Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
Had a nice quiet day – I liked it very much. Did some Tagorian reading. His last art lecture two years ago, sāhityatattwa, has been printed in a book which he sent me recently. There what he writes re. mathematical ananda is interesting. He postulates that all delight may be the subject matter of poetry. Hence: “The question that naturally comes to mind is why this (mathematical delight) has not been a subject matter of literature. The reason is that its experience is confined to a few people and unknown to the general public. The language with which one can understand it is technical. It has not been developed into a living material from the feelings of the common people.”
Put “yogic poetry” in place of mathematics and you will at once understand why he cannot accept yogic poetry as poetry proper, since of course its province is (today at least) alpaloker madhye baddha [confined to a few people] and certainly sārbasadhāraner agochar [unknown to the general public]. Khagendra Mitra has echoed this identical view in a somewhat roundabout way by his rather obscure term anubhaber swajatya, [similar feeling] what?
Mathematical delight be blowed! What does he mean? That you can’t write mathematics in verse? I suppose not, it was not meant to be. You can’t start off
Oh, two by three plus four plus seven!
To add things is to be in heaven.
But all the same if one thinks it worth while to take the trouble, one can express the mathematician’s delight in discovery, or the grammarian’s in grammatising or the engineer’s in planning a bridge or a house. What about Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral? The reason why these subjects do not easily get into poetry is because they do not lend themselves to poetic handling, their substance being 
intellectual and abstract and their language also, not as the substance and language of poetry must be, emotional and intuitive. It is not because they appeal only to a few people and not to the general run of humanity. A good dinner appeals not to a few people but to the general run of humanity, but it would all the same be a little difficult to write an epic or a lyric on the greatness of cookery, and fine dishes or the joys of the palate and the belly. Spiritual subjects on the other hand can lend themselves to poetic handling because they can be expressed in the language of high emotion and radiant intuition. How many people will appreciate it is a question which is irrelevant to the merit of the poetry. More people have appreciated sincerely Macaulay’s Lays or Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads than ever really appreciated Timon of Athens or Paradise Regained – but that does not determine the relative value or appropriateness of these things as poetry. Artistic or poetic value cannot be reckoned by the plaudits or the reactions of the greatest number. I am only just reading Khagen Mitra’s swājātya – this is only a splenetic comment on your quotation from Tagore.