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Letters on Poetry and Art
CONTENTS
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Twentieth-Century Poetry
Georgian Poetry
The stanzas are not quite successful. [Certain lines] have too much a stamp of what I think was called Georgian poetry ―though I suppose it would more properly be called late-Victorian-Edwardian-early-Georgian. The defect of that poetry is that it has a fullness of language which fails to go home ―things that ought to be very fine, but miss being so; so much of the poetry of Rupert Brooke as I have seen, for instance, always gives me that impression. In our own language I might say that it is an inspiration which tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflating the voice of the poetic intelligence. 1 November 1936
Early Twentieth-Century English Poetry
About modern English poetry of the early part of this century Livingston Lowes, writing in 1918, remarks in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry: "That which does allure it in the East is an amazing tininess and finesse ―the delicacy, that is to say, and the deftness, and the crystalline quality of the verse of China and Japan. . . . The strange, the remote, in its larger, more broadly human aspects . . . ―all this has been gradually losing its hold upon poetry. Instead, when we fly from the obsession of the familiar, it is growingly apt to be to the more recondite, or precious, or quintessential, or even perverse embodiments of the strange or far ―to `the special, exquisite perfume' of Oriental art, . . . to the exceptional and the esoteric, in a word, rather than to the perennial and universal."
The remark of Livingston Lowes is no doubt correct. Even now and even where it is the external, everyday, obvious that is being
Page-412 taken as theme, we see often enough that what the mind is trying to find is some recondite, precious or quintessential aspect of the everyday and obvious ―something in it exceptional or esoteric. But while in the East, the way to do it is known, the West does not seem yet to have found it. Instead of going inside, getting intimate with what is behind, and writing of the outside also from that inside experience, they are still trying to stare through the surface into the inner depths with some X-ray of mental imagination or "intuition" and the result is not the quintessence itself, but a shadow-picture of the quintessence. That is perhaps why there is so much feeling of effort, artifice, "even perverse embodiment" in much of this poetry ―and no very definitive success as yet. But, I suppose, the way itself, the endeavour to leave the obvious surfaces and get deeper is the only road left for poetry, otherwise it can but repeat itself in the old modes with slight alterations till exhaustion brings decadence. On the road that is being now followed there is also evident danger of decadence, through an excess of mere technique and artifice or through a straining towards the merely out-of-the-way or the perverse. But there seems to be no other door of progress than to make the endeavour. 10 October 1932
Housman, Watson, Hardy, Bridges
I hear from Nolini that you want two books (reviewed in the New Statesman) representing the achievement of the seventeenth-century "Metaphysicals", in order to add some thing about them to your Future Poetry. . . . There is another gap also, perhaps as serious: there is nothing about Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell. And one other name ―not belonging to either group but verging on the mystical domain ―is worth inclusion: Christina Rossetti. Perhaps something on Gerard Manly Hopkins wouldn't be uninteresting, too. Among non-mystical poets there are some omissions also: Chapman, for instance ―and in the recent group, William Watson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and Robert Bridges.
Page-413 I did not deal with all these poets because it was not in the scope of my idea to review the whole literature, but to follow only the main lines. But the main difficulty was that at the time I had no books and could only write from memory. I have read nothing of Housman ―what I had read of Watson or Hardy did not attract me and these are anyhow not central figures nor near the centre. Bridges was also a side figure at the time I wrote, it is only after his Laureateship that he came much forward. I had read only his Eros and Psyche and a few other things, and he did not give me the impression of being on one of the main lines. But I feel now that before the book can be published it has to be brought more up to date and the place of the poets who attempted spiritual poetry more fully indicated. 23 January 1934
Chesterton
I have not read Chesterton's poetry as a whole, but what I have seen of it does not attract me. Scott no longer ranks as a poet; Chesterton's verse struck me as a modernisation of Scott. I have told you I do not share contemporary enthusiasms. As for the "best war-scenes since Homer", that is exactly the phrase that was used for a long time about Scott. 1932 *
I am sending you the first pages of an essay on Chesterton. I hope you will wait till you have finished the whole before declaring that the case is not proven.
