Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

Introductory Note

This collection of surveys, studies, discussions, annotations, queries and controversies is meant to serve, in general, as a companion volume to the author's earlier book of 1947, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. What was there developed is, as a rule, practically passed over here, except when a too scant treatment would leave a serious gap in the exposition. Similarly, that book itself avoided repeating the contents of two pieces written before it and now included in this. But either work, in its particular way, has a certain completeness of its own.

The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo worked out a definite scheme in three parts. The present collection is a looser series, yet a significant sequence in a sometimes strict and sometimes broad sense has been attempted in the arrangement. Further, as the essays were written at different times to meet various needs, there is a small amount of overlapping amongst them. But for the most part they bring forward new aspects and complement one another as both analytical and evaluative commentaries. Even when a few quotations repeat and a topic is touched again, fresh light is sought to be thrown in a setting which is itself new.

The title of the book has the interest of deriving indirectly from Sri Aurobindo himself. It is the same as that of the opening piece which was originally called "Sri Aurobindo as a Poet". Sri Aurobindo found the name rather flat and suggested the proper caption.

The poetry of Sri Aurobindo is too vast and rich for a mere couple of fair-sized volumes to do full justice to it. But the author has tried his best to give a succession of interpretative insights, hoping to catch the "many-splendoured" poet in his essentiality even if failing to cope in a satisfying manner with his totality.

This procedure must involve some sins of omission Yet, when properly understood, they may become pardonable. To range exhaustively over each genre practised by Sri Aurobindo has not been the avowed pursuit. Nor has it been the explicit aim in any of the dissertations to follow a story or to expound its message. Even those long poems which have been dealt with at a length seeming more or less commensurate have hardly been searched in particular for the sake of the plot or the "philosophy": both have emerged into view on several occasions but mostly in the course of appreciating the fine points of the literary expression. The imaginative cast, the emotional mould, the verbal shape, the rhythmic pattern and, behind everything, what may be designated the intuitive turn creating and animating by its inner form and function all the outer forms and functions: these have been the principal object of sympathetic scrutiny and critical enjoyment. The concentration has been on the poetic art of Sri Aurobindo. And this art can be appraised in its fundamentals by no more than judicious dips into various sections of a number of works or even into just one work typical of many. Lack of close study of the tale's unfoldment and the theme's presentation leaves unaffected the quality of the appraisal. So too does want of sampling every member of a literary class. In the event, the sins of omission appear rather natural acts, though what is omitted is never shunned as intrinsically negligible.

However, Sri Aurobindo is not only the poetic artist: in fact, he is chiefly something else and something more. Again, the art of poetry at its subtlest and greatest is itself an instrument of the art of life and even channels a way for a force and a value beyond both life and poetry: the force is felt as a rapturous inspiration, the value cognised as a luminous revelation. So a perceptive plumbing of the artistry of self-expression in a poet like Sri Aurobindo is especially bound to overpass the domain of