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Letters on Poetry and Art
CONTENTS
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Remarks on Individual Poets
The Author of the Bhagavad Gita
Sri Krishna is not supposed to have written anything. The Gita is part of the Mahabharata which is attributed to the sage Vyasa, the contemporary of Krishna. But in its present form the Mahabharata seems to be of later origin and many scholars say that the Gita was composed afterwards by someone and put into the Mahabharata. In any case whoever wrote it was a great Yogi and certainly received his inspiration from Krishna. Catullus and Horace You prefer Catullus [to Horace] because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius here into Catullus ―Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy in him than a red ant. He was an exquisite lyrist ―much more spontaneous in his lyrism than the more sophisticated and well-balanced Horace, a poet of passionate and irregular love, and he got out of the Latin language a melody no man could persuade it to before him or after. But that was all. Horace on the other hand knew everything there was to be known about philosophy at that time and had indeed all the culture of the age at his fingers' ends and carefully put in its place in his brain also ―but he did not make the mistake of writing a philosophical treatise in verse. A man of great urbanity, a perfectly balanced mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate
Page-372 like Catullus, an Epicurean who took life gladly but not superficially ―this was his character. As a poet he was the second among the great Augustan poets, a great master of phrase ―the most quoted of all the Roman writers, ―a dexterous metrist who fixed the chief lyric Greek metres in Latin in their definitive form, with a style and rhythm in which strength and grace were singularly united, a writer also of satire1 and familiar epistolary verse as well as a master of the ode and the lyric ―that sums up his work. June or July 1933
Virgil
I don't think Virgil would be classed by you as a psychic poet, and yet what is the source of that "majestic sadness" and that word-magic and vision which make his verse, more than that of almost any other poet, fill one with what Belloc calls the sense of the Unknown Country?
I don't at all agree that Virgil's verse fills one with the sense of the unknown country ―he is not in the least a mystic poet, he was too Latin and Roman for that. Majestic sadness, word-magic and vision need not have anything to do with the psychic; the first can come from the higher mind and the noble parts of the vital, the others from almost anywhere. I do not mean to say there was no psychic touch at all anywhere in Virgil. And what is this unknown country? There are plenty of unknown countries (other than the psychic worlds) to which many poets give us some kind of access or sense of their existence behind much more than Virgil. But if when you say verse you mean his rhythm, his surge of word music, that does no doubt come from somewhere else, much more than the thoughts or the words that are carried on the surge. 31 March 1932
1 Yes, he wrote a series of satires in verse ―he ranks among the greatest satirists, but without malice or violence, his satire is good-humoured but often pungent criticism of life and men.
Page-373 Dante
Somehow Dante's verse as well as his life-story move me so much: it is I think mainly because of Beatrice ―his conception of her gives him that excellence and that appeal. Will you please write also a few words on the real truth and significance of his devotion to her?
I am afraid I know very little about it.
*
As regards Beatrice, I have never thought about the matter. Outwardly, it was an idealisation, probably due to a psychic connection of the past which could not fulfil itself in that life. But I do not see how his conception of her gives him his excellence ― it was only one element in a very powerful and complex nature. 10 July 1932
Dante and Milton
Would it be correct to call Dante a mystic poet? And how
would you compare the inspiration-sources of Dante and Milton? Both the poets have a metaphysical background and a
strong religious fervour.
I don't think either can be called mystic poets ―Milton not at
all. A religious fervour or metaphysical background belongs to the mind and vital, not to a mystic consciousness. Dante writes
from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive force behind it.
18 October 1936
Marlowe
To me he seems an experiment wherein the occult voices were conceiving an epic drama with the central conception bodied
forth a little loosely in semi-dissolving scenes.
What about Edward II? Marlowe had already moved towards
the well-built drama.
Page-374
Shakespeare's Hamlet
Would you take, as many critics do, Hamlet as typically a
mental being? How would you characterise his essential psychology?
Hamlet is a Mind, an intellectual, but like many intellectuals a mind that looks too much all round and sees too many sides to
have an effective will for action. He plans ingeniously without coming to anything decisive. And when he does act, it is on a
vital impulse. Shakespeare suggests but does not bring out the idealist in him, the man of bright illusions.
Donne
Donne is very much in the limelight these days. How far can
we regard the present high estimate of him as justified?