You have made good to a certain extent ―but are these strikingnesses all that there is in Chesterton? Something more is needed to make a poet of rank. I do not think the comparison with Coleridge can hold if it is intended to indicate anything like equality. Coleridge's poetry tells by its union of delicate and magical beauty with exquisite simplicity and straightness. Chesterton never loses the rhetorician. Even in these passages there is something of the rhetorician's brazen clang, an excited violence, a forced note however striking. It rises into sheer poetry, so far as I can see,
Page-414 only in three of the passages quoted, the Wessex dog simile,1 that of the illumined manuscripts2 and finally the description of the Dark Ages and the fall of Rome.3 The last in spite of haunting ghosts of Kipling and Macaulay pursuing it is fine in vision and expression and substance. Chesterton however exceeds his ghosts ―he has something of the racer in him and not merely of the prancing cart-horses they were.
*
If Chesterton is noble, grand style, epic (Chapman also) ―it becomes difficult to deny these epithets to many others also. Even Kipling and Macaulay can put in a claim. What then is the difference between them and Homer, Milton etc.? Only that Homer is polysyllabic (he is not really) and Chesterton monosyllabic? 31 January 1935
Yeats and the Occult
The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult is due
to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered
―it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, almost sensation of the occult, a
light not of earth flowing through without anything to stop it or to change it
into a product of the terrestrial mind. When one writes from pure occult vision
there is this perfection and direct sense though it may be of different kinds,
for the occult world of one is not that of another. But when there is the
intervention of the intellectual mind in a poem this intervention may produce
good lines of another power, but
1 And Wessex lay in a patch of peace,
Like a dog in a patch of sun ――
2 It was wrought in the monk's slow manner,
From silver and sanguine shell,
Where the scenes are little and terrible
Keyholes of heaven and hell.
3 When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky
And whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging
Of the nations in the night.
Page-415
they will not coincide in tone with what is before them or after ―there is an
alternation of the subtler occult and the heavier intellectual notes and the
purity of vision becomes blurred by the intrusion of the earth-mind into a
seeing which is beyond our earth-nature.
But these observations are valid only if the object is as in Yeats'
lines to bring out a veridical and flawless transcript of the vision
and atmosphere of faeryland. If the object is rather to create
symbol-links between the seen and the unseen and convey the
significance of the mediating figures, there is no obligation to
avoid the aid of the intellectualising note. Only, a harmony and
fusion has to be effected between the two elements, the light and
beauty of the beyond and the less remote power and interpretative
force of the intellectual thought-links. Yeats does that, too, very
often, but he does it by bathing his thought also in the faery
light; in the lines quoted [from
The Stolen Child and
The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland], however, he does not do that, but
leaves the images of the other world shimmering in their own native
hue of mystery. There is not the same beauty and intense atmosphere
when a poem is made up of alternating notes. The finest lines [of
these poems] are those in which the other-light breaks out most
fully ―but there are others also which are very fine too in their
quality and execution. November 1934
Yeats and A. E.
I do not think I have been unduly enthusiastic over Yeats, but one
must recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he
is far superior to A. E. ―just as A. E. as a man and a seer was far
superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid-world of
the vital
antariksa, he has not penetrated beyond to
. spiritual-mental heights as A. E. did. But all the same, when one
speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give
the most importance. What Yeats expressed, he expressed with great
poetical beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a
creative imagination. A. E. had an unequalled profundity of
Page-416
vision and power and range in the spiritual and psychic field. A. E.'s thought
and way of seeing and saying things is much more sympathetic to me than
Yeats' who only touches a brilliant floating skirt-edge of the truth of
things ―but I cannot allow that to influence me when I have to judge of the
poetic side of their respective achievements.
*
The depths of A. E. are greater than those of Yeats, assuredly. His
suggestiveness must therefore be profounder. In this poem [Sibyl]
which you have translated very beautifully, his power of expression,
always penetrating, simple and direct, is at its best and his best
can be miraculously perfect.
A. E
.
The substance of A. E.'s poetry is always very good ―he is one of
the two or three whose poetry comes nearest to spiritual knowledge
and experience. He has too a very fine and subtle ´ perception of
things ―a little more vital élan (of which he seems to have had
abundance in his life but not so much in his poetry) and he
would have been not only a fine but a very great poet. 11
February 1932
Abercrombie
I have the Abercrombie extracts. I am sorry that I cannot
participate in the general admiration for these great poets; I
suppose it must be my fault, though at the request of an earlier [disciple
named] Chandrasekhar I read some of Abercrombie's dramas and
tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I have had no time as
yet to write anything about his blank verse. I shall make a last
attempt at admiration when I am free.
