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

Spiritual Poetry and Popular Taste [2]

Mystic poetry will ever remain for Tagore mystic and mysterious and occupy a second place.

That is another matter. It is a question of personal idiosyncrasy. There are people who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty. The clear precise intellectual meanings of Pope are to them the height of poetry — the emotional and romantic suggestions of the Skylark or the Ode to the Nightingale unsatisfactory. How the devil, they ask, can a skylark be a spirit, not a bird? What the hell has “a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew” to do with the song of the skylark? They are unable to feel these things and say Pope would never have written in that incoherent inconsequential way. Of course he wouldn’t. But that simply means they like things that are intellectually clear and can’t appreciate the imaginative connections which reveal what is deeper than the surface. You can, I suppose, catch something of these, but when you are asked to go still deeper into the concrete of concretes, you lose your breath and say “Lord! what an unintelligible mess. Give me an allegorical clue for God’s sake, something superficial, which I can mentally formulate.” Same attitude as the Popists’ — in essence.

8 December 1936