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Overhead Poetry
Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence
I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight ―not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking ―it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane, ―this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem
Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree ―
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is
nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm
and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision,
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and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic
intelligence and uplift it. Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic
intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitation but more vivid, colourful, vivid with various lights and hues; it becomes
less intellectual, more made of vision and a flame of insight. Very often this comes by an infiltration of the veiled inner Mind
which is within us and has its own wider and deeper fields and subtler movements,
―and can bring also the tinge of a higher
afflatus to the poetic intelligence, sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that
the greatness of poetry as poetry does not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more
access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet.
19 October 1936
Higher Mind and Inner Mind
When I say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher experience I am not speaking here of the “descent”
in Yoga by which the higher realisation can come down into the inferior planes and enlighten or transform them. I mean that
the Higher Mind is itself a spiritual plane and one who lives in it has naturally and normally the realisation of the Self, the
unity and harmony everywhere, and a vision and activity of knowledge that proceeds from this consciousness but the inner
Mind has not that naturally and in its own right, yet can open to its influence more easily than the outer intelligence. All the same
between the reflected realisation in the mind and the automatic and authentic realisation in the spiritual mental planes there is
a wide difference. . . . There is also a plane of dynamic Vision which is a part
of the inner Mind and perhaps should be called not a plane but a province. There are many kinds of vision in the inner Mind and
Page-21 not this dynamic vision alone. So to fix invariable characteristics for the poetry of the inner Mind is not easy or even possible;
it is a thing to be felt rather than mentally definable. A certain spontaneous intensity of vision is usually there, but that large or
rich sweep or power which belongs to the illumined Mind is not part of its character. Moreover it is subtle and fine and has not
the wideness which is the characteristic of the planes that rise towards the vast universality of the Overmind level.
. . . That is why the lower planes cannot express the Spirit with its full and native voice as the higher planes do
―unless
something comes down into them from the higher and overrides their limitations for the moment.
October 1936
Poetic Intelligence and Illumined Mind
Certainly, if you want to achieve a greater poetry, more unique, you will yourself have to change, to alter the poise of your
consciousness. At present you write, as you do other things, too much with the brain, the mere human intelligence. To get back
from the surface vital into the psychic and psychic vital, to raise the level of your mental from the intellect to the illumined mind
is your need both in poetry and in Yoga. I have told you already that your best poetry comes from the illumined mind, but as a
rule it either comes from there with too much of the transcription diminished in its passage through the intellect or else is generated
only in the creative poetic intelligence. But so many poets have written from that intelligence. On the other hand if you could
always write direct from the illumined mind ―finding not only the substance, as you often do, but the rhythm and language,
that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The intellect produces the idea, even the poetic idea, too much
for the sake of the idea alone; coming from the illumined mind the idea in a form of light and music is itself but the shining
body of the Light Divine. On the other hand to cease writing altogether might be a
doubtful remedy. By your writing here you have at least got rid of most of your former defects, and reached a stage of preparation
Page-22 in which you may reasonably hope for a greater development hereafter. I myself have more than once abstained for some time
from writing because I did not wish to produce anything except as an expression from a higher plane of consciousness, but to
do that you must be sure of your poetic gift, that it will not rust by too long a disuse.
4 September 1931 Poetry of the Illumined Mind
and of the Intuition
The poetry of the illumined mind is usually full of a play of lights
and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid
―it acts usually by a luminous rush. The
poetry of the Intuition may have play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them
―it may be quite bare; it tells
by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The illumined mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but
even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic.
1934
Overmind Touch
What super-excellence?1 As poetry? When I say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch, I
do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes
―that Amal’s lines outshine Shakespeare or
Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm
are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only
the surface mental meaning. The [first] line is very fine from the technical point of view, the distribution of consonantal and
1 Sri Aurobindo was asked: “You said that these two lines of Amal’s poem:
Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,
The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind
have an Overmind touch. . . . Can you show me where their super-excellence lies?”
Page-23 vowel sounds being perfect. That however is possible on any level of inspiration.
