Talks on Poetry

TALK FIVE

We have now completed, with the help of Sri Aurobindo's lines, our summing up of the psychology and metaphysics of the poetic mood and process. Now I may sound a note of warning to budding poets. Our lines speak of the Eternal, the Infinite. These are terms that would spring easily to one's lips when one essays poetry in an Ashram of Yoga, but we have to be careful about them so long as we do not constantly live in the eternal and infinite Consciousness. Even if we do live in that Consciousness we must see that the poet in us speaks out of the man who has realised the presence of the Supreme and is not merely an outer person who wants to put to the uses of art the inner person's experience. In Sri Aurobindo the great words occur organically, as a living self-expression charged with truth. But we, who are not Sri Aurobindo nor sufficiently Aurobindonians even, have to be on guard against a facile indul-gence in them. We cannot avoid them, we have to bring them in at times in the context of our aspirations or intuitions, but let us bring them in when we really are compelled to do so by the necessities of the inspiration. Let us do our utmost to resist their outleap and yield to them only when they overwhelm us. When the Inspiration just says "Hullo" to us from a distance, let us not immediately respond by crying out, "Infinite! Eternal!" The Inspiration must take us by the throat and press out of us such ejaculations. They must come churned up from our depths at a sort of life-or-death moment and not fall tripping from our tongues every now and then.

Merely their occurrence in the midst of high thoughts and lofty phrases does not prove them to be inevitable there. For it is possible to have high thoughts and lofty phrases without creating anything except resonant rhetoric. The rhetorical element is not in itself an enemy to poetry — Milton is often rhetorical in the best sense, Byron is frequently rhetorical in a fairly good sense, but theirs is a rhetoric natural to a certain genuine mood and springs from within. False rhetoric is what attempts to swell out something which is not intrinsically great or something which though great has yet come forth not in its original form but in an imitation by the outer mind.

Both the manifestations we find in the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo had a remarkable capacity for powerful expression in

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which the imagination could soar high without having sufficiently gone deep. Hugo did not properly fathom his subjects, he caught hold of some large surface-impressions and tried to carry them up into heavenly air, but the higher they went the more vacuous they became, for it is only when you have seen and felt things pro-foundly that you can discover divine meanings in them and attune them to the illimitable empyrean. Hugo seems to have believed that a constant scattering of words like "eternite, infinite divinite" were enough to ensure profundity. This was a mistake in artistic method. But behind it was also a psychological flaw in the poet. Hugo had a lot of self-conceit. To a youth who said to him that he had been reading Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe, Hugo said sharply: "Mais a quoi bon? Je les resume tous."¹ The colossal confidence with which he thought he summed up all the poetic giants of the past and with which he went on pronouncing like Lord God Himself on cosmic themes was his own undoing. He remains a great poet in spite of his faults, but the status he reached was quite disproportionate to his promise. More self-criticism, more resistance to his own gifts would have intensified and en-riched his utterance.

We may make the same observation about another European poet, the modern Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio. His work is per-haps the most wealth-burdened so far as the use of words is concerned. But he has not enough wealth of substance to go with the verbal luxuriance and incandescence. The Italian language lends itself easily to musical polysyllabism, the poet has almost his poetry half made for him in the sound and texture of the language. Restraint, the shaping stroke, the selective capacity are therefore all the more required. D'Annunzio appears deficient in them. Not that he has mere word-prolificity everywhere: at times he brings wonderful imagination-shot ideas and then his poetry is pure glory. But, like Hugo, he overwrites and is not self-critical, not patient to match depth with height, subtlety: with .splendour.· He too had a mighty notion of himself. All great poets are perfectly aware of the divine afflatus ,blowing through ,them and know very well that they are great. Yet all are not carried off their feet by the afflatus nor do they allow its passage through their minds· to give them a swelled head. I recollect an anecdote about D' Annunzio

1. "But what is the good? I sum them all up."

