Murali Sivaramakrishnan. Acrylic on Canvas 2019
MURALI SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
That everything which comes into being must pass away; that all is fleeting, all is moving; that to exist is to be like the fountain and have a shape because one is never still—is the theme of all art because it is the texture of reality. Man is drawn to life because it moves from him; he has desires as ancient and punctual as the stars; love has a poignant sweetness and the young life pushes aside the old; these are the qualities of being as enduring as man. Man too must pass away.
Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality, Indian Edition New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1945; rpt.1956.p 316.
We live still in an age which is in a great intellectual trouble and ferment about life and the world and is developing enormously the human intelligence, often at the expense of other powers which are no less necessary to self- knowledge, in order to grapple with life and master it. We are seeking always and in many directions to decipher the enigma of things, the cryptogram of the worlds which we are set to read, and to decipher it by the aid of the intellect; and for the most part we are much too busy living and thinking to have leisure to be silent and see. —Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry.
The world is a movement of God in His own being; we are the centres and knots of divine consciousness which sum up and support the process of His movement…. The world is a formula, a rhythm, a symbol system expressing God to Himself in His own consciousness. Sri Aurobindo, The Web of Yoga, SABCL, XVII, p.50)
T
here are several approaches to any given text; and hence in its own way Sri Aurobindo’s The Future Poetry, affords several gates of entry. Conceived as early as the second decade of the twentieth century, its complete text bloomed forth only by 1930s. As was usual with him, he chiseled and shaped it as periodical chapters. By then he had settled down in his own ashram in Pondicherry, and was concurrently working on several articles and essays which would soon go into press as tomes on a variety of issues ranging through politics, philosophy, textual exegesis, interpretative readings, yoga and spirituality. There is arguably little doubt that the grand narratives of the nineteenth century were prime forces that churned out his intellectual exegeses. Having said that, it might not be out of place here to close-examine The Future Poetry alongside another great work on a similar scale like Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry that was first published as early as 1937 immediately after its author’s premature death at the age of thirty. To call Caudwell’s work great might be a bit odd considering its dogmatic tone and an over-eagerness of its almost juvenile author. Had he lived longer perhaps he might have carried out major alterations in the text. Nevertheless, both books show suitable evidence of their respective author’s enthusiasm and desire for cutting new wood; both reveal ample intellectuality, and a strong desire for experimentation and amazing comparative scholarship. Both are testaments of applied close-reading and explorations of consciousness in their efforts towards creating a new poetics.
Perhaps the comparisons and similarities stop there; there are more dis-similarities that surface when one places the two texts beside one another. But what intrigues me is the tremendous commitment and philosophical acumen shown by both the authors in tracing out their individual ideologies and applying this to the history of what appeared to them most significant at that point of time: the history of British poetry. Both Sri Aurobindo and Christopher Caudwell resort to the history of British poetry to establish their theories of evolving poetic consciousness. This could be the common point of departure for inquiries as well; my intention however is not to draw parallels and establish identities but to explore possible parallels and inquire into difference and insights.
Christopher Caudwell was born in London in 1907 and christened Christopher St John Sprigg. He left school and started work as a journalist at 15. He was a voracious reader and delved into philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, politics, linguistics, mathematics, economics, physics, biology, neurology, literature and literary criticism and much more. At the age of 27, Caudwell became interested in Marxism and began his study of it with extraordinary intensity, discovering that it provided the key to the synthesis he was seeking. He wrote Illusion and Reality in 1935. He was killed in action while fighting in the Spanish civil war. (Some relevant details of his major works have been provided at the end of this essay).
One of his own contemporaries Ellen Sypher writes:
He was and remains more or less of a maverick. From upper middle class roots, he left school at fifteen to work in aeronautics. After his commitment to Marxism he moved to Poplar, a working class section of London, where he wrote and did menial party work for the British Communist Party, whose leadership did not even know of him until after his death. He apparently undertook his serious theoretical work in isolation. His work bears all the weaknesses of such an individualistic position in that he uncritically accepts prevailing attitudes. Especially he ignores proletarian culture, and he depends too much on the then very influential Freud. Yet notwithstanding these narrow dimensions of his work, some of his perceptions of literature’s basis and workings stand alongside those of the best of Marxist aestheticians. Caudwell’s work, undoubtedly because of its mixed character, has not substantially influenced any writer on aesthetics although he is undisputedly the major Marxist writer on aesthetics in the British and U.S. tradition.