Page-417
Lawrence
To continue about Lawrence's poetry from where I stopped.4
The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of language for the sake of
language, of form for the sake of form, even of indulgence of poetic emotion
for the sake of the emotion, because all that veils the thing in itself, dresses
it up, prevents it from coming out in the seizing nudity of its truth, the power
of its intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express
the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible ―reduce expression to its barest
bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible, suppress as much of the form as
may be and you get nearer that behind which is invisible. It is the same impulse
that pervaded recent endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the reality;
let us suppress the concealing form and express the reality by its appropriate
geometrical figures ―and you have cubism. Or since that is too much, suppress
exactitude of form and replace it by more significant forms that indicate rather
than conceal the truth ―so you have "abstract" paintings. Or, what is within
reveals itself in dreams, not in waking phenomena, let us have in poetry or
painting the figures, visions, sequences, designs of dreams ―and you have
surrealist art and poetry. The idea of Lawrence is akin; let us get rid of
rhyme, metre, artifices which please us for their own sake and draw us away from
the thing in itself, the real behind the form. So suppressing these things let
us have something bare, rocky, primally expressive. There is nothing to find
fault with in the theory provided it does lead to a new creation which expresses
the inner truth in things better and more vividly and directly than with rhyme
and metre the old poetry, now condemned as artificial and rhetorical, succeeded
in expressing it. But the results do not come up to expectation. Take the four
lines of Lawrence5 ―in what do they differ from
the
4 Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter a day after one
published on pages 561 under the
heading "Lawrence's Letters" ―Ed.
5 Just a few of the roses gathered by the Isar
Are fallen, and their bloodred petals on the cloth
Float like boats on a river, waiting
For a fairy wind to wake them from their sloth.
Page-418
old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a
less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable.
But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that goes on reverberating within and preserves the vision forever. What the modernist metreless verse does is to catch up
the movements of prose and try to fit them into varying lengths and variously arranged lengths of verse. Sometimes something
which has its own beauty or power is done ―though nothing better or even equal to the best that was done before, but for
the most there is either an easy or a strained ineffectiveness. No footsteps hitting the earth? Footsteps on earth can be a walk,
can be prose; the beats of poetry can on the contrary be a beat of wings. As for the bird image, well, there is more lapsing than
flying in this movement. But where is the bareness, the rocky directness ―where is the something more real than any play of
outer form can give? The attempt at colour, image, expression is just the same as in the old poetry
―whatever is new and deep
comes from Lawrence's peculiar vision, but could have been more powerfully expressed in a closer-knit language and metre.
Of course, it does not follow that new and freer forms are not to be attempted or that they cannot succeed at all. But if they
succeed it will be by bringing the fundamental quality, power, movement of the old poetry
―which is the eternal quality of
all poetry ―into new metrical or rhythmic discoveries and new secrets of poetic expression. It can't be done by reducing these to
skeletonic bareness or suppressing them by subdual and dilution in a vain attempt to unite the free looseness of prose with the
gathered and intent paces of poetry. 29 June 1936
*
I have been glancing at odd times at Pansies. Flashes of genius, much defiant triviality of revolt-stuff, queer strainings after things not grasped, a gospel of "conscientious sensuality" rushing in at favourable opportunities ―all in a formless deliberate disorder, that is the impression up till now
―I shall wait to see
Page-419
if there is something else.
9 February 1933
*
I am sending you Pansies.
Before sending I opened it at random and found this ― I can't stand Willy Wet-leg,
can't stand him at any price.
He's resigned, and when you hit him
he lets you hit him twice.
Well, well, this the bare, rockily, direct poetry? God help us!
P.S. I think Dara could do the companion of that in his lighter moments! This is the sort of things to which theories lead even
a man of genius. 2 July 1936
*
What I have written [about modern poetry] is too slight and
passing and general a comment, such as one can hazard in a private letter; but for a criticism that has to see the light of
day something more ample and sufficient would be necessary. Lawrence's poetry, whatever one may think of his theory or technique, has too much importance and significance to be lightly handled and the "modernism" of contemporary poetry is a
fait
accompli. One can refuse to recognise as legitimate the fait accompli, whether in Abyssinia or in the realms of literature, but
it is too solid to be met with a mere condemnation in principle.
*
Please take a look at this
―form perfect as against its
imperfect model. The formal perfection justifies my faith in rhyme,
rhythm, etc. as against Lawrence's free verse.
There can be no doubt of that. Lawrencists however would say
that the question is not between imperfect and perfect metrical work, but between metrical rhythm in poetry and poetry
stripped bare of metre and presented with a bare elemental energy of language, vision and movement. Theory for theory
Page-420
it can stand, but in the practice and result the effects seem to me to be against Lawrence's theory.
