POEMS AND POETS
34. The Outward Look
Great poets everywhere are moved by lasting themes and lofty thought. This connects them in an invisible way with the basic currents of life, though the expressions are conditioned by the immediate cultural context one is familiar with. Hunger is universal, but 'Gives us this day our daily bread' pleads the Lord's prayer, while our Rudram seeks 'wajascha me, godhumascha me' etc.
Poetic inspiration comes from many sources. It can be spiritual-intuitional, as in the Upanishads; it can be intellectual, or even a mere verbal exuberance and linguistic felicity. But true poetry must leave a hint at least of something beyond the words or objects described. Thus when Tennyson makes the brook sing " for men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever", it is the very Time Spirit which is addressing us in the form of the brook. Man's mortality is set against eternity. The site and sounds associated with the brook are beautiful, but it is not just the physical dimension which matters.
Any true artist has to take us beyond the physical medium. He has to use nature to make us transcend it. A painter makes us forget the canvas, or he is no artist. One who just reproduces nature is a photographer, not painter. Photography is limited by the instrument, painting is not, music is not. When we listen to Kenny G, are we mindful of the instrument, or the music? Does not the music take us beyond the instrument ? " That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound but a star.", as said by Browning. Imitation is not art, but creativity is.
The same holds true with words. In the olden days, poetry was read or recited aloud, where the sound suggested something beyond the sense words conveyed. A poet is not a mere wordsmith. True inspiration brings words in its own train.Sri Aurobindo remarks:
"it is not sufficient for poetry to attain high intensities of word and rhythm; it must have, to fill them, an answering intensity of vision and always new and more and more uplifted or inward ranges of experience."
This we see in poets across cultures, ages. Sri Aurobindo, our greatest poet and Rasika writes:
" In spite of a broad gulf of difference we yet find an extraordinary basic kinship between these two very widely separated great ages of poetry, though there was never any possibility of contact between that earlier oriental and this later occidental work,- the dramas of Kalidasa and some of the dramatic romances of Shakespeare, plays like the Sanskrit Seal of Rakshasa and Toy-Cart and Elizabethan historic and melodramatic pieces, the poetry of the Cloud Messenger and erotic Elizabethan poetry, the romantically vivid and descriptive method of Spenser's Faerie Queene and the more intellectually romantic vividness and descriptive elaborateness of the Line of Raghu, the tone and manner of Drayton and that of the much greater work of Bharavi. This kinship arises from the likeness of essential motive and psychological basic type and emerges and asserts itself in spite of the enormous cultural difference."
From: The Future Poetry p.126
Sri Aurobindo Ashram,2000
For the last thousand years or so, India has not expressed its soul in Sanskrit poetry; nor in regional poetry,either, except in the Bhakti movement. In modern times, this spirit briefly raised its head in Bengali, in a Bankim Chandra, or Tagore, and in Tamil in Subramanya Bharati. Alas, it was all too brief.
Providence brought English to India, but the education that became its vehicle made us revolve "around a lawyer's office and a Government cutcherry, ...far away from the great stream of world's living thought and action"....giving us " the falsest possible education, a knowledge always twenty-five or fifty years behind the time.", in the words of Sri Aurobindo. Even so, the English language and literature remain our only window to the world, painfully small as it is. We have to ensure that this does not fall a victim to cultural chauvinism in the name of narrow patriotism, or linguistic jingoism..
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