TALK TWENTY-ONE So the Quarterly Examination has come and gone, and we are together again. We were as if enemies for a while: now once more there is peace between us and we can look back calmly on wounds given or taken. But is it really a fact that you felt the Quarterly Examination as Keats had felt the Quarterly Review in which his Endymion had been attacked? Surely you can't picture me as a sort of Jeffreys exulting at the sight of your discomfiture? Besides, I was not solely responsible for the paper. The second question asking you to comment on the statement that "poets are born, not made" was neither born from me like a spontaneous sword try

TALK TWENTY-NINE Mallarme, with precise yet puzzling image-combinations that would suggest a meaning as elusive as in wordless Music, sought to embody in poetic words a supra-intellectual sense of some perfect Beyond of Silence. His attitude to the work he had undertaken is stated by Stefan George (pronounced Gayorgay), one of his early admirers, in a forceful German phrase: Und fur sein denkbild blutend Mallarme. which means, And bleeding for his ideal, Mallarme. It is well known how whole-heartedly Mallarme dedicated his life to achieving his poetic object. But people who feel that he sought some Beyond mistake certain expressi

A BACK-LOOK AT MACBETH I was not given a theme in advance. Nirod has just now said, "Talk about Macbeth — or, if you like, about the Sonnets. After all, it doesn't matter because it's the same genius who wrote the play and those poems." Perhaps he should have added, "It's the same non-genius who is going to talk." Well, as he has mentioned Macbeth first, I take it that his preference is for the play. The only trouble is that all of you have studied it very lately whereas my memory of it goes back by several decades. So, naturally, it's a little hazy. Still, it is not difficult to say a few things by way of introduction. There has been a controversy as to

TALK TWENTY-EIGHT Let us continue from where we left off in the last lecture — or, if you think that what I said last time left you in a bewilderedly broken condition of mind, I shall refer not to the last lecture but to the last fracture. Perhaps my words now will set some of the broken pieces together. Mallarme's is a mysticism of a very mystifying kind Before him there had been mystical poetry, but except for Blake it had not the quality of mystification which this Frenchman brought into play. His was a step necessary in the evolution of the poetic conscious-ness towards what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry, a poetry written n

TALK FOURTEEN We have illustrated piquancy epigrammatic, both in its sober and in its drunken forms — or, more piquantly put, both in its Words-worthy and in its Swinburning manifestations. We shall now cite a less pointed example where the inversion of function which consti-tutes the fine paradoxicality of piquancy is illustrated with a more pictorial turn. W. H. Davies, a modern poet, speaks about the sea trying With savage joy and effort wild To smash his rocks with a dead child. We would expect a smashing and killing of a child with the help of rocks. But that would not convey the vehemence of the hurling waves, the blind ferocity o

TALK FORTY Between my last lecture and this, quite a gap has fallen. And in that gap I fell down! Yes, I had a nasty toss some days back and had to stay at home for a time. What happened? you will ask. Well, as your Professor of Poetry I may say that my life has a poetic rhythm — a falling movement and a rising movement. Also, I am very much like a simile — very much like what I am doing just now, for I am giving you a simile in comparing myself to one. The Romans had the phrase: Omne simile claudicat — "Every simile limps." One may understand this in two ways. A simile may limp because it may not come up to the reality: unable to keep pace with t

TALK THIRTY-NINE We have finished our discussion of pure poetry. We gave the subject the broadest definition possible and made pure poetry depend not on the kind but on the quality. All kinds can be "pure" and the purity is determined by the distance from prose— distance in terms of intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm and not in terms of what is popularly thought of as poetic — namely, a special vocabulary and an unfamiliar theme. Pure poetry thus becomes co-extensive with life itself, but life in its inner nature: as Nirodbaran has put it in a line which is poetry at its purest — Life that is deep and wonder-vast.

TALK THIRTEEN Last time I spoke of falsetto, something forced in sound-expres-sion, something that is not the natural body of a keen musical feeling. Falsetto in poetry can come not only when a poet indulges in polysyllables that have an imposing air. It can come even when he is monosyllabic and apparently unpretentious. Monosyllables and polysyllables can both be at fault and can both serve as a legitimate means. We have several times mentioned them: Let us now ask: What functions in general do they perform? Some special func-tions we have already touched upon. But in general we may say that their functions are according to the nature of the l

TALK ELEVEN I find on my table two books that look like the collections of my own poems. Who has placed them here? Oh, the lady on the last bench? Well, what am I supposed to do with my own books? Do you want me to read some poems out of them? I don't know whether I can do so — but we shall see. All depends on whether I can show modesty convincingly enough and then overcome it entirely for your sake! This morning I must be very very very serious to balance the light-heartedness of last time. I must be so long-faced that I can't even say, "Good morning." But if I said "Bad morning" you'd again start laughing. So I'll just keep a solemn countenance

TALK TWENTY-THREE We have brought Shakespeare and Eliot together apropos of the latter's lines on evening as an etherized patient. But Eliot and Sarojini Naidu would indeed be strange associates, the one a sophisticated modernist, the other a romantic traditionalist, the one intellectually inspired, the other emotionally beauty-swept. Yet there are some tracks in my mind along which I must bring them together: perhaps the very ingeniousness of Shakespeare and Eliot drives me in this matter. The lines we have quoted from Eliot I have considered the surgeon's delight. Well, the husband of the Indian poetess was a doctor and it is by marrying