SRI AUROBINDO
The Future Poetry
and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art
Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art
Section Six. Indo-English Poetry – Current Use of English Language
Achievement of Indo-English Poetry — Literary Decadence in Europe
162
The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid. Toru Dutt and Romesh of the same ilk prove nothing; Toru Dutt was an accomplished verse-builder with a delicate talent and some outbreaks of genius and she wrote things that were attractive and sometimes something that had a strong energy of language and a rhythmic force. Romesh was a smart imitator of English poetry of the second or third rank. What he wrote, if written by an Englishman, might not have had even a temporary success. Sarojini is different. Her work has a real beauty, but it has for the most part only one highly lyrical note and a vein of riches that has been soon exhausted. Some of her lyrical work is likely, I think, to survive among the lasting things in English literature and by these, even if they are fine rather than great, she may take her rank among the immortals. I know no other Indian poets who have published in English anything that is really alive and strong and original1. The test will be when something is done that is of real power and scope and gets its due chance. Tagore’s Gitanjali is not in verse, but the place it has taken has some significance. For the obstacles from the other side are that the English mind is apt to look on poetry by an Indian as a curiosity, something exotic (whether it really is or not, the suggestion will be there), and to stress the distance at which the English temperament stands from the Indian temperament. But Tagore’s Gitanjali is most un-English, yet it overcame this obstacle. For the poetry of spiritual experience, even if it has true poetic value, the difficulty might lie in the remoteness of the subject. But nowadays this difficulty is lessening with the increasing interest in the spiritual and the mystic. It is an age in which Donne, once condemned as a talented but fantastic weaver of extraordinary conceits, is being hailed as a great poet, and Blake lifted to a high eminence; even small poets with the mystic turn are being pulled out of their obscurity and held up to the light. At present many are turning to India for its sources of spirituality, but the eye has been directed only towards Yoga and philosophy, not to the poetical expression of it. When the full day comes, however, it may well be that this too will be discovered, and then an Indian who is at once a mystic and a true poet and able to write in English as if in his mother-tongue (that is essential) would have his full chance. Many barriers are breaking; moreover, both in French and English there are instances of foreigners who have taken their place as prose-writers or poets.
24.1.1935
P.S. About decadence: a language becomes decadent when the race decays, when life and soul go out and only the dry intellect and the tired senses remain. Europe is in imminent peril of decadence and all its literatures are attacked by this malady, though it is only beginning and energy is still there which may bring renewal. But the English language has still several strings to its bow and is not confined to an aged worn-out England. Moreover, there are two tendencies active in the modern mind, the over-intellectualised, over-sensualised decadent that makes for death, and the spiritual which may bring rebirth. At present the decadent tendency may be stronger, but the other is also there.
163
It is not true in all cases that one can’t write first-class things in a learned language. Both in French and English people to whom the language was not native have done remarkable work, although that is rare. What about Jawaharlal’s autobiography? Many English critics think it first-class in its own kind; of course he was educated at an English public school, but I suppose he was not born to the language. Some of Toru Dutt’s poems, Sarojini’s, Harin’s have been highly placed by good English critics, and I don’t think we need be more queasy than Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don’t find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear.
1.10.1943
164
Many Indians write better English than many educated Englishmen
27.2.1936
Future of Indo-English Poetry
165
What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance.
If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry, the English tongue is the most widespread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which make it admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying.
166
As for the question itself, I put forward four reasons why the experiment could be made. (1) The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff 
like Easterners and especially Indians. (2) We are entering an age when the stiff barriers of insular and national mentality are breaking down (Hitler notwithstanding), the nations are being drawn into a common universality with whatever differences, and in the new age there is no reason why the English should not admit the expression of other minds than the English in their tongue. (3) For ordinary minds it may be difficult to get over the barrier of a foreign tongue but extraordinary minds, Conrad etc., can do it. (4) In this case the experiment is to see whether what extraordinary minds can do cannot be done by Yoga.
