{"id":1278,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:48","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1278"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:48","slug":"29-the-soul-of-poetic-delight-and-beauty-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/09-the-future-poetry-volume-09\/29-the-soul-of-poetic-delight-and-beauty-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-29_The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\nc<\/font>hapter<\/font>
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span><\/span>XXVIII<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n


\nThe<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n    <\/font> <\/b>T<\/font><\/span>HE light of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things
\nthough they are, are insufficient to give poetry the touch of immortality and perfection,
\neven a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the
\nsoul and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and
\ngive immortality to the breath and body of the life. Delight is the soul of
\nexistence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and
\nthese two fundamental things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the
\npoet, though they are often enough separated in our cruder vital and mental
\nexperience. These twin powers meet, make a consonance of the perfect har\u00admony
\nof his work and are the first deities he serves, all the others only group
\nthemselves about them, strive to be admitted to the soul of delight and the
\nprivilege of beauty and have to make themselves acceptable to them before they
\ncan mix with them in a compelling and attracting oneness. For the poet the moon
\nof beauty and delight is a greater godhead even than the Sun of truth or the
\nbreath of life, as in the symbolic image of the Vedic moon-god Soma whose plant
\nof intoxication has to be gathered on lonely mountain heights in the moonlight
\nand whose purified juice and essence is the sacred wine and nectar of
\nsweetness, rasa,\u00a0 <\/span>madhu, amrta,<\/i>
\nwithout which the gods themselves could not be immortal. A lightest trifle, if
\nit manages to get itself saturated with this sweetness of poetic delight and
\nbeauty, will be preserved for its sake, while the highest strenuous labour of
\nthe thinking mind and the most forceful assertion of the life-power, if
\ndeprived of or deficient in this subtlest immortalising essence, may carry on
\nfor a time, but soon drops, grows old, sinks into the gulf of oblivion or has
\nat most a lifeless survival and be\u00adlongs to the dead history of literature, not
\nto its eternal present. But beauty and delight, whatever form it takes, \u2014 for
\nwe may<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 235<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

speak here of the two as one, \u2014- has an imaging
\nyouth, an eternal moment, an immortal presence.<\/p>\n

The imperative instinct for beauty and the
\naesthetic demand which set that among the first needs and was not satisfied
\nwith anything else if this were neglected or put second in importance, are now
\nthings, that are almost lost, nowhere general to the hu\u00adman mind, but once they
\nwere the sign of the poetic and artistic peoples and the great ages of art and
\npoetry and supreme crea\u00adtion. The ancient communities who created those fine
\nmany-sided cultures which still remain the fountain-head of all our evolving
\ncivilisation, had the instinct for beauty, the aesthetic turn of the
\ntemperament and formation of the mind almost, it would seem, from the
\nbeginning, planted in their spirit and their blood, colouring their outlook so
\nthat even before they got the developed intellectual consciousness of it, they
\ncreated instinc\u00adtively in the spirit and form of beauty and that is quite half
\nthe secret of the compelling and attractive power of the antique cultures. The
\nearliest surviving poetry of ancient India was phi\u00adlosophical and religious,
\nthe Veda, the Upanishads, and our mo\u00addern notions tend to divorce these things
\nfrom the instinct of delight and beauty, to separate the religious and the
\nphilosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings
\nis their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming
\nout spontaneously as a word of beauty, the re\u00advealed utterance of that
\nuniversal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey
\nof sweetness, madhvadam\u00a0 <\/span>purusam;<\/i>
\nand this high achievement was not surprising in these ancient deep-thinking men
\nwho discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by
\nthe bliss of the eternal spirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda.
\nThe idea of beauty, the spontaneous satisfaction in it, the worship of it as in
\nitself something divine, became more intellectually conscious afterwards, was a
\ndominant, strain of the later Indian mind and got to its richest outward colour
\nand sensuous passion in the work of the classical writers, while the expression
\nof the spiritual through the aesthetic sense is the constant sense of Indian
\nart, as it is also the inspiring motive of a great part of the later reli\u00adgion
\nand poetry. Japan and China, more especially perhaps <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 236<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