What leaves us worrying is the question about Caudwell’s elusive legacy, probably on account of his eclectic and “mixed character”. But then there is little doubt that he was an important intellectual who thought in new lines. Now, about his Illusion and Reality, the critical world conveniently sidelined. Even his own latter day Marxist lineage condemned him as having engaged with vulgar Marxism!
As Marxist Literary theory underwent a ‘cultural turn,’ Illusion and Reality was increasingly seen as dogmatic and rigid in its discussion of bourgeois poetry. The debate shifted away from its use of Freudian concepts to its ties with Stalinist Marxism. In Culture and Society (1958), Raymond Williams said of Illusion and Reality that it had “little to say of actual literature that is even interesting” and that the book “is not even specific enough to be wrong.” Terry Eagleton remarked about Caudwell in 1976 that “there is little, except negatively, to be learnt from him.” Even E. P. Thompson, one of Caudwell’s most generous late-interpreters, argued that the status of Illusion and Reality should be downgraded among Caudwell’s works in favor of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938).From the late 1950s until the late 1980s, Illusion and Reality was equated with vulgar Marxism. However, Christopher Pawling’s 1989 book on Caudwell sought to restore the reputation of Illusion and Reality by suggesting that it belongs to what Raymond Williams called an “alternative Marxist tradition” that included Antonio Gramsci, George Lukács, and Lucien Goldmann.
There are two major theoretical positions that constitute the backbone of Caudwell’s arguments—Marxist historical materialism and IA Richards’ formalist methodology reflected through New Criticism. Caudwell’s own reading of Marxism apparently is of the textual kind and he applies its logic and methodology almost religiously to his interpretation of poetry and poetics, as strongly condemned by later Marxists themselves. For him sociology formed the study of primary human relations and the theory of historical materialism is a palpable and verifiable truth of life. We read at the beginning of his classic text:
Concrete living is not solid crystal. At any one time men are doing different things and therefore stand in relation to one another. The study of these human relations in a general form is sociology. This sum of human relations is not changeless in time but changes rapidly. The general laws determining the relations of human beings at a given period, and the change of these relations from period to period, form the theory of historical materialism.
At the very outset he rejects idealism as emotionalism and incapable of aiding in the understanding of poetics.
As regards this study of poetry, we reject from the outset any limitation to purely aesthetic categories. If anyone wishes to remain entirely in the province of aesthetics, then he should remain either a creator or an appreciator of art works. Only in this limited field is aesthetics “pure.”
And he continues:
But as soon as one passes from the enjoyment or creation of art works to the criticism of art, then it is plain that one passes outside art, that one begins to look at it from “outside.” But what is outside art? Art is the product of society, as the pearl is the product of the oyster, and to stand outside art is to stand inside society. The criticism of art differs from pure enjoyment or creation in that it contains a sociological component. In art criticism, values are ranged and integrated in a perspective or world-view which is a more general view of art from outside. It is an active view, implying an active living relation to art and not a cold contemplation of it, and implying therefore a view of art as active, with an explosive, energetic content. And it is a view of art, not of society or of the mind.
For Caudwell poetry is one of the earliest aesthetic activities of the human mind. But however fundamental to his poetics is the faith that poetry is founded on the economics of the times. As he visualizes it, poetry is the nascent self-consciousness of man, not as an individual but as sharer with others of a whole world of common emotion.
