|
|
|
Sri Aurobindos' Savitri
(an Adventure of Consciousness) |
|
Making of a new Poetry : Sri Aurobindo’s Poetics
Introduction
Some scholars and critics of poetry hold the opinion that Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a divine life upon earth is not of today, not even of tomorrow. It will take a long time before humanity reaches that stage or its possibility. At present it is only a fanciful conception, a chimera. To such critics poetry should be concerned with something less spiritual, with something more practical and ‘realistic’. But they forget that since his appearance on earth Man in the very midst of all sorts of turmoils and tribulations has been aspiring and yearning for something else, ignoring the present, looking into the beyond. An aspiration and yearning for the great Mystery does not depend on man’s well-being or material prosperity. In that case one would perhaps never turn to the mysterious Unknown, for the world would not easily achieve or likely to achieve in the near future that material, economic and social perfection as the history of the world so far records. Besides, if one were to wait ad inifinitum for achieving this worldly perfection, then one would never turn to ‘other – worldly things’.
The attempt at world reform, though a good gesture, appears like trying to cure the outward symptoms and neglect the main cause of the malady. All our social, economic, political and moral ills have at their base lack of a spiritual outlook. All the ills of the world could be alleviated if man would consent to be spiritual, and he ‘might be all-knowing and omnipotent’. But
He sang no more the deathless heart of love,
His chant was a hymn of Ignorance and Fate.
Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the divine life embodies a central truth and though it may appear difficult to realise it now, still that should be the preoccupation of man’s inner being with the hope that the ills and sufferings of the world could be transformed. In the context of the present day’s situation all other attempts, except the spiritual, at curing human ills seem superficial. The high ideal of a divine life upon earth cannot therefore be kept in ‘cold – storage’; instead it should be given an opportunity to work out its path. Attempts at world reform should, however, not side – track or oppose the deep significance of ways spiritual. “To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the present nature of humanity and eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations.”1 In that case our life would never attempt ‘the great and difficult heights’
Or leave the world’s bounds and, where no limits are,
Meet with the heart’s passion the Adorable
Or set the world ablaze with inner Fire.
— Savitri : 496-7
The situation today is
Action and thought cemented made a wall
Of small ideals limiting the soul.
— Savitri : 497
The world that Sri Aurobindo sees and creates in his poetry, specially in the grand epic Savitri, is something which to many appears ‘poetically intractable’. Philosophy has been regarded as not suitable for poetry yet every poet is a philosopher in his own way. But how many succeed in making philosophy the subject matter of their poetry. Keats did not dare to philosophise, and a few other poets foundered in this attempt. Whenever poets attempted to philosophise or even put in more thought – power in their poetry, they no more remained true poets losing their poetic fervour. The classic examples are of Milton and Wordsworth, and it is said even of Dante to some extent. Sri Aurobindo puts philosophy into his poetic fervour and creates a poetry of sheer beauty and power. A philosopher chanting out his philosophy in poetry is a rare spectacle, though in the past, it is said, it did happen as in the Vedas and the Upanishads.
If by philosophy is meant spiritual truth and spiritual realisation, what can be more poetic in essence than this philosophy? Poetry is generally regarded as the expression of human joys and sorrows. Did not Shelley sing “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts?” Man takes joy in the thrill of the flesh and the savour of the earth. It is always the human element that man seeks in poetry and life; he fails to recognise that poetry may also express other-worldly sweetnesses and truths. It is mostly the human significance that moves us, the spiritual remains esoteric, for the initiate. And the earth-bound men ‘owe small debt to a superior plane’
To be the common man they think the best
To live as others live is their delight.
For most are built on Nature’s earthly plan
And owe small debt to a superior plane;
The human average is their level pitch,
A thinking animal’s material range.
— Savitri : . 689
One thing we must be very careful to remember is that ‘it is not mere the human that is of supreme interest, but something which even in being human yet transcends it’. This is the basic difference between the Hellenic spirit of European poetry and that of Sri Aurobindo. The renaissance humanism of Europe takes its stand on things earthly and human, while Sri Aurobindo’s poetry takes its stand upon divinity and thence to embrace and mould what is earthly and human. In other words poetry of Europe sings of the humanity of man, poetry of Sri Aurobindo sings of the divinity of man. In this sense he not only has given a new direction to poetry, but has also created a new genre of poetry by his practice.
To every field of human activity Sri Aurobindo has given an impetus, put behind it an impelling force to growth and perfection. So is the case in the field of poetry. Reviewing contemporary English poetry, both of England and of India, Sri Aurobindo finds that although poetry has reached a higher level of consciousness and inspiration, yet it is not to his expectation, and needs much more to be attained. Poetry to be perfect or reach near perfection must have the fountain of its inspiration in the very high ‘overhead’ plane of consciousness as he calls it. Moreover, Sri Aurobindo’s new concept of poetry puts on it the high responsibility of implanting a new consciousness into earth nature and thereby help to establish a superhumanity upon earth. But this poetry cannot be a mere philosophy nor can it be didactive in nature. It has to be revelatory, pointing to man ‘the endless and beginningless road’ which he must traverse by himself; it has to be a poetry packed with the power of transforming human nature and carry man ‘a little beyond’. It has to be a poetry that transforms and delights.
It is a matter of common experience and knowledge that in every age certain great books are written that are read with joy because reading them is a unique and most satisfying experience. Such books are the expressions of the artist’s vision of his self and the world whereby he invites others to take that high path ‘on the waters of a nameless Infinite’. It is, however, unfortunate that critics, attempting to judge the genius of such artists, fail to realise the high mission of these artists and what they reveal through their experiences. On this David Cecil comments that a race of critics has arisen who judge a book by how far it expresses what they conceive to be the mind of its period. Such critics do forget that a great poet is not bound by the littleness and limitations of the present, but on the contrary he is a driving force for the birth of a new age and a new humanity, or should we say a new superhumanity.
Economic slavery, triumph of science and materialistic approach to life and preoccupation with the idea of the welfare state have made man paralytic or at best a lame giant. In his supreme conquest over material things, the individual has become a stranger to his own inner being and to the world. In their efforts at systematisation, the so called ‘intellectuals’ have created economic man, political man, military man. The individual has lost its uniqueness, and a disorientation of personality set in. Such a crisis always leads to the ultimate human tragedy, the tragedy of meaninglessness of life: “A sick, toss’d vessel, dashing on each thing” as T.S. Eliot says. It is the realisation of one’s true being and its destiny, not its standardisation, that is to be achieved if mankind is to be emancipated and saved from its inevitable catastrophe. Man’s ultimate aim and mission should lie in developing the fullness of his being, not merely grasping at the surface routine of life. “If human nature does alter”, writes Forster in Aspects of Novel, “it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way.” The deeper he dives into the secretest chamber of his being or rises higher in his consciousness, the greater is the discovery of divinity in him and his divine potentialities.
The discovery and growth of one’s inner being is not a mere figment of imagination but the consistent expression of psychic truth, of a direct experience ‘that passes all the argument of the earth.’ Only a rare few have hit upon this adventure; they are the pioneers of the spirit’s ways, and of these Sri Aurobindo is certainly in the forefront. The creative outflow of the artist’s genius will for ever elude and baffle human understanding if the unfolding of the poet’s spiritual experiences is not taken into consideration. It is these that furnish true material for poetic creation. The poet’s mission is not to ‘celebrate bygones’, not to explore the life that has exhibited itself, but to liberate what is hidden in man, to set free ‘the indispensable fire’ as Whitman says or ‘the celestial fire’, ‘the burning witness’ as Sri Aurobindo says. The poet has to be a pioneer of spiritual adventure, the ‘protagonist of the mysterious play in which the Unknown pursues himself through forms’ (Savitri : 22) —
And lead man to truth’s wide and golden road
Than runs through finite things to eternity.
— Savitri : 476
In this sense the poet is not an author but the subject of his poetry. It does not presuppose a static situation; it exists as ‘a passage way to something rather than a thing in itself concluded’. This is the new poetry of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. It is the poetry of the soul, of inner romanticism, moving along the high road of the spirit towards the supreme Mystery.
