Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Poets of the Ashram
Some General Remarks [7]
How is it that people find my poetry difficult? Dilip
used to say that it usually passed a little over his head. I suspect that only
Nolini and Arjava get the hang of it properly. Of course many appreciate when I
have explained it to them — but otherwise they admire the beauty of individual
phrases without grasping the many-sided whole the phrases form. This morning
Premanand, Vijayrai and Nirod read my Agni.
None of them caught the precise relevances, the significant connections of the
words and phrases of the opening lines:
Not from the day but from the night he’s born,
Night with her pang of dream — star on pale star
Winging strange rumour through a secret dawn.
For all the black uncanopied spaces mirror
The brooding distance of our plumbless mind.
In the rest of the poem too they generally failed to
get the true point of felicity which constitutes poetic expression. My work is
not surrealist: I put meaning into everything, not intellectualism but a
coherent vision worked out suggestively in various detail. Is there some
peculiarity in my turn of imagination or in my English, which baffles Indian
readers especially?
It is precisely because what you put in is not
intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult
to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry. One can
grasp fully only if one has some clue to what you put in, either the clue of
personal experience or the clue of a sympathetic insight. One who has had the
concrete experience of the consciousness as a night with the stars coming out
and the sense of the secret dawn can at once feel the force of these two lines,
as one who has had experience of the mind as a wide 
space
or infinity or a thing of distances and expanses can fathom those that follow.
Or even if he has had, not these experiences, but others of the same order, he
can feel what you mean and enter into it by a kind of identification. Failing
this experience, a sympathetic insight can bring the significance home;
certainly, Nolini and Arjava who write poems of the inner vision and feeling
must have that, moreover their minds are sufficiently subtle and plastic to
enter into all kinds of poetic vision and expression. Premanand and Vijayrai
have no such training; it is natural that they should find it difficult. Nirod
ought to understand, but he would have to ponder and take some trouble before he
got it; night with her labour of dream, the stars, the bird-winging, the
bird-voices, the secret dawn are indeed familiar symbols in the poetry he is
himself writing or with which he is familiar; but his mind seeks usually at
first for precise allegories to fit the symbols and is less quick to see and
feel by identification what is behind them — it is still intellectual and not
concrete in its approach to these things, although his imagination has learned
to make itself their transcribing medium. That is the difficulty, the crux of
imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience —
and that has yet to be made.
But what about Dilip? Arjava’s poems simply frighten
him but mine too he finds difficult. Everybody feels at home in Harin’s poetry,
though I am sure that often, if I catechised them, I would find the deepest
felicities missed. Perhaps my tendency to pack too much meaning into my words
becomes a difficulty in others, but would they have the same difficulty with
Bengali poetry?
Dilip wrote to me in recent times expressing great
admiration for Arjava’s poems and wanting to get something of the same quality
into his own poetic style. But in any case Dilip has not the mystic mind and
vision — Harin also. In quite different ways they receive and express their
vision or experience through the poetic mind and imagination — even so because
it expressed something not usual, Dilip’s poetry has had a difficulty in getting
itself recognised except by people who were able to give the right response. Harin’s poetry deals very skilfully with spiritual ideas or
feelings through the language of the emotion and the poetic imagination and
intelligence — no difficulty there. As regards your poetry, it is indeed much
more compressed and carefully packed with substance and that creates a
difficulty except for those who are alive to the language or have become alive
to subtle shades, implications, depths in the words. Even those who understand a
foreign language well in the ordinary way, find it sometimes difficult to catch
these in its poetry. Indications and suggestions easy to catch in one’s own
tongue are often missed there. So probably your last remark is founded.
14 March 1937