It seems to me that Donne falls between two stools. The Elizabethan ingenuities pass because of the great verve of the life force that makes them attractive; Donne's ingenuities remain intellectual and do not get alive except at times, the vital fire or force is not there to justify them and make them alive and lively. On
the other hand he keeps to an Elizabethan or semi-Elizabethan style, but the Elizabethan energy is no longer there
―he does
not launch himself as Milton did into a new style suitable for the predominant play of the poetic intelligence. Energy and force of
a kind he has, but it is twisted, laboured, something that has not found itself. That is why he is not so great a poet as he
might have been. He is admired today because the modern mind has become like his
―it too is straining for energy and force
without having the life-impulse necessary for a true vividness and verve nor that higher vision which would supply another
kind of energy ―its intellect too is twisted, laboured, not in possession of itself.
28 February 1935
Page-375
Blake
Blake stands out among the mystic poets of Europe. His occasional obscurity, ―he is more often in his best poems lucid and crystal clear, ―is due to his writing of things that are not familiar
to the physical mind and writing them with fidelity instead of accommodating them to the latter. In reading such writing the
inner being has to feel first, then only the mind can catch what is behind.
27 July 1936
*
You said that Blake put down with fidelity whatever came down.
I didn't mean that he never altered. I don't know about that. I meant he did not let his mind disfigure what came by trying to
make it intellectual. He transcribed what he saw and heard. 29 July 1936
Wordsworth
I am rather astonished at your finding Wordsworth's realisation,
however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional effervescence. Wordsworth's was hardly
an emotional or effervescent character. As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself
and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or more
vivid. Still, Wordsworth's did not make that impression on me and to him it certainly came as something positive, wonderfully
luminous, direct, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not get to the source, because more was
hardly possible in his time and surroundings, at least to a man of his mainly moral and intellectual temper.
In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing can be. Such a concrete spiritual realisation whether of the personal
Page-376
Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the Self does not, except in rare cases, come at or anywhere near the beginning
of a sadhana, in the first years or for many years: one has to go deep to get it and deeper to keep it. But a vivid and very
personal sense of a spirit or infinite in Nature can very well come in a flash and remain strongly behind a man's outlook on
the universe. June 1934
Wordsworth and Keats
It is better to be as simple and direct as possible in one's
writing.
One can't make rigid rules like that. Wordsworth is as simple
and direct as possible (not always though). Keats aims at word-magic. One can't say Wordsworth is a greater poet than Keats.
Whatever style is poetically successful, is admissible. 21 December 1935
Keats and Shelley
As regards Keats and Shelley why attach so much importance
to fluency? Keats besides produced enough in his few years of productivity and enough besides of a high excellence to rank him
among the greater English poets. What might he not have done if he had lived to fifty? But I don't believe he had any dramatic
genius in him. None of these poets had. Shelley's Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic construction and poetic imagination,
but it has no organic life like the work of the Elizabethans or the Greeks or like such dramas as the
Cid or Racine's tragedies.
7 February 1935
*
With regard to Keats, is it not rather difficult to deny a great poet a possibility when his whole ambition is set towards acquiring it? If we didn't have Hyperion, would we have thought it possible for him to strike the epic note? None of the poets
round him had the least epical gift.
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It can easily be seen from Keats' earlier work. And with ripeness he could do great things in the narrative form. His dramatic
attempt is rubbish. All these poets ―Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats had the gift which if sublimated leads to epic power
―none had
the dramatic gift. The ambition to do a thing is not a proof that he can do it ―now and here.
8 February 1935
Tennyson
I suppose you know that I have no great consideration for Tennyson. I read him much and admired him when I was young
and raw, but even then his In Memoriam style seemed to me mediocre and his attempts at thinking insufferably second-rate
and dull. These lines ["An infant crying in the night . . . "] are better than others, but they are still Tennyson.
12 September 1931
*
Crossing the Bar was considered when I was in England as the
23 January 1935
Tennyson and Wilde
I could never swallow In Memoriam even in the days when I admired him ―very early days! It has been well described as "sorrow in kid gloves". I suppose he was sincere, but he failed to make his expression sincere. The thought is perfectly shallow and conventional for the most part and there is no depth or strength of feeling. As for Wilde, there was always a strain of insincerity somewhere, he posed even over his sufferings ―but he was a marvellous artist of speech and his imagination and his colouring are superb. In spite of the touch of insincerity,
Page-378 of overstress, [De Profundis] remains one of the greatest things [written in] English prose.2
Browning
My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think, in The Future Poetry. I had a fervent passion for him when I was from seventeen to eighteen, after a previous penchant for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings (Fifine at the Fair and some others excepted) some half-dozen times at least. There is much stuff of thought in him, seldom of great depth, but sometimes unexpected and subtle, a vast range not so much of character as of dramatic human moods, and a considerable power and vigour of rough verse and rugged language. But there is very little of the pure light of poetry in him or of sheer poetic beauty or charm and magic; he gets the highest or finest inspiration only in a line or two here and there. His expression is often not only rough and hasty but inadequate; in his later work he becomes tiresome. He is not one of the greatest poets, but he is a great creator. 5 December 1931
Baudelaire
It is a pity that Baudelaire could not allow the Spirit in him to find tongue in the highest key possible to his consciousness.