southern China, for the north has been weighted by
\na tendency to a more external and formal idea of measure and harmony, had in a
\ndifferent way this fusion of the spiritual and aesthetic mind and it is a
\ndistinguishing stamp of their art and culture. The Persian had a sort of
\nsensuous magic of the transforming aesthesis born of psychic delight and
\nvision. Ancient Greece did all its work of founding European civilisation by a
\nunion of a subtle and active intelligence with a fine aesthetic spirit and
\nworship of beauty. The Celtic nations again seem always to have had by nature a
\npsychic delicacy and subtlety united with an instinctive turn for imaginative
\nbeauty to which we surely owe much of the finer strain in English literature.
\nBut there these spontaneous miracles of fusion end and in the mind of later
\npeoples who come in and take possession with a less innate, a more derivative
\nculture, the sense of beauty works with a certain effort and is clogged by many
\nheavier elements which are in conflict with and prevent the sureness of the
\naesthetic perception. There is in their cruder temperament and intelligence a
\nbarbaric strain which worships rudely the power and energy of life and is not
\nat home with the delight of beauty, an ethical and puritanic strain which looks
\naskance at art and beauty and pleasure, a heavy scholastic or a dry scientific
\nintellectual strain which fol\u00adlows after truth with a conscientious and
\nindustrious diligence, but without vision and fine aesthesis. And the modern
\nmind, inheritor of all this past, is a divided and complex mind which strives
\nat its best to get back at the old thing on a larger scale and realise some
\noneness of its many strands of experience, but has not yet found the right
\nmeeting-place; and it is besides still labouring under the disadvantage of its
\naberration into a mechanical, economical, materialistic, utilitarian
\ncivilisation from which it cannot get free, though it is struggling to shake
\noff that dullest side of it for which a naked and unashamed riot of ugli\u00adness
\ncould be indulged in without any prickings of the spiritual conscience but
\nrather with a smug self-righteousness in the hide\u00adous, the vulgar and the
\nignoble. The day when we get back to the ancient worship of delight and beauty,
\nwill be our day of sal\u00advation; for without these things there can be neither an
\nassured nobility and sweetness in poetry and art, nor a satisfied dignity <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 237<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

and fullness of life nor a harmonious perfection of the spirit.<\/p>\n

An insufficiently profound and intimate perception
\nof the real deep soul of poetic delight and beauty is the first obstacle to a recovery
\nof the old strong soundness of the aesthetic sense and spontaneity of the
\naesthetic impulse. This comes from the peculiar character of the modern
\nintelligence and its want of har\u00admony between our internal selves and our
\nexternal experience; there is little spontaneous joy of their meeting, an
\nactive labour to assimilate, but no happy, deep or satisfied possession either
\nof self or life, a continual seeking but no repose in the thing found, a
\nfeverish restlessness without home and abiding-place. The spirit of man can
\nmake its home in either one of two things, the depths of our self arrived at
\nthrough vision of self-knowledge, through power of self-mastery or through
\necstasy, or a profound, a glad and satisfied acceptance of the truth, the
\ndelight and beau\u00adty of the world and life, of existence and experience. And
\neither of these things can help too to bring in the other, \u2014 possess the inner
\nself and life can become happy and illumined by a full sense of its hidden
\nsignificance, or get hold of the complete delight and beauty of life and the
\nworld and you have then only a thin layer of shining mist to break through to
\nget also at the self and spirit behind it, the eater of the honey of sweetness
\nwho is seated in the soul of man and extends himself through the universe. The
\nancient peoples had in a very large measure this foundation of satisfaction and
\nharmony, took the greatest interest in the reality of the inner self, as once
\nin India and China; the Atman, the Tao, and life and the world as its field of
\nexpression and self-experience or, like the Greeks, felt at once the
\nnaturalness and profundity of human existence and gave to it an immediate and
\nsubtle aesthetic response. The modern mind, on the con\u00adtrary, looks little into
\nour deepest self, takes little interest in sounding that depth and has hardly
\nany confidence in its reality, and concentrates not on the truth and delight
\nand beauty of life, but upon the stress of its results and circumstances, which
\nin themselves have only an incidental and no satisfying and harmonious meaning,
\nand on the agitating or attractive turmoil of the mind excited by their contact
\nor their siege,1<\/sup><\/p>\n

