A GREAT PIONEER OF YOGIC POETRY:  AN APPRAISEMENT OF AE'S INSPIRATION   It was in starlight that I heard of AE's death. I do not know if he died also under the stars, but there could have been no better time to hear of his passing. For often he must have shut his eyes in tranced forgetfulness of earth at this deep and passionless hour: he was one of those to whom meditation and self-communion was the truest life, and he has told us how those little gemlike songs of his early days came to him pure and perfect out of the profound hush into which he had plunged his mind. I remember my own joy on first realising what his poetry disclosed — a cool unpretentious flower

-019_Romantic Melancholy and Existentialist Anguish (A Letter) ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY AND EXISTENTIALIST ANGUISH   (A LETTER)   If I were a historian of literary thought I should call your letter a connecting-link of tendencies between some moods of the nineteenth century and some complexes of the twentieth. In terms of colour, it is a creamy grey of uncertain aestheticism, joining the poetic pallors of those days to the philosophic blacknesses of our own. In terms of shape, it is a bridge between romantic melancholy and existentialist anguish — shall we say, a Bridge of Sighs, recalling those lines of Byron's? —   I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison o

-011_God's Doorway "GOD'S DOORWAY "   A shining door, immense and unmoving, stands between our worship and the Beyond. That is all the light vouchsafed to us, a hard light blocking our passage to the ultimate Secrecy. We knock and knock, but no grace slides through the fast fitting, no glimpse of the other side is given us by any relenting of the giant hinges. Still, we find that every knock gathers — with its harsh and hurtful rebound from the surface of gold confronting us — a ringing sweetness, a most melodious and heart-ravishing "Nay" to all the importunate prayers of our flesh and blood. Here is a refusal that is a rapture more rich than our grandest triumphs in the world. Out of its mysterious reve

TWO LETTERS ON POETRY   1   "Poetry is life at a remove of form and meaning."   This dictum of R. P. Blackmuir's strikes me as crystallising a very central truth. Let me interpret it to you as best I can.   It is a mistake to cut poetry off from life, but it is also a mistake to equate it with life. In poetry we do get life, but not in its crude immediacy. We get it at a remove — with a certain refining change of it.   Life, as it is, has a looseness, a roughness, a disorder-liness: it lacks a perfect organisation of energy, a rounding off and a finishing touch, a harmonious weaving together of many strands into one whole. All that life lacks here

TOWARDS THE ILLIMITABLE   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 multitude 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

-009_The Critic^s Development THE CRITIC'S DEVELOPMENT   A true critic of poetry passes through three stages of development. He begins by a conscious exercise of the analytic mind upon his experience of a poem. He takes his impression to pieces, classifies his reactions, studies the structure from the outside and considers both the matter and the form inasmuch as they are communicated to him across a gulf of strangeness: his criticism is the result of his mind's evaluation, as regards both significance and technique, of the relation established between two separate ends, the poem and himself.   By constant practice he discovers a few points of contact with the poem, through which he visions the f

  INSPIRATION AND EFFORT   INSPIRATION  AND  EFFORT STUDIES IN LITERARY ATTITUDE AND EXPRESSION   AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA)   The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA   First published 1995 (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 j170/17.6.94/750  

SPLENDID SURPRISES   THE MYSTICAL POEMS OF NISHIKANTO   It is high time critics took serious note of the new school of poetry that has arisen in India under the inspiration of Sri Aurobindo who is himself the centre of it. The new school is of special interest not only because of the novel content and form of its poetry but also because of the way in which that poetry comes to its members.   The old view of a divine breath blowing through the poet is rather at a discount today. Not that the poet is regarded as altogether a conscious intellectual agent deliberately fashioning out his work. Much indeed of modern verse is an intellectual exercise, an attempt at being

-017_A Poet,a Poem and a commentator(A Letter) A POET, A POEM AND A COMMENTATOR A LETTER   My delay in acknowledging and estimating your commentary on my poem, A Poet's Stammer,1 must have led you to think: "How cold and ungrateful are poets — they don't care how much labour critics spend on appreciating them." But that would be a mistake. Poetry is not everybody's pet and the poet knowing how much "life's clamour" tends to drown his small silvery voice is hardly likely to miss valuing the few leaps he finds of the reader-heart to his tune. If there is any neglect by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Grav

INNER SIGHT AND INNER SONG NIRODBARAN'S ACHIEVEMENT IN MYSTICAL POETRY   Doctors have been good novelists: there are enough unusual incidents of human value in their clinical experience to make arresting stories under the selective surgery of a realistic imagination. But rare is the doctor who turns poet. A Dr. Cronin is conceivable, a Dr. Bridges is a wonder indeed. The book Sun-Blossoms which is before me is a radiant curiosity since — as the Foreword to it by K. H. G. tells us — the poems here collected were penned by a doctor. The wonder, however, becomes easier to accept without ceasing to be splendidly out of the way, when we are told also that Dr. Nirodbaran b