-002_Poetic Values and Powers (A Letter) POETIC VALUES AND POWERS   (A LETTER)   You have defined the poet as a bringer of joy — and, since the joy of the mystical consciousness is the highest, you arrive at the conclusion that the highest type of poet is the mystical. Your conclusion is valid from a certain standpoint, but not as a judgment on art. Is art to be judged by its explicit nearness to or farness from the mystical realisation? The joy which art brings us is not always explicitly the mystical ananda: it is mostly that ananda in a specific disguise and it is not required to be more: hence our judgments on art have to be within the realm of that disguise. A poet is great not by speaking so

HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA 1. THE PRODIGAL POETIC PROMISE (a)   The Irish mystic and poet, AE, has written:   The gay romance of song Unto the spirit's life doth not belong.   And it is true that AE utters the core of himself best in chaste simple whispers. But the spiritual feeling caught in the series of great little books published by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in his early days is like a jet of rainbow-flame. Sometimes the colours fuse into a white light, but usually they sparkle and quiver and trace in the veil between the outward and the inward a variegated rift, so to speak, through which may be poured with an ever-largening impetus

THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE*   The poet who is not merely idealistic or religious but has a direct mystical sensitivity and of whom it may be said that his adventure is the Apocalypse — what species of poetry would he particularly aspire to write? In general answer to this query we may begin with some remarks on production from the dream-consciousness, the phenomenon now loosely known as Surrealism.   The ordinary notion about the dream-consciousness is very restricted and, though Freud and Jung have interestingly and ingeniously explored certain layers below the mind's threshold, they have not driven home the fact familiar to all practitioners of Yoga tha

ENGLISH STYLE   An English friend has written for the benefit of foreign aspirants to authorship in his language:   "In English, and especially in Modern English, one has to be very careful about over emphasis and over-statement. The word 'great', for example, which makes such a show in many other languages, is but sparingly used. We may apply it to men or women whose importance resides not in their position, not even in the stir they may have made in the world, but in the genuineness of achievement tested by time. It is felt to be too big, too judicial a word to be lavished on what is contemporary.   "A critic in a review will hesitate before describing a writer of the

-003_Moods and Modes of Poetry (Two Letters) MOODS AND MODES OF POETRY   (TWO LETTERS)   1   You are right in saying that the true objective of poetry is not merely expression but also communication. A poet should not care solely to please himself or one or two of his own mind; he should try to establish rapport with the large number of cultured men who are receptive to poetry. Yet, to make easy communication his entire ideal would be unfaithfulness to his own inspiration, particularly if he happens to be a mystic. "Clarity winged with beauty" is indeed a fine thing finely stated and some of the world's greatest verse conforms to this type — but clarity is a relative term and what is clea

SHELLEY, SWINBURNE, HOUSMAN — AND MARY SHELLEY   1   The Times Literary Supplement of November 21, 1968 (pages 1318-19), discusses under the title, "Shelley, Swinburne and Housman", the famous eighth line —   Fresh spring, and summer and winter hoar —   of one of Shelley's most Shelleyan lyrics beginning, in its standard published form,   Oh, world! oh life! oh time!   The lyric consists of two stanzas, and the line in question which is in the second stanza is one foot shorter than the corresponding line in the first. The tale of the seasons is also short by one of them: namely, autumn. Critics naturally have aske

-021_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri, the Nature of Epic and the Expression of Mysticism in English Poetry (A Letter) SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI, THE NATURE OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF  MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY   A LETTER   The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are analytic, classificatory; but the labelling is done skilfully and catchingly. I can understand his dissatisfaction with the passages he has quoted from Sisir Ghose, Srinivasa Iyengar and myself. But I don't know whether it is right to pull out a passage from me like that, as if I have wri