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which shows the extent of its swelling in him. It concerns a most enjoyable incident. Once he was introduced to the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. He stood at a little distance with en-raptured eyes and, with a broad sweep of his right arm, exclaimed: "Belle! Magnifique! D'Annunzienne!" — and then came closer and said, "Bonjour, Madame." He had such a personality that he made his hearers accept his identification of the beautiful and the magnificent with the d'Annunzian, and many a woman, especially if she was a susceptible artiste, fell a victim to his Charm and verve. But his belief that whenever he was D'Annunzian he was achiev-ing beautiful and magnificent poetry played the deuce with him on numberless occasions. A poet can surely be conscious of his own greatness and let himself go in poetic creation without a critical back-look, when he happens to be what I may term an avatar of poetry rather than a vibhuti of poetry. Shakespeare is reported to have blotted not a single word of what he wrote; but he could afford to do that without serious damage to his own quality be-cause he happened to be a poetic superman, a poetic avatar. Neither Hugo nor D'Annunzio was anything more than a big-size vibhuti in the poetic world. Hugo, I believe, was the bigger of the two and with a little more sense of Hugo being not so much of a Victor as his name suggested, he would have qualified for the company that Sri Aurobindo has noted as the sheer first class.

Sri Aurobindo. sets up five criteria: imaginative originality, expressive power, creative genius, scope of interests, scale of work. Poets stand higher or lower according as they satisfy these criteria in a greater or smaller measure. Sri Aurobindo chooses eleven poets for the sheer first class, but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative originality and expressive power and creative genius, the widest scope and the largest amount of work. Those in the second are a little wllnting in cine or other of the required qualifications. Dante and · Kalidasa. would have gone into the first row if they had possessed the elemental creativity as of a demigod that

1. I believe that Firdausi, author of the Persian epic Shah-nameh , is omitted altogether because Sri Aurobindo did not read Persian and was judging by his own direct knowledge of poetic works in the original.

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characterised its occupants. They have instead built their worlds and peopled them by an energetic constructiveness of the personal poetic mind. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but his scale of creation is much smaller: the same may be said of Sophocles. Virgil and Milton command a still less spontaneous breath of creative genius, though their expressive power is immense. Where in their works do we meet a teeming world like that of the Shakes-pearean plays? Milton has his fallen archangel Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but most of the other characters are a little wooden. Among those who have just missed entering the third row are the Roman Lucretius, the Greek Euripides, the Spanish Calderon, the French Corneille and Hugo, the English Spenser.

While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering "Wordsworth". Well, Sri Aurobindo has said that Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats have been left out of consideration not because their best poetry falls short of the finest ever written but because they have failed to write anything on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest singers. Apart from their deficiency in creating a living world of their own, what was wanting in them was sustained volume. None of them gave us as much of supreme poetry as even those who have just missed stepping into the third row. They have not lacked in quality: their defect was in quantity of quality. A poet who pens a few supreme lines cannot be put on a par with one who pours out hundreds. There is, for instance, the poet — Bur- gon, I think — who has become unforgettable for just one line about the ancient city of Petra discovered by archaeologists:

A rose-red city half as old as time.

Surely he cannot be made a peer of Gerard Manley Hopkins who has not only the highly original evocation of Oxford —

Towery city and branchy between towers —

but scores of other verses capturing with crowded yet precise imagery and with strong yet nervous rhythm a diversity of what he called "inscape" and "instress".

Diversity — this in itself is also a desideratum: the poet's scope

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has to be wide if he hopes to claim the sheer first class. He must take as his province multitudinous Nature and multifoliate Life and multifarious Mind. His interests should not be such as might find complete cover under a title like the one intended for a book of verses published some years ago: A Country Muse. I say "inten-ded" because actually, thanks to a printer's howler which by a master-stroke of unconscious insight exposed the smallness of the poet's scope, the book came out under a different caption: A Country Mouse (The printer's hand has tried its tricks with me also in the course of editing Mother India. In reprinting some words of Sri Aurobindo on the spiritual visions of the past, the phrase "Buddhism was only a restatement of Vedanta" was saved at the last minute from appearing with "restaurant" in place of "restatement".)

