‘spontaneous overflow’ both occur simultaneously. This preparation is the concentration and rise of consciousness and the spontaneity is the dawning inspiration. Sri Aurobindo emphasizes that consciousness has an important role to play in the creation of a text.
Human beings are complex personalities. We have different levels within our beings to which we keep shifting unknowingly and to which we can also move consciously with effort. We are a composite of different levels of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo has described different levels of consciousness pertaining to each level of mind. I mention here broad categories of those levels – mind, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind. Human beings are mostly on the level of mind and embody the mental consciousness. However, with efforts one can evolve into the higher levels. If a poet or writer evolves, and then seeks inspiration from higher levels, he or she might receive some inspiration from these levels. However, this process of climbing up and calling for inspiration is a simultaneous and a continuous process, for Sri Aurobindo says that it is difficult to station oneself on the higher levels. A temporary rise in consciousness may help to catch a ray of inspiration from the higher levels and deliver them into their work. He also mentions that inspiration is very unpredictable. “Inspiration is always a very uncertain thing; it comes when it chooses, stops suddenly before it has finished its work, refuses to descend when it is called. This is a well- known affliction, perhaps of all artists, but certainly of poets.”5
Sri Aurobindo has shown how few poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley etc have caught the inspiration for few moments and have translated them into their poetry. One of the most celebrated lines of Keats – ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ was written in such an inspired moment, he says. Another important condition for inspiration to dawn is that the receiver should be a passive recipient, for the inspiration brings with it all the substance, technique and form. Sri Aurobindo does not rule out the technical perfection needed by the recipient, but that being there at the base, the inspiration can easily manifest into creation. Regarding this, he writes- “The most genuine and perfect poetry is written when the original source was able to throw its inspiration pure and undiminished into the vital and there takes its true native form and power of speech exactly reproducing the inspiration, while the outer consciousness is entirely passive and transmits without alteration what it receives from the godheads of the inner and the superior spaces.”6 Sri Aurobindo himself has exemplified through his writings and poetry how with efforts he raised his consciousness and received inspiration from higher and higher levels. Regarding the creation of his magnum opus Savitri, he says - “there have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them.”7 Poetry coming from the Overmind inspiration he calls mantra. This will be more elaborately described in the point where I deal with the text-centric approach.
Now we come to the text-centric approach. The text is all important for those who approach literature this way. The author and his biography have no or little role to play. This text centric approach emphasizes a lot on the language and its structure. This has given rise to linguistic, structuralist, philologist, semiotic and other such dimensions to the study of literature. Ferdinand de Saussure, known as the father of modern linguistics has explained at great length the relation between sound and ideas and signifier and signified making a sign. To quote few of his lines – “in language there are only differences… A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and the psychological elements with each sign.”8
Another critic Jonathan Culler gives us the structuralist approach while he quotes Rolland Barthes’ definition of structuralism. Structuralism is “a method for the study of cultural artefacts derived from the
