Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Sameness in Spiritual Poetry

People object to our poetry on the ground that there are too many repetitions. Amal has “stars” coming in almost everyone of his poems.

That was Amal's own preference, not the spiritual poems' necessity. I read the other day a comment on Keats' poetry that he always writes about stars and that there is a spiritual reason for it.

Ordinary poems (and novels) always write about love and similar things. Is it one point against ordinary (non-spiritual) poetry? If there is sameness of expression in spiritual poems, it is due either to the poet's binding himself by the tradition of a fixed set of symbols (e.g. Vaishnava poets, Vedic poets) or to his having only a limited field of expression or imagination or to his deliberately limiting himself to certain experiences or customs that are dear to him. To readers who feel these things it does not appear monotonous. Those who listen to Mirabai's songs, don't get tired of them, nor do I get tired of reading the Upanishads. The Greeks did not tire of reading Anacreon's poems though he always wrote of wine and beautiful boys (an example of sameness in unspiritual poetry). The Vedic and Vaishnava poets remain immortal in spite of their sameness which is in another way like that of the poetry of the troubadours in  mediaeval Europe, deliberately chosen. Variety, is all very well, but it is the power of the poetry that really matters. After all every poet writes always in the same style, repeats the same vision of things in “different garbs”.

Tagore writes that the world creation is full of a variety of rasa. The poet's mind should not be confined to one single inspiration, however vast it may be.

But Tagore's poetry is all from one ¹ He may write of different things but it is always Tagore and his prerana (inspiration) repeating themselves interminably. Every poet does that.

He hints that only spiritual inspiration dealing with things spiritual should not bind a poet's creation. Well?

Well, and if a poet is a spiritual seeker what does Tagore want him to write about? Dancing girls? Amal has done that. Wine and women? Hafez has done that. But he can only use them as symbols as a rule. Must he write about politics? Why should he describe the outer aspects of world nature, , for their own sake, when his vision is of something else within or even apart from her? Merely for the sake of variety? He then becomes a mere littérateur. Of course if a man simply writes to get poetic fame and a lot of readers, if he is only a poet, Tagore's advice may be good for him.

25.05.1938

¹ Inspiration

Back