Inspiration and Effort

Two Letters on Poetry

1

"Poetry is life at a remove of form and meaning."

This dictum of R. P. Blackmuir's strikes me as crystallising a very central truth. Let me interpret it to you as best I can.

It is a mistake to cut poetry off from life, but it is also a mistake to equate it with life. In poetry we do get life, but not in its crude immediacy. We get it at a remove — with a certain refining change of it.

Life, as it is, has a looseness, a roughness, a disorder-liness: it lacks a perfect organisation of energy, a rounding off and a finishing touch, a harmonious weaving together of many strands into one whole. All that life lacks here is attained in poetry as Form.

Similarly, we see in life a welter of motives, a series of cross-purposes, a shifting scenery of intention and action that falls short of satisfying coherence. But in poetry we have a vision that is not only sight but also insight: our thinking, willing, feeling, sensing are all seen lit up with an importance beyond the passing moment; they carry, together with their individual quivers, a rhythm of universal experience and, even beyond this experience, a thrill of some eternal Ideality trying to manifest in the flux of time. Each experience reveals its true direction, its substance of creative idea and becomes a worth-while end achieved. All that life lacks of Meaning is attained in poetry.

Poetry arises from life but does not repeat it. There is a transcendence of it and yet no withdrawal or rejection. Poetry returns upon life, seizes its adventure of exciting imperfections and half-lights and infuses into that adventure the sense of a soul seeking to fulfil a high and happy purpose in a body of faultless beauty and power.

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2

I have always wondered who could be reading my "Talks on Poetry". There cannot be many to take interest in the music of the spheres that poetry really is. The cry of things that are close and claspable is always so much more appealing. Who wants to be haunted by unattainable planets?... But are we not actually living in the Space-age when planets are fast becoming attainable? Physically at least, the heart of the poetry-lover is now not cut off from its goal. But the spheres that have called it are, of course, symbolic, and when the poetry-lover rockets to Venus or Jupiter, he will not outgrow

The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow.

That "something afar" is in the depths of the Divine, and poetry in its essence is the rhythm of the movement of the Gods from one state of rapturous repose to another. Living as we are, we cannot imitate this movement, we cannot share in its splendour — and for this reason most men take poetry to be offering us nothing that can satisfy the acute needs of life. But that attitude is an error committed by those who have failed to vision feelingly and comprehend visionarily and feel comprehendingly the touch of the rhythm I have spoken of. Being a movement between two rapturous reposes it is inevitably what Sri Aurobindo terms

Force one with unimaginable rest.

In the aching dream of divine distances which poetry gives to its lover, there is yet a "rest" unimaginable to the common man. The substance of poetry is an infinite seeking: the form of poetry is an eternal attainment.

You have found this secret: you are one of the earth's lucky ones.

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