The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo

PUBLISHER'S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

This book first appeared in 1947 under the auspices of the Sri Aurobindo Circle. It reappears in a second edition which is "revised". But the revision is significantly restricted. On the one side, in a couple of instances Sri Aurobindo's final versions of his poetry those that were originally quoted. On the other, a few touches, corrective or additive, by the author deal with what may be termed small critical or technical oversights. For the rest, the book has been deliberately kept the same in matter as well as manner. The main reason for this is not only the fact that its scheme, both as a whole and in detail, disallows much tempering, but also the fact that all of it was read out to Sri Aurobindo before being published and won his admiration. Substantially to change by way of supplementing whatever limitations, self-imposed or unavoidable, it had in the circumstances of 1947 would be to make it a work different from the one Sri Aurobindo enjoyed and appraised.

The chief unavoidable limitations were that, at the time the book was written, Sri Aurobindo's epic in quantitative hexameters, Won, which runs into nearly 5,000 lines, was known only in a fragment of 374, and no more than the first few Cantos of Book One were available, to K. D. Sethna, of the blank-verse masterpiece, Savitri, now totalling 23,803 lines. The second edition makes no attempt to treat these two creations from the vantage-point of 1974,

But here we may draw attention, from among the things left unchanged, to one phrase about Savitri in the first edition: "its projected fifty thousand lines." Sri Aurobindo, when he came across the phrase, made no move to alter it. So the author has let it stand with whatever suggestion it may carry of a glorious might-have-been.

Considerable overpassing of early limitations is achieved in the companion collection of essays, Sri Aurobindo — The Poet, published in 1970 by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. But, however broader in various respects the scope of the later volume, none of its essays except the first two were seen by Sri Aurobindo himself and commented upon The

Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo has thus a certain happy edge over them and, truly speaking, its scope is not narrower so much as more concentrated and the apparent limitations may be seen as a focus on fundamental issues and values.

Sri Aurobindo's remark on the Prologue and the opening chapter was: "Exceedingly beautiful." Of the second section he said that it was well done and that he supposed the poem written about had the qualities the critic had discerned in it. The last part drew from him the observation at once generous and modest: "It seems to me very fine both in style and substance, but as it is in high eulogy of my own writing, you must not expect me to say more."

A further interest attaches to the book on two scores. One is that Savitri was first made public through quotations in an article reproduced in its pages. The author had its initial portions with him, dating from the time (1936) Sri Aurobindo had been sending him passages in private. Nowhere before had this poem appeared in print. Soon after the quotations in his article, fascicles began to come out from the Ashram, Canto after Canto.

The second score is that Sri Aurobindo, in a letter dated 2.4.1947, defended the author against some opinions voiced by an academic reader. Sri Aurobindo wrote to the author: "I am in general agreement with your answer to M's strictures on certain points in your style and your use of the English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so only if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French; but this language is constantly changing and escaping from boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it, Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless you take liberties with her."¹

1. The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), pp. 461-2.

Coming to particulars, Sri Aurobindo touched on the legitimacy of the Americanised verb "contact", the utility of the adjective "global", the effective employment of current French and Latin phrases and some unusual turns of speech and finally the appropriate role of colloquialisms. We may quote his pronouncement on the last-named, for it serves to hit off the precise literary traits of the book. Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Colloquial expressions have, if rightly used, the advantage of giving point, flavour, alertness and I think in your use of them they do that; they can also lower and damage the style, but that danger is mostly when there is a set character of uniform dignity or elevation. The chief character of your style is rather a constant life and vividness and supple and ample abounding energy of thought and language which can soar or run or sweep along at will but does not simply walk or creep or saunter and in such a style forcible colloquialisms can do good service."²

Ever since the first edition was exhausted, appeals have come for a reissue. We had hoped to respond in the year of Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary (1972) but conditions beyond our control delayed the printing. We are glad at last to put again in the hands of the public a basic survey of Sri Aurobindo's poetic work in a sensitive yet analytic manner, which was so highly regarded by the penetrating literary critic that the poet himself was.

1974

2. Ibid., p. 463.