Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 2. The Poetry of the Spirit
Psychic, Mystic and Spiritual Poetry

Spiritual Poetry [1]

The spiritual vision must never be intellectual, philosophical or abstract, it must always give the sense of something vivid, living and concrete, a thing of vibrant beauty or a thing of power. An abstract spiritual poetry is possible but that is not Amal’s manner. The poetry of spiritual vision as distinct from that of spiritual thought abounds in images, unavoidably because that is the straight way to avoid abstractness; but these images must be felt as very real and concrete things, otherwise they become like the images used by the philosophic poets, decorative to the thought rather than realities of the inner vision and experience.

28 May 1937