Sri Aurobindo's principal work of literary criticism where he outlines the history of English poetry and explores the possibility of a spiritual poetry in the future.
On Poetry
Sri Aurobindo's principal work of literary criticism. In this work, Sri Aurobindo outlines the history of English poetry and explores the possibility of a spiritual poetry in the future. It was first published in a series of essays between 1917 and 1920; parts were later revised for publication as a book.
THEME/S
It is quite natural for the poets to vaunt their métier as the highest reach of human capacity and themselves as the top of creation, it is also natural for the intellectuals to run down the Yogi or the Rishi who claims to reach a higher consciousness than that which they conceive to be the summit of human achievement. The poet lives still in the mind and is not yet a spiritual seer, but he represents to the human intellect the highest point of mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words its intuition of things, though that stands far below the vision of things that can be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is for that that the poet is exalted as the real seer and prophet. There is too, helping the idea, the error of the modern or European mentality which so easily confuses the mentalised vital or life being with the soul and the idealising mind with spirituality. The poet imaging mental or physical beauty is for the outer mind something more spiritual than the seer or the God-lover experiencing the eternal peace or the ineffable ecstasy. Yet the Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught of Beauty and Delight than the imagination of the poet at its highest can conceive. The Divine is Delight and it is not only the unseen Beauty that he can see but the visible and the tangible also has for him a face of the All-beautiful which the mind cannot discover.
10.11.1934
Poetic intuition and illumination is not the same thing as Rishi's intuition and illumination.
11.2.1936
A Rishi is one who sees or discovers an inner truth and puts it into self-effective language—the mantra. Either new truth or old truth made new by expression and realisation.
Page 517
He [R.M.] has expressed certain eternal truths by process of Yoga—I don't think it is by Rishi-like intuition or illumination nor has he the mantra.
A Rishi may be a Yogi, but also he may not; a Yogi too may be a Rishi, but also he may not. Just as a philosopher may or may not be a poet, and a poet may or may not be a philosopher.
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