Earthly Versus Spiritual Poetic Paradigms in W. B. Yeats and Sri Aurobindo

Abstract

Poetry emerges from life. It faithfully reflects life of the poet, expression of emotions and feelings, and imaginative development. Yeats presents faithfully what he experienced, suffered in the heart’s core, shaping his experience of life and love’s philosophy, and advocating his personal wisdom and thought development over his poetic career. His poetry substantiates all his thoughts and philosophy based on his subjective emotions, drives, and occult experiences. Sri Aurobindo, as a sage and ascetic and mystic poet, reflects on his early life and his later mystic and occult visions. He is a man on a mission to lower God’s consciousness, to establish His rein on the earth, to alleviate the ailing humanity and mankind, to return to invoke him, to cast a look and establish His Conscience on Earth. His poetry carries expression of this spiritual and occult visions deepened by his Yogic Sadhana or meditation. Yeats and Sri Aurobindo have a different attitude to their occult, too. Yeats’s occult, mystic, visions and trances reveal his autobiographical themes, while Sri Aurobindo’s poetry brings metaphorical and metaphysical experiences from mental planes. Both poets have drawn their significant achievements of poetic patterns in their respective poetry.