Therefore the phantastic world of poetic ritual, myth or drama expresses a social truth, a truth about the instincts of man as they fare, not in biological or individual experience, but in associated experience. Such truths are necessarily phrased therefore in the language of the emotions. A pianola roll is pierced with holes. Those holes are real concrete entities. But they are not the music. The music is what happens when it is played. The poem is what happens when it is read.(22)
According to him, it is impossible to understand modern poetry unless we understand it historically – in motion. We can only bring back dead formulae from a study of poetry as static “works of art,” something frozen and ossified. This is particularly true where poetry is the organic product of a whole society violently in motion. And this is how he sees the process of the birth of poetry:
The birth of poetry took place from the undifferentiated matrix of the tribe, which gave it a mythological character. It separated itself from religion as the art of a ruling class in class society, but, except in moments of revolutionary transition like that of fourth century B.C. Greece, this art led a quiet existence, mirroring the slow rise and slow collapse of a class “whose first condition of existence is conservation of its mode of production in unaltered form.” Then a class developed beneath the quiet, stiff art of feudalism, whose vigour is first announced by the Gothic cathedrals. This class in turn became a ruling class, but one whose condition of existence is a constant revolution of the means of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.(50)
Poetry is so intricately connected to social structures as he sees it, and in its evolution we can trace the evolutionary map of social relations as well. Christopher Caudwell is a committed Marxist theoretician and his methodology is so clear and well defined: it is an analysis based on societal productivity and class differences, absolutely textual. Poetry is not for him an individual activity but a social engagement. However poetic activity is a liberating one: it frees the poet and human consciousness. There is also a significant chunk of Freud in Caudwell’s reading of British poets. Perhaps here is a pleasant point of intersection between these two cardinal texts of aesthetics, Illusion and Reality and The Future Poetry. Both are sort of primers in their own manner. Let’s turn to Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was among the significant nationalists who fought against the British Raj, and quite unlike Gandhi he was never a pacifist. Although, right from his early childhood he was brought up in England by his anglophile father, Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose, became one of the most noted of Indian thinkers and philosophers, a radical mystic par excellence! He wrote profusely on various topics ranging from political issues to abstract philosophy, poetics, prosody and history to social and psychological issues, literary criticism to yoga and mysticism, sociolinguistics to Tantric and Vedic studies. His direct involvement in Indian revolutionary nationalism, however, was quite abruptly terminated when he withdrew to the safe haven of Pondicherry (then a French colony), and continued to live as a recluse. Almost all his major writings and translations have been serialized in his journal Arya that he edited. The Life Divine (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972) is his major philosophical contribution. Despite all his multifarious involvements in issues relating to politics and society, Sri Aurobindo continued to write poetry. His magnum opus is, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, which he continued to revise and redraft till his death in 1950.
Aesthetics as it is generally understood is the pursuit of beauty. It is the study of sensory experience as visualized by the 17th and 18th century European thinkers. However, over the years the aesthetic has come to occupy a significant position in our understanding of the world and our place in it socially and historically and culturally. Sanskrit aestheticians have not only contributed to the historical positioning or horizontal development of the aesthetic, but have also done great work in conceptualizing axiological values in a vertical axis, or the cultural matrix in specific locations of time and place. The history of the aesthetic is certainly linked to the history of place, culture and human memory. In the line of the Vedic, Upanishadic and later Puranic contexts the aesthetic occurs in the locus of our inward living. Satyam Sivam Sundaram—these are three nodes that constitute the entire created cosmos. And they are the quality of the Spirit that inhabits the self and the universe at once immanent and transcendental. In Sri Aurobindo’s vision the world is a playground of the Spirit in its unfolding. [1]
Sri Aurobindo never gave up writing poetry or reflecting upon it at any point in his life. Poetry for him was the index of the evolving consciousness. He had a strong faith in the transforming potentialities of the mantra or the word. The Future Poetry and the innumerable letters on art, literature, and poetry in particular are testaments to this belief. Although in the line of the ancient law-givers he too believed that poetry could never become a substitute for sadhana, at every point in his yogic development he resorted to the aesthetic as a creative edifice for the god-ward becoming. Rasasvadah Brahmasvada sahodarah.
Sri Aurobindo had recognized that among the prime purposes of poetry there was antaschamatkara—or inner spiritual expression and enlightenment. He wrote in one of his innumerable letters on poetry: I used Savitri as means of ascent….
He constantly rewrote much of his writing from new and newer insights gathered from yogic experience. In fact we could look upon The Life Divine as his philosophical theorizing, The Synthesis of Yoga a sort of practical field guide, and Savitri as a poetic explication of the text of his yogic becoming. It is significant too that Savitri does not evince what he termed the Supramental Transformation but only endeavours to preface and contextualize it. However, to believe in the Upanishadic view: rasovaisah, Bliss verily is Brahman. And the bliss of the poetic is that charges the entire poem and its poetic structure. The Future Poetry forms the aesthetic text of Sri Aurobindo.
Whatever its shortcomings or limitations when we approach it from our present over-theorised intellectual situation, The Future Poetry remains among the first few serious attempts at the formulation of a comparative aesthetic—a dialogic engagement with the burden of European tradition that was ingressing into the psyche of a generation floundering on the threshold of self-identity, and another almost remote and alienated one in itself, but whose roots could still be salvaged.
