APROPOS OF SAVITRI When I was preparing Savitri for our International University Centre's one-volume edition in 19541 was very careful about the collection of Sri Aurobindo's letters to me, which was to accompany it at the end. I made several alterations in the arrangement - some actually at the page-proof stage. Not unexpectedly the Press felt bothered, but it did not put any hitch in my way. The Mother was kept in touch with all the goings-on. Once I seemed to overstep the limit. After a letter of 1936 had been printed I made a new reading of two words from Sri Aurobindo's manuscript. The letter as it stood in print read: "Savitri is represented in the poem as

-002_Compiler^s Note.htm COMPILER'S NOTE Amal Kiran, (K.D. Sethna), still with us in his 106th year, is acknowledged to be one of the greatest authorities on Sri Aurobindo's revelatory epic poem Savitri: a legend and a symbol. Yet although he has been a prolific author, with 52 published books on a wide range of topics, he has never dedicated an entire book to the poem with which he had such a special relationship. His writings on it have appeared over more than 50 years in various books and journals. The intention behind this compilation is to make easily available to the general interested reader everything written by Amal Kiran on Sri Aurobindo's epic and published by him during his lon

SOME COMMENTS ON SAVITRI1 (I) The opening passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - the block of the first 78 lines from It was the hour before the Gods awake [p. 1] to All can be done if the God-touch is there [p. 3] is often regarded as the most difficult, the most obscure in the whole epic. Its obscurity lies precisely in its description of an obscurity, a darkness, a night which covers the world. What is the nature of the tenebrous phenomenon pictured in lines 2-4 of the passage in relation to the 1st? - Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple

A SUGGESTION ABOUT A WORD IN SAVITRI AN AMERICAN DISCIPLE'S LETTER TO MOTHER INDIA February 13,1972 Dear Mr. Sethna, A follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I have been a reader of Mother India since 1953 and have gained much from it. T have been an admirer of your writings in particular. An engineer in the fields of computer design and communications, I have degrees in philosophy and physics. With the introduction out of the way, I would like to call your attention to a seeming error in Savitri. It occurs in the original two volume edition, and in the 1954 University edition. Perhaps it has been c

-013_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri and Dante^s Divina Commedia.htm SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA TWO LETTERS 1 The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter. The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performa

-010_Poetry in Sri Aurobindo^s Vision Lights from Passages in Savitri.htm POETRY IN SRI AUROBINDO'S VISION1 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 altitude 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

2 Now we come to the next poem. It is written in short lines, unlike the iambic pentameters of the previous one. It is also by a woman, as I have already said. This woman gives a reply, you might say, to the other woman. But at the same time there is an element of agreement. She doesn't say that no poetry should be written but she says that poetry should be written only under certain conditions. So she corrects the imbalance of the other one's poem which is categorical in saying that poetry should never be written. This new piece is called: "Advice to Would-be Poets." All of you, I think, are would-be poets; so it should prove useful to all except for Nirod

TALK FIVE We have now completed, with the help of Sri Aurobindo's lines, our summing up of the psychology and metaphysics of the poetic mood and process. Now I may sound a note of warning to budding poets. Our lines speak of the Eternal, the Infinite. These are terms that would spring easily to one's lips when one essays poetry in an Ashram of Yoga, but we have to be careful about them so long as we do not constantly live in the eternal and infinite Consciousness. Even if we do live in that Consciousness we must see that the poet in us speaks out of the man who has realised the presence of the Supreme and is not merely an outer person who wants to put

TALK FORTY-TWO We have now to comment critically on the poetry of the thought-mind and on the poetry of the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic

TALK TEN Last time we caught hold of true Poetic Diction with the help of Macbeth's seas-incarnadining hand and had also an appreciative look at genuine Poetic Diction through Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows. After the magic casements of Keats, Sri Aurobindo's gate of dreams will be the proper thing to show you first. The hour is of dawn-break, when the mind hovers as if on a meeting-point of the physical world and some wonderful Beyond whose secret seems to shine upon us for a while till common day glares out again. Sr