Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Guidance in Writing Poetry

Sameness and Variety [1]

Harin has suns and moons in plenty in his poetry. A friend of Amal’s has remarked that stars come in almost every one of his poems. This seems to be one point against spiritual poetry. Another is that spiritual poetry is bound to be limited in scope and lack rasa vaicitrya, to use Tagore’s expression.

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 emotions that are clear 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 (one 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. Rasa vaicitrya 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”.

When Sahana sent some of her poems to Tagore, he replied that the poet’s mind should not be confined to a single preraṇā, however vast it might be.

But Tagore’s poetry is all from one প্রেরণা [preraṇā]. He may write of different things, but it is always Tagore and his preraṇā repeating themselves interminably. Every poet does that.

He hints that a poet’s creation should not be confined to spiritual inspiration dealing with things spiritual and mystic.

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? Hafiz has done that. But he can only use them as symbols as a rule. Must he write about politics,— communism, for instance, like modernist poets? Why should he describe the outer aspects of world nature, বিশ্ব প্রকৃতি [biśba prakṛti], for their own sake, when his vision is of something else within বিশ্ব প্রকৃতি [biśba prakṛti] 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.

15 May 1938