Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 274
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
October 1, 1932
I am still at a loss what to answer about uchchvās [exuberance], because I still don’t understand exactly what Suhrawardy is aiming at in his criticism. There is not more uchchvās in Bengali poetry than in English, if by the word is meant rhetoric, free resort to imagery, prolific weaving of words and ideas and sentiments around what one has to say. Most Indian poetry in the Sanskritic languages – there are exceptions of course – was more restrained and classic in taste or else more impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don’t see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament. It is true of course to a certain extent, first, because no foreign language can express what is intimate and peculiar to a national temperament, it tends at once to become falsified and seems exotic, and especially the imagery or sentiment of one language does not go well with that of another; least of all can the temperament of an oriental tongue into a European tongue – what is perfectly simple and straightforward in one becomes emphatic or over-coloured or strange in the other. But that has nothing to do with uchchvās in itself. As to emotion – if that is what is meant – your word effusiveness is rather unfortunate, for effusiveness is not praiseworthy in poetry anywhere; but vividness of emotion is no more reprehensible in English than in Bengali poetry. You give as examples of uchchvās 
among other things Madhusudan’s style, Tagore’s poem to me1, a passage from Govindadas. I don’t think there is anything in Madhusudhan which an English poet writing in Bengali would have hesitated to father. Tagore’s poem is written at a high-pitch of feeling perfectly intelligible to anyone who had passed through the exaltation of the Swadeshi days, but not more high pitched than certain things in Milton, Shelley, Swinburne. In Govinda Das’s lines,– let us translate them into English –
Am I merely thine? O Love, I am there clinging
In every limb of thine – there ever in my creation and my dissolution,
the idea is one that would not so easily occur to an English poet, it is an erotic mysticism, easily suggested to a mind familiar with the experiences of Vedanta or Vaishnava mystics; but this is not effusiveness, it is intensity – and an English writer – e.g. Lawrence – could be quite as intense, but would use a different idea or image.
It is probably modern (contemporary) English poetry of which Suhrawardy is thinking. Here I am no expert; but I understand that the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, expressive, recording either the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets. It does not look as if all contemporary English poetry was like that, it is only one strong trend; but such as it is, it has not as yet produced anything very decisive, great or successful. Much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity or, what is worse, an exaggerated emphatic objectivity; emotion seems often to be replaced by an intensified vital-physical sensation of the object. You will perhaps understand what I mean if you read 
the poem quoted on pages 316-17 of the Parichay (also made much of in a book on English modernistic poetry sent to me by Arjava) – “red pieces of day, hills made of blue and green paper, Satanic and blase, a black goat lookingly wanders” – images expressing vividly an impression made on the nerves through the sight by the described object. Admittedly it is – at least when pushed to such a degree, a new way of looking at things in poetry, but not essentially superior to the impressions created on the heart or the mental imagination by the object. All the same, there is behind, but still not successfully achieved, something real, an attempt to get away from ornate mental constructions about things to the expression of the intimate truth of the things themselves as directly seen by a deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way can what is aimed at be done. I have to form my idea more fully when I have finished Arjava’s book, but this is what impresses me at present.
I can understand very well what Suhrawardy objects to in Harin’s poetry, though his expression of it is absurdly exaggerated (“trash”), and he may be right in thinking it an exotic [?] in English literature; but I am under the impression that Harin will stand in spite of that, though he has still to write something so sovereign in its own kind as to put all doubt out of court; but, even as it is, the poetic quality of his work appears to me undeniable.
1 Rabindranath Tagore’s homage to Sri Aurobindo when the latter was arrested for the first time in the Bande Mataram sedition case in 1907. In this poem, Rabindranath saluted Sri Aurobindo as “the voice incarnate, free, of India’s soul.”