Sri Aurobindo's letters on Savitri - Part 2
As to the many criticisms1 contained in your letter I have a good deal to say; some of
them bring forward questions of the technique of mystic poetry about which I wanted to write in an
introduction to Savitri when it is published, and I may as well say something about that here.
...Rapid transitions from one image to another are a constant feature in Savitri as in most mystic
poetry. I am not here2 building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single
continuous image or variations of the same image. I am describing a rapid series of transitions,
piling one suggestion upon another. There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch,
then the first "beauty and wonder" leading to the magical gate and the "lucent corner". Then comes
the failing of the darkness, the simile used ("a falling cloak") suggesting the rapidity of the
change. Then as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap, - if you want
to be logically consistent you can look at the rift as a slit in the "cloak" which becomes a big tear.
Then all changes into a "brief perpetual sign", the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent
aura. In such a race of rapid transitions you cannot bind me down to a logical chain of figures or
a classical monotone. The mystic Muse is more of an inspired Bacchante of the Dionysian wine than an
orderly housewife.
...Again, do you seriously want me to give an accurate scientific
description of the earth half in darkness and half in light so as
1 The nature of these criticism must not be misunderstood. Just as the merits of Savitri
were appreciated to the utmost, whatever seems a shortcoming no matter how slight and negligible
in the midst of the abundant excellence was pointedly remarked upon so that Sri Aurobindo might not
overlook anything in his work towards what he called "perfect perfection" before the poem came
under the scrutiny of non-Aurobindonian critics at the time of publication. The commentator was
anxious that there should be no spots on Savitri's sun. The purpose was also to get important
issues cleared up in relation to the sort of poetry Sri Aurobindo as writing and some of his
disciples aspired to write. Knowing the spirit and aim of the criticisms Sri Aurobindo welcomed
them, even asked for them. On many occasions - and these provide most of the matter collected here -
he vigorously defended himself, but on several he willingly agreed to introduce small changes.
Once he is reported to have smiled and said: "Is he satisfied now?" Unfortunately, the opportunity
to discuss every part of the poem did not arise and we have, therefore, only a limited number of
psychological and technical elucidations by him of his art.
2 P3 - 4
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to spoil my impressionist symbol1 or else to revert to the conception of earth as a flat and immobile surface? I am not
writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of
the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One
who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a
forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice this impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through
dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether, for this is a necessary part of it. As a matter of fact in the passage
itself earth in its wheeling does come into the dawn and pass from darkness into the light. You must take the idea as a whole and
in all its transitions and not press one detail with too literal an insistence. In this poem I present constantly one partial view of
life or another temporarily as if it were the whole in order to give full value to the experience of those who are bound by that
view, as for instance, the materialist conception and experience of life, but if any one charges me with philosophical inconsistency,
then it only means that he does not understand the technique of the Overmind interpretation of life.
...I come next to the
passage which you so violently attack, about the Inconscient waking Ignorance. In the first place, the word "formless" is indeed
defective, not so much because of any repetition but because it is not the right word or idea and I was not myself satisfied with it.
I have changed the passage as follows:
But the teasing of the Inconscient remains and evidently you think that it is bad poetic taste to tease something so bodiless and unreal as the Inconscient. But here several fundamental issues arise. First of all, are words like Inconscient and Ignorance necessarily an abstract technical jargon? If so, do not words like consciousness, knowledge etc, undergo the same ban? Is it meant that they are
1P1
2P1 - 2
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abstract philosophical terms and can have no real or concrete meaning, cannot represent things that one
feels and senses or must often fight as one fights a visible foe? The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be
mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come into collision with
them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose
resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass. In fact, in writing
this line I had no intention of teaching philosophy or forcing in an irrelevant metaphysical idea, although
the idea may be there in implication. I was presenting a happening that was to me something sensible and, as
one might say, psychologically and spiritually concrete. The Inconscient comes in persistently in the
cantos of the First Book of Savitri: e.g.
There too a metaphysical idea might be read into or behind the thing seen. But does that make it technical
jargon or the whole thing an illegitimate mixture? It is not so to my poetic sense. But you might say,
"It is so to the non-mystical reader and it Is that reader whom you have to satisfy, as it is for the
general reader that you are writing and not for yourself alone." But if I had to write for the general
reader I could not have written Savitri at all. It is in fact for myself that I have written it and for
those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry.