The New Poetry : its growth and nature
In his assessment of the English poetry written by the English poets as well as the Indians, Sri Aurobindo comes to the conclusion that English poetry in its evolutionary growth has still much to achieve to arrive at some sort of a fulfilment. Sri Aurobindo is a poet and a yogi; “he is a true Rishi and a poet combined”2 as Tagore wrote of him. To his yogic vision and experience, consciousness is a power, the Energy of all creative activities, including that of the poetic one. “All takes new values not from itself, but from the consciousness that uses it; for there is only one thing essential, needful, indispensable, to grow conscious of the Divine Reality and live in it and live it always.”3 Sri Aurobindo regards poetry, too, to be a means “capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, (then) they are transmuted and become spiritual”3 In his creative assessment of poetry there are “many true and beautiful things, and a scale of evaluation that surpasses anything in the West — the modern West especially”, writes Kathleen Raine, a reputed poet and critic, in her letter of 25.10.1987 written to K.D. Sethna. This ‘scale of evaluation’ as Kathleen Raine could discover in Sri Aurobindo’s critical evaluation is the levels and planes of consciousness of which Sri Aurobindo speaks and from where the poetic inspiration comes.
The new poetry, as Sri Aurobindo envisages and himself practises, shall be the utterances of the deepest soul of man and of the universal spirit in things. It is the poetry of the soul living its own life and moving in an inner voyage along the high road of the spirit. Such a concept is visible, though in seed form, in Whitman’s poetry of the ‘open road’. His poetry gives expression to exploring the inner truths embedded in the depths of man.
I am an acme of things accomplished,
and I an encloser of things to be:
Again, as he says “All truths wait in all things”, and it is the poet’s mission to unmask these secret truths waiting to be unfolded through poetic speech. But such high concept of Whitman is unfortunately the result of conceptual notions and not of seeing visions or direct seeing and experience. All the same Whitman’s ideas, inspite of the fact that he was not a yogi, made a big stride to the growth of poetical concepts. With Sri Aurobindo’s arrival on the poetical horizon comes the final break through in the concept of poetic creation. To him the poet’s mission does not end with Whitman’s concept though very high. Not by exploring inwardly heaven after heaven can fulfilment of the earthly life be attained. There is another aspect, a more important one, of the new poetry. Besides unfolding the truths hidden in the depths of man and Nature through poetic speech, Sri Aurobindo lays a greater responsibility on the new poetry : Life earthly has to be transformed into the life divine.
A transitional effort towards the creation of a new poetry had already begun in the mid-nineteenth century. Poetry of Whitman and later of Tagore and some Irish poets belongs to this transitional stage. The poetry of Whitman sings of life ‘broadened, raised and illumined by a strong intellectual intuition of the self of man and the large soul of humanity’. In the poets of the Celtic movement there is ‘an emotional and sensational psychical intuitivism half emerging from and half entangled in the vitalistic motive with its strange beauty and brilliance.’ Consciousness here is centralised in the vital – psychic and the inspiration comes from that plane. The wide appealing poetry of Tagore ‘wings and floats in a high intermediate region’. The great popularity of Tagore’s poetry indicates the ‘initial spiritualised turn of our general human feeling and intelligence’, observes Sri Aurobindo. It is a poetry expressing spiritual ‘seekings and glimpses’ and not yet ‘in the complete spiritual light’, assesses Sri Aurobindo. The poetry of Tagore has, however, brought in the poetic speech the psychic radiance and subtlety, “transmuting the earth tones by the touch of its radiance.”4 The ‘subtle and delicate soul experience’ of Tagore’s poetry with its ‘seekings and glimpses, its sight and cadence’ raised that poetry to psycho-spiritual plane thereby pointing to the future trend towards which poetry was moving.
In that transitional stage Tagore’s poetry reached ‘the subtlest elevation of all’, feels Sri Aurobindo. Yet that poetry is not the future poetry of his concept. “That can only be assured when a supreme light of the spirit, a perfect joy and satisfaction of the subtlety and complexity of a finer psychic experience and a wide strength and amplitude of the life soul sure of the earth and open to the heavens have met, found each other and fused together in the sovereign unity of some great poetic discovery and utterance.”5 It shall accept and fashion the whole of life and world and Nature in the light of man’s deepest spirit and the large self of the universe, explains Sri Aurobindo. It must not only lead to ‘the discovery of the divine reality within’ but also of ‘man’s divine possibilities’. And finally, completeness of the new poetry is achieved only when the spiritual idea it expresses becomes a complete spiritual realisation of the poet, not influencing ‘the individual intellect and psychic mind and imagination only’ but also penetrating and pervading ‘the general sense and feeling of the race’ and remoulding them in their image. Sri Aurobindo’s theory of poetry gives the following cardinal characteristics to future poetry:
— The spiritual idea it expresses must not be a mere conceptual notion of the poet; it must be a complete spiritual realisation.
— The new poetry shall not only affect the individual, his psychic mind and imagination, but it has to surge out upon ‘the general sense and feeling of the race’.
— The new poetry must have the power to remould, transform the individual and the race. It must infuse mind and life with a higher transformative consciousness. The entire yogic endeavour of Sri Aurobindo has been to ascend to the supreme consciousness, realise it in his being and bring it into the earth nature. To him this supreme consciousness which he calls the Supramental or the Supermind is the transformative power of the Divine. And Savitri sings of this ascension to and realisation of the supramental plane of consciousness, and how it shall transform earth nature and man’s nature. To infuse mind, life and body with the highest consciousness shall be the supreme endeavour of the future poetic speech.
The New Poetry : its aim and Object:
Since literary criticism took an organised shape, there has been a regular controversy regarding the aim and object of poetry. This may be traced back to Plato’s comments on the poetry of Homer and the dramatists of the time. He condemned them on moral ground. Plato regarded Homer’s poetry, depicting Gods and goddesses acting and behaving as ordinary human beings, as immoral. Besides, all that Homer described in his epics had neither been experienced nor seen by him. Homer’s poetry thus stood on untruthfulness too. Plato condemned the Greek dramatists of the time, in particular the great tragic poets, on moral ground. The tragedians by the cathartic effect of their plays allowed the baser elements of human nature come to the surface when it would have been better hid. Plato was basically a philosopher and a teacher. To him poetry must be didactic and its function to teach morals. Hence he sacrificed poetic beauty and delight on the altar of philosophy and moral. This is perhaps one of the most unfortunate accidents in the field of literary criticism, for Plato was a philosopher among the ancients most endowed with a high poetic sensibility and yet he disparaged poetry the most and banished it from his Republic on petty moral grounds. For him only religious poetry or hymns and prayers to Gods had any place in society. Plato wielded a great influence over the literary criticism in Europe for a pretty long period, and since then stress was being laid on poetry to be didactic and its aim to teach morals.
With the rise of pre-Raphaelite movement in art and poetry, the pendulum of literary criticism swung to an opposite direction. Now artistic and technical excellence was the only thing that mattered in poetic creation. ‘Art for art’s sake’ became the watchword of the time. The movement started as a theory of art but it infiltrated into poetry and its influence came down to Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson and others. Thus a regular controversy between didacticism and art for arts sake cropped up in the field of criticism.
Poetry, according to Sri Aurobindo, is an interpreter of truth but not of ‘the truths offered by the critical and analytic mind’ as supposed by Plato and his followers. It deals not with things thought but with things seen, ‘not with the authenticities of the analytic mind, but with the authenticities of the synthetic vision and the seeing spirit’. In other words all true and great poetry is revelatory in nature. And this truth poetry must express in ‘forms of an innate beauty.’
Often there is a misunderstanding between truth and moral and as a result there entered into poetry the element of didacticism. The primary and essential function of poetry, said Plato, was to teach. In entire disagreement with Plato, Sri Aurobindo emphatically comments: “Its function is not to teach truth of any particular kind, nor indeed to teach at all, nor to pursue knowledge nor to serve any religious or ethical aim, but to embody beauty in the word and give delight.”6 For
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things
A mute Delight regards Time’s countless works:
To house God’s joy in things Space gave wide room,
To house God’s joy in self our souls were born.