Perhaps, one of its paradoxes was that Sri Aurobindo chose to formulate his aesthetic in the language of the coloniser, and in more than one place, the discerning reader might feel a slight unease at his free and sometimes too frequently unrestrained movements between the English poetic tradition and the insights drawn largely from Indian sources. But such inter-readings would serve to evidence the characteristic virtuosity of its author who was equally at home in the Latin, Anglo-saxon and Sanskritic poetic traditions. A close-reading of Sri Aurobindo would convince us that he lived with his aesthetic and metaphysical quests as we live with our everyday realities. Hence, it was not merely the urge to redefine a nationalistic tradition and validate its futuristic insights in the face of an oppressive cultural onslaught that resulted in The Future Poetry, but something more of a significant involvement with the larger questions of poetry and human life.
The text of The Future Poetry as we have it now runs into thirty two chapters inclusive of “Introductory” remarks and “Conclusion”. The publishers’ Note to the first edition, August 1953, says:
“The Future Poetry” was first published as a series of essays in the Arya (from 15-12-1917 to 15-7-1920). Sri Aurobindo thought of revising it throughly before giving it the form of a book. He wished to add even a few chapters, especially one dealing with the Metaphysicals. He was not able to do more than write a few paragraphs supplementary to matter already treated; these have been incorporated in their proper places in the present edition which is thus practically a reprint of the original essays. (The Future Poetry, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953).
It was indeed unfortunate that the author himself could not do a thorough revision of the text or at least supervise the publication in book form. These essays, spanning a period of about three years, were written serially, amidst the thick of several other involvements, as monthly installments—but that doesn’t reduce the coherence of the argument as a whole. However, when one recalls that the Arya was a periodical that Sri Aurobindo co-edited with Richards, and it was a philosophico-religious journal devoted to the exposition of an integral view of life and existence, and also the fact that its life-span spreads from 15 August 1914 (when it was launched) to the last issue in 1921, enfolding within its pages Sri Aurobindo’s major contributions, it would be only logical to argue that The Future Poetry should not be delinked from its author’s other works—works in the field of philosophy, social history and Yoga. In fact, Sri Aurobindo’s works are informed by an integral vision of life and spirituality. And The Future Poetry is no exception.
The first five chapters set forth the context of Sri Aurobindo’s arguments and theorise on his notion of poetry as Mantra. The next is an inter-chapter that centers on his view of the national evolution of poetry, and the following seventeen chapters constitute a historicised reading of English poetry from Chaucer to Yeats and A.E.Housman Chapter twenty four is again an inter-chapter and it gathers the earlier arguments together to focus on what is to follow. Chapter twenty five to thirty two, attempt towards a reinstating of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of poetry and are a vibrant exposition of what in his terms form the hieratic quincunx—the five suns of poetry: Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit.
As part of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library editions The Future Poetry was reissued in 1972 and it incorporated the bulk of his letters on poetry, life and art too. In 1983 the Aurobindo Ashram brought out the second edition that claimed to be “the full-revised text” having undergone thorough checking against the author’s manuscript. In this text the contents have been arranged in two parts, with certain Appendices, list of emendations, glossary etc.: the major change being the retitling of the Introductory Chapter into “The Mantra”. I have used this second edition of The Future Poetry for my reading of the text.
The immediate context of Sri Aurobindo’s treatise was a book by James H. Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1917), which was sent to him for review in the Arya. He soon abandoned the review idea and set out on a work of larger scope in which he thought he could develop his “own ideas and his already conceived view of Art and Life” (Editor’s Note, 1983).
In the introductory chapter “The Mantra”, Sri Aurobindo notes that Cousin’s book raises problems which go beyond the strict limits of the author’s concern and “suggests the whole question of the future of poetry…the higher functions open to it.” He goes on to say:
Taking the impression it [Cousin’s book] creates for a starting point and the trend of English poetry for our main text, but casting our view further back into the past, we may try to sound what the future has to give us through the medium of the poetic mind and its power of creation and interpretation. (9)
Thus Sri Aurobindo’s concerns are quiet clear; a re-reading of the past and immediate present with an insight gained from an understanding of both European and Indic traditions, and consequently to postulate on the future course of poetry.
Although there is no conscious attempt here to formulate an aesthetic system as such, in the sense of a philosophy of beauty, one could find in the course of the argument an implied psychology of aesthetic experience: one that informs Sri Aurobindo’s life and work alike, and a historicisation of it.