If even Hugo with his wide scope and large scale has to be left with one foot across and one foot outside the threshold of the sheer first class how can we admit Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats? A Frenchman, of course, would not easily accept the non-inclusion of any French poet at all when India and Greece get three, Italy and England two, and even Germany One. Perhaps what keeps France out in poetry of the supreme order is just the fact that France is supreme in prose: the prose-mind has reached in France such pervasive perfection that the visionary mind of poetry is interfered with by the logicality and lucidity that are the gods of prose-literature. I do not think Frenchmen will quite agree. How-ever, they are not likely to wrangle over Hugo so much as over another poet who is their darling. They will jump up and protest: "What about Racine, the divine Racine?" And if there were a Frenchman here to see me look at Racine with unworshipping eyes, I might be in danger of savate. Do you know of savate? It is French boxing, in which feet and head are used as well as fists. It is a most fascinating game — provided you are not involved in it. Do not ever get into a brawl with a Frenchman without keeping his savate in mind. Before you can put your fists up for attack or defence you may find a terrific kick landed in your stomach or you may get a broken nose under the impact of your opponent's skull. The famous English king of the ring, John Sullivan — in the good old days when gloves were regarded as effeminate —went through a hell of a bad time in France when a Gallic champion challenged him to a boxing bout. Sullivan was surprised at receiving furious

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yet most skilfully placed kicks all over his body-not only into his. tummy but also into his ears and his mouth. Ultimately he managed to drive a solid punch home to his challenger's chin and brought the non-stop flurry of flying feet to undignified rest flat on the floor. I do not know if Sullivan provoked the fight by sneezing at the name of Racine. It is not likely, for Sullivan may not have been aware that a dramatic poet named Racine existed or perhaps even that a dramatic poet like Shakespeare existed. But Frenchmen are more conscious of their own literature . than Englishmen and it would be risky to be lacking in sovereign respect for Racine in front of any son of Ia belle France. Since I cannot suspect any of you to be a Frenchman in disguise I may make bold to construct a brief dialogue between a Frenchman and myself.

Frenchman: "Mais vous avez oublie notre cher Racine! C'est intolerable.

Myself: "Excusez-moi, Monsieur — je n'ai pas oublie votre Racine, je l'ai ignore."

Frenchman: "Ignore? Sacre nom de Dieu! Ma foi! Zut alors!"

Myself: "Mais permettez-moi, mon ami, d'expliquer un peu ma petite insolence. Vous parlez de Racine. Oui, il y a beau-coup de racines, mais une plante doit avoir non seulement des racines souterraines mais aussi des fleurs au-dessus de la terre. Ou est la efflorescence de Monsieur Racine comparable a celle de Mr. Shakespeare?

Frenchman: "Bah! ce gros barbare de poesie, Meester Shake-speare! Vous etes impossible, une ame insensible. Allez yous-en!"¹

1. An English version of the dialogue:

Frenchman: "But you have forgotten our dear Racine! That's intolerable."

Myself: "Excuse me, Monsieur — I haven't forgotten your Racine, I have ignored him."

Frenchman: "Ignored? Confound it! To be sure! Be blowed!"

Myself: "But allow me, my friend, just to explain my wee bit of insolence. You speak of Racine. Well, Racine means root. Yes, there may be a lot of roots, but a plant ought to have not only roots underground but also flowers rising above the earth. Where is the efflorescence of Monsieur Racine like that of Mr. Shakespeare?"

Frenchman: "Pooh! that gross barbarian of poetry, Meester Shake-speare! You are impossible, an insensitive soul. Off with you!"

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I should thank my stars that I got only a verbal kick. But even otherwise I could console my ame insensible with the thought that Sri Aurobindo is on my side and rates Corneille above Racine, and Hugo above Corneille, but keeps even Hugo out of the sheer first class. In ranking Hugo as tops in French poetry but not tops enough in world-poetry, Sri Aurobindo is supported by one of the acutest minds of France herself, the Nobel-Prizeman Andre Gide. When Gide was asked by an interviewer, "Qui est le poete su-preme en Francais?", Gide said, "Victor Hugo, helas!"

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