Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 20952

Poetry, if it deserves the name at all, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only. There are here three elements, the original source of inspiration, the vital force of creative beauty which gives its substance and impetus and determines the form, and the transmitting outer consciousness of the poet. The most genuine and perfect poetry is written when the original source is able to throw its inspiration pure and unaltered into the vital and there it takes its true native form and power of speech exactly reproducing the inspiration, while the outer consciousness is entirely passive and transmits with-out alteration what it receives. When the vital is too active and gives too much of its own initiative or a translation into more or less turbid vital stuff, the poetry remains powerful but is inferior in quality and less authentic. Finally, if the outer consciousness is too lethargic and blocks, or too active and makes its own version, then you have the poetry that fails. It is also the interference of these two parts either by obstruction or by too great an activity of their own or by both together that causes the difficulty and labour of writing. There would be no difficulty if the inspiration came through without obstruction. or interference in a pure transcription – and that is what happens in a poet’s highest or freest moments. when he writes not at all out of his own external human mind but by inspiration, as the mouthpiece of the Gods.

As for the originating source it may be anywhere, the subtle physical plane, the higher or lower vital itself, the dynamic or creative intelligence, the plane of dynamic vision, the psychic, the illumined mind – even, though this is the rarest, the Overmind. To get the Overmind inspiration through is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. As for your personal question, it is the original source of D’s inspiration and the good will of his vital (emotional) channel that makes his poetry so spontaneous; the psychic inspiration takes at once its true form and speech in the vital and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind. That is usually the character of the lyrical inspiration (D’s gift is essentially lyrical) – to flow out of the being – whether it comes from the vital or the psychic; it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and spontaneous parts of the nature. Your source is on the contrary the creative (poetic) intelligence and, at your best, the illumined mind; but a poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect. This intellect is an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the authentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind, but is not allowed transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to try to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When you get something through from the illumined mind, then you produce something really fine and great, When you get with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say, then you make something fine or adequate, but not great. When the brain is at work trying to fashion Out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then you manufacture something either quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, “good on the whole”, but not the thing you ought to write.