— Savitri : 630
‘This universe an old enchantment guards’, and to reveal and express that ‘World-Delight’ in rhythmic words of beauty is the primary function of poetry. In a very illuminating passage Sri Aurobindo compacts the aim and function of poetry in accordance with his new poetics and which he exemplifies in Savitri”: “But at the same time it is at any rate part of its highest function to serve the spirit and to illumine and lead through beauty and build by a high informing and revealing delight the soul of man.6 The essential function is not to teach moral but to infuse in man a higher consciousness and thereby build the evolving soul in ‘the perfection of the unborn’. Then poetry fulfils what Sri Aurobindo’s poetics demands of it, i.e. to be “capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine.”3
To the ordinary and average mind judging poetry without really entering into the spirit of poetry, it seems ‘as if it were nothing more than an aesthetic pleasure of the imagination, the intellect and the ear, a sort of elevated pastime’. Pleasure certainly is expected from poetry as from all arts, agrees Sri Aurobindo; but the external sensuous and even the imaginative pleasure are only the ‘first elements’. The true recipients of the poetic delight are ‘neither the intelligence, the imagination nor the ear; they are only its channels and instruments; the true creator, the true hearer is the soul’, says Sri Aurobindo. Keats too had caught a similar sense when he wrote his famous lines
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear,but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
And yet Keats could not transcend the sensuous.
To Sri Aurobindo, “poetry has not really done its work, at least its highest work, until it has raised the pleasure of the instrument and transmuted it into the deeper delight of the soul... a delight interpretative, creative, revealing, formative, one might almost say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into an original creative vision...”7 `the still blissful cry’ of the soul.
— such as arose from the Infinite
When the first whisperings of a strange delight
Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,
The passion to discover and to touch,
The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds;
— Savitri : 697 – 8.
Such spiritual creative joy the soul of the poet must feel and succeed in pouring into all those who are receptive to poetry. And this delight is not merely ‘a godlike pastime, it is a great formative and illuminative power’.
Critics under the influence of pre-Raphaelite movement often talk of ‘a faultlessly correct or at most an exquisite technique’ for poetry to be great. True; in all arts good technique is the first step towards perfection; but says Sri Aurobindo, “there are so many other steps, there is a whole world beyond before you can get near to what you seek; so much so that even a deficient correctness of execution will not prevent an intense and gifted soul from creating great poetry.”7 The fate of the artist who strives for ‘a faultlessly perfect technique’ finds expression in Browning’s Andrea del Sarto. Still, technique the poet must have, but ‘in the heat of creation the intellectual sense of it becomes a subordinate action or even a mere undertone in his mind, and in his best moments he is permitted, in a way, to forget it altogether.’ In a very interesting and revealing letter Sri Aurobindo writes of his own experience and method in composing Savitri: “I don’t bother about details while writing, because that would only hamper the inspiration. I let it come through without interference... If the inspiration is the right one, then I have not to bother about the technique then or afterwards, for there comes through the perfect line with the perfect rhythm inextricably intertwined or rather fused into an inseparable and single unity;”8 In the same letter he continues, “I may add that the technique does not go by any set mental rule — for the object is not perfect technical elegance according to precept but sound – significance filling out the word – significance. If that can be done by breaking rules, well, so much the worse for the rule.”8 The style and rhythm of poetry are the expression and movement which originate from a ‘certain spiritual excitement’ caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to express. It is sufficient that the soul sees, and the eye, sense, heart and thought -–mind become the passive instruments of the soul. Then we get the real, the high poetry. All great poetical compositions are the result of ‘the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities’ and not by becoming over – conscious of achieving a perfect technique. This is the relative importance of technique in Sri Aurobindo’s concept of poetry.
Sri Aurobindo gives to the poetry of the future the status of the Mantra. He claims for the Mantra a perfected poetical expression that he calls ‘the absolute of the expressive Word’. To attain this highest power of poetic speech should be the object of future poetry, to discover its secret ‘as the future sign of an ultimate climbing towards an ultimate evolution’ of the poetic consciousness to its summit. The Mantra to be a ‘poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality’ requires the unison of three highest intensities of poetic speech and become indissolubly one. They are
— ‘a highest intensity of rhythmic movement’;
—
‘a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought – substance, of
style’; and
— ‘a highest intensity of the soul’s vision of truth’. The Mantra becomes possible when these three highest intensities stand fused at a certain highest level of consciousness and then it becomes the Mantra of the Real, capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine.
Of the three highest intensities that go to the making of a mantra, “the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the first fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of poetry.”9 A perfect rhythm will often immortalise a work of poetry even though it is wanting in vision and far from the higher intensity of style. Contemporary poetry of Sri Aurobindo’s time, the ‘modern’ poetry, though very carefully written and versified, lacks, according to him two things — “the inspired phrase and inevitable word and the rhythm that keeps a poem for ever alive.”10 Many are the ‘poets’ who write ‘verse as good as verse can be without rising to inspired rhythm.’ Such so called ‘great’ poets (to their admirers) write from the ‘cultured mind, not from the elemental soul-power within.’
By the excellence of poetic movement Sri Aurobindo does not mean a mere metrical rhythm or a perfect technical excellence. “There must be a deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul movement entering into the metrical form and often over flooding it before the real poetic achievement begins.”9
Then falling silent in himself to know
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains.
– Savitri : 375
A subtle, rich or varied metrical excellence, however perfectly it may have been executed, may satisfy the sensual hearing but it is not at all enough for the creative spirit.
Sri Aurobindo is, however, not advocating the use of vers libre as done by Whitman, Carpenter or some French poets. On the contrary metre ‘a fixed and balanced system of the measures of sound’, is, according to him ‘the right physical basis for the poetic movement’. Besides the harmonies and melodies of the pure metrical rhythm, there are higher harmonies and melodies wherein the metrical rhythm is absorbed’ taken up and uplifted by the spiritual and the metrical rhythm is then filled with a music unseizable, the spiritual secret of poetic movement:
A music spoke transcending mortal speech
As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup,
A repetition of God’s first delight
Creating in a young and virgin Time.
— Savitri : 38
This is how the mere metrical is transported to the soul rhythm. Thus “the music fit for the Mantra makes itself audible.”10(a)
Sri Aurobindo’s concept of the Mantra and its effective working finds a beautiful expression in a mantric verse of Savitri; the verse may be studied in two parts. If the hearer is not properly prepared to receive the mantra and strives ‘to read it with the labouring mind’, he will meet with failure:
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
— Savitri p. 375
The true meaning of the rhythmic vibrations of the mantra cannot be conveyed through the sensual ear only. In that case mantric sound will remain encased and shut in ‘the dim ignorant cells’ of the brain.
In the second part of the verse the poet states the conditions of true receptivity of the mantric message, its working and its transformative effect on the hearer:
Then, falling silent in himself to know
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self
Are seized unalterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,
All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:
Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
— Savitri : 375
The light from the consciousness embodied in the mantric word comes not by struggle or by thought, or by reading it with the labouring mind. The primary condition is the quiet of the mind, the mind falling silent. It is in mind’s silence that the higher consciousness acts and the hushed heart hears the Word ‘in the listening of his soul’ through ‘rhythmic strains’. Then the mantra brings into the hearer ‘an ecstasy and an immortal change.’ Sri Aurobindo does not stop here, he goes on to give in detail the changes, transmutations in the hearer. His thought, vision, feeling, sense and even his body consciousness acquire an unimaginable wideness and power. Knowledge comes to him flooding from all sides. He thus, stands ‘transmuted by the white spiritual ray’.
The source of the mantric word is in ‘the empire of the ineffable’ which is “the fountain of eternal Truth round which stand the illumined powers of thought and life. There under the eyes of delight and the face of imperishable beauty of the Mother of creation and the bride of the eternal Spirit they lead their immortal dance. The poet visits that marvellous source in his superconscient mind and brings to us some strain or some vision of her face and works. To find the way into that circle with the waking self is to be the seer-poet and discover the highest power of the inspired word, the Mantra.”11 This is the poetics of the Mantra and Sri Aurobindo gives to poetry its rightful status to be the Mantra of the Real.
