Why is Sri Aurobindo's early poetry so neglected by critics? The reason might have been the absolute focus on Savitri and his later poetry, without much consideration of how the early works of a spiritual poet had been a prelude to his later poetry. If the writing of Savitri had begun in Baroda, then it is highly probable that many of the great themes had been anticipated in the early poetry, even if he had been far behind his peak of inspiration and supreme power of expression. Themes like love and death, evolution of consciousness, ascent into Godhead, transformation of earth, human unity, poetry of incantation and revelation, exploration of Night and many other issues had either been explained in prose or stated in poetry of considerable merit. Brief summaries of some of the early poems have been made by G.S. Pakle in his book Image, Symbol and Myth in Sri Aurobindo's Poetry, but they have been mostly studied in isolation without linking them with the later poetry.
Traditions form a large part of Sri Aurobindo's poetry, both Asian and European. Myth blooms into new metaphors. The classic is also a romantic. Was he not modern? Should we go by his own humble confessions that he had fallen between two ages and lost the contemporary touch? I don't think so. His themes are scientific, psychologically convincing and relevant to the crises of contemporary life. The style, of course, tends towards the romantic, but there are moments of sublime economy, either in his epigrammatic poems or inside the elements of romance hidden as a blended mode of the mystic romance and modernism.
The romantic is also the mystic, sometimes on the borderline of illumination, often realizing the Infinite through the Whitmanesque "I" or stating his experiences in expository lyric. By and large, the early poetry is high class by any standard, modern or otherwise. And ignoring this poetry means losing the track to Sri Aurobindo's evolution of consciousness. Here is a humble effort, within my limitations, to understand the early poetry as a preface to the poetry as Mantra of the Real. Some materials of the second chapter, entitled "The Sad and the Sublime", had come out in Shraddha (February2013), Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata.
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