TALK TWENTY-SEVEN We have already made the rather startling statement that Mallarme is best summed up as the Symbolist Poet of Non-sense, Absence and Silence. But so far we have dealt in generalities: now we must come to the particular face and form, as it were, of this Holy Trinity of his art. We must not only feel the dedicated distance, the aesthetic inwardness in which he seemed to carry on his life as a poet in the midst of the physical and intellectual activity of Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We must also examine the complex composition of his mind before we study the mind of his complex compositions. In his da

TALK EIGHTEEN Sri Aurobindo — we closed last time with this name after talking of Yeats's two incantatory stanzas on the Rose in the deeps of his heart. Especially apt is this name in the Yeatsian context because Sri Aurobindo is not only the sovereign artist of incantation but has also given us a climax of the incantatory art in a poem on the Mystic Rose itself. The most famous of mystical symbols he has steeped in the keenest 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

TALK SIXTEEN Early this morning I ran across one of our students, who had been absent last time. I naturally said, "How are you keeping?" It was a minute later that I thought I should have put the question in the typical South-Indian way. In South India many English-fancying people fuse several phrases into one and ask: "How are you, I hope?" And the general answer is: "Somewhat, I am afraid." Don't ask me to explain these compact sentences. But surely I can appreciate their piquancy. I'll tell you some other things also, equally worth remembering. Once at a railway station a chap was trying to enter a crowded third-class carriage. He had all sor

TALK FOUR Now in the lines of Sri Aurobindo's we have put together for study — I caught for some eternal eye the sudden Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,... And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity — we come, from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary, to what is caught, the thing visioned. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands — at the end of the line. In poetry, lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next ins

TALK SIX We spoke of Hugo soon after discussing, the value of metre. Apropos of Hugo I may continue my remarks on metre by a brief consideration of how metre operates in English and French and some other languages. Let me give you, as a short guide, a piece of verse composed by Coleridge and adapted in some places as well as enlarged at the close by Amal — not exactly rendered, as I would believe if I were of D'Annunzio's temper, belle or magni-fique by being made Amalienne. At the same time it tells us the characteristic of each important metrical foot and illustrates in the greater part of the line the very foot which is being spoken of. Cole

-01_Publisher^s Introduction.htm Publishers' Introduction Talking on poetry is best done if the talker is not only a critic but also a poet. It is with an eye to this double role that Amal Kiran (as Sri Aurobindo had renamed K. D. Sethna, giving the new designation's meaning as "The Clear Ray") was appointed lecturer in poetry soon after the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education had been founded. The class he took twice a week was from the beginning an unusual one. He had told the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, who had appointed him, that he would follow no set method but teach according to his inspiration. The Mother at once said: "Then I shall be with you." And she must have been wit