You
have asked me to comment on your friend Mendonça’s comments on my poetry and
especially on Savitri. 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, 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, 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,
Lone
on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,
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 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": 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 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 Mendonça’s criticism as erroneous at its base and therefore invalid and
inadmissible.
Then there are the lines from the Songs
of the Sea:
The rains of deluge flee, a storm-tossed shade,
Over
thy breast of gloom...
"Thy breast of gloom" is not used here as a mere rhetorical and
meaningless 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 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's
Thou
wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No
hungry generations tread thee down...
To
conclude, there is "the swords of sheen" in the translation of Bande Mataram. 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. Mendonça
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 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 widewinged hymn of a great priestly wind". 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
In
spite of a reluctant sullen heart
My
willing feet were driven to thy door,
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 be 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 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—The high boughs prayed in
a revealing sky—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 Mendonça'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
justs? 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 from
On
evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues...
Blind
Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And
Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,
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
uplifting 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 nor 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
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 length"—I am quoting
the Times reviewer's description (The
Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1942) 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 Comas 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 Mendonça has understood nothing of the
significance or intention of the passages 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 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"
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 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; there
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 a peu pres 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 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 shortcoming 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. Mendonça 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, 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
With
hideous ruin and combustion, down
To
bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In
adamantine chains and penal fire.
is
not at all an illustration of the principle and Shakespeare's
Wilt
thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal
up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In
cradle of the rude imperious surge?
is
inferior In poetic value, lax and rhetorical in its richness and belongs to an
early and inferior Shakespearean style. He says that
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 Paraclete 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 although 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 himself seems to suggest
this reason when he compares this difference to the difference of his approach
as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His 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
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 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
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 Ineffable, 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 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 nānārucirhi 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
At
any rate this is the only thing one can do, especially when one is attempting a
new Croatian. 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
terrarum; 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 Mite
which is finally accepted and settles down as the verdict of posterity; in
Tagore's phrase it is the universal man, viśva
mānava, or rather something 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 Bonne'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
Shakespeare, 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 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. Mendonça'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.
4 May 1947
The
critic's comments were made apropos of the article Sri Aurobindo—A New Age of Mystical Poetry, by KD Sethna—Amal Kiran—(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.