These [assonance, etc.] are technical elements, the Overmind touch does not consist in that, but in the undertones or
overtones of the rhythmic cry and a language which carries in it a great depth or height or width of spiritual truth or spiritual
vision, feeling or experience. But all that has to be felt, it is not analysable. If I say that the second line is a magnificent
expression of an inner reality most intimate and powerful and the first line, with its conception of the fire once “flickering” with
the “cry” of clay, but now no longer, is admirably revelatory ―you would probably reply that it does not convey anything of the
kind to you. That is why I do not usually speak of these things in themselves or in their relation to poetry
―only with Amal who
is trying to get his inspiration into touch with these planes. Either one must have the experience
―e.g., here one must have lived
in or glimpsed the mystic mind, felt its fire, been aware of the distances that haunt it, heard the cry of clay mixing with it and
the consequent unsteady flickering of its flames and the release into the straight upward burning and so known that this is not
mere romantic rhetoric, not mere images or metaphors expressing something imaginative but unreal (that is how many would
take it perhaps) but facts and realities of the self, actual and concrete, or else there must be a conspiracy between the “solar
plexus” and the thousand-petalled lotus which makes one feel, if not know, the suggestion of these things through the words
and rhythm. As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry but it is not analysable and teachable. If for instance Amal
had written “No longer flickering with the cry of clay”, it would no longer have been the same thing though the words and mental
meaning would be just as before ―for the overtone, the rhythm would have been lost in the ordinary staccato clipped movement
and with the overtone the rhythmic significance. It would not have given the suggestion of space and wideness full with the cry
and the flicker, the intense impact of that cry and the agitation of the fire which is heard through the line as it is. But to realise
that one must have the inner sight and inner ear for these things;
Page-24 one must be able to hear the sound-meaning, feel the
sound-spaces with their vibrations. Again if he had written “Quivering
no longer with the touch on clay”, it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the
inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image
―not so to the
solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word and no other, in the right place, and in
no other, the right sounds and no others, in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. You may say that it must be
so in all poetry; but in ordinary poetry the mind can play about, chop and change, use one image or another, put this word here
or that word there ―if the sense is much the same and has a poetical value, the mind does not feel that all is lost unless it is
very sensitive and much influenced by the solar plexus. In the overhead poetry these things are quite imperative, it is all or
nothing ―or at least all or a fall.
8 May 1937
*
Rhythms may come from the same source and yet be entirely
dissimilar. It would be a very bad job if the overmind touch made all rhythms similar.
14 February 1934
Overmind Rhythm and Inspiration
In the lines you quote from Wordsworth2 the overmind movement is not there in the first three lines; in the last line there
is something of the touch, not direct but through some high intuitive consciousness and, because it is not direct, the fully
characteristic rhythm is absent or defective. The poetic value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on
the plane from which it comes; it depends on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense 2 The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
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vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet
of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there
are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if one could get a
continuous inspiration from the overmind, that would mean a greater,
sustained height of perfection and spiritual quality in poetry than
has yet been achieved; but it is only in short passages and lines
that even a touch of it is attainable. One gets nearer the overmind
rhythm and inspiration in another line of Wordsworth ― a mind . . .
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone
or in a line like Milton’s
Those thoughts that wander through eternity.
One has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or
end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into
the infinite to go sounding on for ages after. In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the
´ rhythm we listen to behind in “the Ear of the ear”,
śrotrasya śrotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at
its highest tries to have, but it is only the overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind
the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a kind of fully supporting body there.
P.S. Lines from the highest intuitive mind-consciousness, as well as those from the overmind, can have a mantric character
―the
rhythm too may have a certain kinship with mantric rhythm, but it may not be the thing itself, only the nearest step towards
it.
10 July 1931
The Mantra
The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry
is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind
Page-26 inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the
mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the
Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or
values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these
and greater. The passages you mention from the Upanishad and the Gita have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily the
Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry ―it has to come down to an inferior consciousness and touch
it or else to lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into some infinite largeness. There is always a mixture of the two
elements, not an absolute transformation though the higher may sometimes dominate. You must remember that the Overmind is
a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an overmind inspiration would mean the elevation
of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level. But how then do you expect a supramental inspiration to
come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely in human reach? That is always the error of the impatient aspirant, to think
he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only
got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind
of mixed overmind consciousness.