The new Poetry – theory and mystery of its creation:
Artists and poets invariably speak of their ‘inspiration’ as the fountainhead of their creative power. Since man’s attention first turned to look into the process of artistic creation and its mystery, poets, philosophers and critics have been attempting to delve deep into this mystery and analyse it. Philosophers like Kant, Schiller, Schelling advanced theories in this direction. From Kant’s idea in his Critique of Judgment Schelling derives that the creative impulse is not a conscious contrivance; it is an instinctive process. It exists in the unconscious part of the artist’s being. To Schiller a creative work involves the poet’s unique departure in the unconscious by means of his imaginative power. From this Coleridge developed his theory of ‘Esemplastic Imagination’. He says in Miscellaneous Criticism “there is in genius itself an unconscious activity, nay, that is the genius in the man of genius.” The entire working of this unconscious activity in the man of genius which he calls ‘Esemplastic imagination’, lies in his well known phrase — ‘to make the external internal, the internal external’. This implies two aspects. The first part is to make external internal the outside Nature becomes thought in the mind of the poet. This is performed by what Coleridge calls primary imagination. In the second stage the internal becomes external, thought in the mind finds expression outside. This is performed by secondary imagination. In this whole process although mind of the poet intervenes and acts as the recording and transmitting instrument yet the process is to Coleridge an ‘unconscious activity’. From here we plunge into another theory, Freud’s theory of the subconscious and the libido from where, he says, art and poetry originate. This theory would make of poetry an ‘Inferno’s art’.
All these theories speak of the nature of poetic process as an instinctive one or an unconscious activity or having its origin in the subconscious and the libido. None speaks of the mystery of poetic inspiration, how it comes, how it acts and under what conditions; in fact none explains the entire poetic creation. None of these theories is plausible enough nor satisfactory nor appealing and complete. It is ultimately left to Sri Aurobindo to lay bare the process of this mysterious activity. In the history of poetics Sri Aurobindo’s greatest contribution lies in his explanation of the mechanism and working of poetic inspiration.
Sri Aurobindo is a yogi and a poet combined. In his yogic exploration he discovers the great and fundamental truth that consciousness is a power and it is at the base of and behind all creations, including the poetic. Consciousness is ‘the fundamental thing in existence’ and has two aspects: first, it is ‘a power of awareness of self and things’; secondly, it is ‘a dynamic and creative energy’. Further, as human sight and human hearing do not exhaust all the ‘gradations’ of colour and sound – for there is much above or below that is invisible, inaudible to man, “so there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact, — supramental or overmental and submental ranges.”12 Consciousness is essentially the same throughout but variable in status, condition and operation. ‘Variability in its status, condition and operation gives it the semblance of different ranges or planes of consciousness when in truth consciousness is one energy, only it acts at and from various levels’ of magnitude.
The power, the movement of consciousness creates the universe and all that is in it, the macrocosm as well as the microcosm is nothing but consciousness ‘arranging’ itself. “It will be evident that by consciousness is meant something which is essentially the same throughout... in which in some grades or conditions the activities we call consciousness can exist...”13
Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range. But it does not exhaust all the possible ranges or variables above or below the mind. These variables for the sake of convenience are called worlds or planes or gradations. “The gradations of consciousness are universal states not dependent on the outlook of the subjective personality; rather the outlook of the subjective personality is determined by the grade of consciousness in which it is organised according to its typal nature or its evolutionary stage.”13 If the ‘gradations of worlds or planes are regarded as a whole, they appear as a great connected complex movement. The higher concentrate their influences on the lower,
Here all experience was a single plan,
The thousand fold expression of the One.
— Savitri : 96
Then higher concentrate their influences on the lower, the ‘lower react to the higher and develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action’. Besides these universal gradations of consciousness, “in each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the gross physical and material plane. The same are repeated in the consciousness of general Nature.”14 Many are these universal gradations of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo calls collectively the ‘Overhead’ consciousness as they are beyond and above the mind plane. These gradations or variables in hierarchical order have been named by Sri Aurobindo as the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind or Intuition and the highest the Overmind. All these planes of consciousness are, however, in aparaprakriti, the world of ignorance. But the highest of the overhead planes is the transcendental Supermind, the Truth-consciousness. To understand the source and the operation of the mysterious Inspiration of the poets, a very clear and definite understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of and experience with all the levels of consciousness is necessary.
Sri Aurobindo says that ‘gradations of worlds or planes’ of consciousness in the cosmos is akin to what he calls ‘the World-Stair’ and they form ‘a great connected complex movement’.
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
This was the single stair to being’s goal.
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies.
— Savitri : 98
This is the single ‘complex movement’, hierarchies of consciousness.
The higher planes concentrate their influences on the lower, ‘the lower react to the higher and develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action’. Source of inspiration, the poetic creativity, according to Sri Aurobindo, depends upon the play of consciousness and its working. What is this play of consciousness and how does it work? If we understand this, then we enter into the mystery of poetic creation and the source and working of the inspiration.
All creations in the universe, including the poetic, are according to Sri Aurobindo the result of contact or ‘centralising’ of what we call our consciousness with some universal gradations of consciousness in general Nature. The mysterious planes of the inspiration lie in consciousness. The stress formed by the concentration of the poet’s consciousness at a particular level of its universal gradations releases the creative power of inspiration from that plane. Higher the point of concentration of the consciousness, intenser and purer becomes the light and power of inspiration. Therefore Sri Aurobindo’s advice to poets to alter the poise of their consciousness and station themselves in some plane of overhead consciousness.
The creative power, the poetic inspiration may act from any of the planes where and when the ‘contact’ is established by the poet’s consciousness. Where ‘the consciousness places itself and concentrates itself’, from that realm the inspiration comes, making the poet’s consciousness its channel. The poet’s consciousness may concentrate itself in the ego, in the mind or in the outside of the external being; poetry is then the expression of the physical externalities of life. It may concentrate in the inner mind and vital or the inmost psychic, ‘centralising’ its stress there, and poetry then becomes the expression of the inner being or of the still deeper psychic being. The consciousness may even ascend beyond mind, life and body to the wideness and freedom into the cosmic Self; poetry then becomes the utterance of the deepest soul of man and of the universal spirit in things. Poetic inspiration may thus originate from any of the regions where the consciousness puts the stress of its centralising force. This is Sri Aurobindo’s explanation of the origin and source of poetic inspiration and its working.
At this stage a question crops up. Do poems pre-exist on higher planes and they only need to be transmitted here by the poet’s consciousness? “A poem may pre-exist in the timeless as all creation preexists there, or else in some plane where the past, present and future exist together. But it is not necessary to presuppose anything of the kind to explain the phenomena of inspiration. All is here a matter of formation or creation.”15 Poetic activity, too, has to be a creation; that is the important point, explains Sri Aurobindo. The creative operation is — “By the contact with the source of inspiration the creative Power at one level or another and the human instrument, receptacle or channel get into contact.”15 This is the process. “If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready formed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human being is only a channel or receptacle, although he feels the joy of the creation and the joy of the avesh, enthousiasmos, elation of the inrush and the passage.”15 There may also be that “the creative source sends down the substance or stuff, the force and the idea, but the language, rhythm etc. are found somewhere in the instrument; he has to find the human transcription of something that is there in diviner essence above; then there is an illumination or excitement, a conscious labour of creation... Or a line or lines may come through from some plane and the poet excited to creation may build around them constructing his material or getting it from any source he can tap. There are many possibilities of this nature. There is also the possibility of an inspiration not from above but from somewhere within on the ordinary levels, some inner mind, emotional, vital etc which the mind practised in poetical technique works and according to its habitual faculty."16
But to receive an inspiration intenser and purer the point of ‘contact’ or concentrated stress has to be in the overhead planes. The poet must change himself. As inspiration comes from the ‘concentration’ of the consciousness and its stress on a particular level, the higher that level is the greater and purer will be the quality of inspiration. Advising a poet Sri Aurobindo tells him “To get back from the surface vital into the psychic and psychic vital, to raise the level of your mental from the intellect to the Illumined mind (a plane of the overhead) is your need in poetry and in yoga.”17 If one could always write direct from the Illumined mind or any other level of the overhead – finding there not only the poetic substance but the rhythm and language too, “that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The intellect produces the idea, even the poetic idea, too much for the sake of the idea alone; coming from the illumined mind the idea in a form of light and music is itself but the shining body of the Light Divine.”17 All depends on the growth of the poet’s consciousness. The poetic expression must be “a flowing out from a growing self within and not merely a mental creation or an aesthetic pleasure,” This comes by yogic practice. Hence, a seer poet has to be a yogi and a poet combined.
