Sri Aurobindo's letters on Savitri - Part 5
You have asked me to comment on your friend X's comments on my poetry and especially on Savitri.1 But, first of all, it is not usual for a poet to criticise the criticisms of his critics though a few perhaps have done so; the poet writes for his own satisfaction, his own delight in poetical creation or to express himself and he leaves his work for the world, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, to recognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception or its pleasure. As for the contemporary world he might be said rather to throw his poem in its face and leave it to resent this treatment as an unpleasant slap, as a contemporary world treated the early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modern times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up to a great height work little appreciated or quite ignored in its own time. The only safety for the poet is to go his own way careless of the blows and caresses of the critics; it is not his business to answer them. Then you ask me to right the wrong turn your friend's critical mind has taken; but how is it to be determined what is the right and what is the wrong turn, since a critical judgment depends usually on a personal reaction determined by the critic's temperament or the aesthetic trend in him or by values, rules or canons which are settled for his intellect and agree with the viewpoint from which his mind receives whatever comes to him for judgment; it is that which is right for him though it may seem wrong to a different temperament, aesthetic intellectuality or mental viewpoint. Your friend's judgments, according to his own account of them, seem to be determined by a sensitive temperament finely balanced in its own poise but limited in its appreciations, clear and open to some kinds of poetic creation,
1 The critic's comments were made apropos of the article "Sri Aurobindo - A New Age
of Mystical Poetry", by K.D. Sethna (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1946). Passages from Savitri appeared
in print for the first time in this article, in which a few of Sri Aurobindo's shorter poems
were also discussed. The full text of Sri Aurobindo's letter, from which relevant portions are
quoted here, is to be found in On Himself, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library,
Vol 26, pp. 238-63.
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reserved towards others, against yet others closed and cold or excessively depreciative.
This sufficiently explains his very different reactions to the two poems, Descent
and Flame-Wind,1 which he unreservedly admires and to Savitri. However,
since you have asked me, I will answer, as between ourselves, in some detail and put
forward my own comments on his comments and my own judgments on his judgments.
It may be rather long; for if such things are done, they may as well be clearly and
thoroughly done. I may also have something to say about the nature and intention of my
poem and the technique necessitated by the novelty of the intention and nature.
Let me deal first with some of the details he stresses so as to get them out of the way.
His detailed intellectual reasons for his judgments seem to me to be often arbitrary
and fastidious, sometimes based on a misunderstanding and therefore invalid or else valid
perhaps in other fields but here inapplicable. Take, for instance, his attack upon my use
of the prepositional phrase. Here, it seems to me, he has fallen victim to a grammatical
obsession and lumped together under the head of the prepositional twist a number of different
turns some of which do not belong to that category at all. In the line,2
there is no such twist; for I did not mean at all "on my calm summits", but intended straightforwardly to convey the natural, simple meaning of the word. If I write "the fields of beauty" or "walking on the paths of truth" I do not expect to be supposed to mean "in beautiful fields" or "in truthful paths"; it is the same with "summits of calm", I mean "summits of calm" and nothing else; it is a phrase like "He rose to high peaks of vision" or "He took his station on the highest summits of knowledge". The calm is the calm of the highest spiritual consciousness to which the soul has ascended, making those summits its own and looking down from their highest heights on all below: in spiritual experience, in the occult
1 Collected Poems, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 5, pp 563, 559 The poems
and translations referred to in this letter were previously publised in Collected Poems and Plays
(1942) Vol II
2 Not in Savitri but in Trance of Waiting
(Collected Poems, p 558)
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vision or feeling that accompanies it, this calm is not felt as an abstract quality or a mental
condition but as something concrete and massive, a self-existent reality to which one reaches,
so that the soul standing on its peak is rather a tangible fact of experience than a poetical
image. Then there is the phrase "A face of rapturous calm"1: he seems to think it is
a mere trick of language, a substitution of a prepositional phrase for an epithet, as if I had
intended to say "a rapturously calm face" and I said in-instead "a face of rapturous calm" in
order to get an illegitimate and meaningless rhetorical effect. I meant nothing of the kind,
nothing so tame and poor and scanty in sense: I meant a face which was an expression or rather a
living image of the rapturous calm of the supreme and infinite consciousness, - it is indeed so
that it can well be "Infinity's centre". The face of the liberated Buddha as presented to us by
Indian art is such an expression or image of the calm of Nirvana and could, I think, be quite
legitimately described as a face of Nirvanic calm, and that would be an apt and live phrase and
not an ugly artifice or twist of rhetoric. It should be remembered that the calm of Nirvana or
the calm of the supreme Consciousness is to spiritual experience something self-existent,
impersonal and eternal and not dependent on the person - or the face - which manifests it. In
these two passages I take then the liberty to regard X's criticism as erroneous at its base and
therefore invalid and inadmissible.
