Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)
Coleridge [3]
I objected to your criticisms and cutting up of the
Skylark, because the whole of it seems to me to proceed from a wrong 
starting point altogether. You seem to start with the assumption that
the poem ought to be an intellectual whole with coherent parts, a logical
structure. Your contention is that the main idea, consistent in other stanzas,
is of a spiritual something, an incorporeal joy etc., and the stanzas you
condemn as not consistent with the idea and tone of the rest come from an
inferior less spiritual inspiration and lower the level of the poem. Accordingly
you propose to cut out these excrescences and insert some manipulations which
would make the amended whole the perfect poem the Skylark should be.
I do not deny that from that standpoint your deductions
are logical. The poem arranged as you want it, without these too earthly verses,
would be a single ethereal impalpable shining tissue. It would be more subtly
ethereal (not more spiritual), far from the earth, winging between the rainbow
and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly. Only
it would be Shelley with something of himself left out, the Skylark
incomplete with part of its fullness of tone vanished and a big hole in the
middle — a beautiful poem, but no longer so worthy of its place among the few
supreme English lyrics. That at least is what I feel. One thing more — even if
these stanzas are an imperfection, I do not think it wise to meddle with them
either by elimination or re-doing. To interfere with the imperfections of the
great poets of the past is a hazardous business — their imperfections as well as
their perfections are part of themselves. Imagine a drama of Shakespeare with
all the blots scratched out and all the scoriae done over and smoothed to a
perfect polish! It would be Shakespeare no longer. And this is Shelley whose
strange and sweet and luminous magic of lyrical rhythm and language, when he is
at his best and here he is at his best, in the impugned stanzas as well as in
the others, is his own secret and no other shall ever recover it. To meddle here
is inevitably to mar. Things as great or greater in another kind may be done,
but not with this unique and inimitable note. To omit, to change words or lines,
to modify rhythms seems to me {{0}}inadmissible.[[The result is bound to be like
Landor’s rewriting of Milton — very good Landor but very bad Milton.]]
I do not altogether
appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly and your cynical and
sarcastic picture of the high-born maiden as she appears to you — all that has
nothing to do with Shelley’s poetic conception which is alone relevant to the
matter. I could draw a realistic picture of the poet “singing hymns unbidden”
and unwanted and asking occasionally as he wrote whether dinner was ready — with
hopes, but also with fears that he might not get it, his butcher’s bill being
unpaid for a long time. Or I might cavil scientifically about the nature of
sunsets and sunrise and rainbow drops and ask what was the use of all this
romantic flummery when there are real things to write about. Or I might quote
the critic — I don’t remember who he was — who said that Shelley certainly did
not believe that the skylark was a spirit and not a bird and so the whole
conception of the poem is false, insincere, ethereal humbug and therefore not
true poetry because poetry must be sincere. Such points of view are irrelevant.
Shelley is not concerned with the real life of the high-born maiden or the poet
any more than with the ornithology of the skylark or with other material things.
His glow-worm is something more than a material glow-worm. He is concerned with
the soul love-laden, with the dreams of the poet, with the soul of beauty behind
the glow-worm’s light and the colour and fragrance of the rose. It is that he is
feeling and it is linked in his vision with the essential something he has felt
behind the song of the skylark. And because he so felt it he was not only
entitled but bound to make place for it in his inspired lyrical theme.
I may observe in passing that the ethereal and
impalpable are not more spiritual than the tangible and the concrete — they may
seem more easily subtle and ideal to the idealising and abstracting mind, but
that is a different affair. One can feel the spiritual through the embodied and
concrete as well as through its opposite. But Shelley was not a spiritual poet
and the Skylark is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley looked, it is true,
always towards a light, a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but
he never got through the idealising mind to the spiritual experience. What he
did get was something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest
subtle mind-touch 
of an essence behind the
appearance, an essence of ideal light, truth or beauty. It is that he expresses
with a strange aerial magic or a curious supersensuously sensuous intensity in
his finest lyrics. It is that we must seek in the Skylark and, if we find
it, we have no right to claim something else. It is there all through and in
abundance — it is its perfection that creates the sustained perfection of the
poem. There is not and there ought not to be an intellectual sequence, a linked
argument, a logical structure. It is a sequence of feeling and of ideal
perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes
it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an
indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of
Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately
interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from
which he came into the earth life — he tried to find it there wherever he could,
he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical
cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the
ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of
light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light
and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt that he compares
to the hymn of the skylark — the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things
mental, the poet and his hymn, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love,
behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of
the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of
Shelley’s stanza — it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer
and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass, that is
there. This illumination of the earthly mind, vital, physical with his
super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of
Shelley is no longer there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his
wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the
Skylark is no longer there.
18 November 1934