Sri Aurobindo
I never heard of anyone getting genius by effort.One can increase one’s talent by training and labour, but genius is a gift of Nature. By sadhana it is different, one can do it; but that is not the fruit of effort, but either of an inflow or by an opening or liberation of some impersonal power or manifestation of unmanifested power.No rule can be made in such things; it depends on persons and circumstances how far the manifestation of genius by Yoga will go or what shape it will take or to what degree or height it will rise.
Sri Aurobindo
Handwritten by Sri Aurobindo
"Lead me from the unreal to the real.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to immortality."
So be it
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
First Adhyaya (Chapter),
Third Brahmana,
28th Verse (1.3.28).
Suggestions for Indians Writing English Poetry
If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you to observe:
1. Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things at will because he has the intimate sense of his language and can keep the right proportion and measure. An Indian using them kills his poetry and produces a scholastic exercise.
2.Write modern English. Avoid frequent inversions or turns of language that belong to the past poetic styles. Modern English poetry uses a straightforward order and a natural style, not different in vocabulary, syntax, etc., from that of prose. An inversion can be used sometimes, but it must be done deliberately and for a distinct and particular effect.
3. For poetic effect rely wholly on the power of your substance, the magic of rhythm and the sincerity of your expression —if you can add subtlety so much the better, but not at the cost of sincerity and straightforwardness.
Do not construct your poetry with the brain-mind, the mere intellect—that is not the source of true inspiration; write always from the inner heart of emotion and vision.
Sri Aurobindo
he 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.
Sri Aurobindo
Mantra written by The Mother
From Upanishad
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 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.
- Sri Aurobindo
I stretch it out to Thee with both arms
The Mother
in a gesture of offering
and I ask of Thee:
If my understanding is limited, widen it;
if my knowledge is obscure, enlighten it;
if my heart is empty of ardour, set it aflame;
if my love is insignificant, make it intense;
if my feelings are ignorant and egoistic,
give them the full consciousness in the Truth'.
A Rishi may be a Yogi, but also he may not; a Yogi too may be a Rishi, but also he may not. Just as a philosopher may or may not be a poet and a poet may or may not be a philosopher. Poetic intuition and illumination is not the same thing as Rishi intuition and illumination.
Sri Aurobindo