Sri Aurobindo was quite familiar with the span of Western critical tradition from Aristotle up to T.S. Eliot, and more particularly the English critical tradition from Ben Jonson, Sydney and Dryden to the twentieth century, and also the Indian tradition with its emphasis on rasa and dhvani in the line of aestheticians like Bharata,Bhatta Nayaka, Mammata,Ananda vardhana and Abhinavagupta; as The Future Poetry and the large number of letters on literature and art would stand testimony to. Being a radical visionary his preference or acceptance of any aesthetic proposition was not by mere intellectual agreement but by a deep intuitive insight which demanded, more than anything else, harmony and integration. And his speculations on the aesthetic recognise the primacy of the spiritual, or in other words his is a “spiritualised aesthetic”. All art, as Sri Aurobindo envisions it, in its own way, seeks to arrive at a concentrated expression of the Spirit, and it is from the soul that the expression originates and it is to the soul that it unveils the Real. Sri Aurobindo makes this clear at the outset itself:
For neither the intelligence, the imagination, nor the ear are the true or at least the deepest or highest recipients of the poetic delight, even as they are not its true or highest creators; they are only its channels and instruments: the true creator, the true hearer is the soul [my emphasis]. (11)
Now this might sound neo-Platonic, but when one reconsiders Sri Aurobindo’s sources—the prasthana thrayi, the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita—it becomes clear that his is a vision at one with an alternative tradition that recognises the validity of the Spiritual at the heart of being.
To believe his own asseverations, it was an “experiential realisation” that confirmed his vision of the essence of all things as the Infinite Divine Truth of Being, at once conscious, and divine—Satchitananda (Sat: existence; chit: consciousness; ananda: bliss). And the aesthetics that underlies The Future Poetry is an aesthetics implied in the creative experience of reality.
In the Aurobindian scheme of things, the Soul is the divine element in man that constitutes the aesthetic being, exulting and expanding in consciousness by God-ward experience, rising on its own curve to its divine consummation. Elsewhere he writes: “To find the highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God.” (The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library XV, p. 135).
Thus the Soul is the antardtman, the inner self, the true creator and recipient of the aesthetic delight or ananda, which in the language of Indian spirituality, is the essential delight the Infinite feels in itself and in its creation. As Sri Aurobindo choses to explain it:
The world is a movement of God in His own being; we are the centres and knots of divine consciousness which sum up and support the process of His movement…. The world is a formula, a rhythm, a symbol system expressing God to Himself in His own consciousness. (“The Web of Yoga”, SABCL, XVII, p.50)
And here we can see Sri Aurobindo’s principle of ananda which is cardinal to his aesthetics. It would also call to mind the Nietzschean thesis that only as an aesthetic continuum can the universe be resolved. But for Sri Aurobindo this anandais part of the eternal ontological order; this forms a direct link with the rasa theory of art that postulates rasa as designating the totality of the aesthetic experience—the creative experience of the artist, the aesthetic relish of the sahrdaya, and the essence of the created real. Perhaps the only major difference that his thinking would proffer is that, as with everything else in his entire thought-system, there is no finality to the evolving aesthetic boundary, no resolution, until the entire cosmos is “spiritualised”. In his vision the soul of man, like all phenomenal being, is in a constant endeavour to evolve from its unfinished nature and get into a unity with the Spirit through its multiform manifestation and on many different planes. It is a constant becoming, an order of transcendence and transformation.
According to Sri Aurobindo, in art this endeavour reveals itself in a sort of evolution from the objective to the inward to the inmost spiritual—a constant labor of self-finding and engagement. In The Future Poetry it is this characteristic insight that he brings to bear on the history of poetry down the ages more specially English poetry.
Poetry, as we read in The Future Poetry, is an index to the evolving soul of man, and in history it is also an instrument of the evolutionary upsurge. This general evolution of the aesthetic consciousness within the organism of the race has its own natural periods or ages but it is necessarily not linear or sequential. Each nation, as Sri Aurobindo propounds, has or develops a spirit in its inner being a special soul-form and a law of its nature which determines the course of its evolution.
Although Sri Aurobindo was totally unaware of the transformation that was taking place in art and literature in Europe at that time, the inception of a Modernist aesthetics with its divided ego, and unhinged narratives, his reading of the history of English poetry with its marked shift towards what he calls “subjectivity” reveals the profundity of his insights: if instead of the dichotomy between the objective and the subjective he had substituted self-reflexivity that would have served to describe the temper of the age much more faithfully. Perhaps, as his book further serves to evidence, his interest was less in recording literary history faithfully, than in tracing out the larger forces at work beyond and behind man and nature.
