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

TALK TWENTY-SEVEN We have already made the rather startling statement that Mallarme is best summed up as the Symbolist Poet of Non-sense, Absence and Silence. But so far we have dealt in generalities: now we must come to the particular face and form, as it were, of this Holy Trinity of his art. We must not only feel the dedicated distance, the aesthetic inwardness in which he seemed to carry on his life as a poet in the midst of the physical and intellectual activity of Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We must also examine the complex composition of his mind before we study the mind of his complex compositions. In his da

TALK EIGHTEEN Sri Aurobindo — we closed last time with this name after talking of Yeats's two incantatory stanzas on the Rose in the deeps of his heart. Especially apt is this name in the Yeatsian context because Sri Aurobindo is not only the sovereign artist of incantation but has also given us a climax of the incantatory art in a poem on the Mystic Rose itself. The most famous of mystical symbols he has steeped in the keenest inner light and lifted it on a metrical base of pure stress into an atmosphere of rhythmic ecstasy. To receive the true impact of this poem we have to read it with a mind held quiet and the voice full-toned; but

TALK SIXTEEN Early this morning I ran across one of our students, who had been absent last time. I naturally said, "How are you keeping?" It was a minute later that I thought I should have put the question in the typical South-Indian way. In South India many English-fancying people fuse several phrases into one and ask: "How are you, I hope?" And the general answer is: "Somewhat, I am afraid." Don't ask me to explain these compact sentences. But surely I can appreciate their piquancy. I'll tell you some other things also, equally worth remembering. Once at a railway station a chap was trying to enter a crowded third-class carriage. He had all sor

TALK FOUR Now in the lines of Sri Aurobindo's we have put together for study — I caught for some eternal eye the sudden Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,... And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity — we come, from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary, to what is caught, the thing visioned. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands — at the end of the line. In poetry, lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next ins