from Indian writers for review in the Arya, but I always refrained because I would have had to be very severe. I write only about Harindranath because there I could sincerely and I think justly write unqualified praise.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 131
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
May 29, 1931
I have no objection to your sending my comment to Uday-Shankar, although it seems to me of a too slight and passing character to be of any importance. Still, if you think he will really value it so much, you can send it. But surely it is rather too slight for Bharatavarsha.
I do not quite catch the sense of your proposal that I should see his dancing from the next room. It looks as if you thought I had acquired the siddhi of seeing through walls and doors. I assure you that I have not got so far. If he were to dance in the court downstairs, it would be different, but then what would he do with the palm and other plants? – even if Timirbaran1 like another Orpheus were to make them move and join the troupe, I fear he would find them rather cumbersome. However, I suppose neither his visit nor Suhrawardy’s is for tomorrow, so we will leave these things where they belong – on the lap of a shadowy and uncertain future.
As for Suhrawardy, you can if you like send the complimentary portion of my remarks with perhaps a hint that I found his writing rather unequal, so that it may not be all sugar. But the phrases about “album poetry” and chaotic technique are too vivid – being meant only for private consumption – to be transmitted to the writer of the poems criticised; I would for that have expressed the same view in less drastic language. As I have already said once, I do not like to write anything disparaging or discouraging for those whom I cannot help to do better. I received much poetry from Indian writers for review in the Arya, but I always refrained because I would have had to be very severe. I write only about Harindranath because there I could sincerely and I think justly write unqualified praise.
It was, by the way, rather paradoxical or epigrammatic – I don’t know which – to write of Suhrawardy at once that “he was in Paris” and that he “ended his life in a tragedy” – it sounded like a new version of “He, being dead, yet liveth.” I presumed you meant a moral, not a physical ending; but if he is coming to India to give University lectures, there must be also morally something that survives. It is only when the soul is lost – or all the faculties – that it can be said of a man yet living that his life is ended. However, I see that you propose to throw light on the mystery hereafter.
Poetry can start from any plane of consciousness, although like all art – or, one might say, all creation – it must always come through the vital if it is to be alive. And as there is always a joy in creation, that joy along with a certain enthousiasmos2 – not enthusiasm, if you please, but anandamaya āveśa [blissful inrush of the creative force] – must always be there, whatever the source. But your poetry differs from the lines you quote. Suhrawardy writes from a purely vital inspiration, Shakespeare ditto (though he puts a vital feeling in the form of a passionate thought), Tagore in these lines ditto, and in the last case from a rather light and superficial vital. Your inspiration, on the contrary, comes from the linking of the vital creative instrument to a deeper psychic experience, and it is that which makes the whole originality and peculiar individual power and subtle and delicate perfection of your poems. It was indeed because this linking-on took place that the true poetic faculty suddenly awoke in you; for it was not there before, at least on the surface. The joy you feel, therefore, was no doubt partly the simple joy of creation, but there comes also into it the joy of expression of the psychic being which was seeking for an outlet since your 
boyhood. It is this that justifies your poetry-writing as a part of your Sadhana.
I find I have left myself no place or time in this letter for doubt and scepticism. You have not lightened my task by throwing Julian Huxley’s ingeniously worded absurdity at me. What I wanted to point out was that what you seem to mean by scepticism is something quite different from what the Mother meant when she spoke to you about it. However, that must wait for another spare half-hour.
1 A famous Bengali musician, who headed a troupe in Calcutta. He was the conductor of the orchestra that accompanied Udayshankar’s dance.
2 The Greek word means “to be inspired or possessed by a god”.