SRI AUROBINDO’S POETRY: A CRITICAL STUDY (1872-1950)

Abstract

Devotion and an instinctive dislike for an antiquated rhetoric have worked together with equal force to obscure the poetic status of Sri Aurobindo. The devotees have done their best to discourage critical studies - which Sri Aurobindo himself would have disapproved of - and the detractors have missed the deeper layers of Sri Aurobindo's vocabulary and rhetoric. Thanks to K.D. Sethna, V.K. Gokak, K.R.S. Iyengar, Prema Nandakumar, Sisir Kumar Ghose and R.Y. Deshpande for their balanced views, which should be our entry points to a world that has been thoroughly misinterpreted by critics and poets like William Walsh, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla and their literary friends.1 The true spirit of criticism should be an effort to find what we can get from a work of art, not what we cannot get from it.Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) seems to have been a victim of changing trends between two ages. He changed his prose style from 1926 onwards, but he could not or did not wish to write poetry like Eliot or Yeats in the last fifty years of his life. There were three reasons for his choice or behind his incapacity. Firstly, he wished to be an original poet. Secondly, he was the first Indian poet who tried to fuse an Indian sensibility with the English language. Lastly, he wished the spirit of Sanskrit to enter into the character of the English language.Call it modem or antiquated, he was creating a tradition. I agree with K.R.S. Iyengar when he says:Without question, Sri Aurobindo is the one incontestably outstanding figure in Indo-Anglian literature. Tagore, no doubt, holds a comparable position in modem Bengali literature.2The linking with Tagore suggests that Sri Aurobindo too is the maker of a new tradition in Indian literature. His theory of poetry is both revivalist and dynamic. He looks back to the past in search of the lost word, the mantra, which had once dropped from the lips of the ancient rishi, but he also looks ahead anticipating a greater utterance in the mystic poetry of tomorrow. Fascinated by his contemporaries and immediate predecessors like Tagore, Whitman and Carpenter, he sees a further evolution of mantric poetry (poetry of incantation, hymn, prayer and magic) in the days ahead of him. Poetry, like everything else, evolves. Sisir Kumar Ghose was both apprehensive and optimistic:Contrasted with the 'disinherited minds' that crowd the modem scene Sri Aurobindo reveals, no doubt, an antique cast. To many he would seem to belong to a tradition, a mode of self-expression, which is hard to accept or to continue. (This of course is a convenient error). All in all, he seems to stand outside the mainstream of modem poetry or what has imposed itself as the mainstream. Perhaps we are in for a revaluation or revolution of the Word. Poetry such as Sri Aurobindo's might help in that cleaning-up operation.3Sri Aurobindo, a believer in Art for Art's sake and Art for Life's sake at the same time, believed that poetry is the highest form of art and he wished to keep it at the centre of human knowledge and action, as the captain of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery, a mystic fire carrying us forward on the long high road to timelessness.England (1888-92)The early poetry of Sri Aurobindo is perhaps the most neglected facet of his genius. Even leading critics like Sethna, Ghose and Iyengar have not been very enthusiastic, but Iyengar certainly is the most perceptive even though he accepts the influence of Keats and Milton on Sri Aurobindo:These early poems snap Sri Aurobindo in various emotional and intellectual attitudes and reveal also his tightening craftsmanship in verse, making a significant record of the education and ideas, imagination and feelings engendered by a purely European culture. The derivative element is prominent enough, the names and lineaments and allusions appearing rather exotic to an Indian reader; but, then, knowing as he did at the time hardly anything about India and her culture, Sri Aurobindo couldn't have written in any other strain. …