27.2.1936
Pitfalls of Indo-English Blank Verse
167
I have often seen that Indians who write in English, immediately they try blank verse, begin to follow the Victorian model and especially a sort of pseudo-Tennysonian movement or structure which makes their work in this kind weak, flat and ineffective. The language inevitably suffers by the same fault, for with a weak verse-cadence it is impossible to find a strong or effective turn of language. But Victorian blank verse at its best is not strong or great, and at a more common level it is languid or crude or characterless. Except for a few poems, like Tennyson’s early Morte d’Arthur, Ulysses and one or two others or Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustam, there is nothing of a very high order. Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the Princess and Idylls of the King which seem to have set the tone for Indo-English blank verse are perhaps the worst choice possible for such a role. There is plenty of clever craftsmanship but it is mostly false and artificial and without true strength or inspired movement or poetic force — the right kind of blank verse for a Victorian drawing-room poetry, that is all that can be said for it. As for language and substance his influence tends to bring a thin artificial decorative prettiness or picturesqueness varied by an elaborate false simplicity and an attempt at a kind of brilliant, sometimes lusciously brilliant sentimental or sententious commonplace. The higher 
quality in his best work is not easily assimilable; the worst is catching but undesirable as a model.
Blank verse is the most difficult of all English metres; it has to be very skilfully and strongly done to make up for the absence of rhyme, and if not very well done, it is better not done at all. In the ancient languages rhyme was not needed, for they were written in quantitative metres which gave them the necessary support, but modern languages in their metrical forms need the help of rhyme. It is only a very masterly hand that can make blank verse an equally or even a more effective poetic movement. You have to vary your metre by a skilful play of pauses or by an always changing distribution of caesura and of stresses and supple combinations of long and short vowels and by much weaving of vowel and consonant variation and assonance; or else, if you use a more regular form you have to give a great power and relief to the verse as did Marlowe at his best. If you do none of these things, if you write with effaced stresses, without relief and force or, if you do not succeed in producing harmonious variation in your rhythm, your blank verse becomes a monotonous vapid wash and no amount of mere thought-colour or image-colour can save it.
Practical Suggestions for Writing English Poetry
168
If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you:
1. Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things at will because he has the intrinsic sense of his language and can keep the right proportion and measure. An Indian using them kills his poetry and produces a scholastic exercise.
2. Write modern English. Avoid frequent inversions or turns of language that belong to the past poetic styles. Modern English poetry uses a straightforward order and a natural style, not different in vocabulary, syntax, etc., from that of prose. An 
inversion can be used sometimes, but it must be done deliberately and for a distinct and particular effect.
3. For poetic effect rely wholly on the power of your substance, the magic of rhythm and the sincerity of your expression — if you can add subtlety so much the better, but not at the cost of sincerity and straightforwardness. Do not construct your poetry with the brain-mind, the mere intellect — that is not the source of true inspiration: write always from the inner heart of emotion and vision.
169
The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because it is always just missing what it ought to achieve; one feels a considerable poetic possibility which does not produce work of some permanence because it is not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm’s closet. Such awful things as “unsoughten”, “a-journeying,” “a-knocking,” “strayed gift” and the constant abuse of the auxiliary verb “to do” would be enough to damn even the best poem. If he would rigorously modernise his language, one obstacle to real poetic success would perhaps disappear,— provided he does not, on the contrary, colloquialise it too much — e.g. “my dear”, etc. But the other grave defect is that he is constantly composing out of his brain, while one feels that a pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through, if only he would let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do their poetic best in a learned medium; but still the defect is there.
22.6.1931
Mental Theories and Poetic Freedom
170
Why erect mental theories and suit your poetry to them? I would suggest to you not to be bound by any but to write as best suits 
your own inspiration and poetic genius. Each poet should write in the way suited to his own inspiration and substance; it is a habit of the human mind fond of erecting rules and rigidities to put one way forward as a general law for all. If you insist on being rigidly simple and direct as a mental rule, you might spoil something of the subtlety of the expression you now have, even if the delicacy of the substance remained with you. Obscurity, artifice, rhetoric have to be avoided, but for the rest follow the inner movement.
I do not remember the precise words I used in laying down the rule to which you refer, I think I advised sincerity and straightforwardness as opposed to rhetoric and artifice. In any case it was far from my intention to impose any strict rule of bare simplicity and directness as a general law of poetic style. I was speaking of “Twentieth century English poetry” and of what was necessary for A, an Indian writing in the English tongue. English poetry in former times used inversions freely and had a law of its own — at that time natural and right, but the same thing nowadays sounds artificial and false. English has now acquired a richness and flexibility and power of many-sided suggestion which makes it unnecessary for poetry to depart from the ordinary style and form of the language. But there are other languages in which this is not yet true. Bengali is in its youth, in full process of growth and has many things not yet done, many powers and values it has still to acquire. It is necessary that its poets should keep a full and entire freedom to turn in whatever way the genius leads, to find new forms and movements; if they like to adhere to the ordinary form of the language to which prose has to keep, they should be free to do so; but also they should be free to depart from it, if it is by doing so that they can best liberate their souls in speech. At present it is this that most matters.