 <\/sup><\/p>\n


\n1<\/font><\/sup>
\nThis is the result perhaps of an ill-assimilated Christian influence
\nintervening on the external vitalism of the Teutonic temperament and on Latin
\nintellectualism. and bringing in new needs and experiences which disturbed the
\nmind and emotions without possessing the soul with peace or arriving at a
\nharmony of spiritual emotion and spiritual self-knowledge.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

Page \u2013 238<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

This difference results in a fundamental
\ndifference of aesthesis. The pure aesthetic spirit ought to be left free,
\ntrusted in, made master of its own action and creation and it will then create
\nwith greatness and beauty, in a calm and satisfied ecstasy, and yet safe\u00adly
\nharmonise its action with the other spiritual powers of our existence, the need
\nof the life-soul, the insistent seeking of the thought-mind, the demand of the
\nactive will and the senses. But we now make the aesthetic sense and
\nintelligence a servant of these other powers; it is condemned to serve first
\nand foremost our external interest in life or our interest in thought or in
\ntroubled personality or the demand of the senses or passions and bidden to make
\nthem beautiful or vivid to us by an active aesthe\u00adtic cerebration and artistic
\nmanufacture of the word or a supply of carefully apt or beautiful forms and
\nmeasures. The secondary things are put in the first rank, the primary, the one
\nthing need\u00adful has to get in as best it can to give some firm base to the crea\u00adtion.
\nThis aesthesis aided by the vast curiosity of the modern intelligence has done
\nsome great and much interesting work, but it arrives with difficulty at the
\nreadily fused harmonies and assured stamp of the perfect way of spiritual
\ncreation.<\/p>\n

There is a profound intrinsic delight and beauty
\nin all things and behind all experience whatever face it wears to the surface
\nmind, which makes it to a spirit housed within us other than its first
\nappearance, makes it, that is to say, no longer a thing exciting mental
\ninterest, pain, pleasure, but rather a revelation of the truth and power and
\ndelight of being and our feeling of it a form of the universal Ananda of the
\nold philosophical thinkers, the calm yet moved ecstasy with which the spirit of
\nexistence re\u00adgards itself and its creation. This deeper spiritual feeling, this
\nAnanda is the fountain of poetic delight and beauty. It springs from a supreme
\nessence of experience, a supreme aesthesis which is in its own nature
\nspiritual, impersonal, independent of the personal reactions and passions of
\nthe mind, and that is why the poet is able to transmute pain and sorrow and the
\nmost tragic and terrible and ugly things into forms of poetic beauty, because
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 239<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

of this impersonal joy of the spirit in all
\nexperience, whatever its nature. And as, therefore, the subject of the poet is
\nall that he can feel of the infinite life of the spirit that creates in
\nexistence and all that he can seize of the infinite truth of God and Nature and
\nour own and the world’s being; so too what he bring out from his subjects is
\nall that he can pour into speech of his vision of eternal and universal beauty,
\nall that he can express of the soul’s universal delight in existence. That is
\nwhat he has to reveal, and to make others share in, to render more expressive
\nand firmly present to them what experience they have of it and help the race
\ntowards its greater fullness in the soul of man and embodiment in our mind and
\nlife. This Ananda is not the pleasure of a mood or a sentiment or the fine
\naesthetic indulgence of the sense in the attraction of a form, superficial
\nresults and incidents which are often mistaken for that much deeper and greater
\nthing by the minor poetic faculty, the lesser artistic mind, but the enduring
\ndelight which, as the ancient idea justly perceived, is the essence of spirit
\nand being and the beauty which all things assume when the spirit lives in the
\npure joy of creation and experience.<\/p>\n

