming in a perfect rush leaves no need for the poet to play consciously the artist; but inspiration coming slowly and after considerable effort on the poet's part calls for a fair amount of conscious art-activity. Many poets correct even while they create instead of leaving correction to be done afterwards. And you are mistaken in your idea that, if they created without any correction then or afterwards, the poem would always be more touched with natural freshness and radiance. You believe Walt Whitman never revised or modified his first draft and thereby achieved a rare sincerity and simplicity which to what you term "sophisticated ears" sounds somewhat crude. That is not so. Whitman worked over his first draft as assiduously as any other poet: Of course, on several occasions he had no need to work over it, but he never thought such working to be a loss of sincerity and simplicity. His free verse is not another name for poetry just flowing through — without the "sophistications" of chiselling and polishing as well as of rhyme and metre. There is plenty of deliberate art and cunning rhythm-scheme and deft disposition of subtle harmonic units in his free verse.
The first draft of anything has nothing to recommend it in being first: it may be inspired or no, it may be sincere and simple or it may be "sophisticated": everything hangs on whether genuine inspiration has found a channel or a false facility has got an outlet. A corrected version is not bound to be "sophisticated", it may be the very soul of simplicity and
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sincerity. Keats originally began his Endymion with the line:
A thing of beauty is a constant joy.
Only later, when a friend found it lacking something, he rewrote:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
The first draft was tame, the second electric. Those famous lines of his —
...magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn —
had in the first draft "windows" for "casements" and "keel-less" for "perilous". The whole spirit of the thing was lost: the magic atmosphere and the fairy feeling entered only when Keats started being what you term "sophisticated".
I must here mention that by your coupling of sincerity with simplicity and opposing them to sophistication you appear to suggest that to be sincere and not sophisticated one must be simple. I don't see sincerity in terms of simplicity alone. To be complex is not necessarily to be sophisticated. Sophistication is truly the product of an artificial braininess or a deliberate high-brow ingenuity. The "metaphysicals" of the seventeenth century are often sophisticated in the former sense: the "modernists" of the twentieth in the latter. But there are effects in both that are brainy or ingenious in an inspired way: some of Donne's conceits, for instance, are not superimposed on the idea and emotion but organic to them and Eliot has at times an intricate cross-light imagery that is really penetrating. Here they are apparently sophisticated while being truly sincere. Where, however, there is in a poet complexity without any braininess or ingenuity the charge of sophistication has not even an apparent bearing. Poetry may be simple or it may be complex — according to the personality of the poet and the theme in hand.
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Complexity can result from a packing together of many glimpses or a drawing out of one glimpse into many details; it can result also from a colourful and opulent style instead of an austere one or a multi-winged structure of sentence and syntax rather than one that is straight-lined and direct-designed. No jot of sincerity is sacrificed by thus being complex: we may with equal force declare that Nature is natural only when she sends forth a straight stream and not a winding river, raises a mountain with easy contours and a single peak and not a steep-faced mass of several summits, unfolds a majestic oak or a grand baobab spreading uniformly upward and not a sublime banyan hanging from its height shoot on strange shoot downward to the earth. So long as some elemental energy, some urge from within, drives a poet, he rings sincere: inspiration perfectly expressing itself is the sign of sincerity and there is no reason why inspiration should be simple and not complex.
There is also the fact that occasionally the vision transcribed from an abnormal plane of consciousness seems complex to our normal mind, whereas in reality it may be quite simple for a perception in tune with that plane's spontaneities, as in a similar fashion what is clear to the mystical eye is blurred and hazy to the gaze unaccustomed to hidden yogic lights. We need not doubt the sincerity of poems expressive of such seeing. Again, a poet may be simple in one respect and complex in another. Homer is said to be the best example of simplicity. His sentences have on the whole a simpler construction than Milton's or Keats's. Still, Homer has an extraordinary variety of inflexions and a recurrent play of polysyllables beside which the cast of Miltonic or Keatsian words is simple. He is simpler in his basic ideas than either of these English singers and yet if we mark the manner in which he lengthens out and details off his similes we must deem him more complex than they. Sincerity can go hand in hand with a lot of different things.
