Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Guidance in Writing Poetry

Sri Aurobindo’s Force and the Writing of Poetry [2]

I can understand your yogic success in Dilip’s Bengali poetry, because the field was ready, but the opening of his channel in English has staggered me. I can’t understand whether it is your success or his.

What do you mean by Yoga? There is a Force here in the atmosphere which will give itself to anyone open to it. Naturally it will work best when the native tongue is used — but it can do big things through English if the channel used is a poetic one and if that channel offers itself. Two things are necessary — no personal resistance and some willingness to take trouble about understanding the elementary technique at least so that the transcription may not meet with too many obstacles. Nishikanta has a fine channel and with a very poetic turn in it — he offers no resistance to the flow of the force, no interference of his mental ego, only the convenience of his mental individuality. Whether he takes the trouble for the technique is another matter.

I had written to you that Nishikanta bows in front of your photograph before he sits down to write, and that I am ready to bow a hundred times, if that is the trick. You answered that it depends on how one bows. Methinks it does not depend on that. Even if it did I don’t think Nishikanta knows it. Or was it in his past life that he knew it?

Well, there is a certain faculty of effacing oneself and letting the Universal Force run through you — that is the way of bowing. It can be acquired by various means, but also one may have the capacity for doing it in certain directions by nature.

10 December 1935