INTRODUCTORY NOTE This collection of surveys, studies, discussions, annotations, queries and controversies is meant to serve, in general, as a companion volume to the author's earlier book of 1947, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. What was there developed is, as a rule, practically passed over here, except when a too scant treatment would leave a serious gap in the exposition. Similarly, that book itself avoided repeating the contents of two pieces written before it and now included in this. But either work, in its particular way, has a certain completeness of its own. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo worked out a definite scheme in three parts. The present colle

"HEAVEN'S VAST EAGLE" DISCUSSION OF A LITERARY POINT A Reader's Letter In The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (p. 26) you find some small fault with "Like heaven's vast eagle" in the lines from the very early narrative poem of Sri Aurobindo, Urvasie: Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept Down over the inferior snowless heights And swallowed up the dawn. You suggest instead: "Like a vast eagle", which appears reasonable. And then realizing that "heaven" was there for rhythm you would allow "Like some I'm all the more perplexed because you say that this would "stir the imagination with a clearer and closer touch

2 EARLY POEMS AND BLANK-VERSE NARRATIVES Even in his juvenilia, written round about his twentieth year, Sri Aurobindo has at the same time a freshness and a finish, proving that from the beginning the artist went hand in hand with the visionary. Of course, the visioning is done by the heart of a youth and it is coloured by the temper of Romanticism which was inevitable in the eighties of the last century. But the blending of the rich with the graceful and shapely is an effect of the Greek and Latin Muse, in fervent dedication to whom the young Indian lived at Cambridge. Echoes and immaturities are not absent, but the inspired individual note

-005_Sri Aurobindo—Poet of Yoga.htm SRI AUROBINDO — POET OF YOGA* Sri Aurobindo is always a call to spiritual adventure. To read his recent poetry is like walking on the edge of a precipice. One gets intoxicated with heights, one feels dizzy with depths, and it is with an effort that one manages to breathe the keen air and keep a clear head. A vision is lit, an experience takes shape, which are difficult to connect with the familair contours of life. The critic, therefore, is liable to miss the true impact of this poetry, the right suggestion of each austere or colourful line. Most critics will go astray because the self-expression of a supreme Master of Yoga cannot be measured by the rules-of- th

TWO ILLUMINATIONS FROM ILION A great poem illuminates many areas of art and life, provides insight into a number of technical problems and psychologico-cultural issues. I may bring forward two instances of such help from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion. Both have nothing quite directly to do with the central subject-matter or the poetic working out of it; but they are highly relevant to the field of poetry in general and to certain confrontations of self and world emerging today. I The Problem of Translating Homer Sri Aurobindo has framed a theory of what he calls true quantitative verse in English and amply illustrated it with nearly 5000 lin

THE WORLD OF SRI AUROBINDO'S POETRY* AN INTRODUCTORY EXPLORATION UP TO SAVITRI I GREAT POETS OF OUR TIMES Yeats, Rilke, Valéry, Bloc: these are the indisputable peaks of poetry the West has thrown up in our times. One may extend the roll by adding Jiménez who has been outshone in the public eye so far by that more picturesque, romantic and tragic-fated countryman of his, Lorca. Several others of a little later generation, with whom Lorca connects at some points, have had a more sensational success by their revolt against all tradition and their seizing mostly in contorted or bizarre image, in complicated and intellectualised idiom, in free semi

A LATINISED ADJECTIVE IN ENGLISH A CORRESPONDENCE WITH SRI AUROBINDO A humorous discussion with Sri Aurobindo about a Latinised adjective for poetic use may not be out of place here. For it links up ultimately with a poem of his own. I put to him questions and he replied. (In my lines— This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill Flung my disperse life-blood more richly in— a terminal d d will at once English that Latin fellow "disperse", but is he really objectionable? At first I had "Drove" instead of "Flung"—so the desire for a less dental rhythm was his raison d'être, but if he seems a trifle weaker than his

"SWAN OF THE SUPREME AND SPACELESS ETHER... AN APPROACH THROUGH SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY TO A POETIC VISION Have we here a contradiction in terms or a suprarational truth? What point is made by the words "spaceless ether"? Nineteenth-century physics accustomed us to the ether as a medium permeating space and transmitting electromagnetic waves. In the twentieth century, the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's relativity theory discredited the ether as a spacefilling medium and left us with empty space. But this space, according to Einstein, is capable of structure and in that sense cannot be an insubstantial void and may be called "ether".

TWO CRITICS CRITICISED* I In the Illustrated Weekly of India (July 31, 1949) appeared a comment on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. It was by the periodical's editor, an Irishman, C. R. M., in "Books and Comments" and was meant to review my study, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. After calling my book interesting, C. R. M. went on to say: "For Mr. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo's Muse is a case of'this side idolatry', and I am not so sure that genius is so rampant here as he claims. The merits seem to me to consist of a high level of spiritual utterance, abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the

3 THE DRAMAS OF LIFE-VISION, THE PATRIOTIC INSPIRATION, THE PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY The mythic imagination passes more and more into the mystic as Sri Aurobindo penetrates to the very centre of the Indian consciousness and begins to practise Yoga. But this mysticism is not only free from a mere cloudy hugeness: it is also not restricted to a fiery teeming with ethereal populations: the earthly and the human are mostly filled out by it to a divinity of their own in a vibrant continuity with the supra-terrestrial, the ultra-human. And this bent towards synthesis but transposes to a new plane what was al