Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
19 January 1940
Satyendra (Looking at Nirodbaran): I see a roguish smile on his face.
Sri Aurobindo: He wants to ask a question or say something?
Nirodbaran: Satyendra was telling me yesterday that he wasn’t quite clear about the definition of creative force as applied to Bhakti poems. Why shouldn’t they be considered creative if one feels Bhakti by them?
Satyendra: He is putting his own question into my mouth.
Sri Aurobindo: These poems cannot be considered creative, because you identify yourself only with the feeling and not with a man or character as in the case of Hamlet. They do not create a world for you. A creative poem must come out of a part of the poet’s personality and you can’t help identifying yourself with the world or the personality the poet has created or with the experience of the poet himself; otherwise the poem is not creative. Of course, everything is creative in a general way.
Purani: Abercrombie says a great poet transmits his experience to the reader.
Satyendra: But one can transmit without oneself having the experience as some poets here, according to their own account, have done.
Nirodbaran: So also poets can transmit or transcribe creative force without being conscious of it, and I suppose all fine poems are transcriptions.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, poets can do that, but people who have the creative force usually make it a part of themselves, they experience the thing first and then transmit it.
Nirodbaran: How is one to get this force?
Sri Aurobindo: You have it or you don’t. Some poets are born with it.
Nirodbaran: But can’t one acquire it?
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, you can develop it. Most people have it within but it may or may not come out. In Yoga, of course, it is different. There it depends on the power of opening oneself.
Nirodbaran: Talking of J and Nishikanto, I find that the latter hasn’t the former’s subtlety and delicacy of expression.
Sri Aurobindo: A poet need not have these things in order to be great.
Nirodbaran: No. Nishikanto always gives the impression of power.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, power is his main element.
Nirodbaran: X says Nishikanto lacks substance: he means intellectual substance such as he finds in A.E. or Tagore.
Purani: I thought Tagore’s poetry hadn’t much substance of this kind; most of it is fine and decorative.
Nirodbaran: It is rather strange that X doesn’t like Yeats.
Sri Aurobindo: He doesn’t?
Nirodbaran: He says he can’t find substance in him, or whatever substance there is can’t be understood by him. He is referring here to the symbolic poems.
Satyendra: Yeats has expressed his Irish mysticism.
Sri Aurobindo: Those are his early poems. He has expressed other things too.
Nirodbaran: To a man like X who appreciates and understands chhanda (rhythm) so much, Yeats has no appeal! It is strange.
He likes Arjava’s poems and yet Arjava told him that he was greatly indebted to Yeats, and so also is Amal.
Sri Aurobindo: Perhaps X doesn’t understand English poetry sufficiently.
Nirodbaran: But he said that Chesterton has variety in metre and he appreciates it.
Sri Aurobindo: Chesterton?
Nirodbaran: Yes, I think that if he doesn’t understand a poem, he just doesn’t bother about the rest of its qualities; the poem has no appeal for him.
Satyendra: Perhaps Tagore, after reading Nishikanto’s book, will change his opinion and write to him.
Sri Aurobindo: He has evaded the problem by writing before he has scanned the book.
Nirodbaran: You think that Nishikanto has intellectual substance?
Sri Aurobindo: I believe he has.
Nirodbaran: Purani says your “Bird of Fire” has creative force. It is a creative symbolic poem.
Sri Aurobindo (smiling): I don’t know. (Looking at Purani) It is for Purani to pronounce.
Nirodbaran: He also thinks your “Shiva” has it.
Sri Aurobindo: Why not leave my poetry out of it? If you want examples, there is “The Hound of Heaven”, as I have said, and there is Chesterton’s “Lepanto”. They have the creative force.
Nirodbaran: What about Arjava (J. Chadwick)?
Sri Aurobindo: He has none.
Evening
Sri Aurobindo: I think Tagore’s “Parash Pathar” (“Philosopher’s Stone”) and “Urvasie” have the creative force, though it is not usual for him to have it. Tagore has created something here, not a character but a world, not an outer world but an inner one, a reality of the inner life of man. It is not simply a description. And in Nishikanto’s poem, “Gorurgadi” (“Bullock Cart”), the cart is real and the man in it is real, yet the cart is both a personal one and a world-cart.
Take Shelley’s “Skylark” and Keats’ “Nightingale”. The birds in either poem are nothing. It is the thoughts and feelings of the poets that have found expression and the birds transmit those thoughts and feelings while remaining only occasions for expressing them.
By the way, I don’t understand why X says that Nishikanto has no ideas.
Nirodbaran: What he says is that Nishikanto lacks intellectual substance.
Sri Aurobindo: What do you mean by that? You mean philosophical thought?
Nirodbaran: I think he means ideas such as A.E. has, for instance.