As he argues, the law of progressively becoming conscious of oneself is one of the fundamental laws of human existence,and poetry too reflects this trail authentically. Extended a little beyond its specificity, this evolutionary curve of English poetry can be applied to a new reading of world poetry with Homer and Chaucer representing the physical mind of the race, Kalidasa and Shakespeare the vibrant vital mind, and Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil and Dante the intellectual mind in the “rhythmic voyage of self-discovery of the human spirit.”
Concluding his historical survey, Sri Aurobindo observes:
The progress of poetry, as it has been viewed in these pages, has been an index of an advance of the cultural mind of humanity which has enlarged its scope by a constant raising of the scale of the soul’s experience and has now risen to a great height and breadth of intellectual vision and activity, and the question is at present of the next step in the scale of ascension, and whether it can now be firmly taken or will be missed once more with a fall back to another retracing of the psychological circuit. (238)
The next step is the most decisive one, for that will determine the character and temper of the future. “Spirit” is the next grade above the intellect, and therefore, the intellect of the race must open now to an awareness of the spiritual, “an illumined self-knowledge and God-knowledge a world-knowledge too which transmuted in the great light will spiritualize the whole view and motive of our existence” (239).
Sri Aurobindo’s reading of the history of English poetry as it traces the graph of evolving human awareness might sound too metaphysical and vague; but one should keep in mind the fact that all this has been couched in an idiom that is non-Western and non-Eurocentric. Sri Aurobindo’s aim was not mere literary history; the survey of English poetry was only meant to serve as a map of an aesthetic evolution that dovetailed with his vision of the role of poetry as an index of evolving consciousness.
And what remains to be highlighted is the amazing fact that he has not even once recoursed to any European source to substantiate his historical endeavours apart from starting off with Cousin’s book, of course. The Future Poetry as the testament of the aesthetic unfolding of the human spirit has to be seen as an integral part of the entire Aurobindian system—his life, work and yoga alike. It might very well be read as the product of cultural encounter, of colonialism and the backlash of a colonized national ethos.
Sri Aurobindo’s attempt riddled with paradoxes, like the recourse to the colonizer’s language, and even his tracing a foreign body of poetry’s history, should be then seen in a different light.
What Sri Aurobindo has done is to universalize and conceptualize at the same time certain problems of man’s changing involvement with his consciousness and the world, occurring at a crucial point in the formation of nationalistic awareness, when a whole people were struggling to redeem themselves from their oppressive present, through a conscious recovery of their collective heritage and to find an identity through their colonial difference.
The Radical Gaze…
In Caudwell we read,
It is plain that poetry may be judged in different ways; either by the importance of the manifest content, or by the vividness of the affective colouring. To a poet who brings a new portion of external reality into the ambit of poetry, we feel more gratitude than to one who brings the old stale manifest contents. But the first poet may be poor in the affective colour with which he soaks his piece of reality. It may be the old stale colouring, whereas our other poet, in spite of his conventional piece of reality, may achieve a new affective tone. Old poets, we shall judge almost entirely by their affective tone; their manifest contents have long belonged to our world of thought. Hence the apparent triteness of old poetry which yet is a great triteness. From new poets we demand new manifest contents and new affective colouring, for it is their function to give us new emotional attitudes to a new social environment. A poet who provides both to a high degree will be a good poet. A poet who brings into his net a vast amount of new reality to which he attaches a wide-ranging affective colouring we shall call a great poet, giving Shakespeare as an instance. Hence great poems are always long poems, just because of the quantity of reality they must include as manifest content. But the manifest content, whatever it is, is not the purpose of the poem. The purpose is the specific emotional organisation directed towards the manifest content and provided by the released affects. The affects are not “latent,” as in dream; it is associated ideas which are suppressed to form the latent content. Just as the key to dream is a series of instinctive attitudes which provide the mechanism of dream-work, so the key to poetry is a cluster of suppressed pieces of external reality – a vague unconscious world of life-experience. (227)
His own reading of poetics is based on the Marxist maxim that freedom is the recognition of necessity. And in the context of visualizing what the future would proffer he writes:
Only when communism comes into being will the conception of equal “rights” pass from the fabric of the State, and the State, too, wither away. The very “right” of man to realise his freedom by association with others negates the bourgeois conception of equal right, which was the highest ethic to which bourgeois culture could aspire. Its average man was a reflection of the equalisation of labour power in the market. “From each, according to his powers; to each, according to his needs.” When men’s innate ability and desires vary, how could such a creed – that of communism – be compatible with equal rights? A right implies something exercised against another, and communism is a state of society in which material conditions no longer force man to be the enemy of man. (292)
History and political will as Caudwell saw would reach beyond and cast the State aside, as Marx saw it, the State will wither away. The free individual would create free poetry.