22 June 1931
The Overmind and Aesthetics
Obviously, the Overmind and aesthetics cannot be equated together. Aesthetics is concerned mainly with beauty, but more
generally with rasa, the response of the mind, the vital feeling and the sense to a certain “taste” in things which often may be
but is not necessarily a spiritual feeling. Aesthetics belongs to the mental range and all that depends upon it; it may degenerate
into aestheticism or may exaggerate or narrow itself into some version of the theory of “Art for Art’s sake”. The Overmind is
Page-27 essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It
embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and
an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other
than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we
call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual
range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes
by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between
there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its
infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient
and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential
quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose. It can take up and uplift any or every style or at least put some
stamp of itself upon it. More or less all that we have called overhead poetry has something of this character whether it be
from the Overmind or simply intuitive, illumined or strong with the strength of the higher revealing Thought; even when it is not
intrinsically overhead poetry, still some touch can come in. Even overhead poetry itself does not always deal in what is new or
striking or strange; it can take up the obvious, the common, the bare and even the bald, the old, even that which without it would
seem stale and hackneyed and raise it to greatness. Take the lines:
I spoke as one who ne’er would speak again
And as a dying man to dying men.
The writer is not a poet, not even a conspicuously talented versifier. The statement of the thought is bare and direct and the rhetorical device used is of the simplest, but the overhead touch
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somehow got in through a passionate emotion and sincerity and is
unmistakable. In all poetry a poetical aesthesis of some kind there
must be in the writer and the recipient; but aesthesis is of many
kinds and the ordinary kind is not sufficient for appreciating the
overhead element in poetry. A fundamental and universal aesthesis is
needed, something also more intense that listens, sees and feels
from deep within and answers to what is far behind the surface. A
greater, wider and deeper aesthesis then which can answer even to
the transcendent and feel too whatever of the transcendent or
spiritual enters into the things of life, mind and sense.
The business of the critical intellect is to appreciate and judge and here too
it must judge; but it can judge and appreciate rightly here only if it first
learns to see and sense inwardly and interpret. But it is dangerous for it to
lay down its own laws or even laws and rules which it thinks it can deduce from
some observed practice of the overhead inspiration and use that to wall in the
inspiration; for it runs the risk of seeing the overhead inspiration step across
its wall and pass on leaving it bewildered and at a loss. The mere critical
intellect not touched by a rarer sight can do little here. We can take an
extreme case, for in extreme cases certain incompatibilities come out more
clearly. What might be called the Johnsonian critical method has obviously
little or no place in this field, ―the method which expects a precise logical
order in thoughts and language and pecks at all that departs from a
matter-of-fact or a strict and rational ideative coherence or a sober and
restrained classical taste. Johnson himself is plainly out of his element when
he deals crudely with one of Gray’s delicate trifles and tramples and flounders
about in the poet’s basin of goldfish breaking it with his heavy and vicious
kicks. But also this method is useless in dealing with any kind of romantic
poetry. What would the Johnsonian critic say to Shakespeare’s famous lines
Or take up arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them?
He would say, "What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of
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ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of
troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can’t end
the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you." Shakespeare
knew very well what he was doing; he saw the mixture as well as any
critic could and he accepted it because it brought home, with an
inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact
feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out. Still more scared
would the Johnsonian be by any occult or mystic poetry. The Veda,
for instance, uses with what seems like a deliberate recklessness
the mixture, at least the association of disparate images, of things
not associated together in the material world which in Shakespeare
is only an occasional departure. What would the Johnsonian make of
this rk in the Veda:
"That splendour of thee, O Fire, which is in heaven and in the earth
and in the plants and in the waters and by which thou hast spread
out the wide mid-air, is a vivid ocean of light which sees with a
divine seeing"? He would say, "What is this nonsense? How can there
be a splendour of light in plants and in water and how can an ocean
of light see divinely or otherwise? Anyhow, what meaning can there
be in all this, it is a senseless mystical jargon." But, apart from
these extremes, the mere critical intellect is likely to feel a
distaste or an incomprehension with regard to mystical poetry even
if that poetry is quite coherent in its ideas and well appointed in
its language. It is bound to stumble over all sorts of things that
are contrary to its reason and offensive to its taste: association
of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard
of intellectual limitations in the thought, concretisation of
abstractions, the treating of things and forces as if there were a
consciousness and a personality in them and a hundred other
aberrations from the straight intellectual line. It is not likely
either to tolerate departures in technique which disregard the
canons of an established order. Fortunately here the modernists with
all their errors have broken old bounds and the mystic poet may be
more free to invent his own technique.