But what on earth did you expect from Baudelaire beyond what he has written. Baudelaire had to be Baudelairean just as Homer had to be Homeric. 7 November 1934
*
Herbert said yesterday that though Baudelaire is a great poet, he is considered an immoral one.
That is not anything against his greatness ―only against his
2 One corner of the manuscript of this letter has been lost. The words printed within square brackets are conjectural reconstructions. ―Ed.
Page-379 morality. Plenty of great people have been "immoral".
I had just a glance at Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and I found this:
The moon more indolently dreams tonight Than a fair woman on her couch at rest, Caressing, with a hand distraught and light, Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
What a queer imagination, but vulgar or immoral?
What is there vulgar in it or immoral? It is as an indolent distraught gesture that he puts it. How does it offend against morality? 31 January 1937
*
Baudelaire was never vulgar ―he was too refined and perfect an artist to be that. He chose the evil of life as his frequent subject and tried to extract poetic beauty out of it, as a painter may deal with a subject that to the ordinary eye may be ugly or repellent and extract artistic beauty from it. But that is not the only stuff of his poetry. 22 July 1936
Mallarmé
Blake is Europe's greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the current of French poetry (one might almost say of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were the opening.
Mallarmé's works are, in one word, "unintelligible".
Then why did they have so much influence on the finest French writers and why is modernist poetry trying to burrow into the subliminal in order to catch something even one quarter as fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions?
Is it really true that he wrote with a set determination to make his works unintelligible?
Page-380 Certainly not. The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Besides he refused to be satisfied with anything that was a merely intellectual or even at all intellectual rendering of his vision. That is why the surface understanding finds it difficult to follow him. But he is so great that it has laboured to follow him all the same. 14 December 1936
*
Please read pages 19 21 of this book.3 The editor speaks of Mallarmé as an acknowledged master and of his great influence on contemporary poetry.
He can't deny such an obvious fact, I suppose ―but he would like to.
He says, "A purely intellectual artist, convinced that sentiment was an inferior element of art, Mallarmé never evokes emotion, but only thought about thought; and the thoughts called forth in his mind by the symbol are generally so subtle and elliptical that they find no echo in the mind of the ordinary mortal." [pp. 19 20] Do you agree?
Certainly not ―this man is a mere pedant; his remarks are unintelligent, commonplace, often perfectly imbecile.
He continues: "Obscurity was part of his doctrine and he wrote for the select few only and exclusively . . . " [p. 20]
Rubbish! His doctrine is perfectly tenable and intelligible. It is true that the finest things in art and poetry are appreciated only by the few and he chose therefore not to sacrifice the truth of his mystic (impressionist, symbolist) expression in order to be easily understood by the multitude, including this professor.
3 L. E. Kastner, ed., A Book of French Verse: From Marot to Mallarmé (Cambridge: ´ Cambridge University Press, 1936).
Page-381
"Another cause of his obscurity is that he chose his words and phrases for their evocative value alone, and here again the verbal sonorities suggested by the tortuous trend of his mind make no appeal except to the initiated." [p. 20] (I suppose here he means what you meant about the limitedness of the French language?)
Not only that ―his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for ´ Mallarmé's unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only.
"His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal ac counts for his sterility (he has left some sixty poems only, most of them quite short) and the darkness of his later work, though he did write, before he had fallen a victim to his own theories, a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible." [p. 20]
60 poems if they have beauty are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet's work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only seven plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets.
He says that " Mallarmé's verse is acquired and intricate" i.e. a thing not of spontaneity, but of intellectualisation. Saying that Verlaine is an inspired poet, he seems to imply the contrary about Mallarmé.
If these two magnificent poems (the last two)4 are not inspired, then there is no such thing as inspiration. It is rubbish to say of a man who refused to limit himself by intellectual expression, that he was an intellectual artist. Symbolism, impressionism go beyond intellect to pure sight ―and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism.
4 " Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" (see page 404 below), and Les fleurs. ―― Ed.
Page-382 Nolini says that in poetry simplicity leads to beauty. Applied to Mallarmé, would this mean that due to his acrobatics with words, his poems are not beautiful.
