"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

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