SAVITRI* SOME GLIMPSES AND REFLECTIONS On August 15, 1954, the eighty-second birthday of Sri Aurobindo, a most splendid offering to the Master was the one-volume edition brought out by the Ashram of his greatest poetic achievement—Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol—over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece i

A CROSS CRITIC CROSS-EXAMINED I* One is appalled by the blithe irresponsibility with which some of our writers launch into deep waters and spout frothy criticisms without realising how badly out of their depth they are. Thus Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, in a review published in the Sunday Standard of February 25, 1965, falls foul of Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar for devoting to Sri Aurobindo three chapters of his Indian Writing in English and indulges in a little orgy of abuse over a poem of Sri Aurobindo's praised by Iyengar, Thought the Paraclete, from which Mr. Ezekiel quotes five lines while criticising all its twenty-two. He says this poem i

4 GRADES OF POETIC QUALITY: SOME CRITICAL DISTINCTIONS Before we look at the maturest and final phase of the Aurobindonian world of poetry, we may cast—as a phrase in Revelation has it—"a hurried glance behind" to make, apropos of Sri Aurobindo's work so far, some clear distinctions between fair levels on the one side and fine uplands on the other and then between the latter's laudable success and a sheer excellence of peaks beyond praise. Our task is hardly unpleasant since it is not one of demarcating non-poetry from poetry: thanks to the nature of our material, it merely involves recording lower and higher degrees of enjoyment. Sri Aurobindo hi

ROSE OF GOD* A COMMENT ON ITS MYSTICISM AND ITS POETRY I Mysticism rising to a climax of the incantatory art—there we have that poem of Sri Aurobindo's: Rose of God. The most famous of mystical symbols he has steeped in the intensest 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 we must be very clear in our enunciation, not allowing any emotional fuzz to come between the poet's significant sound and the intuitive depths of our intelligence. It is not a mere emotional thri

2 DIONYSIAN AND APOLLONIAN Dionysian and Apollonian have been a fashionable antithesis, following upon Nietzsche's use of the terms. After Nietzsche they are always opposed roughly as Romanticism and Classicism, instinct and reason, natural state and civilisation, myth and rationalism, music and the plastic arts, the dithyrambic and the reflective as exemplified in the chorus and the dialogue respectively of a Greek tragedy.1 Recently the antithesis à la Nietzsche has come into special literary prominence in connection with the life-vision and soul-attitude of Nikos Kazantzakis. In an excellent exposition of Kazantzakis's synthesis of the two in what that gr

5 ILION: AN EPIC IN QUANTITATIVE HEXAMETERS In the poetry of sheer spiritual Light we have two kinds of work by Sri Aurobindo. One makes an individual use of traditional forms: here the greatest achievement is the blank-verse Savitri The other makes experiments in new forms: here the outstanding accomplishment is compositions solving the problem of quantitative metre which has baffled so many English poets. But these compositions are themselves of two kinds—those that deal with directly spiritual experiences and an unfinished epic of about five thousand lines, entitled Ilion, that is based on Page-107 Homer's theme in the Iliad

THE OPENING OF SAVITRI * SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON BOOK ONE CANTO ONE I Would you kindly help me to understand the following points in Savitri ( International University Centre Edition, with the Author's Letters on the Poem, 1945) ? P. 3. "A power of fallen boundless self..." Is it the same as "The huge foreboding mind of Night" ? Pp. 3,4. The above-mentioned "power" longing "to reach its end in vacant Nought", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown" "Repeating for ever the unconscious act...", and the Earth wheeling "abandoned in the hollow gulfs"—are these movements successive or simultaneous ? The dou

-004_Sri Aurobindo—the Poet.htm SRI AUROBINDO — THE POET * To see a star of the first literary magnitude swim into our ken makes one of the rarest and richest moments of life. But there are thrills and thrills; and while it may strike us dumb to discover all of a sudden "deep-brow'd" Homer's "demesne", it may prove difficult to stand Silent, upon a peak in Darien, if we find that a mare magnum already familiar to us had all along a shade of glory we had never distinguished—that, for instance, it was Homer who also wrote Plato or that the author of the Republic was the true wizard who even here in the world of Impermanence had made the phenomenal ill-fate of Ilium almost a divine Idea

POETRY IN SRI AUROBINDO'S VISION * LIGHTS FROM PASSAGES IN SAVITRI We have said a good deal about Sri Aurobindo the Poet. And we have looked upon Savitri as the peak—or rather the many-peaked Himalaya—of Aurobindonian poetry. Also, in dealing with the supreme altitudes as well as the inferior heights we have given glimpses of the Poet's view of the poetic phenomenon both in its essence and in its progression. It may not be amiss to dwell at a little more length on some of the fundamentals involved. The easiest way to do so would be to string together or else paraphrase a number of passages from Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism. But I should

-002_Publisher^s Note.htm PUBLISHER'S NOTE We are very happy to publish this research work of Mr. K. D. Sethna, As explained in the author's Introductory Note, it is a companion volume to his earlier study, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. Himself a poet as well as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, Mr. Sethna may be said to bring an inside knowledge of the art with which the present book is concerned. The papers collected here are the result of a penetrating search for the soul of poetry and the possibilities of its highest expression. We are sure the readers will find in this volume critical perceptions which will enable them to come into an intimate contact with Sri Aurobindo's poetry in all it