Here is an instance in point. You refer to certain things I wrote and
concessions I made when you were typing an earlier draft of the first books
of
Savitri. You instance my readiness
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to correct or do away with repetitions of words or clashes of sound
such as "magnificent" in one line and "lucent" in the next. True,
but I may observe that at that time I was passing through a
transition from the habits of an old inspiration and technique to
which I often deferred and the new inspiration that had begun to
come. I would still alter this clash because it was a clash, but I
would not as in the old days make a fixed rule of this avoidance. If
lines like the following were to come to me now,
His forehead was a dome magnificent,
And there gazed forth two orbs of lucent truth
That made the human air a world of light,
I would not reject them but accept "magnificent" and "lucent" as entirely in
their place. But this would not be an undiscriminating acceptance; for if it
had run
His forehead was a wide magnificent dome
And there gazed forth two orbs of lucent truth
I would not be so ready to accept it, for the repetition of sound here
occurring in the same place in the line would lack the just rhythmical
balance. I have accepted in the present version of
Savitri several of the freedoms established by the modernists including
internal rhyme, exact assonance of syllable, irregularities introduced into
the iambic run of the metre and others which would have been equally painful
to an earlier taste. But I have not taken this as a mechanical method or a
mannerism, but only where I thought it rhythmically justified; for all
freedom must have a truth in it and an order, either a rational or an
instinctive and intuitive order.
26 April 1946
The Overmind Aesthesis
Something more might need to be said in regard to the overhead note in
poetry and the overmind aesthesis; but these are exactly the subjects on
which it is difficult to write with any precision or satisfy the intellect’s
demand for clear and positive statement.
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I do not know that it is possible for me to say why I regard one
line or passage as having the overhead touch or the overhead note
while another misses it. When I said that in the lines about the
dying man the touch came in through some intense passion and
sincerity in the writer, I was simply mentioning the psychological
door through which the thing came. I did not mean to suggest that
such passion and sincerity could of itself bring in the touch or
that they constituted the overhead note in the lines. I am afraid I
have to say what Arnold said about the grand style; it has to be
felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive
feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one’s experience or
one’s deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or
the other which rings out and cannot be gainsaid. One might put
forward a theory or a description of what the overhead character of
the line consists in, but it is doubtful whether any such mentally
constructed definition could be always applicable. You speak, for
instance, of the sense of the Infinite and the One which is
pervasive in the overhead planes; that need not be explicitly there
in the overhead poetic expression or in the substance of any given
line: it can be expressed indeed by overhead poetry as no other can
express it, but this poetry can deal with quite other things. I
would certainly say that Shakespeare’s lines
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
have the overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling; but
Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He
is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always
does with life, with vital emotions and reactions or the thoughts that
spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of life. It is not any strict
adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of
poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and
physical consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the
language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something. If I
had to select the line in European
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poetry which most suggests an almost direct descent from the
overmind consciousness there might come first Virgil’s line about
"the touch of tears in mortal things":
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Another might be Shakespeare’s
In the dark backward and abysm of time
or again Milton’s
Those thoughts that wander through eternity.
We might also add Wordsworth’s line
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
There are others less ideative and more emotional or simply descriptive
which might be added, such as Marlowe’s
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
If we could extract and describe the quality and the subtle something that
mark the language and rhythm and feeling of these lines and underlie their
substance we might attain hazardously to some mental understanding of the
nature of overhead poetry.
The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness ―that epithet would
more accurately apply to the supramental and to the Sachchidananda consciousness
―though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive something from it and
though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and in its full and native
self-power, when it does not lean down and become part of mind, is
superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, even the very
base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands behind every
particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental, vital or physical
actualities and possibilities which are diminished and degraded derivations and
variations from it and have not, except in certain formations and activities of
genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything of the native overmind quality
and
Page-33
power. Nevertheless, because it stands behind as if covered by a
veil, something of it can break through or shine through or even
only dimly glimmer through and that brings the overmind touch or
note. We cannot get this touch frequently unless we have torn the
veil, made a gap in it or rent it largely away and seen the very
face of what is beyond, lived in the light of it or established some
kind of constant intercourse. Or we can draw upon it from time to
time without ever ascending into it if we have established a line of
communication between the higher and the ordinary consciousness.