On the other hand, as his life and brief political career would show, Sri Aurobindo chose to identify with the most often unseen larger forces at work behind those that regulate history and politics of individuals. This could account for his sudden withdrawal from the action front to being the recluse at Pondicherry. Later when in his writings he equates silence and soul-force this is what he means. Reflecting on the future of poetry, imbued with a vigorous nationalistic temper, the poet in him could not, at any point wish away the burden of the colonialized self. Neither could he blindly harp on an almost apathetic Indian aesthetic tradition—primarily because it was never homogenous, and secondarily, it centered more on dramaturgy rather than poetics, and more important to his purpose, it lacked the dynamism and alacrity that is necessary for the spirit’s unfolding. His reading of Indian tradition was founded on the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, and in the aesthetic evolution of the race, he recognized the selfsame creatrix unfolding to itself.
In the light of Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation, ancient Indian Vedic culture was founded on spiritual truth of being, and man’s essential truth rendered itself not in the horizontal plane of his daily activities, but intercepted it at every point in a vertical infinitude. The Vedic s’rutiappeals to the s’rotrasyasrotram, the Ear of the ear, and it is to the soul of the hearer that it is addressed. Both the Vedic rishis, and the creators of the Upanishads that followed, conceived of the Word as an icon of the Absolute, and what they strived for was yoga of sound and sense. This culture of sound was to command the attention of later Indian philosophers of language, like Mandana Mishra, Kumarila Bhatta, Abhinavagupta and Bhartrhari.
The Future Poetry is a personal aesthetic testimony. It includes history, metaphysics and poetic theory within its scope. It is proposition towards a new spiritual aesthetic founded on past and present alike. In the final analysis, whether one agrees with Sri Aurobindo’s poetic darsana, his view of the role of poetry and the poet, or his highly personalised reading of English poetry or not, one cannot help being impressed by the thorough going logic of his arguments. Here we see both Plato and Aristotle rubbing shoulders with Yajnavalkya and the Vedic seers. In the characteristic self-assurance of the drsta, Sri Aurobindo who combines the kavi and bhashyakar,delineates the future course of the spirit of poetry, and towards the close of the book we read:
It is in any case the shock upon each other of the oriental and occidental mentalities, on the one side the large spiritual mind and inward eye turned upon self and eternal realities, on the other the free inquiry of thought and the courage of the life energy assailing the earth and its problems that is creating the future and must be the parent of the poetry of the future. (270)
Perhaps, in such an argument, one could discern the radical dislodging of Eurocentric reference points. It might appear a rather oddly launched reductivist thesis that sees the West and East in terms of intellect and intuition, the materialistic and the spiritual. But considering Sri Aurobindo’s historical position and his contemporary situation and the terminology available to him, we should reinterpret this line of thinking in terms of the polemic of the post-colonial consciousness ideally seen by a futuristic visionary who has not glibly circumvented a cultural situation and value.
In Caudwell’s theories poetry moves from primitive communist stage through feudalist and capitalist phases. Divisions in social systems reveal the divisions in the structure of human labour.
The development of agricultural and pastoral civilisation leads to the creation of a ruling class which becomes ossified and has as its counterpart a class of serfs and slaves. The struggle with Nature is transformed into men’s struggle with each other. The first emergence of the ruling class is seen as the transformation of mythology into the epic, and into story, and in the evolution of ritual into play. The conflict of society is reflected in a poetrysombre and clouded with moral issues – questions of right and wrong – balanced by a poetry concerned with delight – with love and joy. Doubt, pathos, nobility, serenity, fear and a conscious beauty all enter the field of poetry. And the development of classes, by rendering possible the differentiation of function, gives more freedom to individuality. For the first time men speak personally in poetry. The lyric is born. (309)
In his vision of future poetry, Caudwell sees the movement forward from bourgeois culture to communism, an increase in freedom. It is a movement back to the collectivism and integrity of a society without coercion, where consciousness and freedom are equally shared by all. (311)This is perhaps that heaven of freedom that Rabindranath Tagore evoked in Gitanjali.
