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"Language in a human mind is not a list of words with their customary meanings attached, but a single interlocking structure, one's total power of expressing oneself."
Northrop Frye
In studying the poetry of Sri Chinmoy, we encounter a writer who has chosen to produce the bulk of his work in a language that is not his native idiom. Traditionally, this linguistic "unhousedness," as George Steiner refers to it,[1] would have been considered a restricting factor. We are accustomed to think of the newcomer to a language as a hesitant practitioner of standard word usage and phrase structures. What we find in the case of Sri Chinmoy, however, is a poet who, perhaps because of the unspoken pressure of his own Bengali language, has been able to bring to English an energy and a power seldom found in recent literature. In absorbing the English language we see him in a sense recreating it, tracing it back to its original impulses, using single words with a consciousness of their unqualified power and exploring the many patterns made available by rhetoric with a keen awareness that in the form and presentation of words lies their emotive force. Casting aside fashions which have tended to dismiss rhetoric from general currency, which translate aphorism in poetry as didacticism and which consistently treat the abstract as secondary to the concrete, Sri Chinmoy freely elects to use those very elements in his poetry. As a "language-maker" he is influenced only by the immediate value of a particular word or structure in revealing his inner vision.
Intensely alive to the original expressive brilliance of English, Sri Chinmoy has emerged with a poetic style that reflects the purity of this response. With his predilection for the short poem, his frequent use of compound nouns to condense images and his emphasis on tightly controlled linguistic models, he avoids as if by instinct the surplusage of writers who have been nourished solely within the shell of their own language. The phenomenon that we beheld in the prose of multilinguists Beckett, Borges and Nabokov and in the poetry of Pound, Tagore and St. John Perse is repeated by Sri Chinmoy Indeed, it is highly conceivable that the writer whose sensibility pivots not on one language but on two or even more may find himself in a privileged position. For him, language does not have a fixed and customary application but is, rather, a collection of pockets of energy by means of which he can unconstrainedly and abundantly achieve a full and profound expression.