Sri Aurobindo then describes the poetry created from beyond the mind consciousness, from the overhead planes in the following words: “The poetry of the illumined mind is usually full of a play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the truth vivid — it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of the Intuition (Intuitive mind) may have play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them — it may be quite bare, it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it.”18 But the highest of the overhead planes in the lower hemisphere is the Overmind. It is from here that the highest kind of poetry, the Mantra of the Real, comes. “Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into the infinite and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of thing it speaks of but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all.”18 However, ‘the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry. The Overmind is a ‘superhuman consciousness’ and to write from that plane is not possible unless the human nature is elevated beyond the human level to the Overmind. The highest of the overhead planes, strictly speaking, is the Supermind in the transcendental plane. And to expect the Supramental inspiration to create poetry is, to say mildly, ‘the error of the impatient aspirant’. When the Overmind inspiration itself is the rarest commodity, then to expect a Supramental inspiration to come down is ‘ignorantly ambitious’.
It has often been seen that a poem has different tones or pitches of expression; not only of expression but even of the poet’s vision of truth. This is very well explained by Sri Aurobindo’s ‘contact’ theory. As it has already been discussed earlier that the origin and quality of poetic inspiration depends on the level of the point of contact the poet’s consciousness makes with a particular level of the universal gradation. Then by one reason or the other this contact glides upward to bring into the poet a higher or truer and purer inspiration; the contact or the centralising stress may also slide down in the scale so as to create from a lower inspiration. Such a sliding of the contact in the scale of gradations is what Sri Aurobindo calls ‘variations’ in inspirational planes that result in diverse tones of poetic expression and vision in a poem. The working of such variations in the poetic inspiration is because the poet “starts from a high plane but the connecting consciousness cannot receive uninterruptedly from there and as soon as it flickers or wavers it comes down to a lower, perhaps without noticing it, or the lower comes in to supply the continuation of the flow or on the contrary the consciousness starts from a lower plane and is lifted in the avesh perhaps occasionally, .... or else the higher force attracted by the creative will breaks through or touches or catches up the less excited inspiration towards or into itself... On the lower planes beginning from the mental downwards there can also be such variations...”19 What generally happens is that ‘the sudden wings of a supreme inspiration from above have swooped down’ upon the poet and lifts him abruptly for a moment to highest heights, ‘then as abruptly dropped him and left him to his own normal resources’.
In the field of poetic activity an oft repeated inspirational problem is faced by poets. They often complain of lack or interrupted flow of inspiration in their writings. This state, says Sri Aurobindo, could very well be ‘a stage of preparation for a greater development hereafter’. He gives some other reasons too. A general cause of interrupted visits from the Muse is either ‘too long a disuse of one’s poetic gift or over – eagerness for perfection.’ A greater reason which is of a serious magnitude is that too often ‘the poetic part (is) caught in the mere mind’. “It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who don’t mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour, fluency to carry it off are usually the abundant writers.”20 However, “the interference of the mental is one of the great stumbling blocks when one tries to write from above.”21
For a smooth and effective working of the inspiration, says Sri Aurobindo, certain conditions are needed to be fulfilled. These are as under: First the poet must change himself i.e. alter the poise of his consciousness and station himself in the overhead planes. If one could always write from the overhead plane, say the Illumined Mind finding from there the poetic substance, rhythm and language too, “that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The illumined Mind clothes the poetic idea in a form of light and music of its own.”22 Secondly, the creative operation is the result of the stress with the source of inspiration, the creative power at one level or another where the human instrument, receptacle or channel gets into contact. In such a process it is no use trying to pull down the inspiration; the poet must avoid pulling down the inspiration forcibly by his mental consciousness, must not strive to pull at it. Instead, “the absolutely right thing comes in a sort of receptive self-opening and calling-down condition.”23
This light comes not by struggle or by thought;
In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts
And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.
— Savitri : 315
An intense aspiration or call in the quiet and silence of the mind shall be a great help. Listen, again to another verse —
Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,
Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind
Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.
— Savitri : 38
Therefore Sri Aurobindo’s advice to poets to keep “the consciousness uplifted... that it then remains ready for the flow from above when that comes. To get as early as possible to the highest range one must keep the consciousness steadily turned towards it and maintain the call.”24 This is what in poetry is called the poet’s invocation to the Muses. To remain in entire quietude in the silence of the mind, in a condition of passive receptivity of a high – poised consciousness, are the primary conditions for the true inspiration to visit the poet, ‘and not to thrash the inner air vainly for the inrush of some inspiration. This is the process.’
The New Poetry — its Overmind Aesthesis:
The Overmind, on the contrary, is concerned more with bringing out the truth. “It is essentially a spiritual power.’26 Sri Aurobindo explains the nature of the Overmind: “It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought.... It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity... Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first, it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities,... it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.”26
In this sense the two words — Overmind and Aesthetics – are not compatible, and “Obviously, the Overmind and aesthetics cannot be equated together.”26 Yet all poetry must have an aesthesis of some kind or other; “Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art.”27 The only conclusion we may arrive at is that a new overhead poetry cannot be appreciated by the existing theory of aesthesis; “there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.”28 Ordinarily, by aesthesis is meant something concerned with beauty ‘and that indeed is its most prominent concern,‘ agrees Sri Aurobindo. But going deeper into the origin of aesthetics, he extends its meaning, scope and working; to him aesthesis is ‘concerned with many other things also’. This becomes evident from his theory of the origin of aesthesis. He writes, “it is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things. Universal Ananda is the artist and creator of the universe witnessing, experiencing and taking joy in its creation.”29 As this Ananda sinks in its dark negation towards the Inconscient, there is a diminishing of its intensity — ‘intensity of being, intensity of consciousness, intensity of force, intensity of the delight in things and the delight of existence’. There grows a general tone of neutrality’ and indifference’ as a result of the devolution of consciousness. In the lower consciousness ‘it creates its opposites, the sense of ugliness as well as the sense of beauty, hate and repulsion and dislike as well as love and attraction and liking, grief and pain as well as joy and delight’. From these dualities born from ‘the universal insensibly’ as a result of Ananda’s sinking in dark negation that the present aesthetics originates. Similarly in the reverse movement of the consciousness towards the higher levels there is an increase of these intensities, and aesthesis can share in this intensification, and “as it enters the Overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding esctasy. The ground is no longer a general neutrality but a pure spiritual ease and happiness...”29 To this overhead aesthesis the ordinary aesthesis of the lower consciousness has to change. Secondly, the ordinary aesthesis to become the Overmind has to acquire a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight which it had lost during the plunge of the consciousness. Then it acquires a most integral experience of the Overmind: “It sees also the one spirit in all, the face of the Divine everywhere and there can be no greater Ananda than that,...”30
The Overmind has ‘an essential aesthesis’. “It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular... When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.26 But the revelation of truth by the Overhead planes, and specially by the Overmind, is ‘not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect’. It can also be ‘a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever’. There is no dichotomy between seeking after truth and its expression through beauty. “The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty. He can feel a poetic and aesthetic joy in the expression of the true as well as in the expression of the beautiful. He does not make a mere intellectual or philosophical statement of the truth; it is his vision of its beauty, its power, his thrilled reception of it, his joy in it that he tries to convey by an utmost perfection in word and rhythm...”31 In such an Aesthesis where is the incompatibility between truth and beauty, between Overmind and Aesthetics. This could be possible because Sri Aurobindo in his theory has raised ordinary aesthesis to the level of Overmind consciousness where there can be no disharmony. The Overmind aesthesis “can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous form and the consciousness that receives it a supreme height and depth of ecstasy. The Overmind of Sri Aurobindo ‘sees and thinks and creates in masses’. It ‘reunites separated things’, ‘reconciles opposites’. Hence in the Overmind Aesthesis “truth and beauty not only become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true.31 This is the Overmind Aesthesis: “A rapture of the thrilled undying Word” (Savitri: 38), where
There is the imperishable harmony,
The world’s contradictions climb to her and are one.
— Savitri : 661
Such a fundamental and universal aesthesis “can create a sheer and pure poetry impossible for the intellect to sound to its depths or wholly grasp, much less to mentalise and analyse.”31
The Overmind aesthesis is in truth a universal aesthesis of beauty and delight that uplifts all things, expressing its truth through them and moulding the truth into ‘a field or objects of its divine aesthesis’, bringing with it ‘a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection’. Yet in its working the aim is always the truth and truth revelation.
