{"id":1281,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:49","slug":"18-the-poets-of-the-dawn-2-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\/18-the-poets-of-the-dawn-2-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-18_The Poets of the Dawn \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 2.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font>
\n<\/span>XVII<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n   The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 2<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/span>A<\/font>
\nPOETRY<\/font> whose task is to render
\ntruth of the Spirit by passing behind the appearances of the sense and the
\nintellect to their spiritual reality, is in fact attempting a work for which no
\ncharacteristic power of language has been discovered, \u2014except the symbolic, but
\nthe old once established symbols will no longer entirely serve, and the method
\nitself is not now sufficient for the need, \u2014no traditional form of presentation
\nnative to the substance, no recognized method of treatment or approach, or none
\nat once sufficiently wide and subtle, personal and universal for the modern
\nmind. In the past indeed there have been hieratic and religious ways of
\napproaching the truths of spirit which have produced some remarkable forms in
\nart and literature. Sufi poetry, Vaishnava poetry are of this order, in more
\nancient times the symbolic and mystic way of the Vedic singers, while the
\nunique revelatory utterance of the Upanishads stands by itself as a form of
\ninspired thought which penetrates either direct of through strong unveiling
\nimages to the highest truths of self and soul and the largest seeing of the
\nEternal. One or two modern poets have attempted to use in a new way the almost unworked wealth of poetical suggestion in Catholic Christianity. But the drift
\nof the modern mind in this direction is too large in its aim and varied in its
\napproach to be satisfied by any definite or any fixed symbolic or hieratic
\nmethod, it cannot rest within the special experience and figures of a given
\nreligion. There has been too universal a departure from all specialized forms
\nand too general a breaking down of the old cut channels; in place of their
\nintensive narrowness we have straining through all that has been experienced by
\nan age of wide intellectual curiosity to the ultimate sense of that experience.
\nThe truth behind man and Nature and things, behind intellectual and emotional
\nand vital perception is sought to be seized by a pressure upon these things <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 114<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

themselves,
\nand the highly intellectualized language and way of seeing developed by this
\nage is either used as it is with more meaning or strained or moulded anew or
\ngiven some turn or transformation which will bring in the intensity of the
\ndeeper truth and vision. An intellectualism which takes this turn can choose
\none of three methods. It may prolong the language and forms it already
\npossesses and trust to the weight of the thing it has to say and the power of
\nits vision to inform this vehicle with another spirit. It may strain, heighten,
\ntransfigure the language and forms into a more intensive force of image, mould
\nand expression. Or it may strive for some new and direct tone, some sheer cry
\nof intuitive speech and soul born from the spirit itself and coming near to its
\nnative harmonies. The moulds too may either be the established moulds turned or
\nmodified to a greater and subtler use or else strange 8nprecedented frames,
\nmagical products of a spiritual inspiration. On any of these lines the poetry
\nof the future may arrive at its objective and cross the borders of a greater
\nkingdom of experience and expression.\u00a0 <\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But these earlier poets came in an age of
\nimperfect, unenriched and uncompleted intellectuality. The language which they
\ninherited was admirable for clear and balanced prose speech, but in poetry had
\nbeen used only for adequate or vigorous statement, rhe3torical reasoning,
\nsuperficial sentimentalizing or ornate thought, narrative, description in the
\nmanner of a concentrated, elevated and eloquent prose. The forms and rhythmical
\nmovements were unsuitable for any imaginative, flexible or subtly feeling
\npoetry. Their dealing with these forms was clear and decisive; they were thrown
\naside and new forms were sought for or old one taken from the earlier masters
\nof from song and ballad moulds and modified or developed to serve a more fluid
\nand intellectualised mind and imagination. But the language was a more
\ndifficult problem and could not be entirely solved by such short cuts as
\nWordsworth\u2019s recipe of a resort to the straightforward force of the simplest
\nspeech dependent on the weight of the substance and thought for its one
\nsufficient source of power., We find the tongue of this period floating between
\nvarious possibilities. On its lower levels it is weighted down by some remnant
\nof the character of the eighteenth century <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 115<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and
\nproceeds by a stream of eloquence, no longer artificial, but facile, fluid,
\nhelped by a greater force of thought and imagination. This turn sometimes rises
\nto a higher level of inspired and imaginative poetic eloquence. But beyond this
\npitch we have a fuller and richer style packed with thought and imaginative
\nsubstance, the substitute of this new intellectualised poetic mind for the more
\nspontaneous Elizabethan richness and curiosity; but imaginative thought is the
\nsecret of its power, no longer the exuberance of the life-soul in its vision.
\nOn the other side we have quite different note, a sheer poetical directness,
\nwhich sometimes sinks below itself to poverty and insufficiency or at least to
\nthinness, as in much of the work of Wordsworth and Byron, but, when better
\nsupported and rhythmed, rises to quite new authenticities of great or perfect
\nutterance, and out of this there comes in some absolute moments a native voice
\nof the spirit6, in Wordsworth\u2019 revelations of the spiritual presence in Nature
\nand its scenes and peoples, in Byron\u2019s rare forceful sincerities, in the
\nluminous simplicities of Blake, in the faery melodies of Coleridge, most of all
\nperhaps in the lyrical cry and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are
\ncomparatively rare moments, the mass of their work is less certain and unequal
\nin expression and significance. Finally we get in Keats a turning away to a
\nrich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech which prepares us for the lower
\nfullnesses of the intellectual and aesthetic epoch that had to intervene. The
\ngreatest intuitive and revealing poetry has yet to come. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Byron and Wordsworth are the two
\npoets who are the most hampered by this difficulty of finding and keeping to
\nthe native speech of their greater self, most often depressed in their
\nelevation, because they are both drawn by a strong side of their nature, the
\none to a forceful, the other to a weighty intellectualised expression; neither
\nof them are born singers or artists of word and sound, neither of them poets in
\nthe whole grain of their mind and temperament, not, that is to say, always
\ndominated by the aesthetic, imaginative or inspired strain in their being, but
\ndoubled here by a man of action and passion, there by a moralist and preacher,
\nin each too a would-be \u201ccritic of life\u201d, who gets into the way of the poet and
\nmakes upon him illegitimate demands; therefore they are readily prone to fall
\naway to what is, however interesting <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 116<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

