Uttering the Unutterable Speaking of a "metaphysical" poet, Dr. Johnson laid down the law to goggling and gaping Boswell: "If Mr. X has experienced the Unutterable, Mr. X will be well advised not to try and utter it." The advice, I am afraid, is not the Doctor's wit or sanity at its best. It is a superficially brilliant play on words, taking little stock of the uses and potentialities of the art of words. Just consider the term "Unutterable". It is not mumbo-jumbo: it has a meaning. Strictly and frontally, it signifies a divine infinitude which is so marvellous and mysterious that it cannot at all be described in language. An additional background significance is cau

Sight and Insight TWO WORKINGS OF THE POET'S EYE To write poetry one must go with one's subject into one's heart and imagination and identify it with them so that what one expresses of it may come out intimately vibrant and visible. But one can express either the surface of one's subject or the depth of it, create either an outward glory or an inward splendour. The Eagles of Robinson Jeffers and D. H. Lawrence All poetry is an inward way of speaking: still, it may not always speak of the inward stuff of its subject. And this in spite of the subject being what is called "subjective": for instance, a statement about love may provide us with the delicacy or power of t

The Megalomaniac A moment's warmth and the intimacies of a handful can never be my terminus. I must either possess like a God or feel the universe alien and strive to destroy its endless multitudes by some mystical fiat of my consciousness. If I fail, I move among men like a dusky cloud, depressing them and myself losing all savour of life. Even the poet in me, whose natural being is to discover the veins of gold embedded in dull rock, keeps drifting with a listless countenance. I know that a Light dissolving every imperfection lives somewhere and that I have a home in it which on occasion I attain. But the sense of not having attained it for good is often the verge of lunacy for

Literary Leaps I have been busy the last half hour at the game of turning the pages of a bookseller's catalogue and letting the titles serve my mind as leaping-boards. Some have landed me in memories, others in speculations. Here is an announcement that Dostoievsky is being republished in a uniform edition. The first two novels brought out are Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazhov. How well I remember reading the former! Night after night I read it, just before dropping asleep, and its picture of a murderer's mind was so overwhelmingly vivid that I would get a most uneasy sensation of being myself the culprit. As a rule, the villain of a story is not the chief character:

Great Meanings There is the famous case of the examinee who on being asked to paraphrase the well-known words from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn - Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter - wrote: "It is nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." We may be inclined to laugh at the ingenious fool. Do we, however, understand Keats rightly? Most of those who have not read his poem think he meant that new and unfamiliar tunes are more enjoyable than the ones to which we have been accustomed. In fact, this is not at all what he had in mind. He was talking of the carved figures on an ancient vase used for storing the ashes of the dead: some of these figur

The Attack on Romantic Idealism The romantic temperament is on the decline. To surround sex with the idealistic imagination is fast becoming unfashionable. It is regarded as playing a sort of secular "stooge" to that "arch-enemy of progress", the religious and mystical tendency. That is one aspect of the attack - scientific naturalists telling "visionary" poets to cut their colourful "cackle" and come down to brasstacks of animal reality. The other aspect of the attack is derived, surprisingly, from just the opposite quarter - the camp not of scientific naturalists but of those who have developed a spiritual world-view and seen the need of an inner Godwar

A Few Explanations These causeries, for all their play of changing mood and personal idiosyncrasy, were not conceived merely as passing thoughts. Seriousness went to their making and they were intended to go a long way - yet with no burden of an abstract unbending mind. Depth of thinking was sought to be reached here by a vivid and many-sided though not imprecise and unmethodical movement: vision was to accompany logic. But the yoking of the poetic intuition with the logical faculty might very well prove a worse hindrance for the common reader. The common reader had to be respected: I must not tie him up in colourful complexities and snatch him away from practical issues.

"The Red Immortal" Let me say at once that I do not have in mind either Lenin or Stalin. The word "red" here is not a synonym for "Soviet". It connects up with more natural and much older things than the economic system of Communist Russia - things like roses and human blood. To get my meaning you must ask what the red rose symbolises. The extreme beauty of a rose, steeped in crimson, stands, to the poetic eye, for the beauty-thrill between human beings, which we call love. It is the stir of love in our blood that Flecker named The red immortal riding through the hearts of men. Poets do not spin merely pretty phrases. They strain to pluck their language from the depths

Some Matters of the Muse Knowing that I have been enamoured of the Muse for quite a long time, a reader who is anxious to absorb her influence has asked me some questions about the appreciation of poetic quality, rhythm-values, mystical tones, the inevitable form. The questions are far from easy to answer, because the analytic mind is not the prime judge in poetry. The critical intelligence can distinguish shades, elucidate imagery, point out technical effects, but all this after something else has felt and recognised inspiration, the divine afflatus. Vision, word, rhythm - these three are so closely related, so charged with one another's essence, that the act of poe

THE THINKING CORNER The Thinking Corner Causeries on Life and Literature AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA) The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA First published 1996 (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