Inspiration and Effort

Poetry of every kind, more so mystic poetry, is the expression of the inexpressible. What makes such an expression possible is the force of Inspiration. But the stream of Inspiration is not always a continuous flow but often "spurts, jets, clogged clarities, fragmentary freshnesses—half-lines, scattered phrases, separate drops unable to meet and move forward." That necessitates effort. But the effort is not an intellectual labour, as the layman tends to think, linking up different parts of the poem "like a mechanic riveting joints". "It is an instinctive, intuitive groping" to "the unknown fount of Inspiration". How different poets receive Inspiration from different planes and how their creative effort enables them to bring before us their immortal pieces is the theme of the work under review. The author himself with an access to the higher reaches of what Sri Aurobindo calls "Overhead" Inspiration and with a rare critical sensibility coupled with a versatile scholarship, plays variations on the theme in the different pieces. The work is actually a compilation of articles and notes as well as different letters written by Amal Kiran to correspondents of various types — some fellow Sadhaks in the Ashram attempting to write poetry, some Professors of English, either offering comments on the author's own poem or challenging him on a theme chosen by him or raising questions on Sri Aurobindo's poetry or allied matters, others seeking to understand mystic as well as other kinds of poetry. The tone in the different pieces, each a master-piece in itself, varies from one of polemics to a rapturous eulogy, from a theoretical analysis to sublime statement, from the "practical criticism" of a piece to the erudite establishment of a particular reading of a passage. Thought the majority of the pieces are concerned with mystic poetry, whether of "Yogis of Pantheism" like Wordsworth and Shelley or the "Great Pioneer of Yogic Poetry" AE, or the supreme master, Sri Aurobindo himself or his disciples, the chief of them being the author himself, Amal has the taste and discernment of a true poet-critic to declare that the greatness of a poem qua poem depends not on the plane or source of Inspiration but on the artistic intensity of expression. Among many problems concerned with Inspiration in poetry and discussed by Amal in his letters and essays are the questions of "clarity" and simplicity in poetry which always intrigues the "Common Reader". From whatever plane is the poet inspired the poet seeks not so much to express himself as to "communicate" and he communicates best when his poem is characterised by "clarity winged with beauty" as an uncommon common reader puts it to Amal. Admitting it to be a fine thing finely stated Amal points out that clarity is a relative term and one man deems clear what another would call obscure. Clarity need not be mental clarity. A poem need not yield its main purport immediately.

It is when he deals with mystic poetry that Amal really soars to ecstatic heights. His essays on AE "A Great Pioneer in Yogic Poetry" is one of the very best pieces in the volume. The opening sentence strikes the keynote of rapture in the essays:
"It was in the star-light I head of AE's death…" But in the very midst of rapture there are precision and "clarity winged with beauty".

Even AE, according to Amal, also lives in an iridescence and not in the full Spirit-Sun; but the shimmering haze of Shelley differs from his diffuse illumination: Shelley sees hazily from an aching distance while AE sees diffusely from very near.

Those who live in the Spirit-Sun are Sri Aurobindo and his disciples who drew inspiration from him. Even the disciples are swept beyond the merely human experience as they are in a deep and large ego-exceeding silence, a hushed receptivity of the mind and heart. They hear voices which come from above the normal level of consciousness, even above the subliminal recesses. Among Sri Aurobindo's poet-disciples Amal is the best and best-known. It is not in the two letters where he discusses Sri Aurobindo's poems with two professors of English that we get an example of his "overhead poetry" though the letters reveal the bitter fact that our learned academicians with all their ingenious "Explications" and the like are incapable of seizing "the Art and Heart of Poetry" as Amal puts it elsewhere. In one letter he shows how his Love and Death where he creates a wonderful artistic marvel from the Mother's statement.

"…every sexual act is a step towards death"* is not "frivolous" but seriously shows how to achieve true immortality succeeding as a poem with its felicity of word and rhythm, intensity of vision, force of style and the ultimate quality of being felt as a whole. In another letter, he "smiles" at "an Explicator" who does not see the tension in the poet when he tries to speak between the desire of self-expression and the feeling he is breaking some vow to remain plunged in the profundities of the Beyond. It is when he discusses a less known English poet, Joyce Chadwick, who has an affinity with Aurobindonian poetry then he quotes his own "Overhead" lines from Agni Jatavedas:
O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light —
O music burning through the heart's dumb-rock —
O beast of beauty with golden heart —
O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed —
Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,
Thy myriad arms equal to each desire ! …

There are quite a few Aurobindonians rising to the heights of the mystic Parnassus cited and discussed by Amal. One of them is a less known English poet, John A. Chadwick whom Sri Aurobindo christened Arjava. He is a master-poet of the occult worlds. We also have Nirodbaran who could write magnificently, thus:
Where time is a voyage with wide unfurled wings,
The flame-sails of unknown awakenings.

It is a pity there is no space to quote in a brief review all the wonderful examples cited by Amal from Dilip Kumar Roy, Harindranath Chattopadhyay and Nishikanto.

To a richly cultivated taste like Amal's, as one would expect, Sri Aurobindo happens to be the crowning glory of all poetic creation and his Savitri the highest possible peak of poetic achievement. The master received his poetic compositions direct from the Overhead realms: like the riks of the Veda his poetry is Mantra in the wide range of experience and subtle suggestion and perfection of expression. In the work before us we have a number of passages from the master and three whole essays are devoted to Savitri. Amal justly ridicules a Professor's attempt to consider the poem as an Epic in the class-room fashion and reveals in his own inimitable style that "Epic" is a certain frame of mind and tone of voice. The subject proper is secondary and so is the mode of treatment or development. In another letter he shows how Sri Aurobindo's Blank Verse is far different from Tennyson's Blank Verse with which it is wrongly compared. In the third he points out how Savitri could never have been influenced by The Divine Comedy in spite of obvious echoes from the poem and superficial similarities.

One of the most remarkable pieces in the volume tries to establish the right reading of a line in a minor poem by Shelley. The eighth line of Shelley's A Lament reads,
Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar,

The ingenious and scholarly attempts to introduce "Autumn" to complete the list of Seasons are reasoned away with an imaginative sympathy with Shelley's creative process which only an Amal can possess. There are two pieces which deserve a special mention. One is on English Style. It is an attack on the Grammar Book prescription against what are supposed to be overemphasis and overstatement. It is suggested that the word "great" be used only with reference to men and women whose importance resides not in their position, not even in the stir they have made in the world, but the genuineness of achievement tested by time.

Amal rightly shows how one should not be too facile in condemning a writer's phrases without reference to the quality of the mind of the writer. The other essay ‘The Critic's Development' demonstrates the three stages a critic passes through, that of a conscious exercise of the analytical mind upon the experience of the poem, the evaluation of the relation established between the poem and himself with reference to matter and form, significance and technique, and that of the final entry into the poet's own creative act and through that to the founts of the poet's inspiration. At the end,
"…the critic is no longer the critic but through the poem the poet whose say is the work he has created."

Some of the pieces have appeared in Mother India the Ashram Monthly Review of Culture edited by our author. One wishes another typical piece of Amal's, revealing him at his best, A New Shakespeare Poem, published in Mother India, April 1986, has been included in the volume.

— K. B. Sitaramayya
(Retired professor, Annamalai University)

December 1995


* The Four Austerities: Collected Works of the Mother, Volume 12, p. 54