Page 204

The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.[33]

The one who would try to say something new or to use language in a new way has to forge his own path. It is no little thing, Yeats writes,

to achieve anything in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it ... to give one's life as well as one's words which are so much nearer to one's soul to the criticism of the world. [34]

That Sri Chinmoy is conscious of his artistic isolation is glimpsed in the following poem:

I shall collect flower-poems
From the garden of Light;
Therefore, I am flying in the sky
With the southern wind.
I have no one with me.
All alone, endlessly I am flying,
And I am all lost in the beauty of teeming clouds.[35]

The poet who heralds something new-in the case of Sri Chinmoy it is the liberation of spiritual poetry from its commonly accepted position as a variety of minor poetry and its return to the status of major poetry-must, as both Wordsworth and Emerson confirmed, himself create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. In the words of Wordsworth,

Every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be. [36]