Requirements for Writing Good English
171
This book, returned herewith, is not in my opinion suitable for 
the purpose. The author wanted to make it look like a translation of a romance in Sanskrit and he has therefore made the spirit and even partly the form of the language more Indian than English. It is not therefore useful for getting into the spirit of the English language. Indians have naturally in writing English a tendency to be too coloured, sometimes flowery, sometimes rhetorical and a book like this would increase the tendency. One ought to have in writing English a style which is at its base capable of going to the point, saying with a simple and energetic straightforwardness what one means to say, so that one can add grace of language without disturbing this basis. Arnold is a very good model for this purpose, Emerson less, but his book will also do.
It is surely better to write your own thoughts. The exercise of writing in your own words what another has said or written is a good exercise or test for accuracy, clear understanding of ideas, an observant intelligence but your object is, I suppose, to be able to understand English and express yourself in good English.
16.5.1932
172
Avoid over-writing; let all your sentences be the vehicle of something worth saying and say it with a vivid precision neither defective nor excessive. Don’t let either thought or speech trail or drag or circumvolute. Don’t let the language be more abundant than the sense. Don’t indulge in mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them.
14.6.1935
Licences in the Use of English Language
173
This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry — of course, it is incorrect, 
but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language — and, in this case, of the Latin also.
1931
174
But neither feeling nor logic can stand against usage. A language is like an absolute queen; you have to obey her laws, reasonable or unreasonable, and not only her laws, but her caprices — so long as they last — unless you are one of her acknowledged favourites and then you can make hay of her laws and (sometimes) defy even her caprices provided you are quite sure of the favour. In this case, Tagore perhaps feels the absoluteness of some usage with regard to these particular words? But one can always break through law and usage and even pass over the judgment of an “arbiter of elegances” — at one’s own risk.
26.1.1932
Current Use of English Language
175
I am in general agreement with your answer to M’s strictures on certain points in your style and your use of the English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so only if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French; but this language is constantly changing and escaping from boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it. Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless 
you take liberties with her. As for the changeableness, it is obvious in recent violences of alteration, now fixed and recognised, such as the pronunciation of words like “nation” and “ration” which now sound as “gnashun” and “rashun”; one’s soul and one’s ear revolt, at least mine do, against degrading the noble word “nation” into the clipped indignity of the plebian and ignoble “gnashun”, but there is no help for it. As for “aspire for”, it may be less correct than “aspire to” or “aspire after”, but it is psychologically called for and it seems to me to be much more appropriate than “aspire at” which I would never think of using. The use of prepositions is one of the most debatable things, or at least one of the most frequently debated in the language. The Mother told me of her listening in Japan to interminable quarrels between Cousins and the American Hirsch on debatable points in the language but especially on this battlefield and never once could they agree. It is true that one was an Irish poet from Belfast and the other an American scholar and scientist, so perhaps neither could be taken as an unquestionable authority on the English tongue; but among Englishmen themselves I have known of such constant disputes. Cousins had remarkably independent ideas in these matters; he always insisted that “infinite” must be pronounced “infighnight” on the ground that “finite” was so pronounced and the negative could not presume to differ so unconscionably from the positive. That was after all as good a reason as that alleged for changing the pronunciation of “nation” and “ration” on the ground that as the “a” in “national” and “rational” is short, it is illogical to use a different quantity in the substantive. “To contact” is a phrase that has established itself and it is futile to try to keep America at arm’s length any longer; “global” also has established itself and it is too useful and indeed indispensable to reject; there is no other word that can express exactly the same shade of meaning. I heard it first from Arjava who described the language of Arya as expressing a global thinking and I at once caught it up as the right and only word for certain things, for instance, the thinking in masses which is a frequent characteristic of the Overmind. As for the use of current French and Latin phrases, it may be condemned as objectionable on the same ground as the use of clichés and stock phrases in literary style, but they often hit the target more forcibly than any English equivalent and have a more lively effect on the mind of the reader. That may not justify a too frequent use of them, but in moderation it is at least a good excuse for it. I think the expression “bears around it a halo” has been or can be used and it is at least not worn out like the ordinary “wears a halo”. One would more usually apply the expression “devoid of method” to an action or procedure than to a person, but the latter turn seems to me admissible. I do not think I need say anything in particular about other objections, they are questions of style and on that there can be different opinions; but you are right in altering the obviously mixed metaphor “in full cry”, though I do not think any of your four substitutes have anything of its liveliness and force. Colloquial expressions have, if rightly used, the advantage of giving point, flavour, alertness and I think in your use of them they do that; they can also lower and damage the style, but that danger is mostly when there is a set character of uniform dignity or elevation. The chief character of your style is rather a constant life and vividness and supple and ample abounding energy of thought and language which can soar or run or sweep along at will but does not simply walk or creep or saunter and in such a style forcible colloquialisms can do good service.
