2 Now we come to the next poem. It is written in short lines, unlike the iambic pentameters of the previous one. It is also by a woman, as I have already said. This woman gives a reply, you might say, to the other woman. But at the same time there is an element of agreement. She doesn't say that no poetry should be written but she says that poetry should be written only under certain conditions. So she corrects the imbalance of the other one's poem which is categorical in saying that poetry should never be written. This new piece is called: "Advice to Would-be Poets." All of you, I think, are would-be poets; so it should prove useful to all except for Nirod

TALK FIVE We have now completed, with the help of Sri Aurobindo's lines, our summing up of the psychology and metaphysics of the poetic mood and process. Now I may sound a note of warning to budding poets. Our lines speak of the Eternal, the Infinite. These are terms that would spring easily to one's lips when one essays poetry in an Ashram of Yoga, but we have to be careful about them so long as we do not constantly live in the eternal and infinite Consciousness. Even if we do live in that Consciousness we must see that the poet in us speaks out of the man who has realised the presence of the Supreme and is not merely an outer person who wants to put

TALK FORTY-TWO We have now to comment critically on the poetry of the thought-mind and on the poetry of the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic

TALK TEN Last time we caught hold of true Poetic Diction with the help of Macbeth's seas-incarnadining hand and had also an appreciative look at genuine Poetic Diction through Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows. After the magic casements of Keats, Sri Aurobindo's gate of dreams will be the proper thing to show you first. The hour is of dawn-break, when the mind hovers as if on a meeting-point of the physical world and some wonderful Beyond whose secret seems to shine upon us for a while till common day glares out again. Sr

I SERIES OF TALKS THE HEART AND THE ART OF POETRY TALK ONE We are here to study the marvel that is poetry. But a Poetry Class involves duties as well as beauties, and I wish to get over the most prosaic of all duties before we launch into our delightful work. You know that the whole lot of you are supposed to grace the benches of this room with regular attendance and I am expected to go through the horrible task of taking the roll-call. I want to avoid the horror. So let me express a hope. There is a famous riddle: in an accident what is better than presence of mind? The answer is: absence of body. Well, I sincerely hope you will not regar

TALK TWENTY-TWO A song of Shakespeare's from Measure for Measure closed our discussion of melopoeia. Well, Shakespeare is just the poet with whom to start our discussion of phanopoeia. For, Shakespeare is the superman of imagery. But let us first say a few prefatory words on our subject. Just as the music of melopoeia must come fused with significance, though not necessarily significance acceptable to the reasoning mind, so also the Colour and shape, the contour and gesture brought by phanopoeia must come as organic part of the substance of poetry. By this I mean that true imagery is not something added to an idea or emotion, it does not serve si

TALK THIRTY -ONE We are ready to take up the third term of our scheme — Logopoeia which comes after Melopoeia and Phanopoeia. Let me remind you of what it stands for. In Melopoeia the prominent feature is the word-music. In Phanopoeia it is the word-imagery. In Logopoeia it is the word-thought — intelligible discourse, play of idea-power, language as a vehicle for reflection. Or, if we go negatively, we may say that Logopoeia means in poetry the expression where neither word-music nor word-imagery is prominent: these features may be there, indeed they have to be there if poetry is to exist at all, but whatever else than they is prominent determin

TALK THIRTY-FOUR "Pure poetry" — that is a phrase we have used once or twice in the course of our Talks. But so far we have put aside discussion of it. Now that we have talked of Logopoeia — poetic "thought-making" — the phrase becomes topical, for, though there are several schools of "pure poetry", they combine in ruling out logopoeic expression. Any kind of thinking, all reaching of conclusions moral or any other, they condemn as out of place in real poetic speech. They regard Arnold's formula — "criticism of life" — in relation to this speech as philistine impertinence. Poetry, they hold, produces a mood, but it does so in a direct fashion: i

TALK TWO It seems that last time my stick was lying across the table. God knows how it came to be there. But a teacher passing by, after the bell had rung, noticed it and said to me later, "Better not keep the stick there." I asked him whether it had looked too aggressively evident in that place, as if I had been about to violate the rule that has been set up for all the teachers. He nodded. Well, I have no intention to break the rule, even if the parents or guardians of all of you wrote to me as the parents of a certain boy once wrote to a teacher: "Please don't whack our son. He is very delicate and at home we never beat him except in self-defence."

TALK EIGHT We have said that Victor Hugo made history by using the word mouchoir (handkerchief) in a poetic drama. By the way, I myself made a bit of history last time by using not the word but the thing itself in an extraordinary context: absent-mindedly I wiped the blackboard with my mouchoir. I would have made still more history and, while being historical, made you hysterical if I had wiped my face afterwards with the chalk-powdered handkerchief. Well, something like acting so queerly was what the poetic pundits of England thought the first practitioners of Romanticism were doing: they were shocked at the manner in which the Romanti-cists were try