1936
*
What a pity that Lawrence did not give his poetry a rhythmic form, that would have given it its full sound and sense-value and
made it sure of immortality. The Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s
I admit I have not read as much of "modern" (contemporary) poetry as I should have
―but the little I have is mostly of the
same fundamental quality. It is very carefully written and versified, often
recherché in thought and expression; it lacks only two things, the inspired phrase and inevitable word and the rhythm
that keeps a poem for ever alive. . . . Speech carefully studied and made as perfect as it can be without reaching to inspiration,
verse as good as verse can be without rising to inspired rhythm ―there seem to be an extraordinary number of poets writing
like that in England just now. . . . It is not the irregular verses and rhymes that matter, one can make perfection out of irregularity
―it is that they write their poetry from the cultured striving mind, not from the elemental soul-power within. Not a principle
to accept or a method to imitate! June 1931
*
The things you will see him [a critic in the New Statesman and Nation] assuming . . . may be more widely prevalent, to the exclusion of more catholic tastes and liberal views, than I have hitherto believed. In which case there perhaps could be no sort of public in England for poetry which is mystical or spiritual.
I imagine it is only one dominant tendency of the day that is represented by these autocrats; the other is precisely the "mystic" tendency ―and I don't think it will be so easily snuffed out as that. 23 June 1932
*
Page-421 It is probably modern (contemporary) English poetry of which your friend is thinking. Here I am no expert; but I understand that the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, vivid, expressive, recording either the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets. It does not look as if all contemporary English poetry were like that, it is only one strong trend; but such as it is, it has not as yet produced anything very decisive, great or successful. Much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity or, what is worse, an exaggerated emphatic objectivity; emotion seems often to be replaced by an intensified vital-physical sensation of the object. You will perhaps understand what I mean if you read the poem quoted on pages 316 17 of the Parichay (also made much of in a book on English modernistic poetry sent to me by Arjava) ―"red pieces of day ―hills made of blue and green paper ―Satanic and blasé ―black goat lookingly wanders", images expressing vividly an impression made on the nerves through the sight by the described objects. Admittedly it is ―at least when pushed to such a degree, ―a new way of looking at things in poetry, but not essentially superior to the impressions created on the heart or the mental imagination by the object. All the same there is behind, but still not successfully achieved, something real, an attempt to get away from ornate mental constructions about things to the expression of the intimate truth of the things themselves as directly seen by a deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way the thing can be done. I have to form my idea more fully when I have finished Arjava's book, but this is what impresses me at present. 1 October 1932 *
The latest craze in England is either for intellectual quintessence or sensations (not emotions) of life, while any emotional and ideal element in poetry is considered as a deadly sin. But beautiful poetry remains beautiful poetry even if it is not in the current
Page-422 style. And after all Yeats and A. E. are still there in spite of this new fashion of the last one or two decades. 8 October 1934 *
Please give me a few names of poets ―especially modern poets, whom I should study.
I have very little familiarity with the names of modern poets subsequent to A. E. and Yeats and De la Mare, all of whom you know. There are about a hundred of them moderns, Spender + x + y + z + p2 etc. Before that there were Hopkins and Flecker and others and before that Meredith and Hardy and Francis Thompson. You can tackle any of them you can lay your hands on in the library. Watson and Brooke and other Edwardians and Georgians would not be good for you. 16 October 1938
*
Originality is all right, but if you become so original that nobody can follow you and all fall behind gasping for breath, that is an excess of virtue. The modernist poets do that with the result that nobody has the least idea what they mean, not even themselves, and the farther result that, as it has been said "there are more people now who write poetry than read it". 8 June 1938
*
Somebody once said of modernist poetry that it could be understood only by the writer himself and appreciated by a few friends who pretended to understand it. That is because the ideas, images, symbols do not follow the line of the intellect, its logic or its intuitive connections, but are pushed out on the mind from some obscure subliminal depth or mist-hung shallow; they have connections of their own which are not those of the surface intelligence. One has to read them not with the intellect but with the solar plexus, try not to understand but feel the meaning. The surrealist poetry is the extreme in this kind ―you remember our surrealist Baron's question: "Why do you want poetry to have a meaning?" Of course, you can put an intellectual explanation on the thing, but then you destroy its poetical appeal. Very great
Page-423 poetry can be written in that way from the subliminal depths, e.g. Mallarmé, but it needs a supreme power of expression, like Blake's or Mallarmé's, to make it truly powerful, convincing, and there must be sincerity of experience and significant rhythm. 2 August 1943
Surrealism
What the deuce is this Surrealism? I gather Baudelaire was its father, and Mallarmé his son.