What comes down may be very much diminished but it has something of
that. The ordinary reader of poetry who has not that experience will
usually not be able to distinguish but would at the most feel that
here is something extraordinarily fine, profound, sublime or
unusual, ―or he might turn away from it as something too
high-pitched and excessive; he might even speak depreciatingly of
"purple passages", rhetoric, exaggeration or excess. One who had the
line of communication open, could on the other hand feel what is
there and distinguish even if he could not adequately characterise
or describe it. The essential character is perhaps that there is
something behind of which I have already spoken and which comes not
primarily from the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing
but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them
all and things then tend to be seen not as the mind or heart or body
sees them but as this greater consciousness feels or sees or answers
to them. In the direct overmind transmission this something behind
is usually forced to the front or close to the front by a
combination of words which carries the suggestion of a deeper
meaning or by the force of an image or, most of all, by an
intonation and a rhythm which carry up the depths in their wide wash
or long march or mounting surge. Sometimes it is left lurking behind
and only suggested so that a subtle feeling of what is not actually
expressed is needed if the reader is not to miss it. This is
oftenest the case when there is just a touch or note pressed upon
something that would be otherwise only of a mental, vital or
physical poetic value and nothing of the body of the overhead power
shows itself through the veil, but at
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most a tremor and vibration, a gleam or a glimpse. In the lines I
have chosen there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm, as
prominently in Virgil’s line, often in the very building and
constantly in the intonation and the association of the sounds which
meet in the line and find themselves linked together by a sort of
inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an
unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a
deeper sense on the mind as in Virgil’s
sunt lacrimae rerum.
One can note that this line if translated straight into English would sound
awkward and clumsy as would many of the finest lines in Rig Veda; that is
precisely because they are new and felicitous turns in the original
language, discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase; they defy
translation. If you note the combination of words and sounds in
Shakespeare’s line
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
so arranged as to force on the mind and still more on the subtle nerves and
sense the utter absoluteness of the difficulty and pain of living for the
soul that has awakened to the misery of the world, you can see how this
technique works. Here and elsewhere the very body and soul of the thing seen
or felt come out into the open. The same dominant characteristic can be
found in other lines which I have not cited, ―in Leopardi’s
l’insano indegno mistero delle cose
"The insane and ignoble mystery of things"
or in Wordsworth’s
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Milton’s line lives by its choice of the word "wander" to collocate with
"through eternity"; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have
been an overhead line, even if the surface sense had been exactly the same.
On the other hand, take Shelley’s stanza ―
Page-35
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
This is perfect poetry with the most exquisite melody and beauty of wording
and an unsurpassable poignancy of pathos, but there is no touch or note of
the overhead inspiration: it is the mind and the heart, the vital emotion,
working at their highest pitch under the stress of a psychic inspiration.
The rhythm is of the same character, a direct, straightforward, lucid and
lucent movement welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The
same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley’s which is
perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry:
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not, ― The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
We have again extreme poetic beauty there, but nothing of the overhead note.
In the other lines I have cited it is really the overmind language and
rhythm that have been to some extent transmitted; but of course all overhead
poetry is not from the Overmind, more often it comes from the higher
thought, the illumined mind or the pure intuition. This last is different
from the mental intuition which is frequent enough in poetry that does not
transcend the mental level. The language and rhythm from these other over
head levels can be very different from that which is proper to the Overmind;
for the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or
deep or wide or all these things together:
Page-36
to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger, it
goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a
corresponding language and rhythm. The higher thought has a strong
tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut
light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent
character. The outflow of the illumined mind comes in a flood
brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images,
sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with
a luminous sweep. The intuition is usually a lightning flash showing
up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and
miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the
inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves
nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single
stroke. These however are only general or dominant characters; any
number of variations is possible. There are besides mingled
inspirations, several levels meeting and combining or modifying each
other’s notes, and an overmind transmission can contain or bring
with it all the rest, but how much of this description will be to
the ordinary reader of poetry at all intelligible or clearly
identifiable?
There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all these
styles. Milton’s "grand style" is such a substitute for the manner of the Higher
Thought. Take it anywhere at its ordinary level or in its higher elevation,
there is always or almost always that echo there:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree
or
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues
or
Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old.
Shakespeare’s poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which
we may regard as a mental substitute for the
Page-37
inspiration of the illumined mind and sometimes by aiming at an
exalted note he links on to the illumined overhead inspiration
itself as in the lines I have more than once quoted:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge.