2.4.1947
176
I2 have gone carefully through the proof of the first chapters of The Deliverance, but find most of these unexplained red marks totally unintelligible; sometimes I can make a guess, but most often not even that. What, for instance, is the objection to the use of “its” and “it” for a river?
There seems to be an objection to any metaphors or figures such as “the scales of public opinion” or a river rejecting someone from its borders. This seems to me astonishing; at any rate the figures are there in the original and one cannot suppress them in a translation or alter arbitrarily the author’s substance.
Objections are made also against quite good and appropriate English words such as “beggared” and “quadrupled” or against perfectly correct phrases like “All that was now a history of the past” or “reaching” a figure or “dropping” some money or “he sat at home in his room” in the sense of remaining inactive. One can say, for instance, “He sat in his palace listening to the footsteps of approaching Doom”. So too there appears to be some objection to the phrase “neither X nor another”, a common English turn; to “started (in the sense of beginning an action or movement) a relentless insistence and importunity”. (One can say for instance, “He started an obstinate resistance which never flagged nor ceased”.) Vivid epithets, e.g., “rapid visits” or familiar and lively phrases such as “she was back again”, are found to be improper and objectionable. “Cares of her household” gets a red mark, though one speaks of “household cares”, “cares of state”, cares of all kinds. A fever (one must not refer to it as “it”) is allowed to throw a person down, but not to let him rise from his bed. Incomprehensible?
All these startling red ink surprises are packed together in the short space of the first chapter. But in the second we meet with still bigger surprises. One is not allowed to “make time” for anything, a most common phrase, or to “leave” a responsibility to someone. A meal must not be “vegetarian” though a diet can be, and though one speaks in English of “a frugal vegetarian dinner”. One is not allowed to have a school task to do or to “prepare” a task; but unhappily that is done in England at least and in English.
“Today” is objected to because it is applied to past time; but it is put here as part of the tone of vivid remembered actuality, the past described as if still present before the mind, which is constant in the original. Similarly, a little later on, “the early dusk had fallen a couple of hours ago”; in strict narrative time it should be “before” and not “ago”, but though the author writes in the past tense, he is always suggesting a past which is passing immediately before our eyes. I do not see how else the translator is to keep this suggestion. One could use more correctly the historic present: “It is winter and the dusk has fallen a couple of hours ago”; but that would be to falsify the original.
All right of passage is refused to a humorous use of the phrase “give voice”, nor can one “retort” instead of merely replying. There is perhaps a syntactical objection to the use of “desperate” at the beginning of the sentence, but the objection is itself incorrect. One says “Pale and haggard, he rose from his bed”. One is not allowed to speak humorously of a “portion” instead of a “part” of a big bed so as to emphasise its bigness and the dividing of it into occupied regions by the “gang”. A heart is not allowed to “pound away”, still less to pound “dismally”. The objector seems to damn everything vividly descriptive, everything new in turn, phrase or image, everything in fact not said before by everyone else. A man lying down is not allowed to “start up”, though the dictionary meaning of the word is there, “to rise up quickly or suddenly”, e.g. “he started up from his bed” or “from his chair”. What again is meant by the objection to such recognised locutions as “to take away the (bad) taste” or “much she cares”, and why should there not be an “implacable pressure” or why is one forbidden to “get out money” from a box? These red marks are terribly mysterious.
