Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Poetic Inspiration and Yoga

You ask me why I don't keep my inner condition right. As if I knew how to do it! It keeps itself right or goes wrong without the least caring for my effort.

What about the wonderful efforts (unprecedented in human history) by which X and you have made yourselves poets? Why can't you put some of that superhuman effort into this? If you do and succeed, I will rigorously leave all the credit to you and not ask any for a superior Power.

The Force had seized me and has now left me – that's all.

What is this talk about Force? Nothing is done in this world except by one's own effort. Ask your own reason and X.

You say I am an efforter. Well, without effort, how to write? If I had waited for a spontaneous downpour of Inspiration, my outpours by now would have been only 4 or 5!

I don't understand. You say it is only by effort that one can write poetry – that is, what is written is something constructed by mere effort. It follows that anybody who makes a necessary effort can become a great poet. Up till now it was thought that there was some mysterious thing called inspiration. There are plenty of people who have made Herculean and untiring efforts night and day but have not succeeded in writing anything that others would call poetry – they may have just produced good or bad verse. That however in the light of your luminous rationality is evidently an agelong error. As X might say “I labour  and write poems day and night and people give the credit to some damned thing (not my own great self) they call Inspiration.” Evidently. But what is this about a few cases? Are you going to tell me that Inspiration after all exists? Can't be.

04.03.1936