But the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched
language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy
for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or
vice versa. Thus Milton’s lines might at first sight be taken because of
a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the
overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right
because there are no depths of sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the
noble and dignified pathos of the blindness and old age of a great
personality fallen into evil days. Milton’s architecture of thought and
verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle
echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man’s being are foreign
to his intelligence, ―for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that
he works. He does not stray into "the mystic cavern of the heart", does not
follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the
secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid
psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of
life.
I do not know therefore whether I can speak with any certainty about the
lines you quote; I would perhaps have to read them in their context first,
but it seems to me that there is just a touch, as in the lines about the
dying man. The thing that is described there may have happened often enough
in times like those of the recent wars and upheavals and in times of violent
strife and persecution and catastrophe, but the greatness of the experience
does not come out or not wholly, because men feel with the mind and heart
and not with the soul; but here there is by some accident of wording and
rhythm a suggestion of something behind, of the greatness of the soul’s
experience and
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its courageous acceptance of the tragic, the final, the fatal ―and
its resistance; it is only just a suggestion, but it is enough: the Overhead has touched and passed back to its heights. There is
something very different but of the same essential calibre in the line you quote:
While sad eyes watch for feet that never come.
It is still more difficult to say anything very tangible about the
overmind aesthesis. When I wrote about it I was thinking of the static aesthesis that perceives and receives rather than of the
dynamic aesthesis which creates; I was not thinking at all of superior or inferior grades of poetic greatness or beauty. If the
complete Overmind power or even that of the lower overhead plane could come down into the mind and entirely transform its
action, then no doubt there might be greater poetry written than any that man has yet achieved, just as a greater superhuman life
might be created if the supermind could come down wholly into life and lift life wholly into itself and transform it. But what
happens at present is that something comes down and accepts to work under the law of the mind and with a mixture of the
mind and it must be judged by the laws and standards of the mind. It brings in new tones, new colours, new elements, but it
does not change radically as yet the stuff of the consciousness with which we labour.
Whether it produces great poetry or not depends on the extent to which it manifests its power and overrides rather than
serves the mentality which it is helping. At present it does not do that sufficiently to raise the work to the full greatness of the
worker. And then what do you mean exactly by greatness in poetry?
One can say that Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil’s lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved.
But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his
best: even, each has a certain exquisiteness of perfection, each in his own kind. Virgil’s kind is large and deep, that of Catullus
sweet and intense. Virgil’s art reached or had from its beginning
Page-39 a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word
and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts at comparison like Arnold’s comparison of Wordsworth’s
Skylark with Shelley’s. You may
say that Milton was a greater poet than Blake, but there can always be people, not aesthetically insensitive, who would prefer Blake’s lyrical work to Milton’s grander achievement, and there are certainly things in Blake which touch deeper chords
than the massive hand of Milton could ever reach. So all poetic superiority is not summed up in the word greatness. Each kind
has its own best which escapes from comparison and stands apart in its own value.
Let us then leave for the present the question of poetic greatness or superiority aside and come back to the overmind
aesthesis. By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a
vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and
more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit’s delight of existence, Ananda. Poetry, like all
art, serves the seeking for these things, this aesthesis, this Rasa, Bhoga, Ananda; it brings us a Rasa of word and sound but also
of the idea and, through the idea, of the things expressed by the word and sound and thought, a mental or vital or sometimes
the spiritual image of their form, quality, impact upon us or even, if the poet is strong enough, of their world-essence, their
cosmic reality, the very soul of them, the spirit that resides in them as it resides in all things. Poetry may do more than this,
but this at least it must do to however small an extent or it is not poetry. Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry,
as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends
to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think
Page-40 or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that
aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things
also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms,
beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things. Universal Ananda is the artist and creator
of the universe witnessing, experiencing and taking joy in its creation. In the lower consciousness it creates its opposites, the
sense of ugliness as well as the sense of beauty, hate and repulsion and dislike as well as love and attraction and liking, grief and
pain as well as joy and delight; and between these dualities or as a grey tint in the background there is a general tone of neutrality
and indifference born from the universal insensibility into which the Ananda sinks in its dark negation in the Inconscient. All this
is the sphere of aesthesis, its dullest reaction is indifference, its highest is ecstasy. Ecstasy is a sign of a return towards the
original or supreme Ananda: that art or poetry is supreme which can bring us something of the supreme tone of ecstasy. For as
the consciousness sinks from the supreme levels through various degrees towards the Inconscience the general sign of this
descent is an always diminishing power of its intensity, intensity of being, intensity of consciousness, intensity of force, intensity
of the delight in things and the delight of existence. So too as we ascend towards the supreme level these intensities increase.