it
\nmay otherwise be, a lower, a not genuinely poetic range of substance and
\nspeech. But both in the deepest centre or on the highest peak of their
\ninspiration are moved by powers for which their heavily or forcibly
\nintellectualized language of poetry was no adequate means. It is only when they
\nescape from it that they do their rare highest work. Byron, no artist,
\nintellectually shallow and hurried, a poet by compulsion of personality rather
\nthan in the native colour of his mind, inferior in all these respects to the
\nfiner strain of his great contemporaries, but in compensation a more powerful
\nelemental force than any of them and more in touch with all that had begun to
\nstir in the mind of the time, -always an advantage, if he knows how to make use
\nof it, for a poet\u2019s largeness and ease of execution, -succeeds more amply on
\nthe inferior levels of his genius, but fails in giving any adequate voice to
\nhis highest possibility. Wordsworth, meditative, inward, concentrated in his
\nthought, is more often able by force of brooding to bring out that voice of his
\ngreater self, but\u00a0 <\/span>flags constantly,
\nbrings in a heavier music surrounding his few great clear tones, drowns his
\ngenius at last in a desolate sea of platitude. Neither arrives at that
\namplitude of achievement which might have been theirs in a more fortunate time,
\nif ready forms had been given to them, or if they had lived in the stimulating
\natmosphere of a contemporary culture harmonious with their personality. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Byron\u2019s prodigious reputation,
\ngreater and more prolonged on the continent than in his own country, led
\nperhaps to too severely critical an undervaluing when his defects became
\nnakedly patent in the fading away of the helpful glamour of contemporary
\nsympathies. That is the penalty of an exaggerated fame lifted too high on the
\nwings or the winds of the moment. But his fame was no accident or caprice of
\nfortune; it was his due from the Time-Spirit. His hasty vehement personality
\ncaught up and crowded into its work in a strong though intellectually crude
\nexpression an extraordinary number of the powers and motives of the modern age.
\nThe passion for liberty found in him its voice of Tyrrhenian bronze. The revolt
\nand self-assertion of the individual against the falsities and stifling
\nconventions of society, denial, unbelief, the scorn of the sceptic for
\nestablished things,
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 117<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

the
\nromance of the past, the restlessness of the present, the groping towards the
\nfuture, the sensuous, glittering, artificial romance of the pseudo-East, the romance
\nof the solitary, the immoral or amoral superman, all that flawed romanticism,
\npassionate sentimentalism, insatiable satiety of sensualism, cynicism, realism
\nwhich are the chaotic fermentation of an old world dying and a new world in
\nprocess of becoming, -a century and half\u2019s still unfinished process, -caught
\nhold of his mood and unrolled itself before the dazzled, astonished and
\ndelighted eyes of his contemporaries in the rapid succession of forcibly
\nill-hewn works impatiently cut out or fierily molten from his single
\npersonality in a few crowded years from its first rhetorical and struggling
\noutburst in Childe Harold<\/i> to the accomplished ease of its finale in Don
\nJuan<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Less than this apparent
\nplenitude would have been enough to create the rumour that rose around the
\noutbreak of this singular and rapid energy. No doubt, his intellectual
\nunderstanding of these things was thin and poverty-stricken in the extreme, his
\npoetic vision of the powers that moved him had plenty of force, but wanted
\ndepth and form and greatness. But he brought to his work what no other poet
\ncould give and what the mentality of the time, moved itself by things which it
\nhad not sufficient intellectual preparation to grasp, was fitted to appreciate,
\nthe native elemental force, the personality, the strength of nervous and vital
\nfeeling of them which they just then needed and which took the place of
\nunderstanding and vision. To this pervading power, to this lava flood of
\npassion and personality, were added certain pre-eminent gifts, a language at
\nfirst of considerable rhetorical weight and drive, afterwards of great nervous
\nstrength, directness, precision, force of movement, a power of narrative and of
\nvivid presentation, and always, whatever else might lack, an unfailing energy.
\nIt was enough for the highest assured immortality<\/p>\n

