Introduction
View: Chapter 1
Every age calls forth its poet, someone who is able to express its deepest ideals and aspirations. The critic who first engages in the appraisal of this newly emergent poet is faced with vastly different responsibilities from the critic who deals with writers of an established excellence. Beyond his direct response to this promising new body of literature lies the task of creating a climate of empathy in which the poems may be received by future readers and commentators. The critic cannot fall prey to hesitation at this early stage. He must make a bold case for his choice, one that may move others to turn to the poetry and which may also serve as a point of departure for further critical studies. And, gradually, with the passage of time and the accumulation of diverse viewpoints, a perception of the intrinsic worth of the poet may begin to mature in the public consciousness.
To present the case for a supremely gifted poet of our times and to lay the groundwork for this awakening of public sensibility to his creations are the challenges that I have undertaken to fulfil in this study.
The poet in question is Sri Chinmoy. From 1971 to 1981, thirteen major volumes of his poetry--representing a total of over nine thousand poems-appeared in print in the United States. At the outset, it is obvious that we are dealing with a poet of great abundance and energy. In order to discover the source of this expressiveness, we must look to the poet's theme. Sri Chinmoy is, first and foremost, a poet of man's inner life. It is the richness and diversity of the spirit of man that have captured his imagination and compelled him, in poem after poem, to record the infinite variety of experiences that comprise the spiritual journey. The search for truth and beauty, the struggle to overcome the limitations of the mind, and the communion of the human soul with the Divine-these are the central ideas around which the poems revolve. By drawing his inspiration directly from the soul, Sri Chinmoy touches on its measureless reserves. Indeed, the very abundance of his works confers on them a qualitative significance, for it may be read as the outer sign of an inner profusion of the spirit. The reader of these poems will notice the absence of a strongly held individuality in the poet's persona. In its place, he will encounter a speaking voice that is free from the constraints of personality and ample in its power to contain a wide humanity. Basing his oeuvre on the single, highly compacted stanzaic unit, Sri Chinmoy has explored the full gamut of man's communicative choices, ranging from the dramatically occasioned modes of lyric, prayer and conversation through to the distilled wisdom of aphorism, definition and pensee. It is a microcosmic form of poetry. Each crystalline strophe is structurally complete and independent of its neighbours. Its appearance on the page--so brief that the reader may take it in at a single glance-permits us to grasp the full meaning of discrete poems in a way that is not always possible with more extended works.
And yet, in spite of their formal independence, Sri Chinmoy's poems do reflect upon one another. As we focus on them in succession, it becomes clear that a more structured patterning would have hindered their true purpose-and that is to unfold a vast, visionary landscape of spiritual experiences and realisations in which the soul stands as the solitary and splendid hero.
The poet's compression of his seer-vision into the miniature world of the stanza creates a unique tension between the brevity of this form and the wide scope of the subject. Where this might have led to a certain enigmatic quality or opaqueness of symbolic texture, however, Sri Chinmoy exercises great control of diction to produce a language of exemplary restraint, poise and clarity. Using the natural spoken and meditative rhythms of the English language and selecting in the main images and metaphors of a universal temper, the poet has produced a chastened form of speech, free from heavy ornamentation and accessible to all readers, regardless of cultural differences. Having little need for the utilitarian words in which the English language abounds, his sole poetic vocabulary is the sparse array of words that it offers for spiritual realities. Moreover, because Sri Chinmoy's mother tongue is Bengali, with its immense spiritual refinement and subtlety, he has further encountered the difficulty of working with an instrument that is far less malleable to his vision, crudely formed in some areas, at times obdurate and blunt. it is hard to fully appreciate the peculiar plight of the spiritual poet who, returning from the heights of mystic vision, feels impelled to share the fruits of his experience with all men. Bringing news of an unknown realm, he casts about him for correspondences from the known world that will make his experience more accessible, he strives for precision among our surface world of names and forms for his invisible but certain reality.
In order to exact a greater accuracy and expressiveness from the English language, Sri Chinmoy has developed a number of creative but hitherto largely unexplored principles inherent in it: the rich and revealing parallel structure, the fusion of nouns into compounds, and the use of rhetorical paradigms together create what might have been thought impossible in the English language--the effect of word-shrines. These are not born of the poet's struggle with language but of his victorious acceptance of it. If its powers have waned, he wakes them by using key words with utmost dignity; if its images are found to be limited, he confers on them new resonances by calling on them to help him approach the highest summits of spiritual vision; where there is power, he preserves it; where there is energy, he harnesses it. All that was immature and undeveloped in the vocabulary of the inner life has now become mature and fully developed. In Sri Chinmoy's poems, the English language may be said to achieve its true spiritual potential.
Sri Chinmoy's vast mass of poetry is characterised above all by its simplicity and power. Walt Whitman praised simplicity as the highest art:
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity Nothing is better than simplicity.[1]
In the case of Sri Chinmoy, this simplicity is of two kinds. It is that which lies on the far side of spiritual experience where the seeker perceives the resolution of all opposites and all the many different approaches to God are merged into the same end. Again, his enlarged understanding of the universe sheds new radiance on the most common images and metaphors. Transcending intellectual and philosophical complexities, the voice of the soul also arrives at an eloquent and powerful simplicity. It is this combination of a high, intuitive spiritual vision and a powerful aesthetic expression that has made Sri Chinmoy's poetry "a triumph of contemplation."[2]
Footnotes
[1] Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren (Penguin, 1977), pp. 13-14
[2]This definition of poetry is offered by Benedetto Croce. Q. in Allen Tate, ed. The Language of Poetry (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), p.105.
Thesis on the Poetry of Sri Chinmoy by Vidagdha Meredith Bennett
