Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
To continue about Lawrence’s poetry from where I stopped.
The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of language for the sake of language, of form for the sake of form, even of indulgence of poetic emotion for the sake of the emotion, because all that veils the thing in itself, dresses it up, prevents it from coming out in the seizing nudity of its truth, the power of its intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible – reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible, suppress as much of the form as may be and you get nearer that behind, which is invisible. It is the same impulse, as I have said, as pervaded recent endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the reality; let us suppress the concealing form and express the reality by its appropriate geometrical figures – and you have cubism. Or since that is too much, suppress exactitude of form and replace it by more significant forms that indicate rather than conceal the truth – so you have “abstract” paintings. Or, what is within reveals itself in dreams, not in waking phenomena, let us have in poetry or painting the figures, visions, sequences, design of dreams – and you have surrealist art and poetry. The idea of Lawrence is akin; let us get rid of rhyme, metre,
artifices which please us for their own sake and draw us away from the thing in itself, the real behind the form. So suppressing these things let us have something bare, rocky, primally expressive. There is nothing to find fault with in the theory provided it does lead to a new creation which expresses the inner truth in things better and more vividly and directly than with rhyme and metre the old poetry, now condemned as artificial and rhetorical, succeeded in expressing it. But the results do not come up to expectation. Take the four lines of Lawrence1 – in what do they differ from the old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that goes on reverberating within and preserves the vision forever. What the modernist metreless verse does is to catch up the movements of prose and try to fit them into varying lengths and variously arranged lengths of verse. Sometimes something which has its own beauty or power is done – though nothing better or even equal to the best that was done before, but for the most there is either an easy or a strained ineffectiveness. No footsteps hitting the earth: Footsteps on earth can be a walk, can be prose: the beats of poetry can on the contrary be a beat of wings. As for the bird image, well, there is more lapsing than flying in this movement. But where is the bareness, the rocky directness – where is the something more direct and real than any play of outer form can give? The attempt at colour, image, expression is just the same as in the old poetry – whatever is new and deep comes from Lawrence’s peculiar vision, but could have been more powerfully expressed in a closer-knit language and metre.
Of course, it does not follow that new and freer forms are not to be attempted or that they cannot succeed at all. (I may say in passing that this is not the same principle as my stress poem – reliance on stresses and reliance on lengths are two very different things.) But if they succeed it will be bringing the fundamental quality, power, movement of the old poetry – which is the eternal quality of all poetry – into new metrical and rhythmic discoveries and new secrets of poetic expression. It can’t be done by reducing these to skeletonic bareness or suppressing them by subdual and dilution in a vain attempt to unite the free looseness of prose with the gathered and intent paces of poetry.
P.S. Written in haste with no time to revise. If slips or corrections needed, will do in typescript. I am keeping the excerpts to see if there is anything else that needs saying.