Part V — Answers to questions on poetry

57. Question: Is there an inner world where poetry originates?

Sri Chinmoy: Yes, there is an inner world where everything is already written. An expression comes to a poet, and he writes it down. But you have to know that there is a place where these thoughts and ideas are all coming from. This is true for both poems and songs. The poet can just go to that particular world with his inner vision and take them. Sometimes the poet may also go to the dream world and get a poem from there. It is like plucking a mango. Or he may wait until the mango falls right in his lap. I have at times composed poems while lying on my bed, just reading the words off the wall. The lines were all written there; I could see them with my inner vision. In India I wrote a few Bengali poems like that. Tagore and others have also done it.