The universality of this delight and beauty does
\nnot mean that we can take whatever we will straight from life and experience,
\njust as it is, and by making it precise and vivid through word and image or
\ndressing it in imaginative colour achieve poetic effect and beauty. That is the
\ntheory by which a great deal of our modern endeavour at poetry seems to be
\nguided, as it is the ruling method of inferior poets and the mark too of the
\nlesser or unsuccessful or only partially successful work of greater writers.
\nThe error made is to confuse the sources of poetic delight and beauty with the
\nmore superficial interest, pain and pleasure which the normal mind takes in the
\nfirst untransmuted appeal of thought and life and feeling. That in its first
\ncrude form or a little deepened by sensitiveness of emotion and a <\/i>reflective
\nintelligence is the response to existence of the natural mind, the only
\ninstrument of the majority, and what it is apt to expect from the poet is that
\nthis is what he too shall give to the world and only think it more profoundly,
\nfeel it more sensitively, live it with a greater excitement and find for it
\nbeauty of word <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 240<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

and attraction of rhythm. The poet has in him a
\ndouble persona\u00adlity, a double instrument of his response to life and existence.
\nThere is in him the normal man absorbed in mere living who thinks and feels and
\nacts like others, and there is the seer of things, the supernormal man, the
\nsuper-soul or delight-soul in touch with the impersonal and eternal fountains
\nof joy and beauty who creates from that source and transmutes by its alche\u00admy
\nall experience into a form of the spirit’s Ananda. It is easy for him, if the
\ndemand of his genius is not constant or if he is not held back by a natural
\nfineness of the poetic conscience, to subject this deeper and greater power to
\nthe lower and general demand and put it at the service of his superficial
\nmental expe\u00adrience. He has then to rely on the charm and beauty of word and
\nform to save the externality of his substance. But the genius in him when he is
\nfaithful to it, knows that this is not his high way of perfection nor the thing
\nhis spirit gave him to do; it is a spiri\u00adtual transmutation of the substance
\ngot by sinking the mental and vital interests in a deeper soul experience which
\nbrings the inevitable word and the supreme form and the unanalysable rhythm.
\nThe poet is then something more than a maker of beautiful word and phrase, a
\nfavoured child of the fancy and imagination, a careful fashioner of idea and
\nutterance or an effective poetic thinker, moralist, dramatist or story-teller;
\nhe becomes a spokesman of the eternal spirit of beauty and delight and shares
\nthat highest creative and self-expressive rapture which is close to the
\noriginal ecstasy that made existence, the divine Ananda. <\/p>\n

This
\nrapture, the Platonic divine possession and enthusiasm, is born not of mental,
\nbut of soul experience, and the more the surface mind gets into the way, the
\nmore this divine passion is weakened and diluted by a less potent spirit. The
\nsurface mind is powerfully attracted by the stir of the outward passion and
\nexcitement, the stress of immediate thought, life and action, hastens to embody
\nit in speech or in deed and has no leisure to transmute life into those greater
\nabiding values of which the soul in its depths is alone capable. But the higher
\nfaculties are given us as keys to a deeper experience; the seer, the poet, the
\nartist, the children of the spirit’s light and intuition are only true to
\n <\/p>\n

Page
\n\u2013 241<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

themselves when they live in the depths of the
\nsoul, refuse to be hurried away by the surface call of mind and life and wait
\nrather for their own greater voices. The poetry which insists on an external
\neffectiveness, on immediate thought and life and experience, may seize very
\npowerfully the ear of the moment, but is singularly frail in its affectation of
\npower and even if it has strength of body, is hollow and null inside; it fails
\nbecause it is concerned with immediately vital things perhaps, but not with
\nthat which is immortal. That is just why patriotic poetry, war poetry or poetry
\nof the occasion and the moment are so difficult to write greatly and, although
\nit would seem that these things are among the most dynamic and should move most
\neasily to powerful utterance, are oftenest poor in poetic substance and
\ninferior in value. For life they may be dynamic, but they are not so readily
\ndynamic for art and poetry, and precisely because the vital interest, the life
\nattraction is so strong that it is difficult to draw back from the external to
\nthe spiritual delight and the spiritual significance. A great poet may do it
\nsometimes, because the constant instinct of his genius is to look beyond the
\nsurface and the moment to that which is universal and eternal behind the
\npersonal experience and the occasion is only for him an excuse for its
\nutterance. The drama of action and mere passion is for the same reason
\nshort-lived in its gusto of vitality, fades in a century or less into a
\nlifeless mask, while the drama of the soul abides, because it gets near to the
\nsubtler eternal element, the soul’s essential aesthesis, the spirit’s delight
\nin self-creation and experience. Philosophical and religious poetry too fails
\nso often by a neglect of the same fine distinction, because the interest of the
\nthought pursued by the intellectual activity, the interest of the mind in its
\nsurface religious ideas and feelings get the upper hand and do not consent to
\nsink themselves in the spiritual emotion of the seeing of truth and the abiding
\nspiritual experience. The mental and vital interest, plea\u00adsure, pain of
\nthought, life, action is not the source of poetic delight and beauty and can be
\nturned into that deeper thing only when they have sunk into the soul and been
\ntransmuted in the soul’s radiant memory into spiritual experience, \u2014 that perhaps
\nwas what the Greeks meant when they made Mnemosyne the\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>eternal mother of the muses; the passions
\ncan only change into <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 242<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

