You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men's hearts must burn and beat.

Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book promises to be a good read. She has done her research. She writes well. She thinks formidably. I'll surely enjoy critically engaging with this text. Does poetry speak to us of a tacit dimension of language? If there is a special case of language called poetry, a genre distinct from others that we can isolate and consider separately from our investigations of language, does it yet tell us of a reality, a vivid reality, of all speech and its house, language? My prejudice is clear. I am surrounded by poetry–but perhaps I delude myself. By no stretch am I an expert on what constitutes poetry.

While Scarry holds that "imaginary vivacity comes about by reproducing the deep structure of perception" (p. 9), I suggest that poetic juice flows from the chthonic prosody of all tongues, iteratively one imagines. Assonance and consonance are the stuff of Scarry's prose. Perhaps also her thoughts. However, she claims that "verbal art … has no acoustical features" (p. 5, her emphasis). Can it be said without controversy that verbal art (in the limited sense in which Scarry defines it) has no acoustical features but it echos the spoken word? The idea may be backwards and upsidedown too. Scarry defines poetry (apparently deciding for us that the model for all poetry must be written) as a "sequence of printed signs [which] contains a set of instructions for the production of actual sound; the page itself does not sing but exists forever on the verge of song" (p. 7). Poetic language does not echo the spoken word but formulates it. It presages. Obviously text is a possibility of language, as a way of irrealizing speech. Are any traces of this possibility already inscribed in the spoken word? What about possibilities for following instructions? Dreams. What happens to the spoken word in dreams? Is the word in dreams interpreted through hearing? Does the prosody of a sequence of dream words have no acoustical features? Are these words merely submerged?

Dear Dilip Roy,

Your letter has come at a time when I am too troubled in mind to write, as I would like, about the poems you sent me. Yes, you have my permission to translate the verses or any other poems you may desire.

I think the extracts from Sri Aurobindo very fine, and the verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic' quality. There are many fine lines like

The song-impetuous mind.
The Eternal Glory is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay.

Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remark- able since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language. I refer to this because the only advice one writer can give another rightly is technical criticism. The craft of any art, painting, music, poetry, sculpture, is continually growing and much can be taught in the schools. But the inspiration cannot be passed on from one to another. So I confine myself to a technical criticism.

You, like many Indians, are so familiar with your great traditions that it is natural for you to deal with ideas verging on the spiritual more than European writers do- The danger of this when writing poetry is that there is a tendency to use or rather Overuse great words like 'immensity', 'omnipotence', 'inexhaustible', 'limitless3 etc. By the very nature of the ideas which inspire you, you are led to use words of that nature because of a kinship with the infinity of the spirit. But in the an of verse if one uses these words overmuch they tend to lose their power just as painting in which only the primary colours would weary the eye.

I would ask Mr. Sethna to try to reserve the use of such great words, as a painter keeps his high lights, for the sun and moon or radiant water and the rest of his canvas is in low tones. So the light appears radiant by contrast. English is a great language but it has very few words relating to spiritual ideas. For example the word Karma in Sanskrit embodies a philosophy. There is no word in English embodying die same idea. There are many words in Sanskrit charged with meanings which have no counterpart in English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya etc., and I am sure the languages which the Hindus speak today must be richer in words fitted for spiritual expression than English, in which there are few luminous words that can be used when there is a spiritual emotion to be expressed. I found this difficulty myself of finding a vocabulary though English is the language I heard from my cradle,

I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this, I do so because I find a talent in the verses you sent me and do not wish him to do without such burnishing as a fellow-craftsman can help to give.

Will you tell your philosophic friend who praises silence that with the poet the silence cannot he for ever? He sings and then keeps silent until the cup is filled up again by sacrifice and mediation and then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will he poured into his cup. The secret of this is that through the free giver the song flows freely and whoever constrains life in himself, in him it is constrained. There is indeed the Divine silence, but we do not come to that being by negation.

If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely s to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet'. likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different because I have made in criticism a practice of appreciating very thing that can be appreciated as a catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right Judgment from contemporary critics even.

Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary are or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes; but it not of much value; for very poor poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved if he can manage it - seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Difference of estimate need not surprise him at all.

Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on A.E.'s part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the contrary, sufficiently warm: 'a genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' - he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind, which A.E. (and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem. This Errant Life selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands) but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a .statue by Praxiteles. This - apart from the idea and feeling which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the idea in the lines quoted by A.E. which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch die mind and vital strongly but die other goes home into the soul.....

His remarks about 'immensity' etc, are very interesting to me; for these arc the very words, with others like them, that arc constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought, but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well mat this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language.

His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent arc mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent die balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere of these high lights - in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the Timeless ? To follow A.E.' s rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience- Truth first - a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it docs not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; me inadequacy docs not exist and even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate- It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the fail occult-, mystic, spiritual purpose.

What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance.

"If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds of poetry, the English tongue is die most wide-spread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which makes it admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying.

…I could not guess
The viewless spirit’s wide domain,

…The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night