These things which Byron more or less
\nadequately expressed, were the ferment of the mind of humanity in its first
\ncrude attempt to shake off the conventions of the past and struggle towards a
\ndirect feeling of itself and its surrounding world in their
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 118<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

immediate
\nreality. But behind it there is something else which seems sometimes about to
\nemerge vaguely, an element which may be called spiritual, a feeling of the
\ngreatness of man the individual spirit commensurate with Nature, man able to
\nstand in the world in his own strength and puissance, man affirming his
\nliberty, the claim to freedom of a force as great within as the forces which
\nsurround and seem to overwhelm him. It is a Titanism, the spirit in man seen
\nthrough the soul of desire, in revolt, not in self-possession, man the fallen
\narchangel, not man returning to godhead: but it reposes on it is the obscure
\nside of a spiritual reality. He could not break through the obstructions of his
\nlower personality and express this thing that he felt in its native tones of
\nlargeness and power. If he could have done so, his work would have been of a
\nlasting greatness. But he never found the right form. Never achieved the
\nliberation into right thought and speech of the Daemon within him. The language
\nand movement he started from were an intellectual and sentimental rhetoric, the
\nspeech of the eighteenth century broken down, melted and beaten into new shape
\nfor stronger uses; he went on to a more chastened and rapid style of great
\nforce, but void of delicacy, subtlety and variety; he ended in a flexible and
\neasy tongue which gave power to even the most cynical trivialities and could
\nrise to heights of poetry and passion: but none of these things, however
\nadapted to his other gifts, was the style wanted for this greater utterance.
\nArt, structure, accomplished mould were needs of which he had no idea; neither
\nthe weight of a deep and considered, nor the sureness of an inspired
\ninterpretation were at his command. But sometimes language and movement rise
\nsuddenly into a bare and powerful sincerity which, if he could have maintained
\nit, would have given him the needed instrument: but the patience and artistic
\nconscientiousness or the feeling for poetic truth which would alone have done
\nthis, were far from him. Considerable work of a secondary kind he did, but he
\nhad something greater to say which he never said, but only gave rare hints of
\nit and an obscured sense of the presence of its meaning. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Wordsworth, with a much higher
\npoetic mind than Byron\u2019s did not so entirely miss his greatest way, though he
\nwandered <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 119<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