The power of Overmind Aesthesis, according to Sri Aurobindo, has two ways of acting, provided one is willing to alter the poise of one’s consciousness turning it steadily towards the highest and make the mind ‘sufficiently subtle and plastic to enter into all kinds of poetic vision and expression’. The two modes of its operation are: First, in one who has not fully and strictly fulfilled the conditions, in such a case the power of Overmind merely “touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character.”32 This is the Overmind touch on the poetic mind. Secondly, in one who fulfils the conditions, “it (Overmind) brings down into these normal modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive of a superhuman level.”32 Poetry created from the latter action is true Overmind poetry. Both the actions when working in poetry may produce things exquisite and beautiful. But a greater poetry, more unique is produced by the second way. Sometimes, on some extremely rare occasion, “there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature.”33 Poetry then becomes the Mantra of the Real. The Overmind can create a poetry which surpasses other levels of inspiration, ‘greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.’ The overhead planes can add much to”the domain of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all...34
Regarding the aim and function of the new poetry Sri Aurobindo sums up : “The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the kingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man’s inner being but in his life and his works. Poetry also may have its share in that revolution and become part of the spiritual empire.”35 To give a mentally constructed definition of Overmind poetry and its aesthesis with any precision to ‘satisfy the intellect’s demand for clear and positive statement’ is very difficult, says Sri Aurobindo. This poetry “has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one’s experience or one’s deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or the other which rings out and cannot be gain-said.”36 To conclude our examination of the significance and contribution of this poetry and this new aesthesis in the words of Sri Aurobindo: “It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things so that it could never lack in beauty.”34
Let us recall here what Coleridge said of poetic genius in his Miscellaneous Criticism, “there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius." To Sri Aurobindo the source of poetic genius is neither the unconscious nor the subconscious; it is the overhead consciousness. “In a certain sense all genius comes from overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or a possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use.”32
Such a ‘rhythmic and creative self-expression in poetry, an intuitive revealing poetry’ or poetry to be the ‘Mantra of the Real’ is possible by ‘a supreme harmony of five eternal powers, Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit’. These powers form the governing principles or ‘laws’ of the new ‘Aesthesis’ of the future poetry. These are the ‘five suns’ of Sri Aurobindo’s poetics. The five principles of poetics as enunciated by him are as follows.
The Sun of poetic Truth:
Truth is one of the high powers of the inspired singer. But what is that sunlight of Truth in which the poet must see and ultimately ‘shape from its burning rays the flame – stuff of his creation’? For the votaries of realism in literature, poetic truth is the stark and naked reality of the surface life, what we see in life, vitally feel and energetically think, the raw, rough, concrete and dynamic facts of experience in opposition to life’s innocence, spontaneity, innate beauty, goodwill, etc — should all these be ‘transferred without any selective process into poetic form’? In the name of realism they demand poetry to be faithful to life, to express all the dirt and mire that come up to the surface of life from the subconscious. This outward life as we see it is a field of all that is sordid and ugly, all that is corrupt and falsehood. To express this in poetry is not only a waste of poetic power and energy but it lowers too the already low human consciousness. Besides, the true function of poetry is to liberate what is ‘concealed in life’s hermetic envelope’.
Then we have the ‘academic conception’ of truth, the truth of reason which includes philosophic and scientific truths. Here poetry becomes a criticism of life set in a high and serious tone, as Arnold regarded poetry, though its form remains artistic. Also there is in academic conception of truth a general dislike of free imagination and things visionary, subtle remote. A poet may give us truth of philosophy, truth of religion or even truth of science provided he transmutes it into its poetic form and spirit. The moment a poet stands before the altar of the Muse, he has to change his ‘robes’ of personality, irrespective of the truth he expresses, opines Sri Aurobindo. The poet becomes a personality who looks ‘with a more richly irised seeing eye and speaks with a more rapturous voice’. Philosophy, religion and science have their joy of deep and comprehensive understanding but that is not the ‘joy of the word, the rapturous voice of the poet’. There are instances of great poetry expressing truths of philosophy, religion and science as in Lucretius, Goethe and ancient Indian poets of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita.
However, the Truth of which Sri Aurobindo speaks is ‘the very front and face of Infinity’:
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light
All – ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
In a golden country keeps her measureless house;
— Savitri : 661
This truth is many sided and has many distinct ways of expressing itself and each follows its own law and process of self-expression. Many are the facets of the one infinite Truth and they express themselves according to the mind or the receptacle through which they are channelled : for Truth is the same, it only takes different shapes of the vessels in which it pours itself-
The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
But shaped into vessels for the spirit’s use,
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase
— Savitri 662-3
The poetic truth differs from say a philosophic or religious truth in having been given ‘a new significance by the transforming power of poetic vision’. Poetry adopts distinct method of expression and gives a different face to the infinite Truth by speaking of it ‘with a more rapturous voice’:
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup.
—Savitri : 38
To Sri Aurobindo the poetic mind differs from a philosophic or a scientific mind broadly in two ways. First, the poetic mind is endowed with ‘the transforming power of poetic vision’. Secondly, the poetic mind sees truths “by intuition and direct perception and brings out what they give him by a formative stress on the total image,... the living truth of the form, of the life that inspires it, of the creative thought behind and the supporting movement of the soul and a rhythmic harmony of these things revealed to his delight in their beauty.”39 Yet it remains an unfortunate fact and one of the accidents in the history of liteary criticism that Plato, one of the greatest philosophers most endowed with a high poetic sensibility, failed to see this point and sacrificed poetry in preference to philosophy.
A great integrator as he is, Sri Aurobindo finds no antagonism among the many facets of the Truth as expressed by philosophy or religion or poetry. These are all aspects of the one infinite Truth, varying only in the method and power of expression:
There is the Truth of which the world’s truths are shreds,
The light of which the world’s ignorance is the shade
— Savitri 661
And ‘at their end when they come into their deepest spirit, they begin to approach each other and touch’:
There is the imperishable harmony;
The world’s contradictions climb to her and are one.
— Savitri : 661
—
Many aspects of the one Truth meet and harmonise at a higher level of consciousness though here there appears to be contradictions. Sri Aurobindo’s vision points out this truth, “The meeting is not here at the base, but on the tops.”39 The ancient Indian culture, therefore, strung philosophy, religion and psycho-spiritual sciences into one unity, and for the expression of these truths always the poetic speech was used.
‘This universe an old enchantment guards’, and to reveal and to express that ‘World-Delight’ in rhythmic words of beauty is the primary function of poetry. “But at the same time it is at any rate part of its highest function to serve the spirit and to illumine and lead through beauty and build by a high informing and revealing delight the soul of man.”40
The field of poetry is certainly not any religious or ethical ground, nor the pursuit of knowledge. It is rather “all soul experience, its appeal is to the aesthetic response of the soul to all that touches it in self or world; it is one of the high and beautiful powers of our inner and may be a power of our inmost life. All of the infinite Truth of being that can be made part of that life, all that can be made true and beautiful and living to that experience, is poetic truth and a fit subject matter of poetry.”40
This is the first principle of Sri Aurobindo’s new poetics, ‘the sun of poetic truth in whose universal light the poet creates’. The illumined powers of thought and life are centred round the fountain of eternal Truth:
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All – seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space
— Savitri 47
To find the way into that ‘inexpressible Mystery’ with ‘the waking self’ is to be the seer poet and discover the highest power of the inspired word, the Mantra’.
The Breath of Greater Life:
The poetry of the mid nineteenth century had a dominant intellectuality, a preoccupation with reflective thought. But an excess of reason and intellectuality is not conducive to a moved vision and the uplifting breath of life in poetry. Exceptions were a few rare poets like Whitman who strove by sheer thought power towards a greater truth of the soul. Unfortunately Whitman’s poetry found refuge in the new anarchic form, of course a vindication of freedom of movement. All the same Whitman’s contribution is great. He brought to poetry the power and sincerity of life against the tyranny of reasoning and critical intellect. But a firm grasp of a greater life has not yet come to poetry in general.
Poetry to be great requires the enlightening power of the poet’s vision of truth and ‘the sustaining power of the breath of greater life’. “Poetry is the rhythmic voice of life, but it is one of the inner and not one of the surface voices.”41 The new poetry too must deal with life, but not with the outward physical only or with the life of passions and emotions or with the ideal life imaged by the mind. Along with these aspects the new poetry of Sri Aurobindo’s concept shall be the revelation and expression of life of the soul. The living reality of the eternal and universal spirit and its hidden beauty has to be revealed. To Sri Aurobindo “poetry is a self – expressive power of the spirit and where the soul of things is most revealed in its very life by the rhythmic word, there is the fullest achievement of the poet’s function.”41 Future poetry can least afford to chain itself to the surface realities which we too often mistake for the whole of life. The demand for exact presentation of life in poetry is not acceptable to Sri Aurobindo, for crudities of life are, to say the least, not often beautiful, and art always deals with the beautiful. The breath of a greater life shall open ‘new realms of vision, new realms of being’. In these greater realms—
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
Beauty was there creation’s native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
There love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams...