Only Nolini can say what he meant, but to refuse beauty to Mallarmé's poetry would be itself an acrobacy of the intellect. For what then is beauty? Simplicity and beauty are not convertible terms, there can be a difficult beauty. What about Aeschylus then? or Blake?
"According to Mallarmé's own definition, the poet's mission is either `to evoke gradually an object in order to suggest a mood, or, inversely, to choose an object as a symbol and disengage from it a mood by a series of decipherments'." [p. 19]
It is a very good description of the impressionist method in literature. Verlaine and others do the same, even if they do not hold the theory.
I do not understand what Mallarmé means here, but it seems different from what Housman says, that the poet's mission is to transfuse emotion ―of which Mallarmé had none!
I do not know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the ´ surface vital joy and grief of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can include also the deeper spiritual or inner feeling which does not weep or shout, then they are here in these two poems. The Swan [in " Le vierge . . . "] is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, said poet being, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness, than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned Swan as developed by Mallarmé.I do not say that the spiritual or the occult cannot be given an easier expression or that if one can arrive at that without
Page-383 minimising the inner significance, it is not perhaps the greatest achievement. (That is, I suppose, Nolini's contention.) But there is room for more than one kind of spiritual or mystic poetry. One has to avoid mere mistiness or vagueness, one has to be true, vivid, profound in one's images; but, that given, I feel free to write either as in Nirvana or Transformation, giving a clear mental indication along with the image or I can suppress the mental indication and give the image only with the content suggested in the language but not expressed so that even those can superficially understand who are unable to read behind the mental idea ―that is what I have done in The Bird of Fire. It seems to me that both methods are legitimate. 16 December 1936
Heredia and Swinburne
I don't think Heredia and Swinburne go very well together; one is a passionate and chaotic imperfection and the other is a passionless perfection, but it is a passion of the music of words only and a perfection of word and rhythm only; for they resemble each other only in one thing, an excess of the word over the substance. 19 August 1932
Michael Madhusudan Dutt
I had once the regret that the line of possibility opened out by Michael [Madhusudan Dutt] was not carried any farther in Bengali poetry; but after all it may turn out that nothing has been lost by the apparent interruption. Magnificent as are the power and swing of his language and rhythm, there was a default of richness and thought-matter, and a development in which subtlety, fineness and richness of thought and feeling could learn to find a consummate expression was very much needed. More mastery of colour, form and design was a necessity as well as more depth and wealth in the thought-substance ―and this has now been achieved and, if added to the ojas, can fulfil what Madhusudan left only half done. 14 June 1932
Page-384 Rabindranath Tagore
Of course Tagore's worshippers will go for Prabodh Sen, what
did you expect? Literary nature (artistic generally, or at least very often) is
human nature at its most susceptible ―
genus irritabile
vatum. And besides where is the joy of literature if you cannot use your skill of words in pummelling some opposite faction's
nose? Man is a reasoning animal (perhaps), but a belligerent reasoning animal and must fight with words if he cannot do it
with fists, swords, guns, or poison gas. All the more, I applaud your decision not to pursue farther the
24 November 1932 *
I am afraid his powers are very much on the wane, but let us not whisper it too loud. The setting of a great genius and one that, after all, created on a very high level for a very long time! 10 October 1933
*
Tagore, I think, is substantially right in dubbing his spiritual poems imaginative rather than spiritual.
Well, yes, he mentalises, aestheticises, sentimentalises the things of the spirit ―but I can't say that I have ever found the expression of a concrete spiritual realisation in his poetry ―though ideas, emotions, ideal dreamings in plenty. That is something, but ― 23 March 1934
*
Tagore has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way ―that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and putting of the steps are minor matters. His exact position as a poet or a prophet or anything else will be assigned by posterity and we need not be in haste to anticipate the final verdict. The immediate verdict after his departure or soon after it may very well be a rough one, ―for this is a generation that seems to take a delight in trampling with an almost Nazi rudeness on
Page-385 the bodies of the Ancestors, especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was "no great things" and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore? But these injustices of the moment do not endure ―in the end a wise and fair estimate is formed and survives the changes of time. Tagore, of course, belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may or may not be correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of a fusion into something new and true ―therefore it could create. Now all that idealism has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse Event and everybody is busy exposing its weakness, but nobody knows what to put in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, "Heil-Hitler" and the Fascist salute and Five-Year Plan and the beating of everybody into one amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody's-eyes plunge into the bog in the hope of finding some firm foundation there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring creation is possible. 24 March 1934
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