Surrealism is a new phrase invented only the other day and I am not really sure what it conveys. According to some it is a dream poetry making a deeper truth, a deeper reality than the surface reality. I don't know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is ´ a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine and others used to be classed as impressionist poets: sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets. 12 February 1937
*
I really can't tell you what surrealism is, because it is something ―at least the word is ―quite new and I have not read either the reliable theorists of the school nor much of their poetry. What I picked up on the way was through reviews and quotations, the upshot being that it is a poetry based on the dream consciousness, but I don't know if this is correct or merely an English critic's idea of it. The inclusion of Baudelaire and Valery seems to indicate something wider than that. But the word is of quite recent origin and nobody spoke formerly of Baudelaire as a surrealist or even of Mallarmé. Mallarmé was supposed to be the founder of a new trend of poetry ―impressionist and symbolist, followed in varying degrees and not by any means in the same way by Verlaine, Rimbaud, ―both of them poets of great fame. Verlaine is certainly a great poet and people now say Rimbaud also, but I have never come across his poetry except in extracts ―and developing in Valery and other noted writers
Page-424 of today. It seems that all these are now claimed as part of or the origin of the surrealist movement. But I cannot say what are the exact boundaries or who comes in where. I suppose if Baron communicates to you books on the subject or more precise information, we shall know more clearly now. In any case surrealism is part of an increasing attempt of the European mind to escape from the surface consciousness (in poetry as well as in painting and in thought) and grope after a deeper truth of things which is not on the surface. The Dream Consciousness as it is called ―meaning not merely what we see in dreams, but the inner consciousness in which we get into contact with deeper worlds which underlie, influence and to some extent explain much in our lives, what the psychologists call the subliminal or the subconscient (the latter a very ambiguous phrase) offers the first road of escape and the surrealists seem to be trying to force it. My impression is that there is much fumbling and that more often it is certain obscure and not always very safe layers that are tapped. That accounts for the note of diabolism that comes in in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud also, I believe, and in certain ugly elements in English surrealist poetry and painting. But this is only an impression. Nirod's poetry (what he writes now) is from the Dream Consciousness, no doubt about that. It has suddenly opened in him and he finds now a great joy of creation and abundance of inspiration which were and are quite absent when he tries to write laboriously in the mental way. This seems to indicate either that the poet in him has his real power there or that he has opened to the same Force that worked in poets like ´ Mallarmé. My labelling him as surrealist is partly ―though not altogether ―a joke. How far it applies depends on what the real aim and theory of the surrealist school may be. Obscurity and unintelligibility are not the essence of any poetry and ―except for unconscious or semi-conscious humorists like the Dadaists ―cannot be its aim or principle. True dream-poetry (let us call it so for the nonce) has and must always have a meaning and a coherence. But it may very well be obscure or seem meaningless to those who take their stand on the surface or "waking" mind
Page-425 and accept only its links and its logic. Dream poetry is usually full of images, visions, symbols, phrases that seek to strike at things too deep for the ordinary means of expression. Nirod does not deliberately make his poems obscure, he writes what comes through from the source he has tapped and does not interfere with its flow by his own mental volition. In many modernist poets there may be labour and a deliberate posturing, but it is not so in his case. I interpret his poems because he wants me to do it, but I have always told him that an intellectual rendering narrows the meaning ―it has to be seen and felt, not thought out. Thinking it out may give a satisfaction and an appearance of mental logicality, but the deeper sense and sequence can only be apprehended by an inner sense. I myself do not try to find out the meaning of his poems, I try to feel what they mean in vision and experience and then render into mental terms. This is a special kind of poetry and has to be dealt with according to its kind and nature. There is a sequence, a logic, a design in them, but not one that can satisfy the more rigid law of the logical intelligence. About Housman's theory; it is not merely the appeal to emotion that he posits as the test of pure poetry ―he deliberately says that pure poetry does not bother about intellectual meaning at all ―it is to the intellect nonsense. He says that the interpretations of Blake's famous poem rather spoil them ―they appeal better without being dissected in that way. His theory is questionable but that is what it comes to; he is wrong in using the word "nonsense" and perhaps in speaking of pure and impure poetry. All the same, to Blake and to writers of the Dream Consciousness, his rejection of the intellectual standard is quite applicable. 12 February 1937
*