poetic matter when they have been spiritualised in
\nthe same bright sources and have undergone the purification, the kath<\/i><\/span>arsis,<\/i> spoken of by the Greek critic; the life values are only
\npoetic when they have come out heightened and changed into soul values. The
\npoetic delight and beauty are born of a deeper rap\u00adture and not of the surface
\nmind’s excited interest and enjoyment of life and existence.<\/p>\n

The ancient Indian critics denned the essence of
\npoetry as rasa<\/i> and by that word they meant a concentrated taste, a
\nspiritual essence of emotion, an essential aesthesis, the soul’s pleasure in
\nthe pure and perfect sources of feeling. The memory of the soul that takes in,
\nbroods over and transmutes the mind’s thought, feeling and experience, is a
\nlarge part of the process which comes by this aesthesis, but it is not quite
\nthe whole thing; it is rather only a common way by which we get at something
\nthat stands behind, the spiritual being in us which has the secret of the uni\u00adversal
\ndelight and the eternal beauty of existence. That which we call genius works or
\ncomes out from something deep within which calls down the word, the vision, the
\nlight and power from a level above the normal mind and it is the sense of the
\ninrush from above which makes the rapture and the enthusiasm of illumina\u00adtion
\nand inspiration. That source, when we know better the secrets of our being,
\nturns out to be the spiritual self with its diviner consciousness and
\nknowledge, happier fountains of power, inalienable delight of existence. The,
\ncultures that were able directly or indirectly to feel the joy of this self and
\nspirit, got into the very strain of their aesthesis the touch of its delight,
\nits Ananda, and this touch was the secret of the generalised ins\u00adtinct for
\nbeauty which has been denied to a later mind limited by intellectual activity,
\npractical utility and the externals of life:<\/p>\n

we have to go for it to exceptional individuals gifted with a
\nfiner strain, but the widespread aesthetic instinct has been lost and has yet
\nto be recovered for the common mind and recognised once more as a part of human
\nperfection as indispensable as intel\u00adlectual knowledge and at least as
\nnecessary to happiness as vital well-being. But this Ananda, this delight, this
\naesthesis which is the soul of poetic beauty works like other things, like
\npoetic truth, or the poetic breath of life on different levels, in different
\nprovinces <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 243<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