Sri Aurobindo: But he has poetical ideas and he develops them in his poems. A poet need not have intellectual ideas to be great. Homer has no intellectual ideas. There are only one or two lines that contain a great thought in the first five or six books. Otherwise the Iliad is all war and action and movement. And you can’t say that Homer is not a great poet. If you do, you’ll have to ignore many poets of the past. When Nishikanto started writing, I said his poems were “vital”, but he made great progress afterwards.
Nirodbaran: Some of his poems are even psychic.
Sri Aurobindo: His “Bullock Cart” is certainly psychic.
Nirodbaran: X doesn’t say that he is not a great poet, only that he lacks one element – that’s all – and he would like him to have it.
Satyendra: If you want intellectual substance, I would ask you to read one Gujarati poet named Akho. He is all Vedanta.
Nirodbaran: X has no fancy for such poetry. This morning I had an argument with Purani over your poem “Shiva”. Purani says it has creative force, just as your “Bird of Fire” has.
Purani: Didn’t you agree with me?
Nirodbaran: Yes, about “Bird of Fire”. About the other I said that I didn’t find creative force in it and asked, “Do you become Shiva when you read it?”
Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary to become Shiva. The point is whether you find the picture painted there to be living and feel that Shiva is alive in the poem.
Purani: I find it creative in that sense. It is not merely an idea of what Shiva is or stands for that has been depicted. What I find here is a personality, a being.
Sri Aurobindo: When you feel that, it means that the thing depicted is a piece of creation. Tagore also seems to have liked this poem very much.
Nirodbaran: Yes, that is the only poem he liked. According to you, then, to be creative means that what is depicted is vivid, alive, appearing real.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes.
Nirodbaran: It seems to me that your “Rose of God” has the creative force too.
Satyendra: He is trying to make you commit yourself! (Laughter)
Purani: If Sri Aurobindo doesn’t want to commit himself, nobody can succeed in that game.
Nirodbaran: I didn’t have any sly intention. We only want to grasp the point clearly.
Purani: Nirodbaran says that if there is poetic force, it will be felt; I say that not everybody will feel it. “The Hound of Heaven” won’t be appreciated by all.
Nirodbaran: By “everybody” if you mean the masses, of course not. But I meant that a poet or a literary man who has a taste for poetry will feel the force there.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, unless he has a prejudice.
Purani: There are persons like A.C. who may not find creative force there. He is a literary man, a Ph.D. from Oxford.
Sri Aurobindo: In philosophy?
Purani: No, in literature; he did research in ancient English poetry.
Sri Aurobindo: Oh, that is the skeleton of English poetry.
Nirodbaran: Sahana says some of Tagore’s dramas have creative force.
Sri Aurobindo: Which?
Nirodbaran: She doesn’t remember which. But don’t you think “Sacrifice” has it?
Sri Aurobindo: When people talk of Tagore’s dramas, they mean particularly “Sacrifice”. Of course, that is the best of the lot, but there too the characters are not living. They have all come out of his mind. He has the idea that things should be like this or like that and he makes them according to his idea.
Nirodbaran: I remember another poem of Tagore, “I will not let you go”, which seems to be creative.
Purani: It is the same as the other one, “God’s Retribution” – a fine description.
Sri Aurobindo: The girl there is also fashioned from his mind. A girl doesn’t behave in that way.
Nirodbaran: What about Madhusudan’s Bengali work, “The Slaying of Meghnad”? That surely has a lot of creativeness.
Sri Aurobindo: A poor creation. What sort of Ravana has he created? It is an outline of an idealised non-Rakshasic Rakshasa. He makes Ravana weep profusely. That is highly amusing.
Bengalis at one time were very fond of weeping. I think it was Romesh Dutt who translated the story of Savitri from the Mahabharata and portrayed her as weeping whereas in the original epic there is not a trace of tears. Even when her heart was being sawn in two, not a single tear came to her eyes. By making her weep, he took away the very strength on which Savitri was built.
Purani: He wanted to make the story realistic, perhaps.
Sri Aurobindo: He thought Vyasa had made a mess of it. Even present-day Bengalis are fond of weeping. They expect everybody to weep. When Barin was condemned, they reported that Sarojini wept and that when I met Sarojini I too began lamenting and crying! Barin had to contradict the report.
Purani: Also when Manmohan died, some people thought you were mourning him.
Sri Aurobindo: We brothers, I am afraid, were not so passionately fond of each other. (Laughter)
Yes, I was talking of Madhusudan. I don’t say that his poem is not fine or that it has no force or thought in it. It is an epic – but it is not creative. It has no vital substance.
Purani: People say he tried to imitate Milton.
Sri Aurobindo: Milton, Homer and everybody else.