By way of a casual comparison
There are several exits and entrances. I have steered away from looking upon Sri Aurobindo’s efforts as an isolated one and thus free and unconnected to his times and ideologies. His own framework of poetic futures encloses the history of British poetry that he was too familiar with, and his reading envisages a possible expansion of consciousness. There is little doubt that here the sensitive eye and the attentive ear can easily sense the echoes of Hegelian dialectics and Bergson’s idea of creative evolution to mention only the most obvious. Such a comparison and perception are certainly not to devalue or disinherit the essence and uniqueness of the Aurobindian eye, but meant only as an attempt to understand and see him in perspective, in the geography of his own intellectual heritage and in the landscape of the overall history of ideas. Christopher Caudwell’s attempt at engaging with the dominant ideology of his time also leads him to contextualize and reread the history of British poetry. Illusion and Reality is certainly a testament worth perusing for those interested in the history of poetry and the poetic of the future. The discerning reader open minded enough would certainly see the parallel movements of both texts–Illusion and Reality and The Future Poetry. Caudwell’s text-book Marxism and commitment might seem a trifle over-stressed these days especially in the twenty first century’s political climate, but Sri Aurobindo’s poetic eye revels in an open context.
I have titled this comparative section ‘casual’ because of the obvious distance between the ideologies of both these authors and the framework of the texts chosen. No doubt,Illusion and Reality is a classic instance of text book Marxism. Of course its young author was perhaps all too young for mature reflections on a topic like this and we also are informed that Caudwell wrote the entire book within a short while. His boyish enthusiasm and over excitement at exploring the psyche and fantasy connecting it to the creative aspect of poetry and thus evolving a new direction in literary aesthetics is so blatant in the form of the text as we have it. But Caudwell’s “intention” is to out-reach his times and break new wood.
In this context both Caudwell and Sri Aurobindo are revolutionaries and pioneers. They are both”over-reachers” exploring newer terrains of poetic analyses. Their chosen intention was to topple hitherto held reference points and with due respect to the mode and methods of analysis, tools and references available to them at the time of their launching their poetic testaments, we as discerning critical minds should honor their work, methodology and output.
In the history of literary theorizing The Future Poetry and Illusion and Reality are textual landmarks and they will remain so for years to come.
******
Note by author [1] In his extremely interesting book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig (1974; rpt. London: Corgi, 1981) attempts to develop a theory of Quality substituting this concept for religious notions like God or Spirit. His character Phaedrus at one point states categorically that, “Quality is the Buddha,” and argues “such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunited.” (p.231).These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If only we could reunite these three nodes, we could be on the right track. In many ways Sri Aurobindo’s attempt was toward this direction of holism and unity.
Note The main visual ‘Belonging to Earth’ is a reproduction of a painting by the author, part of an exhibition he held at the Jehangir Art Gallery Mumbai in May 2019. Author’s Bibliography NOTE: Sri Aurobindo’s complete works have been produced by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, as Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library(SABCL) in 1972, and they are constantly being corrected proof-read and updated—a new complete edition is awaited. Aurobindo, Sri. The Future Poetry,2nd Ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1983. Aurobindo, Sri. The Web of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. Vol. XVII. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. Aurobindo, Sri. The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library.Vol.XV Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. Aurobindo, Sri. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. 10th imprint.Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1984. Cousins,James H.New Ways in English Literature.Madras:Ganesh & Co., 1917. Caudwell, Christopher. Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry(1937) 1945; rpt New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1956. Mukherji, Ramaranjan. Literary Criticism in Ancient India.Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar,1966. Murali, S.The Mantra of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics. Delhi: B R Publishers, 1997. Murali, S. Tradition and Terrain: Aesthetic Continuities. Delhi: B R, 2007. Murali,S. Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics and Poetics: New Directions. Delhi: Authorspress, 2013. Pirsig, Robert M.Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .1974; rpt. London: Corgi, 1981. Raine, Kathleen. “The Future Poetry,”Sri Aurobindo Circle, 15, 1959.32-36. Sypher, Ellen. “Christopher Caudwell, His aesthetics and film,” Jump Cut, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 65-66. Christopher Caudwell: Primary Works Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet: 1986; The Concept of Freedom. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977; The Crisis in Physics, edited with an introduction by Professor H[yman] Levy. London: John Lane, 1939 [rpt 1949]; Illusion and Reality; a Study of the Sources of Poetry. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature, edited by Samuel Hynes. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1970; Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts, selected, edited, and introduced by Jean Duparc and David Margolies. London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986; Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, introduction by Sol Yurick. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. [Reprint of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) & Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949)] This My Hand [novel]. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1936 [He also published several books of crime fiction and on aeronautics under his real name]
Murali Sivaramakrishnan is a painter, poet independent critic and former Head, Department of English, Pondicherry Central University, India. smurals@gmail.com
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