of its actions with the same law that we have
\nobserved in the rest, of the emergence of a richer and profounder face of
\nitself the more it gets inward and upward from the less to the more occult
\npowers of its revelation. This finer soul of delight throws itself out on the
\nphysical mind and being, takes up its experiences and turns them by its own
\ninnate and peculiar power into things of beauty, fuses into itself the
\nexperiences of the life soul and transmutes to beauty their power and passion in
\nthe surge of its poetic ecstasy, takes up all life and form into the reflective
\nthought-mind and changes them in the beauty and rapture of thought discovering
\nand embodying new values of soul and Nature and existence. And in all its
\nworking there is felt its own essence of an intuitive delight which acts in
\nthese moulds and gets into them whatever it can of its own intimate and eternal
\ndelight values. But when that intuitive mind self-finding, self-seeing,
\nself-creating in a higher power of light and vision than is pos\u00adsible on the
\nintellectual or other levels gets out into full play, and now there is some
\nsign of this emergence, then we come nearer to the most potent sources of
\nuniversal and eternal delight and beauty, nearer to its full and wide seeing, and
\nits all-embracing rapture. This inner mind is the first native power of the
\nself and spirit dropping its lower veils and the very life and aesthesis of the
\nspirit in its creation is a life of self-experiencing spiritual delight and a
\nluminous Ananda.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The beauty and delight of such a greater intuitive
\ninspira\u00adtion, a poetry of this spiritual Ananda making all existence lumi\u00adnous
\nand wonderful and beautiful to us may be one of the gifts of the future. It is
\nthat of which we stand in need and of which there is some promise in the
\nhighest strains that we have now begun to hear. This change will mean that
\npoetry may resume on’ a larger scale, with a wider and more shining vision the
\ngreater effect it once had on the life of the race in the noble antique cul\u00adtures.
\nAt one time poetry was a revelation to the race of the life of the gods and man
\nand the meaning of the world and the beauty and power of existence and through
\nits vision and joy and the height and clarity of its purpose it became creative
\nof the life of the people. Ananda, the joy of the spirit in itself carrying in
\nit a revelation of the powers of its conscious being, was to the <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 244<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

ancient Indian idea the creative principle, and
\nancient poetry did thus creatively reveal to the people its soul and its
\npossibilities by forms of beauty and suggestions of power in a way we have to a
\ngreat extent lost by our later pettier use of this always great art and medium.
\nOne might almost say that ancient India was created by the Veda and Upanishads
\nand that the visions of inspired seers made a people. That sublime poetry with
\nits re\u00advelation of godhead and the joy and power of life and truth and
\nimmortality or its revelation of the secrets of the self and the powers of its
\nmanifestation in man and the universe and of man’s return to self-knowledge got
\ninto the very blood and mind and life of the race and made itself the
\nfountain-head of all that incessant urge to spirituality which has been its
\ndistinguishing gift and cultural motive. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana
\nrevealing to it in forms of noble beauty and grandiose or beautiful or telling
\ntypes of character the joy of its forms of life, the signi\u00adficance of its
\nspiritual, ethical and aesthetic ideals, the powers and dangers of the human
\nsoul, its godheads and its titanisms have played a great and well-recognised
\nformative part second only to religion and the stress of religio-social
\ntraining in the life of the Indian peoples. And even later the religious poetry
\nof the Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas has entered powerfully into the life of the
\nnation and helped to shape its temperament and soul-type. The effect of the
\nHomeric poems in Greece, the intimate con\u00adnection of poetry and art with the
\npublic life of Athens sprang from a similar but less steep height of poetic and
\nartistic motive. The epic poems revealed the Hellenic people to itself in the
\nlucid and clear nobility and beauty of an uplifting of life and an aesthe\u00adtic
\nsense of the humanity and divinity of man; the later art and poetry interpreted
\nto Athens her religious ideas, her thought, her aesthetic instincts, the soul
\nof grandeur and beauty of her culture.<\/p>\n

And in all these
\ninstances, as in others like the art and poetry of Japan and of ..China, a more
\nor less profoundly intuitive crea\u00adtion from the depths and expression through
\npoetic delight of the soul of a people has been the secret of this effect and
\nthis power of creation or influence. But in other times and places poetry has
\nbeen more a servant of aesthetic pleasure than a creative <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 245<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