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
— Savitri : 235
And in this greater life
Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,
Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm
And liberated her immense desires.
— Savitri : 235
To conclude, the second principle of Sri Aurobindo’s theory of aesthesis, the breath of a greater life, shall make the new poetry express “the strong and infinite sense, the spiritual and vital joy, the exalting power of a greater breath of life.”42
Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty:
Sri Aurobindo says that light of Truth and the breath of a greater Life together cannot give perfection to poetry. The poetry of Whitman is a glaring example of this insufficiency of perfection. Though his poetry reveals the soul of truth with a vaster breath of life, yet it lacks the soul and form of poetic delight and beauty : The light of truth and the breath of life though great and potent powers for poetic creation, yet unless the poet serves the twin deities of delight and beauty he cannot achieve perfection of composition. It is these powers that harmonise the diverse threads and give forms of rhythmic beauty and joy to truth and life. “For the poet the moon of beauty and delight is a greater godhead”43 says Sri Aurobindo. It is this godhead that impresses poetry with the intoxicating rapture of the soul:
All being it explores for unknown bliss,
Sounds all experience for things new and strange.
Life brings into the earthly creature’s days
A tongue of glory from a higher sphere:
It deepens in his musings and his Art,
It leaps at the spelendour of some perfect word...
— Savitri : 631
For Sri Aurobindo ‘delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight’, and the two are inseparable: “Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin.” (X,3). It is beauty and delight that impart to poetry ‘an unaging youth, an eternal moment’.
A secret air of pure felicity
Deep like a sapphire heaven our spirits breathe;
Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call,
Our senses grope for it and touch and lose.
If this withdrew, the world would sink in the void;
If this were not, nothing could move or live.
Savitri : 629
Regarding the source and origin of poetic delight and beauty, Sri Aurobindo asserts, “The poetic delight and beauty are born of a deeper ratpure and not of the surface mind’s excited interest and enjoyment of life and existence.”44 The poet creates from the impersonal and eternal fountains of joy and beauty from where they flow down through the ‘charm’d magic casements’, and the poet ‘transmutes by its alchemy’ the experiences of life and existence into a form of the spirit’s bliss. The poet is truly ‘a spokesman of the eternal spirit of beauty and delight’ and not a mere handmaiden of aesthetic pleasure.
The Power of the Spirit:
Sri Aurobindo regards poetry of the future ‘a voice of eternal things’ which shall raise to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy ‘the events and emotions and transiences of life’. Under the power of the spirit all these will be seen and sung as ‘the steps of an eternal manifestation’. Thus poetry shall restore to humanity the sense of the Eternal and the presence of the Divine’. But about one thing Sri Aurobindo is very emphatic; it shall not speak of these things in a feeble and conventional tone of traditional religion; it shall be ‘a voice of intuitive experience and rhythm and chant of the revelation of an eternal presence.’ Then
The Word, a mighty and inspiring voice,
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
— Savitri : 660
And this can be achieved by the power of the Spirit.
In a poet ‘it is always indeed the spirit in him that shapes his poetic utterance’. The power of his spirit’s vision will make even the most commonplace a thing splendid, noble and beautiful,
Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine
When it was there, the heart’s abyss was filled;
But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,
Existence lost its aim in the inane.
— Savitri : 305 – 6.
“This growth of the power of the spirit must necessarily bring into it (poetry) a more intense and revealing speech, a more inward and subtle and penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of sight, a more vibrant and responsive sense... That will be the type of the new utterance and the boundless field of poetic discovery left for the inspiration of the humanity of the future.”45
Giving a self-assessment of his new concept, Sri Aurobindo writes, “This is a theory of poetry, a view of the rhythmic and creative self-expression to which we give that name, which is very different from any that we now hold, a sacred or hieratic ars poetica only possible in days when man believed himself to be near to the gods and felt their presence in his bosom and could think he heard some accents of their divine and eternal wisdom take form on the heights of his mind”.37 He continues, “And perhaps no thinking age has been so far removed from any such view of our life as the one through which we have recently passed and even now are not well out its shadow, the age of materialism, the age of positive outward matter of fact and of scientific and utilitarian reason”.37
This greater Truth is foreign to our thoughts;
Where a free Wisdom works, they seek for a rule;
— Savitri : 272
“A poetry of this kind need not be at all something high and remote or beautifully and delicately intangible, or not that alone, but will make too the highest things near, close and visible, will sing greatly and beautifully of all that has been sung... but with a new reconciling and fusing vision that will make them other to us than they have been even when yet the same. If it wings to the heights, it will not leave earth unseen below it, but also will not confine itself to earth, but find too other realities and their powers on man and take all the planes of existence for its empire”46 And in the process it will ‘transform the secrets of the older poets’, “transfigure the old rhythms by the insistence of the voice of its deeper subtler spirit and create new characteristic harmonies, reveal other greater powers and spirits of language”46 The objective of Sri Aurobindo is creation of an ‘altered perfected art of poetry’ and his theory is an attempt to “put the poetic spirit once more in the shining front of the powers and guides of the ever-progressing soul of humanity.”46
The New Poetry — its form:
A change in the poetic spirit and its aesthesis necessiates a change of its forms. In the beginning the change of form would more be an inward one than outward, less apparent to the eye. This poetry in the very beginning is not expected to bring in new revolutionary poetic moulds, shattering the old forms. Initially there would be some subtle, inner and profound changes, yet maintaining outwardly the old forms. These subtle changes would mainly cover stylistic changes including a new rhythmic language which would raise this poetry as ‘Mantra of the Real’, and also bring new connotations of words and their usage. “A change in the spirit of poetry must necessarily bring with it a change of its forms, and this departure may be less or greater to the eye, more inward or more outward, but always there must be at least some subtle and profound alteration... The opening of the creative mind into an intuitive and revelatory poetry need not itself compel a revolution and total breaking up of the old forms and a creation of altogether new moulds:”47 The new poetry would be ‘an opening up of new potentialities in old instruments and a subtle inner change of their character’. Previous revolutions in the domain of poetry have always been ‘within the limits of the normal and received action of the poetic intelligence’. It may be expected to be so now too. But the upward and inward movement and the widening of the consciousness at the present juncture is of such rapidity and magnitude that it is very likely and natural that there may appear ‘an irresistible breaking out of all familiar bounds’ and the ‘new creation should wish to break too the old moulds as a restriction and a fettering narrowness’. The new poetic spirit may discover and invent ‘novel and unprecedented forms’ for the freer, subtler, vaster spirit of the new poetry. To satisfy the changed poetic vision, subtler inner changes are of first importance in all the existing forms of poetry.
The New Poetry — its speech:
“A development of the kind of which we are speaking must affect not only the frames of poetry, but initiate also a subtle change of its word and rhythmic movement.”48 It is imperative that ‘the old habits of speech’ and rhythmic movement have to be substituted by new movements and new connotations and usage of the poetic word if the future poetry has to be the soul’s self-expression. Says Sri Aurobindo, “The poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit, the chosen medium of the soul’s self-expression, and any profound modification of the inner habit of the soul, its thought atmosphere, its way of seeing, its type of feeling, any change of the light in which it lives and the power of the breath which it breathes, greatening of its elevations or entry into deeper chambers of its self must reflect itself in a corresponding modification, changed intensity of light or power, inner greatening and deepening of the word which it has to use, and if there is no such change or if it is not sufficient for the new intention of the spirit, then there can be no living or no perfect self-expression.”48 It is only ‘the conservatism of the human mind’ that may stand in the way of a subtle change of its word and rhythmic movement’. A change in the poetic medium i.e. connotations of the word and poetic rhythm always occasioned in the past too whenever poetic spirit entered a new phase of evolution. There is a marked change in the poetic speech of Shakespeare’s age from that of Chaucer or of the romantic age from that of the restoration.
