Aurobindo spends many pages in his book Future Poetry dissing Pope and Drydan for being intellectual poets, which for him meant that their poetry mostly came from them making clever language, not any kind of spiritual inspiration. He has respect for Milton, but compared to Dante, Milton also was in large part just poeticizing a religious doctrine with some innovation. Aurobindo is not doing this, not simply poeticizing some doctrine. He spent most of his time in advanced spiritual practice, so his level of spiritual inspiration was quite high, for with savitri he is attempting to do give metaphors for the full range of human spiritual experience. His metaphors and interpretation of that experience may have been or more less artful according to different opinions, but he was definitely not just coming from the intellect.
One could argue that the intellect is also the soul (Steiner divides the soul into sensual and intellectual and spiritual parts). Sufi poetry obviously filters spiritual experience through many sensual soul metaphors which is why it appeals to people in large part I think, whereas Aurobdino uses many intellectual metaphors. In one letter his student had criticized him for using “the inconscient” as being too abstract for poetry, and he responded that for him it is a very concrete thing.
I think maybe because of our current cultural dichotomy between experience and so-called understanding, Philosophy may be more concerned with understanding, but fails to do even that when it doesn’t lead to experience, to intuitive and sensual experience of ideas. Poetry tries to invoke experience, but I think falls short if it doesn’t also illuminate some idea and merely offers a mundane experience. Spiritual poetry and philosophy tend to be mostly the same thing, or at least their contrasting emphases are less stark because they are both concerned with giving or helping people experience AND understand the living concrete life of things AS spiritual ideas.
Most of the greatest poets of the West I would say have some natural aptitude for the occult, for genuine experience with the spiritual realm of ideas, but none really had much of what I would call a serious spiritual practice. For such spiritual practice has as its first goal the overcoming of the passions and purifying the body. Western poets tend to filter their occult insights through a still very emotionalized vehicle, which is what gives us such strongly stimulating even exciting language. In contrast a zen poet, seems quite dry to most people, yet the focus on the sense image in buddhism leaves much room for a broad appeal. The sufis even more so with their use of very vitalistic metaphors.
I have respect for both east and west. Too much traditional spiritual practice before one has really individuated, leaves not much room for soul, whether intellectual, sensual, or spiritual, in Steiner’s terms. The West has had great souls, persons too singular to just stamp out their emotions in dry universalized spiritualism. This is why Steiner shifted Theosophy’s focus from the East to the West, because we were developing soul qualities the East had not been ready to explore at the height of their powers. The idea of course being still to integrate the body and spirit, just not by stamping out the soul as often happens in the methodical spiritual practices of the east.
I am interested in how serious spiritual practice can effect poetry since as I said it is firstly about overcoming the emotions and so much poetry, especially lyric is rooted in them.. Many western poets have dabbled or been very into the occult, but that is a bit different. A friend was talking about Zen to me recently and how most people conflate the psychological and the spiritual and how this confusion is rather militantly undermined in Zen, his teacher telling him that spirituality has nothing to with the human and human psychological concerns. I think they are way too ascetic and miss the soul, but the idea is correct for what serious mystics mean by spirit. It is indeed very abstract for it is the abstract. The soul, as I was saying, has levels that overlap with emotions, especially the the sensual soul, which for me would be strong in sufi poetry, for they connect to the spirit (the abstract) primarily through their emotions, same with much bhakti poetry and devotional verse, all of which start with emotions but also in a way negate them, negate the personal passions through devotion.
Zen poetry on the other hand revels in the paradox of the concrete/abstract so it has that appeal to the senses, even if it is not really emotional at all, whereas the symbolic philosophy and poetry that I write and especially like probably seems even more dry and less concrete than the arid language of zen ascetics; even if zen poets can negate the soul and world completely, they at least get there more through analyzing sense experience, so this is often considered more “concrete” and poetic because potentially more lyrical even if not at all concerned with the sense soul.