I am sure you did not intend to question this, but as your statement was leaning slightly to one side I have made bold
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to point out the impression it creates. My ideal is to be as wide-notioned and many-viewed as can be consistent with an unsleeping watch to distinguish the genuine gleam from the spurious glitter. I insist unrelentingly on authentic inspiration in poetry — the ring and radiance of the gold of beauty. Once sure of that gold, I let no bias rule me about the plain or the luxuriant, the forthright or the subtle, the clear-cut or the intricate.
To K
All poetry must be patiently and intimately lived with if we are to extract from it its full delight: spiritual or mystical poetry still more, and most the type of inspiration a few Aurobindonian poets aim at. "Most" — not simply because the meaning is likely to be difficult to grasp at first or because the life-stuff of spiritual or mystical inspiration is a reality which cannot be seized except by a sort of aesthetic Yoga. There is yet one more reason: the poetic aim now is the Divine in the original and not in a translation! This rather puzzling statement is best made clear by answering the query: what kind of poetry is the most spiritual or mystical?
To be most spiritual, poetry must draw much more than its thought-substance from a lofty source. The thought-substance of all sterling religious literature has its origin in the altitudes of the Spirit, but one usually deals in abstractions or in some emotional reconstruction of spiritual idea. The thought, of course, has to grasp the spiritual truth — but an effort must also be made to let that truth speak itself instead of our finding speech for it on the planes of consciousness on which we habitually live. The speech of these planes will not render the poetry deficient as poetry nor prove the poet's mysticism to be sham. Yet, what may be genuine as mysticism and wonderful as poetry is not necessarily supreme as the Spirit's own intrinsic expression, not necessarily vibrant with the actual life-throb of the Spirit's own heaven and home where it stands everywhere revealed
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in every aspect. The Spirit clothing itself superbly in the mind's garments — there you have the wonder and wealth of the main bulk of mystical poetry in English. A few other movements are mixed with this, but this is the predominant one, and with whoever wishes to write first-rate poetic literature of mysticism copiously, it cannot as a rule help being predominant, since mind-stuff is for us the easiest to draw upon. But what a few of the Aurobindonians aspire to do is to write things in which the mind's garments are set aside and the Spirit's body grows visible and vibrant.
Nor is that body most desired by them as it appears on certain inner planes. An exquisite or dynamic Occultism catches the Spirit naked; so too does a radiantly piercing and sweet Psychism — but neither the habitat of God's magician nor that of God's saint holds the divine body in its direct amplitude and puissance. These poets do not rest content with the "deep within": they strive to press on to the "high above", the planes from which has descended the cosmic formula, inward or outward. And there it is the rhythm, more even than the cast of vision and the word-mould, that is the secret of the shining out of the pure Spirit. The rhythm of the "high above" is the most difficult capture. Not in all its forms, though; for there are gradations and only at the very top the utter rhythm of God's self is immediate and absolute. Then we have the mantra, the word plucked from the heart of the ultimate Unknown. Then "translation" is left leagues behind: we have not only a direct poetic intimacy with God in the "original" but a sheer poetic identity with Him: we not only are beyond the mind's intervening medium, we have passed from the lesser intensities of God's presence to His keenest and profoundest and vastest Self and Supernature. The mantra arrives in utter authenticity on the pinions of a rhythm that seems to make each line a brief aureoled manifestation, so to speak, of its passage from infinite to infinite. A consciousness, sovereign and boundless, is at play in it, and the play is most vividly communicated through an immense unfathomable vibration, as in Arjava's lines:
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This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone —
or in Dilip Kumar Roy's:
Dark waifs aspire to Thy white haven of sleep,
With voice of clay sing to the immortal stars —
or in the second of Nirodbaran's couplets:
All joy of life is now a shining part
Of the ecstasy of the Eternal Heart
Where time is a voyage with wide unfurled wings,
The flame-sails of unknown awakenings.