This is
the real stumbling-block of mystic poetry and specially mystic poetry of this kind. The mystic feels
real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the
ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of
experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality. Either they are unintelligible to it and in
meeting them it flounders about as if in an obscure abyss or it takes them as poetic fancies expressed in
intellectually devised images. That was how a critic in the Hindu condemned such poems as Nirvana
and Transformation. He said that they were mere intellectual
1 P 79
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conceptions and images and there was nothing of religious feeling or spiritual experience. Yet Nirvana*
was as close a transcription of a major experience as could be given in language coined by the human mind
of a realisation in which the mind was entirely silent and into which no intellectual conception could at
all enter. One has to use words and images in order to convey to the mind some perception, some figure of
that which is beyond thought. The critic's non-understanding was made worse by such a line as:
Evidently he took this as technical jargon, abstract philosophy. There was no such thing; I felt with an overpowering vividness the illimitability or at least something which could not be described by any other term and no other description except the "Permanent" could be made of That which alone existed. To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event. To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote "His anger climbed against me in a stream", it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up
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from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being
confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but
all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these
circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the
world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and
leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity.
A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.
Another question is the place of philosophy in poetry or whether it has any place at all. Some romanticists
seem to believe that the poet has no right to think at all, only to see and feel. This accusation has been
brought against me by many that I think too much and that when I try to write in verse, thought comes in
and keeps out poetry. I hold, to the contrary, that philosophy has its place and can even take a leading
place along with psychological experience as it does in the Gita1. All depends on how it is
done, whether it is a dry or a living philosophy, an arid intellectual statement or the expression not
only of the living truth of thought but of something of its beauty, its light or its power.
The theory which discourages the poet from thinking or at least from thinking for the sake of the thought
proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper, it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the
surrealist, "Why do you want poetry to mean anything?" and on the other in Housman's exaltation of pure
poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the
mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and physical rather than intellectual
sensation and response. It is of course not that really but a vividness of imagination and feeling which
disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks
at are not the brain-mind, not even the
1 This dictum about the role of thought should not be taken as contradicting any implication
of the sentence in an earlier letter: "Thinking is no longer in my line." What comes from "overhead"
through the mystic's silent mind, as in Sri Aurobindo's later poetry can very well assume a philosophical
form. In the presence of thought-form in poetry that is spoken of here, not the source from which it
ultimately derives or the process by which it enters a poem
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poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he
quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or
the surface mind, it expresses certain things that are true and real, not nonsense but a deeper sense
which we feel powerfully with a great stirring of some inner emotion, but any attempt at exact intellectual
statement of them sterilises their sense and spoils their appeal. This is not the method of Savitri.
Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not
understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an
untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience: it is not because there is any
attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but
intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which
has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.
It may be noted that the greater romantic
poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic
view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it.
Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write "To philosophise I dare not yet"; he did not
write "I am too much of a poet to philosophise." To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on the
admiral's flag-ship and flying an almost royal banner. The philosophy of Savitri is different but it is
persistently there; it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all
the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to
convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple or admitting any mental rule of what
is or is not poetic. It does not hesitate to employ terms which might be considered as technical when
these can be turned to express something direct, vivid and powerful. That need not be an introduction of
technical jargon, that is to say, I suppose, special and artificial language, expressing in this case
only abstract ideas and generalities without any living truth or reality in them. Such jargon cannot
make good literature, much less good poetry. But there is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary
cordon against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry
and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.
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I have been insisting on these points in view of certain criticisms that have been made by reviewers and
ethers' - some of them very capable, suggesting or flatly stating that there was too much thought in my
poems or that I am even in my poetry a philosopher rather than a poet. I am justifying a poet's right to
think as well as to see and feel, his right to "dare to philosophise". I agree with the modernists in their
revolt against the romanticist's insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical
reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call
poeticism he ceased to be poetic; wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to
greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately
poetic style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic
rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also he has weighed too much on thought
and hastiest the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of
Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought too much exaggeration of the
lower vital and sensational reactions untransformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless
he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness
and directness of style.
Now I come to the law prohibiting repetition. This rule aims at a certain
kind of intellectual elegance which comes into poetry when the poetic intelligence and the call for a
refined and classical taste begin to predominate. It regards poetry as a cultural entertainment and
amusement of the highly civilised mind; it interests by a faultless art of words, a constant and ingenious
invention, a sustained novelty of ideas, incidents, word and phrase. An unfailing variety or the outward
appearance of it is one of the elegances of this art. But all poetry is not of this kind: its rule does
not apply to poets like Homer or Valmiki or other early writers. The Veda might almost be described as a
mass of repetitions: so might the work of Vaishnava poets and the poetic literature of devotion generally
in India. Arnold has noted this distinction when speaking of Homer; he mentioned especially that there is
nothing objectionable in the close repetition of the same word in the Homeric way of writing. In many things
Homer seems to make a point of repeating himself. He has stock descriptions, epithets always reiterated,
lines
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even which are constantly repeated again and again when the same Incident returns in his narrative: e.g.
the line,
He does not hesitate also to repeat the bulk of a line with a variation at the end, e.g.