About your points: (1) If the surrealist dream-experiences are flat, pointless or ugly, it must be because they penetrate only as far as the "subconscious" physical and "subconscious" vital dream layers which are the strata nearest to the surface. Dream-consciousness is a vast world in which there are a multitude of provinces
Page-426 and kingdoms, but ordinary dreamers for the most part penetrate consciously only to these first layers which belong to what may properly be called the subconscious belt. When they pass into deeper sleep regions, their recording surface dream mind becomes unconscious and no longer gives any transcript of what is seen and experienced there; or else in coming back these experiences of the deeper strata fade away and are quite forgotten before one reaches the waking state. But when there is a stronger dream-capacity, or the dream-state becomes more conscious, then one is aware of these deeper experiences and can bring back a transcript which is sometimes a clear record, sometimes a hieroglyph, but in either case possessed of a considerable interest and significance. (2) It is only the subconscious belt that is chaotic in its dream-sequences ―for its transcriptions are fantastic and often mixed, combining a jumble of different elements; some play with impressions from the past, some translate outward touches pressing on the sleep-mind; most are fragments from successive dream-experiences that are not really part of one connected experience ―as if a gramophone record were to be made up of snatches of different songs all jumbled together. The vital dreams, even in the subconscious range, are often coherent in themselves and only seem incoherent to the waking intelligence because the logic and law of their sequences is different from the logic and law which the physical reason imposes on the incoherences of physical life. But if one gets the guiding clue and if one has some dream-experience and dream-insight, then it is possible to seize the links of the sequences and make out the significance, often very profound or very striking, both of the detail and of the whole. Deeper in, we come to perfectly coherent dreams recording the experience of the inner vital and inner mental planes; there are also true psychic dreams ―the latter usually are of a great beauty. Some of these mental or vital plane dream-experiences, however, are symbolic, very many in fact, and can only be understood if one is familiar with or gets the clue to the symbols. (3) It depends on the nature of the dreams. If they are of the
Page-427 right kind, they need no aid of imagination to be converted into poetry. If they are significant, imagination in the sense of a free use of mental invention might injure their truth and meaning ―unless of course the imagination is of the nature of an inspired vision coming from the same plane and filling out or reconstructing the recorded experience so as to bring out the Truth held in it more fully than the dream transcript could do, ―for a dream record is usually compressed and often hastily selective. (4) The word psyche is used by most people to mean anything belonging to the inner mind, vital or physical, ―though the true psyche is different from these things. Poetry does come from these sources or even from the superconscient sometimes; but it does not come usually through the form of dreams ―it comes either through word-vision or through conscious vision and imagery whether in a fully waking or an inward-drawn state: ¯ the latter may go so far as to be a state of samādhi ―svapna ¯ samādhi. In all these cases it is vision rather than dream that is the imaging power. Dreams also can be made a material for poetry; but everyone who dreams or has visions or has a flow of images cannot by that fact be a poet. To say that a predisposition and discipline are needed to bring them to light in the form of written words is merely a way of saying that it is not enough to be a dreamer, one must have the poetic faculty and some training ―unless the surrealists mean by this statement something else than what the words naturally signify. What is possible, however, is that by going into the inner (what is usually called the subliminal) consciousness ―this is not really subconscious but a veiled or occult consciousness ―or getting somehow into contact with it, one not originally a poet can awake to poetic inspiration and power. No poetry can be written without access to some source of Inspiration. Mere recording of dreams or images or even visions could never be sufficient, unless it is a poetic inspiration that records them with the right use of words and rhythm bringing out their poetic substance. On the other hand, I am bound to admit that among the records of dream-experiences even from people unpractised in writing I have met with a good many that read like a brilliant and colourful poetry
Page-428 which does hit ―satisfying Housman's test ―the solar plexus. So much I can concede to the surrealist theory; but if they say on that basis that all can with a little training turn themselves into poets ―well, one needs a little more proof before one can accept so wide a statement. 13 February 1937 *
Now I find that in spite of your long letters, I haven't yet grasped what this blessed surrealism is.
I wrote very clearly in my letter to Dilip [published on pages 424 26] that I did not know myself what Surrealism is since I have not studied either surrealistic theory or surrealistic literature. I gathered from what I have read ―reviews, citations ―that it was dream-consciousness of a lower type (therefore incoherent and often ugly). I also explained at great length in another letter that there was a Dream Consciousness of a higher type. Are these distinctions really so difficult to understand? 19 February 1937 Page-429
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