Then there are the lines from the Songs of the Sea:
"Thy breast of gloom" is not used here as a mere rhetorical and meaning-less variation of "thy gloomy breast"; it might have been more easily taken as that if it had been a human breast, though even then, it could have been entirely defensible in a fitting context; but it is the breast of the sea, an image for a vast expanse supporting and reflecting or subject to the moods or movements of the air and the sky. It is intended, in describing the passage of the rains of deluge over the breast of the sea, to present a picture of a
1 Savitri, p. 4:
2 Translations, Sri Aurobindos Birth Centenary Library Vol 8, pp 366
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storm-tossed shade crossing a vast gloom: it is the gloom that has to be stressed and made the
predominant idea and the breast or expanse is only its support and not the main thing:
this could not have been suggested by merely writing "thy gloomy breast". A prepositional
phrase need not be merely an artificial twist replacing an adjective; for instance, "a world of
gloom and terror" means something more than "a gloomy and terrible world", it brings forward the
gloom and terror as the very nature and constitution, the whole content of the world and not merely
an attribute. So also if one wrote "Him too wilt thou throw to thy sword of sharpness" or "cast into
thy pits of horror", would it merely mean "thy sharp sword" and "thy horrible pits" ? and would not the
sharpness and the horror rather indicate or represent formidable powers of which the sword is the instrument
and the pits the habitation or lair? That would be rhetoric but it would be a rhetoric not meaningless
but having in it meaning and power. Rhetoric is a word with which we can batter something we do not like;
but rhetoric of one kind or another has been always a great part of the world's best literature; Demosthenes,
Cicero, Bossuet and Burke are rhetoricians, but their work ranks with the greatest prose styles that have
been left to us. In poetry the accusation of rhetoric might be brought against such lines as Keats'
To conclude, there is "the swords of sheen" in the translation of Bande Mataram.2 That might be more open to the critic's stricture, for the expression can be used and perhaps has been used in verse as merely equivalent to "shining swords"; but for any one with an alert imagination it can mean in certain contexts something more than that, swords that emit brilliance and seem to be made of light. X says that to use this turn in any other than an adjectival sense is unidiomatic, but he admits that there need be no objection provided that it creates a sense of beauty, but he finds no beauty in any of these passages. But the beauty can be perceived only if the other sense is seen, and even then we come back to the question of personal reaction; you and other readers may feel beauty where he finds none. I do not myself share his sensitive abhorrence of this
1 Ode to a Nightingale
2 Translations, p. 310
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prepositional phrase; it may be of course because there are coarser rhetorical threads in my
literary taste. I would not, for instance, shrink from a sentence like this in a sort of free verse,
"Where is thy wall of safety? Where is thy arm of strength? Whither has fled thy vanished face of glory?"
Rhetoric of course, but it has in it an element which can be attractive, and it seems to me to
bring in a more vivid note and mean more than "thy strong arm" or "thy glorious face" or than
"the strength of thy arm" and "the glory of thy face".