As we climb beyond Mind, higher and wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily consciousness.
Aesthesis shares in this intensification of capacity. The capacity for pleasure and pain, for liking and disliking is comparatively
poor on the level of our mind and life; our capacity for ecstasy is brief and limited; these tones arise from a general ground of
neutrality which is always dragging them back towards itself. As it enters the overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a
pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstasy. The ground is no longer a general neutrality,
but a pure spiritual ease and happiness upon which the special
Page-42 tones of the aesthetic consciousness come out or from which they arise. This is the first fundamental change.
Another change in this transition is a turn towards universality in place of the isolations, the conflicting generalities, the
mutually opposing dualities of the lower consciousness. In the Overmind we have a first firm foundation of the experience of
a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight. These things can come on the mental and vital plane even before those
planes are directly touched or influenced by the spiritual consciousness; but they are there a temporary experience and not
permanent or they are limited in their field and do not touch the whole being. They are a glimpse and not a change of vision or a
change of nature. The artist for instance can look at things only plain or shabby or ugly or even repulsive to the ordinary sense
and see in them and bring out of them beauty and the delight that goes with beauty. But this is a sort of special grace for the
artistic consciousness and is limited within the field of his art. In the overhead consciousness, especially in the Overmind, these
things become more and more the law of the vision and the law of the nature. Wherever the overmind spiritual man turns
he sees a universal beauty touching and uplifting all things, expressing itself through them, moulding them into a field or
objects of its divine aesthesis; a universal love goes out from him to all beings; he feels the Bliss which has created the worlds
and upholds them and all that is expresses to him the universal delight, is made of it, is a manifestation of it and moulded into
its image. This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand the differences and oppositions,
the gradations, the harmony and disharmony obvious to the ordinary consciousness: but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from
them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga, and the touch or the mass of the Ananda. It sees that all things have their
meaning, their value, their deeper or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only concerned with a surface
vision, surface contacts and its own surface reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express,
the completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of
Page-42 artistic perfection; it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances and the discords become part
of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony, there is a sense of beauty. Even in form itself, apart from the significance,
the overmind consciousness sees the object with a totality which changes its effect on the percipient even while it remains the
same thing. It sees lines and masses and an underlying design which the physical eye does not see and which escapes even the
keenest mental vision. Every form becomes beautiful to it in a deeper and larger sense of beauty than that commonly known
to us. The Overmind looks also straight at and into the soul of each thing and not only at its form or its significance to the mind
or to the life; this brings to it not only the true truth of the thing but the delight of it. It sees also the one spirit in all, the face
of the Divine everywhere and there can be no greater Ananda than that; it feels oneness with all, sympathy, love, the bliss of
the Brahman. In a highest, a most integral experience it sees all things as if made of existence, consciousness, power, bliss, every
atom of them charged with and constituted of Sachchidananda. In all this the overmind aesthesis takes its share and gives its
response; for these things come not merely as an idea in the mind or a truth-seeing but as an experience of the whole being
and a total response is not only possible but above a certain level imperative.
I have said that aesthesis responds not only to what we call beauty and beautiful things but to all things. We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its
charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving
of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a
rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker
and lover of beauty. He can feel a poetic and aesthetic joy in the expression of the true as well as in the expression of the
beautiful. He does not make a mere intellectual or philosophical
Page-43 statement of the truth; it is his vision of its beauty, its power, his thrilled reception of it, his joy in it that he tries to convey by
an utmost perfection in word and rhythm. If he has the passion, then even a philosophical statement of it he can surcharge with
this sense of power, force, light, beauty. On certain levels of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over the
element of gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed one of the chief functions of the Overmind
to separate the main powers of the consciousness and give to each its full separate development and satisfaction, bring out its
utmost potency and meaning, its own soul and significant body and take it on its own way as far as it can go. It can take up
each power of man and give it its full potentiality, its highest characteristic development. It can give to intellect its austerest
intellectuality and to logic its most sheer unsparing logicality. It can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous form
and the consciousness that receives it a supreme height and depth of ecstasy. It can create a sheer and pure poetry impossible for
the intellect to sound to its depths or wholly grasp, much less to mentalise and analyse. It is the function of Overmind to give to
every possibility its full potential, its own separate kingdom. But also there is another action of Overmind which sees and thinks
and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only
become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and
the beautiful is always true. Their highest fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits
draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do what the Supermind does though in a lower
key and with a less absolute truth and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of the intellect to convey as far as that language can do it its own greater meaning and message but on its summits Overmind uses its own native
language and gives to its truths their own supreme utterance, and no intellectual speech, no mentalised poetry can equal or
even come near to that power and beauty. Here your intellectual
Page-44 dictum that poetry lives by its aesthetic quality alone and has no need of truth or that truth must depend upon aesthetics
to become poetic at all, has no longer any meaning. For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only to appear to be utterly
beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable
word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance.
