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
A.E.'s remarks about "immensity", etc. are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art
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of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these "high light" words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare "high lights" over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these high lights—in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless? To follow A.E.'s rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact, the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose.
5.2.1932
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