I come next to the critic's trenchant
attack on that passage in my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious
adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light. Trenchant,
but with what seems to me a false edge; or else if it is a sword of Damascus that would cleave the
strongest material mass of iron he is using it to cut through subtle air, the air closes behind his
passage and remains unsevered. He finds here only poor and false poetry, unoriginal in imagery and
void of true wording and true vision, but that is again a matter of personal reaction and everyone
has a right to his own, you to yours as he to his. I was not seeking for originality but for truth
and the effective poetical expression of my vision. He finds no vision there, and that may be because
I could not express myself with any power; but it may also be because of his temperamental failure to
feel and see what I felt and saw. I can only answer to the intellectual reasonings and judgments which
turned up in him when he tried to find the causes of his reaction. These seem to me to be either
fastidious and unsound or founded on a mistake of comprehension and therefore invalid or else
inapplicable to this kind of poetry. His main charge is that there is a violent and altogether
illegitimate transference of epithet in the expression "the wide-winged hymn of a great priestly
wind".1 A transference of epithet is not necessarily illegitimate, especially if it
expresses something that is true or necessary to convey a sound feeling and vision of things:
for instance, if one writes in an Ovidian account of the denouement of a lovers' quarrel
1 Savitri, p. 4.
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it might be said that it was something in the mind that was willing and the ascription of an emotion or
state of mind to the feet is an illegitimate transfer of epithet; but the lines express a conflict of the
members, the mind reluctant, the body obeying the force of the desire that moves it and the use of the epithet
is therefore perfectly true and legitimate. But here no such defence is necessary because there is no transfer
of epithets. The critic thinks that I imagined the wind as having a winged body and then took away the wings
from its shoulders and clapped them on to its voice or hymn which could have no body. But I did nothing of the
kind; I am not bound to give wings to the wind. In an occult vision the breath, sound, movement by which we
physically know of a wind is not its real being but only the physical manifestation of the wind-god or the
spirit of the air, as in the Veda the sacrificial fire is only a physical birth, temporary body or
manifestation of the god of Fire, Agni. The gods of the Air and other godheads in the Indian tradition
have no wings, the Maruts or storm-gods ride through the skies in their galloping chariots with their
flashing golden lances, the beings of the middle world in the Ajanta frescoes are seen moving through the air
not with wings but with a gliding natural motion proper to ethereal bodies. The epithet "wide-winged" then does
not belong to the wind and is not transferred from it, but is proper to the voice of the wind which takes the
form of a conscious hymn of aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest, as might a
great-winged bird released into the sky and sinks and rises again, aspires and fails and aspires again
on the "altar hills". One can surely speak of a voice or a chant of aspiration rising on wide wings and
I do not see how this can be taxed as a false or unpoetic image. Then the critic objects to the expression
"altar hills" on the ground that this is superfluous as the imagination of the reader can very well supply
this detail for itself from what has already been said: I do not think this is correct, a very alert reader
might do so but most would not even think of it, and yet the detail is an essential and central feature of
the thing seen and to omit it would be to leave a gap in the middle of the picture by dropping out something
which is indispensable to its totality. Finally he finds that the line about the high boughs praying in the
revealing sky does not help but attenuates, instead of more strongly etching the picture. I do not know why,
unless he has failed to feel and to see. The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in
that each element is
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conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of
this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with
the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers,
silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which
all aspires. At any rate this "picture" or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in
the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me. I might indeed have elaborated more details,
etched out at more length but that would have been superfluous and unnecessary; or I might have indulged in an
ampler description but this would have been appropriate only if this part of the vision had been the whole.
This last line 1 is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on
the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times and I am
unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it. If the critic or any
reader does not feel or see what I so often felt and saw, that may be my fault, but that is not sure, for you and
others have felt very differently about it; it may be a mental or a temperamental failure on their part and it will
be then my or perhaps even the critic's or reader's misfortune.
I may refer here to X's disparaging
characterisation of my epithets. He finds that their only merit is that they are good prose epithets, not
otiose but right words in their right place and exactly descriptive but only descriptive without any suggestion
of any poetic beauty or any kind of magic. Are there then prose epithets and poetic epithets and is the poet
debarred from exact description using always the right word in the right place, the mot justed I am under
the impression that all poets, even the greatest, use as the bulk of their adjectives words that have that