Sometimes the word-mould and the cast of vision are nearly of the top and still are prevented from being entirely so by a subtle lack in the sound-values. This calls for an extremely sensitive perception on the poet's as well as the reader's part to be recognised. How crucially determining a factor rhythm is can be observed if we take such a line as:
A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush.
The quality and movement here emanate from the broad clear daylight of the Spirit prevailing in the Sahasrara Chakra, "the thousand petalled lotus" of consciousness immediately above the head. But we at once leap through two still higher stages and reach the threshold of the amplest intensity by merely shifting a pair of words from the middle of the line to its end:
A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all.
The rhythmic movement goes somehow sweeping into the Unknown, just drawing the sense out to a massive measure-
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less suggestion. Such a minor alteration — a change in the place of two words, that does not perceptibly modify the meaning — and so great a difference in the spiritual quality of the line! The purely poetic power was not less before; what is added now, however light it may be, is the mantric touch.
The way the mantric touch gets in leads me to consider another question: Does intense spiritual inspiration sustained from poem to poem prove an intense spiritual life throbbing in the poet day to day?
Indeed, to get the mantric touch often, one must be initiated into Yoga. Even to write, with some degree of command, in the language of the regions above the human mind yet below the level of the mantra, one must spend years in contact with the divine Truth. In the past, except for very short accidental spells, poets outside the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita never caught inspiration from these realms of light. To succeed in making these realms one's habitual fount would be to create a new poetic literature, to usher a novel era in inspired utterance. It is part of the mission of Sri Aurobindo to give poetry this large and luminous innovation. In his later work he has performed feats of spiritual creativity that are a breath-bereaving grandeur. A moiety of his opulence those who have stayed close to him have been able to receive. They can never thank their stars enough for the privilege to reside in his Ashram and learn by his gift of inspiration and critical insight the art of opening doors to the in-world and the over-world.
Yes, they have learnt to open mystical doors, but you must not conclude that they can keep the portals open all the while or pass through them at will into the innermost shrine and the loftiest holy of holies. They may take a few steps forward now and again; what they most often do is to stand at the divine doors and practise a concentrated looking at the mysteries within, an intent hearing of the footfalls of the Gods. If they had the courage and consistency to walk right in and remain there among superhuman presences, they
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would bring to birth a more shining song, a poetry more frequently alive with the pulse of the Eternal. But, even as it is, a contact deep down inside them with the Divine persists and, though it may not kindle up a transformation of their whole self, it is at times a laying of golden fingers on the heart-strings of the poet in them.
To write with spiritual intensity is not always to be a great Yogi. If the lines that are mantric were pointers to the poet's realisation, he would out-halo Ramakrishna and dwarf Vivekananda's sagehood. Do you know that these lines derive from the dizziest pinnacles of the over-world? They flow, if not from the top of Shiva's shadowless head, then at least from under his radiant feet — and those immortal feet are all the summit of samadhi and the ne plus ultra of Nirvana! Surely, even though some of the poetic triumphs issue from there, the poets do not dwell in their kingdom. Nor can anyone claim to have jumped from the thousand-petalled lotus to the ineffable flower wherein the ultimate deity stands — by just transferring a pair of words to the end of a line from its middle! The jump is an act of art, not of life.
No doubt, there is an experience of vague spiritual exhilaration in every act of art that aspires to the Divine: the force of the Eternal is intuited and a grace of soul added to the consciousness; yet the phenomenon is not tantamount to realisation. The poetry has aided the Yoga but it does not measure it accurately, for it is more a shadow of things to come than a shape of what the poet is. The Spirit has sent down powerful or delicate messages to his artist-being and he has transmitted them, himself deeply thrilling in the process and moving readers like you. He has transmitted them with a new and unusual fidelity because he has been taught by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to watch and wait concentratedly for the Everlasting Voices. Some day he will rise from his lowlands to the kingly peaks with his whole self and live in the consciousness of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Then bis poetry will not shame its imperfect composer but project in art the artist's very life and be more
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than a short and occasional and interrupted rapture; it will be all the time a moulded magnificence — a conflagration under divine control, a trained tornado out of the vast, a deluge of ecstasy directed by the Heavenly Hand.
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