Aurobindo was a great soul. He was a Yogi and a poet, a philosopher and a saint. He wrote not only poems and plays but also prose tracts, including his Future Poetry, as immortal a work as his Savitri. The Future Poetry is the Poetics, the new Poetics by the Indian Aristotle of our country. Aurobindo's aesthetic imagination is supported by his synthetic vision, viewing life in all totality and finality, and his theory of poetry is also a search for it.
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| Aurobindo’s Poetic Theory |
Poetry to Aurobindo is not the selection of the best words, nor is it emotion recollected in tranquility, nor a powerful flow of spontaneous feelings, nor a criticism of life, nor an expression of personality, nor a mere jumble of rule- governed, form - conscious laboured effort of a classicist but the sacred wood to burn the dross and evil in man and purify him of the baser instincts. Thus, for him poetry is not a by- product of the surplus of the creative energy of man nor the product of the creative human intelligence, nor even an elevated superior pastime but “the Mantra of the Real.”
The purpose of the mantra is to seek a union with the Almighty and to concentrate upon the Divine. Mantra has a heart – transforming, spirit - captivating and soul - elevating quality; it contains the melody of music, the sweetness, rhythm and enchantment of the ethereal and heavenly and above all a capacity of containing Infinity in a palm of words. The poet, thus, is no mere warbler of words and jugular of phrases but a Vates, a creator and seeker after Truth, after Beauty, after Joy, after Good. He incorporates within himself the power of seeing and realizing satyam, shivam, and sunderam, Poetry is a sure way of realizing the ultimate and the absolute. It speaks of and reveals for us the Real. Aurobindo himself explicated: “what the Vedic poets meant by the mantra as an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realization, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thought and experiences and dead. … ...... the seeing could not be separated from the hearing, it was one act.” (pp. 280-81).
Poetry being the mantra of the Real requires the unison of three elements: (1) the highest intensity of rhythmic movement, (2) the highest intensity of style of verbal form and thought substance, and (3) the highest intensity of the Soul's vision of Truth. As regards its rhythmic movement it is not merely metrical rhythm, or jog trot of Pegasus however effective and pleasing, nor a set harmony or set melody, satisfying to the outer ear and the aesthetic sense, into which most poets fall, but a kind of deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul - movement entering into the material form and often overlooking it , and trying to bring out an echo of hidden harmonies; a sound movement carrying on its wave the thought movement in the word and besides a sound image deepening the thought or the emotional or the vital impression, Its style should present things living to the imaginative vision, the spiritual sense, the soul - feeling and soul – sight. The words of poetry should be not only revealing and effective but also illuminated and illumination; they should have both sound and thought values. And above all the poet should be the seer, hearer and realizer of the vision of the Real, the Eternal, the True, the Beautiful, the Delightful, the Divine.
Thus poetry is essentially a soul act; the true creator and enjoyer of poetry is the soul. Poetry begins in the Absolute and ends in the Absolute. Sri Aurobindo's aesthesis has, therefore, been characterised as ‘meta aesthetics’ or ‘meta – poetics’, however, for poetry to be high, real and mantric, it is not necessary that the vision it embodies be mystical or divine. The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things. It may be a vision of a force or action, or of sensible beauty, or of truth of thought, or of emotion and pleasure and pain, of this life or the life beyond, but it is necessary that it is the soul which sees and the eye, sense, heart and thought - mind offer the least obstruction to the soul- power's onrush. The ultimate aim of Sri Aurobindo's poetry is to lift us to the level of the Supermind.
The future of poetry is linked with the future evolved nature of human consciousness. The future poetry in all its new bearings will make us realize that “the spirit and life are not incompatible, but rather a greater power of the spirit brings a greater power of life.” (p. 288). Hence the main function of poetry is to create a harmonic rhythm between spirit and matter and to discover Divine Truth, Divine Delight and Divine Beauty.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the innermost source of poetry is the soul: poetry in its essence is an activity and expression of the spirit. The purpose of poetry is to enkindle our minds into unusual vitality by its incantatory power, to help man in achieving salvation, that is, freedom from pain, from evil, from suffering from maya. Rishi Aurobindo propounds:
Poetry is the mantra only when it is the voice of the inmost truth and is couched in the highest power of the very rhythm and speech of that truth . And the ancient poets of the Veda and Upanishads claimed to be uttering the mantra because always it was this inmost and almost occult truth of things which they strove to see and hear and speak and because they believed themselves to be using or finding its innate soul rhythms and the sacrificial speech of it cast up by the divine Agni, the sacred Fire in the heart of man. The mantra is the supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinities.