merit, and the difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of
the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages I have quoted
rom Milton,2
1 The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.
2 The reference is to the more general but earlier letter appearing here
in the next section. See pp 814-815
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here the epithets are the same that would be used in prose, the right word in the right place,
exact in statement, but all lies in the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving
emotion and the rhythm which gives them an unlifting passion and penetrating insistence. In
more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets "forbidden tree" and
"mortal taste" are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, good
descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines about Nature's worship in Savitri,
I do not see how they can be described as prose epithets; at any rate I would never have dreamt of using
in prose unless I wanted to write poetic prose such expressions as "wide-winged hymn" or "a great priestly wind"
or "altar hills" or "revealing sky"; these epithets belong in their very nature to poetry alone whatever may be
their other value or want of value. He says they are obvious and could have been supplied by any imaginative reader;
well, so are Milton's in the passages quoted and per-haps there too the very remarkable imaginative
reader whom X repeatedly brings in might have supplied them by his own unfailing poetic verve. Whether
they or any of them prick a hidden beauty out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for
himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats' "magic casements" and "foam of perilous
seas" and "fairy lands forlorn", but I do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of
that unusual character.
I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by this
that they might have some force with regard to another kind of poetry but not to a poem like Savitri.
He says, to start with, that if I had had a stronger imagination, I would have written a very different
poem and a much shorter one. Obviously, and to say it is a truism; if I had had a different kind of
imagination, whether stronger or weaker, I would have written a different poem and perhaps one more
to his taste; but it would not have been Savitri. It would not have fulfilled the intention or had
anything of the character, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritual experience
which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out
its purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an "unconscionable
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length" - I am quoting the Times'1 reviewer's descrip-tion1 in his otherwise eulogistic
criticism of The Life Divine - in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of
a canto. It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of
the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana, it aims not at a minimum but
at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a
limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave
the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally
artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation,
omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen
in Savitri. But X has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the pas-sages he is criticising,
least of all, their inner sense - that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and
partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to
understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only an outward form of words and some kind of
surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious
without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty,
unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney. His
objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been
simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the
title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner
reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse
into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but
splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human
consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the
title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning
and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by
suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start
1 The Times' Literary Supplement, January 17, 1942.
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adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem. It will of course seem much too long
to a reader who does not understand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject;
but that is unavoidable.
To illustrate the inapplicability of some of his judgments one might take his
objection to repetition of the cognates "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void", "opaque Inane", "vacant Vasts"1
and his clinching condemnation of the inartistic inelegance of their occurrence in the same place at the end
of the line. I take leave to doubt his statement that in each place his alert imaginative reader, still less
any reader without that equipment, could have supplied these descriptions and epithets from the context, but let
that pass. What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view of the reader, not imaginative but
attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality, the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in
which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all the details would either
fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the
dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to its place and context.
It is the entrance of the "lonely splendour" into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that
has to be brought out and that cannot be done without the image of the "opaque Inane" of the Inconscience which
is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the
"tread" of the Divine Mother was an intrusion on the vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of
deliverance from it. The same reasoning applies to the other passages. As for the occurrence of the phrases
in the same place each in its line, that is a rhythmic turn helpful, one might say necessary to bring out
the intended effect, to emphasise this reiteration and make it not only understood but felt. It is not the
result of negligence or an awkward and inartistic clumsiness, it is intentional and part of the technique.
The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank
verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it very
sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself,
while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone
1 Pp. 2-4.
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added to stone; the sentence consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely five or six
or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for the sentence are almost indispensable except
when some kind of inconclusive cadence is desirable; here must be no laxity or diffusiveness in the rhythm or
in the metrical flow anywhere, - there must be a flow but not a loose flux. This gives an added importance
to what comes at the close of the line and this placing is used very often to give emphasis and prominence
to a key phrase or a key idea, especially those which have to be often reiterated in the thought and vision
of the poem so as to recall attention to things that are universal or fundamental or otherwise of the first
consequence - whether for the immediate subject or in the total plan. It is this use that is served here by
the reiteration at the end of the line.
I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake
of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in
the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance,
I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence,
but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience.