The words, if looked at from the point of view of their external formation, seem to be mere physical sounds which ‘a device of the mind has made to represent certain objects and ideas and perceptions’; but from the point of view of their inmost psychological aspect, “we shall see that what constitutes speech and gives it its life and appeal and significance is a subtle conscious force which informs and is the soul of the body of sound: it is a superconscient Nature – Force raising its material out of our subconscience but growing conscious in its operations in the human mind that develops itself in one fundamental way and yet variously in language.”49 It is this superconscient Force, ‘the goddess of creative Speech’, that ‘acts in us through different subtle nervous centres’ on various levels. Thus the word has a graduation of its expressive powers of truth and vision. If this idea of ‘different degrees of the force of speech’ is recognised and accepted, then can be explained the various degrees of word-force characteristic of prose speech as well as of the poetic. In prose the word-force ‘avails ordinarily to distinguish and state things to the conceptual intelligence’; while “the word of the poet sees and presents in its body and image to a subtle visual perception in the mind awakened by an inner rhythmic audition truth of soul and thought experience and truth of sense and life, the spiritual and living actuality of idea and object”49, explains Sri Aurobindo; this is what he calls ‘the seeing speech of the seeing mind’.
The poetic speech, in general, depending on the level of consciousness from which it acts, has ‘different grades of its power of vision and expression of vision’. Sri Aurobindo has mainly distinguished five kinds of poetic style — the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired and the inevitable, and of course the transitional ones when the one passes into the other. This speech at its lowest rung is ‘a poetic adequacy’.... a ‘compact and vivid force of presentation’, raised from an intellectual expression by emotional and sensational elements, as in the poetry of Dryden. This speech is like a terse prose statement, though slightly raised to the poetical by a not too deep ‘emotional centre of response’.
The speech of poetic adequacy pass on to the next rung of the gradation — the poetic rhetoric. This speech keeps itself above the poetic adequacy by ‘just managing to bring in some element of rhythmic emotion and vision’. This may, however, lead to a sublimer poetic rhetoric by ‘a greater spirit and less intellectual and more imaginative sincerity and elevation of thought, feeling and vision’. This is found in Milton.
The next rung of the poetic speech is ‘poetic effectivity’. It is ‘a richer, subtler and usually a truer poetic effectivity’ which cannot be attained by the rhetoric way. This speech can be attained only “through a language succeeding by apt and vivid metaphor and simile, richness and beauty of phrase or the forceful word that makes the mind see the body of the thought with a singularly living directness or energy of suggestion and nearness.”50 This speech of poetic effectivity may glide into the ‘dynamically effective’ style as in Wordsworth’s
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair,
Like Twilight’s too, her dusky hair;
Or Shelley’s
Its passion will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
Such poetic speech of dynamically effective nature has given much opulence to English poetry and has imparted to it much of its energy and power. Yet to Sri Aurobindo’s expectation “this is not the highest degree of which poetic speech is capable.”51 There are innumerable heights of consciousness from where the poetic speech may come floating down, “a more intimate vision, a more penetrating spiritual emotion, a more intense and revealing speech to which the soul can be more vibrantly sensible”51 This is the ‘illuminating poetic speech’.
The illuminating speech “comes to its first self-discovery when either the adequate or the dynamically effective style is raised into a greater illumination in which the inner mind sees and feels object, emotion, idea not only clearly or richly or distinctly and powerfully, but in a flash or outbreak of transforming light which kindles the thought or image into a disclosure of new significance of a much more inner character, a more profoundly revealing vision, emotion, spiritual response.”51 But this poetic speech comes suddenly and rarely. “It comes in luminous phrases emerging from a fine and lucid adequacy and the justice or the delicacy makes place for a lustrous profundity of suggestion.”51 Sri Aurobindo gives exquisite examples of the power of this poetic speech from Shelley.
The silent moon,
In her interlunar swoon.
and Wordsworth
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
This is ‘the pure illuminative speech of poetry’ much above the poetic adequacy or the dynamically effective style. The illuminative speech of poetry Sri Aurobindo describes as “an altogether supra-intellectual light of intuitive substance and vision and utterance... an increasing intensity and finally a concentrated purity and fullness of the substance and language of intuitive expression.”52 But this poetic speech too is not sufficient to express the new poetry.
The language and style of intuitive illumination has, therefore, to emerge into a more uplifted range of an inspired and revelatory utterance, ‘the more purely intuitive utterance’ which is the most rare and difficult for poetic intelligence to achieve. Sri Aurobindo gives two examples, voicing a kindred idea. One is Shakespeare’s
Life is but a walking shadow...
it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The other is Shelley’s
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments
Sri Aurobindo estimates the one as having “the colour of an intuition of the life-soul....”, while “the other is the thought mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence”.53 Unfortunately English poetry has lost this poetic speech and to recover that should be the prime endeavour of the new poetry. An intuitive poetic speech can alone be the fit medium of the new poetry of the future. Then.
A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,
A rapture of the thrilled undying Word,
Poured into his heart as into an empty cup.
— Savitri : 38
But the poetic speech does not end here in its evolution. It can express itself from “the boundless finite’s last expanse, the cosmic empire of the Overmind” (Savitri : 660). Then poetry becomes a true ‘Mantra of the Real’. Such a poetic utterance may be cited from Savitri. Here are a few opening lines of a famous passage —
Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
— Savitri : 14
The entire passage runs to more than fifty lines. The passage is indeed a marvel of poetic expression.
This in brief is Sri Aurobindo’s theory of poetry and the poetics of his new aesthetics. But two very significant questions come before us and they need some explanation. These questions are: First, is his theory of poetry like any other earlier theories given by poets or critics and has no significant aim and purpose, just beating its wings ineffectually in the void? Secondly, is it possible to create a poetry of the type that Sri Aurobindo envisages in his theory.
Sri Aurobindo is not any arm-chair yogi. His yoga aims at a mighty and decisive action to build the soul and life of man in the image of the Maker, to unmask the Divine and establish that divinity in earthly life:
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth,
— Savitri : 55
To unveil this true meaning of creation is the work Sri Aurobindo assigns to the new poetry and it cannot on any account be called ineffectual beating of wings or ‘hazy’ as some self-styled critics are apt to comment. “It is this spiritual realisation that the future poetry (of Sri Aurobindo’s concept) has to help forward by giving to it its eye of sight, its shape of aesthetic beauty, its revealing tongue and it is this greatening of life that it has to make its substance.”54 it is in truth a poetry with a larger cosmic vision and a greater power to uplift human consciousness and thereby build the soul of humanity. Poets “who most completely see with this vision and speak with the inspiration of its utterance are those who shall be the creators of the poetry of the future.”55
As regard the second question whether poetry of this kind is at all possible to create, and, if yes, in what poetic form! Of course nothing is impossible for the creative power provided the poet is in the proper poise of consciousness. And the most suitable poetic form for such a vast design to achieve would certainly be the epic. Epic, it is said, belonged to the ‘heroic age’ proper to primitive ages. But the new epic shall not be presentation of external action; it shall be ‘the epic of the soul most inwardly seen’ from ‘some profound and mighty voice’. In these phrases and comments Sri Aurobindo clearly anticipates his own creation of an epic in accordance with his theory of poetics. He not only gives a new theory but also shows the way how it can be done, and done superbly. And Savitri is the result. Here the poet is.
A voyager upon uncharted routes
Fronting the viewless danger of the unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another space and time.
— Savitri : 91
“To create a poetic mould (a magnum opus) equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bound of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as a maker of a new spiritual epoch.56” Savitri is “the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed,” writes R.F. Piper “Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.”
In concluding this chapter on making of a new poetry for the future, let us listen to the grand, assuring and confident voice of one who has himself seen, experienced, realised in his being all the planes of overhead consciousness including the transcendent Supramental and the Sachchidanand consciousness and one who in his mighty inspired tongue sings of his Truth vision. Sri Aurobindo says, “A conscious attempt to write Overhead poetry... would probably result in a partial success;... and in its supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages... But its greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty.”57 Then in a covert and veiled reference to his own role in the creation of the new Overmind poetry, he writes, “If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domain of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality....”57 The last sentence of the above quotation very compactly presents the gist of this grand Epic of epics. Such is Savitri, the Song of Life Divine
 |
 |
 |
The
Web site and administration does not take any responsiblities of any kind for
the material published in Books/Articles .And also the Opinions and Views published
in Books/Articles
are solely of the writers and contributors.For any Query you may directly contact
them either by e-mail address or by Mailing address.
Terms and Condition
for Publication of Book/Article