The criticism of the sentence “How could you etc.” and the use of “today” is intelligible and to a certain extent tenable. I have tried to explain in the proof itself why the ordinary tense-sequence can be disregarded here. In the latter case it is not so much a question of grammar as of the use of the word “today” for a past time. If it can be so used in order to express more vividly the actual thought in the mind of a person at the time the unusual tense-sequence follows as a matter of course. I have, however, yielded the point for the sake of Sarat Chatterji’s reputation which, we are told, is imperilled by our audacities of language.
Chapter III. The objector begins with a queer missing of the obvious sense in the use of “my” and “us”. He goes on to challenge the possibility of “entering into” explanations, discussions etc. though it is commonly done, e.g. “He entered into a long discussion” or “You needn’t enter into tedious explanations; a few words will be enough.”
Chapter IV continues the inexplicable chain and “implacable” series of red objections. I have written “a discussion was in process”, which is a quite permissible phrase, but alter it to “progress” just to soften the redness of the red mark. But why cannot Atul “hold forth” as an orator does and what is the matter with the “cut” of a coat, a phrase sacred to every tailor? People in England do, after all, “blurt out” things every day and they “laugh in the face” of others, though of course it may be considered rude; but “to laugh in the face” is not considered bad grammar or bad English. To give “the order” is wrong in the opinion of the objector; but since the purchase of particular things like coats or suits has just been talked about, it is quite correct to say “the order” instead of “an order”.
One can’t “speak out”, apparently, (or perhaps “speak up” either); one can only just speak: nor can one “see to the making of coats for a family”. Also it is wrong to ask “what is wrong”. It is wrong, it seems, to say “All in the room”; so an Englishman is mistaken when he says “Tell all at home that I am not coming”! So too you can’t speak “once more” or “seek for3” anything! The use of the plural of “devotion”, common in English4, is red marked as an error!
Chapter V. One can’t “labour” to get a result, or “cover up” anything in the sense of “hiding” or even try to do it; one can’t put somebody up5 to do something, though in English it is constantly done. There is an objection to such perfectly natural figures as “could not summon up any reply” or “the sharp edge of your tongue” or “smouldering secretly within herself”. The objector seems indeed to cherish a deadly grudge against figures and images; he is opposed also to colloquial expressions (e.g. “get” out money, “give it here”) even in dialogue. He objects to my putting straight into English the Bengali figure of “falling from the sky”. There is an almost identical phrase in French with exactly the same sense, “to fall from on high” or “to fall from the clouds6”: so I do not see why it should not be done, since it ought to be at once intelligible to an English reader. I note also that words cannot “jump” to the tongue, but why not? they manage to do it every day. Poor Shaila cannot “need” a cup7. Then what is wrong with the sentence “Do you think everybody is your sister” i.e. the speaker herself? It is simply a vivid way of saying “Do you think everybody will be as patient with you as myself”, or “Do you think you can speak to everybody as you do to me”.
I have written at length because the publisher and perhaps others seem to have been upset by the vicious red jabs of this high authority. In most cases they seem to me to have no meaning whatever. If they have, we should be informed to some extent at least of their why and wherefore.
There are... a few doubtful points in half a dozen sentences, points on which Englishmen themselves differ or might differ. I am ready to go through the whole book if the proofs are sent here. But I cannot revise or alter phrases, locutions or figures which, so far as I know English, are either current or natural or permissible,— unless I am told why these are thought to be incorrect or improper.
I cannot altogether understand Professor M’s criticism. What does he mean by irregular language? If he refers to the style and means that it is bad, unchaste, too full of familiar or colloquial terms, not sufficiently dignified, bookish, conventional in phrase, not according to precedent, he is entitled to his view, of course. If he and the objector represent the Indian English-reading public, then D must consider the matter. For in that case, it is clear the book will not be understood by that public, may be banged and bashed by the reviewers, or may for kindred reasons be a failure. The suggestion that Sarat Chandra’s high reputation will be tarnished and lowered by D’s deplorable style and my bad English and horrible grammar, not from any fault of his own, is very alarming. In that case D ought to have the book corrected by some University professor who knows what to write and what not to write and its style chastened, made correct, common and unnoticeable. I don’t think A will do. He is too brilliant and might make the hair of the correct and timid reader rise on his head in horror; besides A does not know Bengali.
The question also arises whether an English reader (an English Englishman, not made in India) would equally fail to appreciate the book; he might find it too Bengali in character and substance and — who knows? — agree that the style of the translation is unorthodox and “irregular”. But here we are helpless — we cannot make the experiment, for the war is on and England is far away and paper scarce there as here.
5.8.1944