When the expression has been found, I have to judge, not by the intellect or by any set poetical rule, but
by an intuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it is not, I have to change
and go on changing until I have received the absolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it
and must never be satisfied with any à peu prés or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of
one kind or another. This is what I have tried to do. The critic or reader will judge for himself whether I
have succeeded or failed; but if he has seen nothing and understood nothing, it does not follow that his adverse
judgment is sure to be the right and true one, there is at least a chance that he may so conclude, not because
there is nothing to see and nothing to understand, only poor pseudo-stuff or a rhetorical emptiness but because
he was not equipped for the vision or the understanding. Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience
which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences.
You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch;
as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness
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and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new
technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules
and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of
Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of
the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential
to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain
freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective.
Your friend may say as he has said in another connection that all this is only special pleading or an apology
rather than an apologia. But in that other connection he was mistaken and would be so here too, for in neither
case have I the feeling that I had been guilty of some offence or some short-coming and therefore there could be
no place for an apology or special pleading such as is used to defend or cover up what one knows to be a false case.
I have enough respect for truth not to try to cover up an imperfection; my endeavour would be rather to cure the
recognised imperfection ; if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite
capacity for painstaking: that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri. Or rather, since it
was not labour in the ordinary sense, not a labour of painstaking construction, I may describe it as an
infinite capacity for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it,
however good it might seem from a lower standard until I got that which I felt to be absolutely right.
X was evidently under a misconception with regard to my defence of the wealth-burdened line; he says that
the principle enounced by me was sound but what mattered was my application of the principle, and he
seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by
citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs.
But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in
question; the question was whether it did not violate a valid law of a certain chaste economy by the use
of too many epithets massed together: against this I was asserting the legitimacy of a massed richness,
I was defending only its principle,
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not my use of the principle. Even a very small poet can cite in aid of his practice examples from
greater poets without implying that his poetry is on a par with theirs. But he further asserts
that I showed small judgment in choosing my citations, because Milton's passage1 is
not at all an illustration of the principle and Shakespeare's2 is inferior in poetic
value, lax and rhetorical in its richness and belongs to an early and inferior Shakespearean
style. He says that Milton's astounding effect is due only to the sound and not to the words.
That does not seem to me quite true: the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance
is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour
of the downfall of the rebel angels: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening
to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the
full psychological commotion of the "hideous" and flaming ruin of the down-fall, and it is the
tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear. X's disparagement of the Shakespearean
passage on "sleep" and the line on the sea considered by the greatest critics and not by myself only as
ranking amongst the most admired and admirable things in Shakespeare is surprising and it seems to me to
illustrate a serious limitation in his poetic perception and temperamental sympathies. Shakespeare's
later terse and packed style with its more powerful dramatic effects can surely be admired without
disparaging the beauty and opulence of his earlier style; if he had never written in that style,
it would have been an unspeakable loss to the sum of the world's aesthetic possessions. The lines
I have quoted are neither lax nor merely rhetorical, they have a terseness or at least a compact-ness
of their own, different in character from the lines, let us say, in the scene of Antony's death or other
memorable passages written in his great tragic style but none the less at every step packed with pregnant
meanings and powerful significances which would not be possible if it were merely a loose rhetoric. Anyone
writing such lines would
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deserve to rank by them alone among the great and even the greatest poets...
As regards your friend's appraisal of the mystical poems, I need say little. I accept his reservation
that there is much inequality as between the different poems: they were produced very rapidly -
in the course of a week, I think - and they were not given the long reconsideration that I have usually
given to my poetic work before publication; he has chosen the best, though there are others also that are
good, though not so good; in others, the metre attempted and the idea and language have not been lifted to
their highest possible value. I would like to say a word about his hesitation over some lines in
Thought the Paraclete1 which describe the spiritual planes. I can understand this
hesitation; for these lines have not the vivid and forceful precision of the opening and the close
and are less pressed home, they are general in description and therefore to one who has not the
mystic experience may seem too large and vague. But they are not padding; a precise and exact description
of these planes of experience would have made the poem too long, so only some large lines are given,
but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem,
"gold-red feet" and "crimson-white mooned oceans", are faithful to experience. Significant colour,
supposed by intellectual criticism to be symbolic but there is more than that, is a frequent element
in mystic vision; I may mention the powerful and vivid vision in which Ramakrishna went up into the
higher planes and saw the mystic truth behind the birth of Vivekananda. At least, the fact that these
poems have appealed so strongly to your friend's mind may perhaps be taken by me as a sufficient proof
that in this field my effort at interpretation of spiritual things has not been altogether a failure.
