Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Mystic Poetry

I. Meaning and Intellectual Understanding

It is a psychological condition, attitude or whatever you like to call it that you must get into, still, compact, receptive, vibrant to the touch when it comes.

Mystic poetry has a perfectly concrete meaning much more than intellectual poetry which is much more abstract. The nature of the intellect is abstraction; spirituality and mysticism deal with the concrete by their very nature.

Mystic poetry is to some misty and mysterious!

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 glowworm 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.

08.12.1936