Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 1. Appreciation of Poetry and the Arts
Appreciation of Poetry
Abiding Intuition of Poetic and Artistic Greatness
Yes, of course there is an intuition of greatness by
which the great poet or artist is distinguished from those who are less great
and these again from those who are not great at all. But you are asking too much
when you expect this intuition to work with a mechanical instantaneousness and
universality so that all shall have the same opinion and give the same values.
The greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the same rank is
unquestioned and unquestionable and the recognition of it has always been there
in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day
in the first rank among the poets and that verdict has never been reversed
since. The area of a poet’s fame may vary; it may have been seen first by a few,
then by many, then by all. At first there may be adverse critics and assailants,
but these negative voices die away. Questionings may rise from time to time —
e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil — but these are
usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser
poets retain their rank in spite of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the
discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to
Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled
over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But
all this is something of an illusion — for mark that even at the worst Pope and
Dryden retained a place among the great names of English poetic literature. No
controversy, no depreciation could take that away from them. This proves my
contention that there is an abiding intuition of poetic and artistic greatness.
The attempts at
comparison of poets like Blake and Shakespeare or Dante and Shakespeare by
critics like Housman and Eliot? It seems to me that these are irrelevant and
otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each
with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare
has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could
not reach; but in essence they stand as mighty equals. As for Blake and
Shakespeare, that opinion is more a personal fantasy than anything else. Purity
and greatness are not the same thing; Blake’s may be pure poetry in Housman’s
sense and Shakespeare’s not except in a few passages; but nobody can contend
that Blake’s genius had the width and volume and riches of Shakespeare’s. It can
be said that Blake as a mystic poet achieved things beyond Shakespeare’s measure
— for Shakespeare had not the mystic’s vision; but as a poet of the play of life
Shakespeare is everywhere and Blake nowhere. These are tricks of language and
idiosyncrasies of preference. One has only to put each thing in its place,
without confusing issues and one can see that Housman’s praise of Blake may be
justified but any exaltation of him by comparison with Shakespeare is not in
accordance with the abiding intuition of these things which remains undisturbed
by any individual verdict.
The errors of great poets in judging their
contemporaries are personal freaks — they are failures in intuition due to the
mind’s temporary movements getting in the way of the intuition. The errors of
Goethe and Bankim were only an overestimation of a genius or a talent that was
new and therefore attractive at the time. Richardson’s Pamela was after
all the beginning of modern fiction. As I have said, the general intuition does
not work at once and with a mechanical accuracy. Overestimation of a
contemporary is frequent; underestimation also. But, taken on the whole, the
real poet commands at first or fairly soon the verdict of the few whose eyes are
open — and often the attacks of those whose eyes are shut — and the few grow in
numbers till the general intuition affirms their verdict. There may be
exceptions, for there is hardly a rule without exceptions, but this is, I think,
generally true.
As for the verdict of
Englishmen upon a French poet or vice versa, that is due to a difficulty
in entering into the finer spirit and subtleties of a foreign language. It is
difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or
for an Englishman to judge Racine,— for this reason. But a Frenchman like
Maurois who knows English as an Englishman knows it, can get the full intuition
of a poet like Shelley well enough. These variations must be allowed for; the
human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions are veiled by
irrelevant mental formations; but in these matters the truth affirms itself and
stands fairly firm and clear in essence through all changes of mental weather.
6 October 1934