But how then are we to account for the same critic's condemnation or small appreciation of Savitri which is
also a mystic and symbolic poem al-though cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch, and
what value am I to attach to his criticism ? Partly, perhaps, it is this very difference of form and pitch
which accounts for his attitude and, having regard to his aesthetic temperament and its limitations,
it was inevitable. He him-self seems to suggest this reason when he compares this difference to the
difference of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His
1 Collected Poems. p 582
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temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his
response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven
and the Kingdom of God, its limitation by his approach towards Paradise Lost. I think he would be naturally
inclined to regard any very high-pitched poetry as rhetorical and unsound and declamatory, wherever he
did not see in it something finely and subtly true coexisting with the high-pitched expression,- the
combination we find in Thompson's later poem and it is this he seems to have missed in Savitri. For
Savitri does contain or at least I intended it to contain what you and others have felt in it but he has
not been able to feel because it is something which is outside his own experience and to which he has no access.
One who has had the kind of experience which Savitri sets out to express or who, not having it, is prepared
by his temperament, his mental turn, his previous intellectual knowledge or psychic training, to have some kind
of access to it, the feeling of it if not the full understanding, can enter into the spirit and sense of the poem
and respond to its poetic appeal; but without that it is difficult for an unprepared reader to respond, -
all the more if this is, as you contend, a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique.
Lycidas is one of the finest poems in any literature, one of the most consistently perfect among works of an equal
length and one can apply to it the epithet "exquisite" and it is to the exquisite that your friend's aesthetic
temperament seems specially to respond. It would be possible to a reader with a depreciatory turn to find flaws
in it, such as the pseudo-pastoral setting, the too powerful intrusion of St. Peter and puritan theological
controversy into that incongruous setting and the image of the hungry sheep which someone not in sympathy
with Christian feeling and traditional imagery might find even ludicrous or at least odd in its identification
of pseudo-pastoral sheep and theological human sheep: but these would be hypercritical objections and are
flooded out by the magnificence of the poetry. I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost'.
Milton's heaven is indeed unconvincing and can be described as grotesque and so too is his gunpowder battle up
there, and his God and angels are weak and unconvincing figures, even Adam and Eve, our first parents, do not
effectively fill their part except in his outward description of them; and the later narrative falls far below
the grandeur of the first four books but
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those four books stand for ever among the greatest things in the world's poetic literature. If Lycidas with
its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the
sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen
greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all
the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are
throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is
constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime. We have to accept for the moment
Milton's dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we
can feel the full greatness of the epic. But the point is that this greatness in itself -seems to have less
appeal to X's aesthetic temperament; it is as if he felt less at home in its atmosphere, in an atmosphere of
grandeur and sublimity than in the air of a less sublime but a fine and always perfect beauty. It is the difference
between a magic hill-side woodland of wonder and a great soaring mountain climbing into a vast purple sky: to
accept fully the greatness he needs to find in it a finer and subtler strain as in Thompson's Kingdom of God.
On a lower scale this, his sentence about it seems to suggest, is the one fundamental reason for his complete
pleasure in the mystical poems and his very different approach to Savitri. The pitch aimed at by Savitri, the
greatness you attribute to it, would of itself have discouraged in him any abandonment to admiration and compelled
from the beginning a cautious and dubious approach; that soon turned to lack of appreciation or a lowered
appreciation even of the best that may be there and to depreciation and censure of the rest.
But there is the other reason which is more effective. He sees and feels nothing of the spiritual meaning and
the spiritual appeal which you find in Savitri; it is for him empty of anything but an outward significance
and that seems to him poor, as is natural since the outward meaning is only a part and a surface and the rest
is to his eyes invisible. If there had been what he hoped or might have hoped to find in my poetry, a spiritual
vision such as that of the Vedantin, arriving beyond the world towards the In-effable, then he might have felt
at home as he does with Thompson's poetry or might at least have found it sufficiently accessible.