much
\nin adjacent paths and finally lost himself in the dry desert sands of their
\nuninspired intellectual mentality. At the beginning he struck in the midst of
\nsome alloy full into his purest vein of gold. His earliest vision of his task
\nwas the right vision, and whatever may be the general truth of his philosophy
\nof childhood in the great Ode, it seems to have been true of him. For as
\nintellectuality grew on him, the vision failed; the first clear intimations
\ndimmed and finally passed, leaving behind an unillumined waste of mere thought
\nand moralizing. But always, even from the beginning, it got into the way of his
\ninspiration. Wordsworth was not a wide thinker, though he could bring a
\nconsiderable weight of thought to the aid of the two or three great things he
\nfelt and saw lucidly and deeply, and he was unfitted to be a critic of life of
\nwhich he could only see one side with power and originality, -for the rest he
\nbelongs to his age rather than to the future and is limited in his view of
\nreligion, of society, of man by many walls of convention. But what the poet
\nsees and feels, not what he opines, is the real substance of his poetry.
\nWordsworth saw Nature and he saw man near to Nature, and when he speaks of
\nthese things, he finds either his noblest or his purest and most penetrating
\ntones. His view of them is native to his temperament and personality and at the
\nopposite pole to Byron\u2019s. Not what which is wild, dynamic or tumultuously great
\nin Nature, but her calm, her serenity, the soul of peace, the tranquil
\nInfinite, the still, near, intimate voice that speaks from flower and bird and
\nlived in as no poet before\u00a0 <\/span>or after him
\nhas done, with a spiritual closeness and identity which is of the nature of
\nrevelation, the first spiritual revelation of this high near kind to which
\nEnglish poetry had given voice. Some soul of man, too, he sees, not in revolt,
\n-he has written unforgettable lines about liberty, but a calm and ordered
\nliberty, -in harmony with this tranquil soul in Nature, finding on it a life in
\ntune with the order of an eternal law. On this perception the moralist in
\nWordsworth founds a rule of simple faith, truth, piety, self-control,
\naffection, grave gladness in which the sentimental naturalism of the eighteenth
\ncentury disappears into an ethical naturalism, a very different idealization <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 120<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of
\nhumanity in the simplicity of its direct contact with Nature unspoiled by the
\nartifice and corruption of a too developed society. All that Wordsworth has to
\nsay worth saying is confined to these motives and from them he draws his whole
\ngenuine thought inspiration.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But it is in the Nature-strain of
\nwhich he is the discoverer that he is unique, for it is then that the seer in
\nhim either speaks the revelatory thought of his spirit or gives us strains
\ngreater than thought\u2019s the imperishable substance of spiritual consciousness
\nfinding itself in sight and speech. At other times, especially when he fuses this
\nNature-strain with his\u00a0 <\/span>thought and
\nethical motive, he writes sometimes poetry of the very greatest; at others
\nagain it is of a varying worth and merit; but too often also he passes out from
\nhis uninspired intelligence work with no stamp of endurance, much less of the
\ntrue immortality. In the end poet in him died while the man and the writer
\nlived on; the moralist and concentred thinker had killed the singer, the
\nintellect had walled up the issues of the imagination and spiritual vision. But
\neven from the beginning there is an inequality and uncertainty which betray an
\nincomplete fusion of the sides of his personality, and the heavy weight of
\nintellectuality shadows over and threatens the spiritual light which it
\neventually extinguished. Except in a small number of pieces which rank among
\nthe greatest things in poetry, he can never long keep to the pure high poetic
\nexpression. He intellectualizes his poetic statement overmuch and in fact
\nstates too much and sings too little, has a dangerous turn for a too obvious
\nsermonizing, pushes too far his reliance on the worth of his substance and is
\nnot jealously careful to give it a form of beauty. In his works of long breath
\nthere are terrible stretches of flattest prose in verse with lines of power,
\nsometimes of fathomless depth like that wonderful <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Voyaging through strange seas of
\nThought, alone,\u00a0 <\/span>
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/i><\/p>\n

interspersed
\nor occurring like a lonely and splendid accident, rari nantes in gurgite
\nvasto<\/i>.\u00b9 It has been said with justice that he talks too much in verse and
\nsings too little; there is a deficient <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n \u00b9\u201dRare
\nswimming in\u00a0 <\/span>the vast gurge\u201d. <\/font>
\n <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 121<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

sense
\nof the more subtle spirit of rhythm, a deficiency which he overcomes when moved
\nor lifted up, but which, at other times hampers greatly his effectiveness. His
\ntheory of poetic diction, though it has a certain truth in it, was, as he
\npracticed it, narrow and turned to unsoundness; it betrayed him into the power
\nof the prosaic and intellectual element in his mind. These defects grew on him
\nas the reflective moralist and monk and the conventional citizen, \u2014there was
\nalways in him this curious amalgam, \u2014prevailed over the seer and poet. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But still one of the set-poets he
\nis, a seer of the calm spirit in Nature, the poet of man\u2019s large identity with
\nher and serene liberating communion: it is on this side that he is admirable
\nand unique. He has other strains too of great power. His chosen form of
\ndiction, often too bare and trivial in the beginning, too heavy afterwards,
\nhelps him at his best to a language and movement of unsurpassed poetic weight
\nand gravity charged with imaginative insight, in which his thought and his
\nethical sense and spiritual sight meet in a fine harmony, as in his one great
\nOde, in some of his sonnets, in Ruth<\/i>,
\neven in Laodamia, <\/i>in lines and
\npassages which uplift and redeem much of his less satisfying work, while when
\nthe inner light shines wholly out, it admits him to the secret of the very
\nself-revealing voice of Nature herself speaking through the human personality
\nin some closest intimacy with her or else uttering the greatness of an
\nimpersonal sight and truth. He has transparencies in which the spirit gets free
\nof the life-wave, the intelligence, the coloured veils of the imagination, and
\npoetic speech and rhythm become hints of the eternal movements and the eternal
\nstabilities, voices of the depths, rare moments of speech direct from our
\nhidden immortality.
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 122<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XVII    The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 2   \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A POETRY whose task is to render truth of the Spirit by passing…<\/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-1281","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\/1281","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=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}