And again the
"Down from the peaks of Olympus he came, wrath vexing his heart-strings" and again, "Down from the peaks of Olympus she came impetuously darting." He begins another line elsewhere with the same word and a similar action and with the same nature of a human movement physical and psychological In a scene of Nature, here a man's silent sorrow listening to the roar of the ocean:
In mystic poetry also repetition is not objectionable; it is resorted to by many poets, sometimes with insistence. I may cite as an example the constant repetition of the word ham, truth, sometimes eight or nine times in a short poem of nine or ten stanzas and often in the same line. This does not weaken the poem, it gives it a singular power and beauty. The repetition of the same key ideas, key images and symbols, key words or phrases, key epithets, sometimes key lines or half lines is a constant feature. They give an atmosphere, a significant structure, a sort of psychological frame, an architecture. The object here is not to amuse or entertain but the self-expression of an inner truth, a seeing of things and ideas not familiar to the common mind, a bringing out of inner experience. It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. He uses
1 Iliad IV.504, V.42, etc
2 ibid I.44
3 ibid IV.74
4 ibid I.34
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avrtti, repetition, as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or
seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty. This kind of repetition I have used
largely in Savitri. Moreover, the object is not only to present a secret truth in its true form and true
vision but to drive it home by the finding of the true word, the true phrase, the mot justs, the true
image or symbol, if possible the inevitable word; if that is there, nothing else, repetition included,
matters much. This is natural when the repetition is intended, serves a purpose; but it can hold even when
the repetition is not deliberate but comes in naturally in the stream of the inspiration. I see, therefore,
no objection to the recurrence of the same or similar image such as sea and ocean, sky and heaven in one
long passage provided each is the right thing and rightly worded in its place. The same rule applies to
words, epithets, ideas. It is only if the repetition is clumsy or awkward, too burdensomely insistent, at
once unneeded and inexpressive or amounts to a disagreeable and meaningless echo that it must
be rejected.
...I think there is none of your objections that did not occur to me as possible from
a certain kind of criticism when I wrote or I re-read what I had written; but I brushed them aside as
invalid or as irrelevant to the kind of poem I was writing. So you must not be surprised at my disregard of
them as too slight and unimperative.
What you have written as the general theory of the matter seems to be correct and it does not differ substantially from what I wrote. But your phrase about unpurposive repetition might carry a suggestion which I would not be able to accept; it might seem to indicate that the poet must have a "purpose" in whatever he writes and must be able to give a logical account of it to the critical intellect. That is surely not the way in which the poet or at least the mystic poet has to do his work. He does not himself deliberately choose or arrange word and rhythm but only sees it as it comes in the very act of inspiration. If there is any purpose of any kind, it also comes by and in the process of inspiration. He can criticise himself and the work; he can see whether it was a wrong or an Inferior movement, he does not set 'about correcting it by any Intellectual method but waits for the true thing to come in its place.
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He cannot always account to the logical intellect for what he has done: he feels or intuits. and the reader
or critic has to do the same.
Thus I cannot tell you for what purpose I admitted the repetition of
the word "great" in the line about the "great unsatisfied godhead",1 I only felt that it was the
one thing to write In that line as "her greatness" was the only right thing in a preceding line, I also felt
that they did not and could not clash and that was enough for me. Again, it might be suggested that the
"high" "warm" subtle ether of love was not only the right expression but that repetition of these epithets
after they had been used in describing the atmosphere of Savitri's nature was justified and had a reason
and purpose because it pointed and brought out the identity of the ether of love with Savitri's atmosphere.
But as a matter of fact I have no such reason or purpose. It was the identity which brought spontaneously
and inevitably the use of the same epithets and not any conscious intention which deliberately used the
repetition for a purpose.
Your contention that in the lines which I found to be inferior to their
original form and altered back to that form, the inferiority was due to a repetition is not valid. In the
line about "a vastness like his own"2 the word "wideness" which had accidentally replaced it
would have been inferior even if there had been no "wide" or "wideness" anywhere within a hundred miles
and I would still have altered it back to the original word. So too with "sealed depths" and
so many others.... These and other alterations were due to inadvertence and not intentional; repetition or
non-repetition had nothing to do with the matter. It was the same with "Wisdom nursing Chance":3
if "nursing" had been the right word and not a slip replacing the original phrase I would have kept it
in spite of the word "nurse"; occurring immediately afterwards: only perhaps I would have taken care to so
arrange that the repetition of the figure would simply have constituted a two-headed instead of a
one-headed evil. Yes, I have changed several places where you objected to repetitions but mostly for other
reasons: I' have kept many where there was a repetition and changed others where there was no repetition
at all. I have indeed made modifications or changes where repetition came at a short distance at the end of
a line; that was because the place made it too conspicuous. Of course where
1 P.15
2 P.16
3 In an earlier version of p.41 line 16:
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the repetition amounts to a mistake, I would have no hesitation in making a change; for a mistake must
always be acknowledged and corrected.
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