The Future Poetry

Philosophy in Poetry

Philosophy in Poetry - I

What does your correspondent mean by "philosophy" in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius, it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when singing about a skylark than when one tries to weave a robe of verse to clothe the attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

is as good poetry as

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

There are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the

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Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabined or stifled by any theories or "thou shalt not"-s of this character.

7.12.1931

P.S. And if one were to take stock of your correspondent's theories (that no poems should ever have any philosophy, etc.), then half the world's poetry would have to disappear. Truth and Thought and Light cast into forms of beauty cannot be banished in that cavalier way. Music and art and poetry have striven from the beginning to express the vision of the deepest and greatest things and not the things of the surface only, and it will be so as long as there are poetry and art and music.

Philosophy in Poetry - II

If H had indicated that the God spoken of was not the sole Divinity he would have spoiled the poem. For the purpose of the poem he has to be spoken of as the sole Divinity. Why must we take the poem as an exercise in philosophy? A poem is a poem, not a doctrine. It expresses something in the poet's mind or his feeling. If it agrees with the total truth or the highest truth of the universe, so much the better, but we cannot demand that of every poet and every poem. My appreciation was given from the purely aesthetic standpoint. Even if a poet were to extol a false doctrine such as a malevolent God creating a painful universe, still if it were a fine poem I would enjoy and praise it—although it would be there too an appearance of the universe but not spoiled by putting it forward as a doctrine.

1.2.1935