TALKS ON POETRY AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA) SRI AUROBINDO INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF EDUCATION PONDICHERRY - 605 002 First Edition: 21st February 1989 ISBN 81-7058-173-7 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1989 Published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry - 605 002 Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 605 002 printed in india

II STRAY TALKS Page-404 POETS, POEMS, POETRY 1 I have been given a sort of carte blanche — told that I should read any poem of my choice or else write one myself and explain where the poetry of it lies. Since the subject is poetry as exemplified by a poem, I may be excused a few general introductory remarks on the cause of this whole beautiful business: the poet. There's the old Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit. A schoolboy has made the startling translation: "Poets are nasty, but don't you get a fit!" Another intuitive youngster has the rendering: "Poets are born, but they are not fit to be!" Well, both the howlers have some sense, t

TALK FORTY-ONE 1 In talking of poetry from the subtle physical plane we took care to point out that the apparent lowest position of this plane in the hierarchy of worlds did not preclude its producing the greatest poetry. The excellence of poetry as such does not depend on the position of a plane: it depends on the intensity of vision and word and rhythm and on the faithfulness with which we transmit this intensity from whatever source. Today, before proceeding to the next plane, I may point out that even mystical and spiritual poetry does not need to be from planes which seem proper to mysticism and spirituality: the Psychic and the Overh

TALK TWENTY-SIX Mallarme was the queerest bird in the sky of poetry. Many poets, almost all, are queer birds of one kind or another. Some of them have even been regarded as being off their chump: Blake was to most of his contemporaries a mad man. And two or three were actually inmates or at least temporary residents of Lunatic Asylums: Cowper, Christopher Smart and the Frenchman Gerard de Nerval. But in defence of the Poetic Art I may declare that in the case of these it was not poetry which drove them mad nor is it that they wrote poetry only in a state of madness. Nerval who was twice in and out of an Asylum made a memorably mysterious line for

TALK THIRTY-TWO We have remarked that Phanopoeia tends generally to be less a failure than Logopoeia. We may now glance at a case in which the latter surpasses the former. It is a case in which the technical device called Aposiopesis has play, though the actual determinant of the poetic quality is not this device. Aposiopesis means a sudden breaking off in speech. In Christabel Coleridge has written of a half-human half-demon creature, the outwardly fair Lady Geraldine. When describing the undressing of this woman before Christabel, he originally had the lines: Behold! her bosom and half her side Are lean and old and foul of hue. This

TALK SEVENTEEN We were speaking of musical poetry of two kinds — lyric melo-poeia and epic melopoeia. My mind now goes back to a reference I once made to musical Words — like "Coal-scuttle", according to a Russian, and "dyspepsia", according to myself. In the Sabrina-lyric we have quite a number of such words: the very name "Sabrina", then "translucent", "amber-dropping", "lillies" and "silver". But what the subject of musical words particularly sug-gests to me this morning is a word matching my old choice of "dyspepsia". The new word is "lumbago". You know what "lumbago" means? The dictionary gives it as "rheumatic pain in the lower back and

TALK THIRTY-SIX The Verlainian "pure poetry" about which we have talked should satisfy the definition offered by the Abbe Bremond. Have you heard of the Abbe Bremond? It seems very few in India know that he existed. The only Abbes known here are the Abbe Faria whom Dumas made unforgettable by his Count of Monte Cristo and the contemporary Abbe Breuil who has made his name as an anthropologist. Bremond is not easy to come by in even our libraries and bookshops. I remember inquiring about him at a bookseller's in Bombay. The chap had a fondness for both French literature and Persian — possibly because the Persian language is considered the French of

TALK THIRTY-FIVE Emphasis on the pictorial element seems to have marked many definitions of "pure poetry". This element can be overdone. And there are many modes of overdoing it. The Symbolist and the Imagist modes are rather specialised ones. A general mode is evident in George Moore's Introduction to an anthology compiled by himself of English verse. Moore defines "pure poetry" as "born of admiration of the only permanent world, the world of things": it is poetry containing no hint of subjectivity, poetry "unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", as the greatest of the phanopoeists, Shakespeare, would have put it if he had had something

TALK THIRTY-EIGHT Today we may round off our discussion of Pure Poetry — with a remark of Sri Aurobindo's. Speaking of the poets of the early nineteenth century and comparing as well as contrasting these voices of the New Romanticism shot with a spiritual aspiration, particularly in alliance with a Nature-mysticism, Sri Aurobindo pairs Wordsworth and Byron on one hand and, on the other, Shelley and Keats. Then he remarks about the two latter: "They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus."1 In this matter of pure poetr

TALK FIFTEEN Like the bell that has called us to the commencement of our class, a deeply melodious ring starts the felicity of phrase in Sri Aurobindo's All can be done if the God-touch is there. Before I say anything, let me observe that it is uncertain whether Sri Aurobindo means a capital G in the seventh word. It may prove on manuscript evidence that a small g is intended. Then a generalisation would be made, pointing to the realm or plane of the many divine cosmic workers whom the one Supreme Divinity has put forth as expressions of His various powers. Not the Supreme Divinity directly but any spiritual entity that comes as a represent