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

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