I hope you do not feel crushed under this avalanche of metaphysical psychology; you have called it upon yourself by your
questioning about the Overmind’s greater, larger and deeper aesthesis. What I have written is indeed very scanty and sketchy,
only some of the few essential things that have to be said; but without it I could not try to give you any glimpse of the meaning of my phrase. This greater aesthesis is inseparable from the greater truth, it is deeper because of the depth of that truth,
larger by all its immense largeness. I do not expect the reader of poetry to come anywhere near to all that, he could not without
being a Yogi or at least a sadhak: but just as the overhead poetry brings some touch of a deeper power of vision and creation into
the mind without belonging itself wholly to the higher reaches, so also the full appreciation of all its burden needs at least some
touch of a deeper response of the mind and some touch of a deeper aesthesis. Until that becomes general the Overhead or at
least the Overmind is not going to do more than to touch here and there as it did in the past, a few lines, a few passages, or
perhaps as things advance, a little more, nor is it likely to pour into our utterance its own complete power and absolute value.
I have said that overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry. But perhaps a
subtle qualification may be made to this statement. It is true that each kind of poetical writing can reach a highest or perfect
perfection in its own line and in its own quality and what can be more perfect than a perfect perfection or can we say that
one kind of absolute perfection is “greater” than another kind? What can be more absolute than the absolute? But then what do
we mean by the perfection of poetry? There is the perfection of
Page-45 the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is
also the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves
they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art’s sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a
lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of
the elevation or depth or intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot then enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter,
with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic reaction even in the most “aesthetic” of critics and readers. From this
point of view the elevation from which the inspiration comes may after all matter, provided the one who receives it is a fit
and powerful instrument; for a great poet will do more with a lower level of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet
can do even when helped from the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or
inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or a possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has
at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or
influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has
two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines
their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the other it brings down into these normal
modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive of a
superhuman level. These two ways of action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but
the word “greater” may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.
The great bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or
perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual
Page-46 force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts
up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is
not ordinarily there. If one listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a wondering admiration for
the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is
expressed. But there is something more in it than that; it is this that a deeper, more inward strand of the consciousness has seen
and is speaking, and if we listen more profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the mind or
Housman’s thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of the universe lending its own depth to our mortal speech
or listening from behind to some expression of itself, listening perhaps to its memories of
old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago
or feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo
Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides
or it may enter again into Vyasa’s
“A void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets’ cry”
Vanam pratibhayam
śūnyam jhillikāgananāditam.
or remember its call to the soul of man,
&
Anityam asukham lokam imam
prāpya bhajasva mām “Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world,
love and worship Me.”
There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself
a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then
emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare,
Page-47 Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this
inspiration. It is a poetry “thick inlaid with patines of bright gold” or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force.
But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the overmind voice and the overmind music and it is to be observed that the
lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be therefore
too much to say that the overhead inspiration cannot bring in a greatness into poetry which could surpass the other levels of
inspiration, greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.
A conscious attempt to write overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its
lowest it might attain to what I have called the first order, ordinarily it would achieve the two lower levels of the second order
and in its supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages achieve the supreme level, something of the highest
summit of its potency. But its greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and
inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its
external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the
truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the
inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of
identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed,
if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domain of poetry
and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into
the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of
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the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to
the Reality that is secret in us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,
Anejad ekam manaso
javīyo nainad devā āpnuvan pūrvam
arsat. . . .
.
Tad ejati tan naijati tad
dūre tad u antike.
“The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the gods cannot
overtake It, for It travels ever in front; It moves and It moves
not, It is far away from us and It is very close.”
The gods of the overhead planes can do much to bridge that distance and to bring out that closeness, even if they cannot al
together overtake the Reality that exceeds and transcends them.
29 July 1946
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