Sri Aurobindo and the Modern Critics

MRS. SUSAMA TEJ

The importance of Sri Aurobindo’s aesthetic theories is often blurred by an over-emphasis on his yogic and mystical experience. While his greatness as a yogi and a seer cannot in the least be doubted, it is worthwhile looking at the Future Poetry as a document enunciating the principles of poetry rather than as revealing a supramental consciousness. A dispassionate look at the Future Poetry would show that Sri Aurobindo as a critic is quite in line with the major modern critics.

Sri Aurobindo considers poetry as a “mediator” between “the immaterial and the concrete, the spirit and life”.¹ Thus poetry to him is not a direct expression of the spirit, but a medium that provides concreteness and life to the spirit and the immaterial–that is to say, it articulates the unformed disposition of mind. Poetry, therefore, to Sri Aurobindo is what T. S. Eliot calls the objective correlative. There might be points of difference in the details of their concepts. But that both Sri Aurobindo and T. S. Eliot aim at a concept of poetry as concrete and organic is beyond doubt. John Crowe Ransom’s notion of poetry as mediating between the subjective mind and objective universe is also closely parallel to Sri Aurobindo’s “mediator.” While Eliot’s medium transmutes the private agonies of the poet to the objectivity of art, Sri Aurobindo’s “mediator” transforms the poet’s subjective constitution to “the deeper delight of the soul”. ² We must avoid too much of theologizing on the words “deeper” and “soul”, for what Sri Aurobindo implies here is rather plain – that the soul which is the universal element in all living men is touched and that the delight it affords is more than the sensuous or the sensual. In effect, Sri Aurobindo speaks of poetry as transmuting the personal to a level of the universal and as affording an intimate perception of the world as opposed to the cold impersonality of prose and scientific discourses.

Sri Aurobindo does not merely underestimate the pleasure principle as the basis of poetry from the clearly distinguishes poetry from other categories of experience with which it generally gets confounded. In its concreteness, poetry differs from philosophy which “may lose itself in abstractions” and religion which turns “towards other-worldliness and asceticism”.³ This kind of distinction has in fact been the most important aspect of new criticism which considers poetry as a special mode of utterance. In fact, Ransom dismisses the moralistic critics including the marxists and the psychologistic critics, notably I. A. Richards, as having failed to realise the differentia that distinguishes poetry from other disciplines. By drawing this distinction, Sri Aurobindo was trying to give an ontological status to the poem in terms of its organicism and concreteness.

Sri Aurobindo rejects the pleasure principle as “an elevated pastime” of the critics who fail to appreciate that poetry has “a great formative and illuminative power.” The effect of poetry thus resides in what Eliot conceives as affecting a “moral synthesis. Eliot thinks that poetry deals with “more eternal matters” than mere surface responses. We can easily see a correspondence of attitude between Eliot and Sri Aurobindo in the matter of the poetic function. Though the new critics like Ransom and Tate are not distinct in their approach to the function of poetry, their insistence on poetry as providing knowledge and a new kind of insight about the objective world perhaps corroborates Sri Aurobindo’s view of poetry as affecting more serious levels of consciousness than the sensational.

Sri Aurobindo’s emphasis on the sound-quality of poetry links him with Eliot’s theory of the auditory imaginative. In a poem, the rhythmic word is infinitely the most important thing. The power of evocation, Sri Aurobindo holds, consists in as much the sound-value of the word as the sense-value, and calls the former as “a quite immaterial element.” This reminds us of Ransom’s consideration of a poem as a tension between the determinacy and indeterminacy of sound and sense. The determinacy of sound sacrifices the variety of meanings and reversely, the determinacy of sense sacrifices the beauty of rhythmic freedom. A happy balance between the two, an “equilibrium” to appropriate a Richardian expression, is what provides the poem its true existence, which to Sri Aurobindo is “a soul value, a direct spiritual power.” This, it must be remembered, has no theological undertones, but reflects the same meaning as what Tate terms as “an experimental order” that envisions the totality of experience, the aesthetic essence.

The concept of the evocative power of words makes one understand the difference between what I. A. Richards termed as the emotive and referential uses of language. Sri Aurobindo speaks of a similar distinction when he considers the words of ordinary speech as being treated in a manner, “though useful in life, they were, themselves without life”.⁴ Sri Aurobindo seems to have had in mind the language of scientific discourses when he says, “ordinary speech uses language mostly for a limited practical utility of communication”,⁵ while poetic speech restores to a word “a powerful life, a concrete vigour”. Sri Aurobindo here is differentiating the denotative and connotative suggestions of a word which, as Yvor Winters has said, belong to the spheres of rational statements and poetic utterances respectively.

That Sri Aurobindo was aware of the ambiguity as characteristic of poetry is borne out amply by his many statements. Since the poetic use of the word is beyond its denotative value, or what he says, “beyond the finite intellectual meaning,” the word is bound to affect multiple levels of consciousness and hence poetry “arrives at the indication of infinite meanings.” Sri Aurobindo, like all modern critics, repudiates a concept of poetry that considers it as a realistic imitation of life. He holds that the poetic images are open to interpretation “on many planes of her creation” which accounts for a certain degree of ambiguity.

Sri Aurobindo’s vision of poetry consists of a comprehension of the totality of being and experience, a notion that is repetitively pointed out by critics like Ransom and Tate. The new critics attempted to save poetry from the realm of science which aims at the fragmentation of experiences and tends towards utilitarian ends on the one hand, and humanism on the other hand which tends to neglect the complexity of experience at the cost of moral or ethical emphasis. Sri Aurobindo too speaks in the same vein, of science aiming at materialism on the one level, and on another level, philosophy and religion aiming at “an infinitive vitalism” or “a remote detached spirituality”.⁶ The Aurobindonean vision of pure poetry, like Ransom’s, is “a post-scientific one” ⁷ to which “the whole field of existence will be open for its subject, God and Nature and man and all the worlds, the field of the finite and the infinite.”

The observations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not exhaustive nor are they meant to be. An humble attempt has only been made to show that. Sri Aurobindo’s aesthetic principles are after all not as abstract as the way they have been hitherto considered. His concept of poetry has the natural link with other significant contemporary views and if he sounds religious in some of his speculations on poetry, he is only displaying the kind of maturity that one accepts easily on case of T. S. Eliot pleading for spiritual values in both his mature poetry and criticism. And it may not be too impertinent to remark that we, as Indians, are pleased to indulge in that colonial outlook which adores the exotic and fears to assert the value of the indigenous.

References

¹ “The Ideal Spirit of Poetry, The Future Poetry”. P. 205.
² “The Essence of Poetry”. P. 10.
³ “The Ideal Spirit of Poetry”. op. cit., P. 205.
⁴ “The Essence of Poetry,” op. cit. p. 12.
⁵ Ibid. p. 13.
⁶ “New Birth or Decadence? Future Poetry”.p. 198.
⁷ John Crome Ransom, The World’s Body (Baton Rouge, 1968). p. viii.