But this is not
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what Savitri has to say or rather it is only a small part of it and, even so, bound up with
a cosmic vision and an acceptance of the world which in its kind is unfamiliar to his mind and psychic
sense and foreign to his experience. The two passages with which he deals do not and cannot give any full
presentation of this way of seeing things since one is an unfamiliar symbol and the other an incidental
and, taken by itself apart from its context, an isolated circumstance. But even if he had had other more
explicit and clearly revealing passages at his disposal, I do not think he would have been satisfied or
much illuminated; his eyes would still have been fixed on the surface and caught only some intellectual
meaning or outer sense. That at least is what we may suppose to have been the cause of his failure, if we
maintain that there is anything at all in the poem; or else we must fall back on the explanation of a
fundamental personal incompatibility and the rule de gustibus non est disputandum, or to put it in the
Sanskrit form nanarucirhi lokah. If you are right in maintaining that Savitri stands as a new mystical
poetry with a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least at first, a widespread,
perhaps, a general failure even in lovers of poetry to understand it or appreciate; even those who have
some mystical turn or spiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirs
or outside their range of experience. It took the world something like a hundred years to discover Blake;
it would not be improbable that there might be a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better
things. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible.
Perhaps by some miracle there may be before long a larger appreciative audience.
At any rate this is
the only thing one can do, especially when one is attempting a new creation, to go on with the work with
such light and power as is given to one and leave the value of the work to be determined by the future.
Contemporary judgments we know to be unreliable; there are only two judges whose joint verdict
cannot easily be disputed, the World and Time. The Roman proverb says, securus judicat orbis ten-arum;
but the world's verdict is secure only when it is confirmed by Time. For it is not the opinion of the
general mass of men that finally decides, the decision is really imposed by the judgment of a minority
and elite which is finally accepted and settles down as the verdict of posterity; in Tagore's phrase it
is the universal man, Viswa Manava, or rather something
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universal using the general mind of man, we might say the Cosmic Self in the race that fixes the value of its
own works. In regard to the great names in literature this final verdict seems to have in it something of
the absolute, - so far as anything can be that in a temporal world of relativities in which the Absolute
reserves itself hidden behind the veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to contend that Virgil
is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written
to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate Milton
for his Latin English and inflated style and the largely uninteresting character of his two epics;
the world either refuses to listen or there is a temporary effect, a brief fashion in literary criticism,
but finally the world returns to its established verdict. Lesser reputations may fluctuate, but finally
whatever has real value in its own kind settles itself and finds its just place in the durable judgment
of the world. Work which was neglected and left aside like Blake's or at first admired with reservation
and eclipsed like Donne's is singled out by a sudden glance of Time and its greatness recognised; or what
seemed buried slowly emerges or re-emerges; all finally settles into its place. What was held as sovereign
in its own time is rudely dethroned but afterwards recovers not its sovereign throne but its due position in
the world's esteem; Pope is an example and Byron who at once burst into a supreme glory and was the one
English poet, after Shakes-peare, admired all over Europe but is now depreciated, may also recover his proper
place. Encouraged by such examples, let us hope that these violently adverse judgments may not be final and
absolute and decide that the waste paper basket is not the proper place for Savitri. There may still be a
place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual
life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and
the world's being, not a corner and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and
as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hidden and unexplored as
if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite as has been found in the past for man's surface and finite
view and experience of himself and the material world in which he has lived striving to know himself and it as
best he can with a limited mind and senses. The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the
kingdom of the Spirit
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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.
I had intended as the main subject
of this letter to say something about technique and the inner working of the intuitive method by which Savitri
was and is being created and of the intention and plan of the poem. X's idea of its way of creation,
an intellectual construction by a deliberate choice of words and imagery, badly chosen at that, is the
very opposite of the real way in which it was done. That was to be the body of the letter and the rest only
a preface. But the preface has become so long that it has crowded out the body. I shall have to postpone
it to a later occasion when I have more time.
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