{"id":1283,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:50","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:50","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:50","slug":"30-the-power-of-the-spirit-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\/30-the-power-of-the-spirit-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-30_The Power of the Spirit.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


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


\nThe Power of the Spirit<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

           
\n<\/b><\/font>A<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/b>POETRY born direct from and full of the power of the spirit and
\ntherefore a largest and a deepest self-expression of the soul and mind of the race
\nis that for which we are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of
\nthe creative mind seem to be in travail. This poetry will be a voice of eternal
\nthings raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience
\nthe events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and
\nsung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal
\nmanifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of
\nthings and the self of Nature; it will be a creative and interpretative
\nrevelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and
\nbeauty and of a greater spiritualised vision and power of life. This can only
\ncome if the mind of the race takes actually the step over which it is now
\nhesitating and passes from the satisfaction of the liberated intellect which
\nhas been its preoccupation for the last two centuries to the pursuit of the
\nrealisation of the larger self, from the scrutiny of the things that explain to
\nthe experience of the things that reveal, the truths of the spirit. The
\nprogress of the mind of humanity takes place by a constant enlarging at\u00adtended
\nwith a constant transmutation of its experience which is reflected in its ways
\nof self-expression, and the tendency of this progression is always more and
\nmore inward, a movement that cannot cease till we get to the inmost, and even
\nthen there can be no real cessation because the inmost is the infinite. The pro\u00adgress
\nof poetry, as it has been viewed in these pages, has been an index of an
\nadvance of the cultural mind of humanity which has enlarged its scope by a
\nconstant raising of the scale of the soul’s experience and has now risen to a
\ngreat height and breadth of intellectual vision and activity, and the question
\nis at present of the next step in the scale of ascension, and whether it can
\nnow be<\/p>\n

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firmly taken or will be missed once more with a
\nfall back to another retracing of the psychological circuit. That will
\ndetermine the character of the coming era of the mind and life of man and
\nconsequently the character of all his methods of aesthetic self-expression.<\/p>\n

The one thing that man sees above the
\nintellect is the spirit and therefore the developed intellect of the race, if
\nit is at all to go forward, must open now to an understanding and seeing
\nspirituality, other than the rather obscure religionism of the past which
\nbelonged to the lower levels of the life and the emotion and which has had its
\nbounds broken and its narrownesses condemned by the free light of intellectual
\nthought: this will be rather an illumined self-knowledge and God-knowledge and
\na world-knowledge too which transmuted in that greater light will spiritualise
\nthe whole view and motive of our existence. That is the one development to
\nwhich an accomplished intellectualism can open and by exceeding itself find its
\nown right consummation. The alternative is a continual ringing of changes in
\nthe spinnings of the intellectual circle which leads nowhere or else a collapse
\nto the lower levels which may bring human civilisation down with a run to a new
\ncorrupted and intellectualised barbarism. This is a catastrophe which has
\nhappened before in the world’s history and it was brought about ostensibly by
\noutward events and causes, but arose essentially from an inability of the
\nintellect hit of man to find its way out of itself and out of the vital formula
\nin which its strainings and questionings can only exhaust itself and life into
\na full illumination of the spirit and an enlightened application of the saving
\nspiritual principle to mind and life and action. The possibility of such a
\ncatastrophe is by no means absent from the present human situation. <\/span><\/b>On<\/span> the one hand the straining of the
\nintellect to its limits of elasticity has brought in a recoil to a straining for
\nunbridled vital, emotional and sensational experience and a morbid disorder in
\nthe economy of the nature and on the other there have come in, perhaps as a
\nresult, perturbations of the earth system that threaten to break up the mould
\nof civilisation, and the problem of the race is whether a new and greater mould
\ncan be created or instead a collapse and decadence intervene and a recommencing
\nof the circle. The hope <\/p>\n

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of the race in this crisis lies in the fidelity of
\nits intellect to the larger perceptions it now has of the greater self of
\nhumanity, the turning of its will to the inception of delivering forms of
\nthought, art and social endeavour which arise from those perceptions and the
\nraising of the intellectual mind to the intuitive supra-intellectual spiritual
\nconsciousness which can alone give the basis for a spiritualised life of the
\nrace and the realisation of its diviner potentialities. The meaning of
\nspirituality is a new and greater inner life of man founded in the
\nconsciousness of his true, his in\u00admost, highest and largest self and spirit by
\nwhich he receives the whole of existence as a progressive manifestation of the
\nself in the universe and his own life as a field of a possible transforma\u00adtion
\nin which its divine sense will be found, its potentialities highly evolved, the
\nnow imperfect forms changed into an image of the divine perfection, and an
\neffort not only to see but to live out these greater possibilities of his
\nbeing. And this conscious\u00adness of his true self and spirit must bring with it a
\nconsciousness too of the oneness of the individual and the race and a harmo\u00adnious
\nunity of the life of man with the spirit in Nature and the spirit of the
\nuniverse.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