master of life and great spiritual agent; when it
\nis at all great, it cannot fail to be that to a certain extent, but it has not
\nso acted as a whole, centrally, in the same large and effec\u00adtive way or with the
\nsame high conscience of its function. It<\/span>
\nhas leaned too much on the surface or external interests of life for the
\npleasure of the intellect and imagination and failed too much to create life
\nfrom within by a deeper delight in the power of vision of the soul and spirit.
\nThe high energy of English poetry has done great and interesting things; it has
\nportrayed life with charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and
\ncharacter and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in
\nShakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in
\nMilton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed commonplace in Pope and Dryden,
\nplayed with ele\u00adgance and beauty on the lesser strings with the Victorians or
\ncast out here and there a profounder strain of thought or more pas\u00adsionate and
\naspiring voice, and if the most spiritual strains have been few, yet it has
\ndreamed in light in Shelley or drawn close in Wordsworth to the soul in Nature.
\nAnd it may seem hard to say in the face of all this splendour and vigour and
\nglow and beauty and of the undeniable cultural influence, that something was
\ntoo often lacking which would have made the power of this poetry more central
\nand intimate and a greater direct force on the life of the people, and yet this
\nis, I think, true in spite of exceptions, not only here, but of almost all the
\nlater European literature. To get back to a profounder centre, to create from
\nwithin in a more universal power of the spirit and its vision and delight of
\nexis\u00adtence will supply the missing element and make poetry once again young and
\nmighty and creative and its word deeply effec\u00adtive on life by the power of a
\ngreater Ananda.<\/p>\n

The mind of man, a little weary now of the
\nsuperficial plea\u00adsure of the life and intellect, demands, obscurely still, not
\nyet perceiving what will satisfy it, a poetry of the joy of self, of the deeper
\nbeauty and delight of existence. A merely cultured poetry fair in form and word
\nand playing on the surface strings of mind and emotion will not serve its purpose.
\nThe human mind is opening to an unprecedented largeness of vision of the
\ngreatness of the worlds, the wonder of life, the self of man, the mystery of <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 246<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

the spirit in him and the universe. The future
\npoetry must seek in that vision its inspiration, and the greater its
\nuniversality of joy in existence, the more it seeks through intuitive sight and
\naesthesis the deepest fountains of poetic delight and beauty, the more it will
\nbecome powerfully creative of a greater life for the race. The modern poet is
\nperfectly right in a way in breaking down in whatever direction the bounds
\nerected by the singers of the past around their magic palace and its grounds;
\nhe must claim all things in heaven or earth or beyond for his portion: but that
\ncare for a fine poetic beauty and delight which they safeguarded by excluding
\nall or most that did not readily obey its law or turn to fair material of
\npoetic shaping, he must preserve as jealously and satisfy by steeping all that
\nhe finds in his wider field in that profoundest vision which delivers out of
\neach thing its spiritual Ananda, the secret of truth and beauty in it for which
\nit was created; it is in the sense of that spiritual joy of vision, and not in
\nany lower sensuous, intellectual or imaginative seeing, that Keats\u2019 phrase
\nbecomes true for the poet, beauty that is truth, truth that is beauty, and this
\nall that we need to know as the law of our aesthetic knowledge. He is right too
\nin wishing to make poetry more intimately one with life, but again in this sense
\nonly, in going back to those creative fountains of the spirit’s Ananda from
\nwhich life is seen and reshaped by the vision that springs from a moved
\nidentity, \u2014 the inmost source of the authentic poet vision. The beauty and
\ndelight of all physical things illu\u00admined by the wonder of the secret spiritual
\nself that is the in\u00adhabitant and self-sculptor of form, the beauty and delight
\nof the thousand-coloured, many-crested million-waved miracle of life made a
\nhundred times more profoundly meaningful by the great\u00adness and the sweetness
\nand attracting poignancy of the self-creating inmost soul which makes of life
\nits epic and its drama and its lyric, the beauty and delight of the spirit in
\nthought, the seer, the thinker, the interpreter of his own creation and being
\nwho broods over all he is and does in man and the world and constantly re-sees
\nand shapes it new by the stress and power of his thinking, this will be the
\nsubstance of the greater poetry that has yet to be written. And that can be
\ndiscovered only if and so far as the soul of man looks or feels beyond even
\nthese things <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 247<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

and sees and voices the eternal and knows its
\ngodheads and gets to some close inward touch of the infinite ecstasy which is
\nthe source of the universal delight and beauty. For the nearer we get to the
\nabsolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man and the universe and the
\nreceptive and creative spiritual emotion which needs for its voice the moved
\ntones of poetic speech. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 248<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

chapter XXVIII The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty       THE light of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","wpcat-29-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}