Giving a poetic definition and interpretation of the mantra Aurobindo writes in Savitri (Book IV Canto 3, p.426):
…………………………………………………….
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sounds:
The word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self
Are seized unalterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
He feels a wideness and becomes a Power
And knowledge rushes on him like a sea;
Transmuted by the whites spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God - face and hears transcendent speech.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the poet is the seer and revealer of Truth. He is one who has got an insight into the things around and who can reveal the beauty and reality hidden from the sights of an ordinary man. He can enter even where the sun's rays do not reach. In Sri Aurobindo's own words: “The privilege of the poet is to go beyond and discover that more intense illumination of speech that inspired word and supreme inevitable utterance, in which there meets the divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain heads of the spirit within us. Poetry is the expression and movement which comes from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul, of which it is eager to deliver itself.” He adds further: “Poetry comes into being at the direct call of three powers, inspiration, beauty and delight, and brings them to us and us to them by the magic charm of the inspired rhythmic word. If it can do that all perfectly, its essential work has been done. It is in its beginning concerned with close, and simple natural things and when it grows more subtle, still it has only to create power of beauty, move the soul with aesthetic delight and make it feel and see, and its function seems at and end.” The more transparent and open they are, the more efficiently do they accomplish their work of transmission of the creative essence from one soul to another, and that is the measure of poetry. Thus, the highest work of poetry is to raise the pleasure of the instrument and transmute it into the deeper delight of the soul.
Towards the end of The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo observes: “The voice of poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a Supermind which sees things in their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgence and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre. It is the possession of the mind by the supramental touch and the communicated impulse to seize this sight and word that creates the psychological phenomenon of poetic inspiration and it is the invasion of it by a superior power to that which it is normally able to harbour that produces the temporary excitement of brain and heart and nerve which accompanies the inrush of the influence.” (pp. 392-3)
Aurobindo's theory of poetry, though largely Vedic, gets strong support from the Western thinkers and critics too. Even the fierce critic of poets, Plato, probably felt that the poet was a possessed creature, not using language in the way that normal human beings do, but speaking in a divinely inspired frenzy. In Plato's celebrated work Ion, Socrates says to Ion, the rhapsodist, “The gift you possess is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet ............ all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed ............... not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine ............. the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.” Longinus, explaining the sources of the sublime, has much of the elevating function of poetry in his mind. Even in our times critics and poets like Abercrombie and C. Day Lewis tend to believe that the source of poetry lies much deeper in the human psyche than commonly believed and understood. Abercrombie asks the question, “What, then is the first thing which we require of all poetry -- not merely in order to be great, but to exist at all?” and then himself answers the question. “I will call it, compendiously, ‘incantation’; the power of using words so as to produce in us a sort of enchantment ; and by that I mean a power not merely to charm and delight, but to kindle our minds into unusual vitality, exquisitely aware both of things and of the connexions of things.” (The Idea of Great Poetry, Martin Secker, 1926, p.18) C. Day Lewis also opines that poetry has its roots in incantation (A Hope for Poetry Blackwell, 1945, p.30).
The Future Poetry (originally published as a series of essays in The Arya from 1917 to 1920 and published in 1952 in a book form) is an original contribution to modern aesthetics. In the field of literary criticism it is a pioneering work and surpasses the Aesthetics of Croce, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, The Speculations of Hulme, The Principles of Literary Criticism of I.A. Richards, The Use of Poetry and Use of Criticism of T.S. Eliot, the New Bearings of F.R. Leavis and the Archetypal Patterns in Poetry of Maud Bodkin in perception, range and role of poetry in the future human evolution. It is produce of a mind that was soaked in the Western literary tradition beginning from Homer and Virgil to T.S. Eliot on the one hand and deeply immersed in the ancient lores and Vedic literature of India on the other hand. It presents values of universal significance.