Sri Aurobindo - The Essence of Poetry

Introduction:

Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Vande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, in 1910 was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer. The Future Poetry was first published in the monthly review Arya in thirty-two installments between December 1917 and July 1920. It explores the possibility of spiritual poetry in the future.

Objective:

            Aurobindo begins the chapter “The Essence of Poetry” with an aim to probe into the highest power we demand from poetry, its nature and essential law, through which the possibility of its use as the mantra of the real can be understood. He says that “the essential things in poetry is(sic) neither an impossible nor an unprofitable endeavour”.

Two common errors:

            When analysing the poetic creation, two common errors occur.

 1. The ordinary uninstructed mind judges poetry without really entering it and looks as if it were an aesthetic pleasure of the imagination, the intellect and the ear.

2. Too instructed critic/ too intellectually conscientious artist or craftsman

Any poem pretty, pleasant and melodious with a beautiful idea, for instance – a song of Anacreon or a plaint of Mimnermus comes under this category. The externally sensible and the inner imaginative pleasure are only the first elements expected from this type of poem.

            Aurobindo remarked that Intelligence, imagination and the ear are only the channels and instruments of poetic delight and the true creator, the true hearer is the soul. The greatest work of poetry is raising the pleasure of the instrument and transmuting the word into the deeper delight of the soul.

Divine Ananda – A spiritual joy

            Aurobindo pinpoints the requirements of a powerful poet who can conquer the human difficulties of writing poetry. He should succeed in pouring into all those who receive it. Most importantly, the soul of the poet should be able to feel the spiritual joy – a Divine Ananda which is defined by Aurobindo as an inverse reflection of the joy that the universal Soul felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into an original creative vision. The intellectually conscientious poet focuses on a faultlessly correct or at most an exquisite technique.

Technique – Rhythmic Word

            The good technique is the first step towards perfection. The technique, however indispensable, occupies a smaller field in poetry because a) its instrument, the rhythmic word is full of immaterial elements; b) its complex, flexible, variously suggestive instrument has infinite possibilities. The rhythmic word has a sensible element – sound value, an immaterial element – thought value, and its sense and sound together or separately - soul value, a direct spiritual power that soars up beyond the province of any laws of mechanical construction.

            The intellectual sense of poetry creation becomes a subordinate action in the poet’s mind whereas the perfection of sound movement and style becomes the spontaneous form of the poet’s soul, that utters itself in an inspired rhythm and an innate, revealed word. It is the highest speech, the supreme poetic utterance and the immortal element in his poetry available to man for the expression whether of his self-vision or of his world-vision.

            The highest experience, the pure spiritual can never be wholly expressed, still, it tries to express them not merely intellectually, but instinctively using rhythmic forms. However, poetry attempts to extend this vision and utterance to all experience even the most objective and urges to express something in the object beyond its mere appearances.

Words and their sense

Words are the conventional signs for ideas. We put a more vital power into the conventional word-sign which is not inherent in itself. In the history of language, words did not have a real life of their own. The speaker was more conscious of its vivid life than the listeners with their mechanized and sophisticated intellects. Aurobindo opines that the intellectual sense - the feelings, sensations and broad indefinite mental impressions with minute shades of quality – must have been a secondary element in the primitive language but attained dominance as the language evolved.

Sound came to express fixed ideas but there is no natural and inherent equivalence between the sound and its intellectual sense. Intellectually any sound might express any sense, if men were agreed on a conventional equivalence between them. The word got its sense since an indefinable quality or property in the sound might have raised certain vibrations in the life-soul of the human creature, in his sensational, his emotional, his crude mental being. For instance, the word wolf, just denotes to our intellectual, a certain living object i.e. it expresses the sensational relation between the wolf and man.

Poetry and Words

Poetry recovers partly by a stress on the image replacing the old sensational concreteness partly by a greater attention to the suggestive force of the sound, its life, its power, and the mental expression it carries. Poetry associates this with the definitive thought value contributed by intelligence. In that way, it succeeds in carrying up the power of speech to the direct expression of a higher reach of experience than the intellectual or vital. It brings out its soul suggestion, its spirit. So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings. Thus poetry expresses the experience, the vision, the ideas of the higher and wider soul in him. Here, Aurobindo says that poetry opens to the readers by the word, the doors of the spirit.

Prose Style and Poetry Style

            Aurobindo talks about the difference between the Prose style and the Poetry style. The prose style carries speech to a much higher power than its ordinary use. It doesn’t make it with greater attempts like the poetry. Because Poetry stands firmly on the intellectual value of the word. It uses rhythms that ordinary speech neglects, and aims at a general fluid harmony of movement. It associates words agreeably to please and to clarify intelligence. It strives for a more accurate, subtle, flexible and satisfying expression. A higher adequacy of speech is its first object. Beyond this adequacy, it aims at a greater effectiveness by various devices of speech for heightening its force of intellectual appeal. It may admit a more emphatic rhythm, more powerfully stimulate the emotion and appeal to a more vivid aesthetic sense. This rich use of images is employed as ornaments(alamkara) to give a stronger intellectual vision. Reason and taste, two powers of intelligence are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist while to the poet they are only minor deities.

The whole style and rhythm of poetry are the expression and movement that come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself. The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things. There are two elements, that speech can express - the outward or instrumental and the real or spiritual. In thought, for instance, there is the intellectual idea, that which the intelligence makes precise and definite to us, and the soul-idea, that which exceeds the intellectual and brings out the whole reality of the thing expressed.

The poet seeks for the soul of the emotion. To Aurobindo, with the poetical sense of objects, the poet attempts to embody the truth of life or truth of Nature. It is this greater truth and its delight and beauty that brings us the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities. Aurobindo, in a nutshell, defines poetry, as the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds.