INSPIRATION AND EFFORT   INSPIRATION  AND  EFFORT STUDIES IN LITERARY ATTITUDE AND EXPRESSION   AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA)   The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA   First published 1995 (Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)   © Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) Published by The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A. Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA j170/17.6.94/750  

SPLENDID SURPRISES   THE MYSTICAL POEMS OF NISHIKANTO   It is high time critics took serious note of the new school of poetry that has arisen in India under the inspiration of Sri Aurobindo who is himself the centre of it. The new school is of special interest not only because of the novel content and form of its poetry but also because of the way in which that poetry comes to its members.   The old view of a divine breath blowing through the poet is rather at a discount today. Not that the poet is regarded as altogether a conscious intellectual agent deliberately fashioning out his work. Much indeed of modern verse is an intellectual exercise, an attempt at being

-017_A Poet,a Poem and a commentator(A Letter) A POET, A POEM AND A COMMENTATOR A LETTER   My delay in acknowledging and estimating your commentary on my poem, A Poet's Stammer,1 must have led you to think: "How cold and ungrateful are poets — they don't care how much labour critics spend on appreciating them." But that would be a mistake. Poetry is not everybody's pet and the poet knowing how much "life's clamour" tends to drown his small silvery voice is hardly likely to miss valuing the few leaps he finds of the reader-heart to his tune. If there is any neglect by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Grav

INNER SIGHT AND INNER SONG NIRODBARAN'S ACHIEVEMENT IN MYSTICAL POETRY   Doctors have been good novelists: there are enough unusual incidents of human value in their clinical experience to make arresting stories under the selective surgery of a realistic imagination. But rare is the doctor who turns poet. A Dr. Cronin is conceivable, a Dr. Bridges is a wonder indeed. The book Sun-Blossoms which is before me is a radiant curiosity since — as the Foreword to it by K. H. G. tells us — the poems here collected were penned by a doctor. The wonder, however, becomes easier to accept without ceasing to be splendidly out of the way, when we are told also that Dr. Nirodbaran b

TWO NEGLECTED ENGLISH POETS   Joyce Chadwick and John A. Chadwick, contemporary with each other and belonging to our own time, are hardly heard of in English critical circles. The former died in England in 1950, the latter in India as far back as 1939; but their works have made little headway. Identical in surname, they were yet no relatives; they did not even come in contact and wrote without knowledge of each other's poetry. But their common surname is highly symbolic; for both expressed themselves under a similar spiritual stress and combined with the typical English note a mystic motive either directly caught from or indirectly attuned to modern renascent India.

LIFE, POETRY, LOVE, DEATH   A READER'S CRITICISM OF A POEM AND THE POET'S REJOINDER   LOVE AND DEATH   We sign mortality in our marriage-beds. Brief bliss alone cries out for the unborn child To carry a little farther man's flickering heart; That kiss of creation proves death's seal on our life. Immortals need no mating: dawns to come Laugh ever already in their sun-stream blood. They strive to sow the future with no sparks From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh. O soul, clasp not in love the body's doom. Let love be largeness never called to leap Breathless for kindling from two death-bound halves — Man th

-008_Keat^s On First Looking into Chapman's Homer- KEATS'S ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER*   SOME CRITICAL NOTES   This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective sonnet and as such is more comparable to the last-named than to the others except that Ozymandias contains, as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early

NOTES ON POETIC INSPIRATION   A PERSONAL DOCUMENT   People sometimes ask me: "How do you get poetic inspiration?" Inspiration comes to me in the form of a sudden spark or flame-seed falling into the consciousness. A kind of shock is felt and I know that the soul is pregnant with a poem. The poem may follow after a brief interval or there may be a long period of gestation, but I am absolutely certain of its growth in the subliminal as soon as that subtle shock is experienced. For instance, "Pointers", beginning —   Everything points now Somewhere, somewhere,  Silverly straining Through the dusk air —   was the result of my gazing out at t

-023_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri and Dante's Divina Commedia (Two Letters) SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA   TWO LETTERS   1     The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter.   The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic per

-001_Inspiration and Effort (A Letter) INSPIRATION AND EFFORT   (A LETTER)   You hold that genuine poetry is written always by inspiration — effortlessly — as if in a state of semi-trance. A correct view, this, as regards fundamentals. But you take my breath away by adding that, because in my letter I used words like "tried", "attempted", "sought" when I spoke of producing poetry of a mystic and spiritual order new in many respects to the English language, you drew the conclusion that I wrote my poems with a manufacturing mentality which thought out with intellectual labour all the phrases, linked up the different parts like a mechanic rivetting joints and constructed artificially an unfamiliar