The voice of a new deeper
\nintuitive poetry can be a powerful aid to this necessary change of seeing and
\naspiration, because what the thought comprehends with a certain abstraction, it
\ncan make living to the imagination by the word and a thing of beauty and
\ndelight and inspiration for the soul’s acceptance. This poetry will speak of
\nnew things and of old things in a new way and with a new voice, not by any
\nexclusion or diminution of its province, but by a great heightening above, a
\ngreat intimacy within, a great enlargement and wideness around, a vision of inmost
\nthings and therefore a changed vision of the world and life and the untold
\npotentialities of the soul’s experience. It will restore to us the sense of the
\nEternal, the presence of the Divine which has been taken from us for a time by
\nan intellect too narrowly and curiously fixed on the external and physical
\nworld, but it will not speak of these things in the feeble and conventional
\ntones of traditional religion, but as a voice of intuitive experience and the
\nrhythm and chant of the revelation of an eternal presence. The voice of the
\npoet will reveal to us by the inspired rhythmic word the God who<\/p>\n

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\n

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is the Self of all things and beings, the Life of
\nthe universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all the emotion and
\ndelight of the endeavour of the human soul to discover the touch and joy of
\nthat Divinity within him in whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being
\nand life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and
\nwith Nature and with all creatures. The note which has already begun and found
\nmany of its tones in Whitman and Carpenter and A.E. and Tagore will grow into a
\nmore full and near and intimate poetic knowledge and vision and feeling which
\nwill continue to embrace more and more, no longer only the more exceptional
\ninner state and touches which are the domain of mystic poetry, but everything
\nin our inner and outer existence until all life and experience has been brought
\nwithin the mould of the spiritual sense and the spiritual interpretation. A
\npoetry of this kind will be in a supreme way what all art should be, a thing of
\nharmony and joy and illumination, a solution and release of the soul from its
\nvital unrest and questioning and struggle, not by any ignoring of these things
\nbut by an uplifting into the strength of the self within and the light and air
\nof its greater view where there is found not only the point of escape but the
\nsupporting calmness and power of a seated knowledge, mastery and deliverance.
\nIn the greatest art and poetry there should be something of the calm of the
\nimpersonal basing and elevating the effort and struggle of the personality,
\nsomething of the largeness of the universal releasing and harmonising the
\ntroubled concentrations of the individual existence, something of the sense of
\nthe transcendent raising the inferior, ignorant and uncertain powers of life
\ntowards a greater strength and light and Ananda. And when art and poetry can
\nutter the fullest sense of these things, it is then that they will become the
\ngreatest fortifiers and builders of the soul of man and assure it in the
\ngrandeur of its own largest self and spirit. The poetry of Europe has been a
\nvoice intensely eager and moved but restless, troubled and without a sure base
\nof happiness and repose, vibrating with the passion of life and avid of its joy
\nand pleasure and beauty, but afflicted also by its unrest, grief, <\/i>tragedy,
\ndiscord, insufficiency, incertitude, capable only of its lesser harmonies, not
\nof any great release and satisfaction. The<\/p>\n

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art and poetry of the East have been the creation
\nof a larger and quieter spirit, intensely responsive as in the Far East to
\ndeeper psychic significances and finding there fine and subtle har\u00admonies of
\nthe soul’s experience or, as in India, expressing in spite of the ascetic creed
\nof vanity and illusion much rather the great\u00adness and power and satisfied
\nactivity of human thought and life and action and behind it the communion of
\nthe soul with the Eternal. The poetry of the future reconciling all these strains,
\ntaking the highest as its keynote and interpreting the rest in its intensity
\nand its largeness, will offer to the human mind a more complex aesthetic and
\nspiritual satisfaction, express a more richly filled content of self-experience
\nraised to a more persistent sight of things absolute and infinite and a more
\npotent and all com\u00adprehending release into the calm and delight of the spirit.<\/p>\n

And this poetry must bring with it too a new
\ndepth of the intimacies of the soul with Nature. The early poetry of Nature
\ngave us merely the delight of the forms of objects and the beauty of the
\nsetting of the natural world around man’s life, but not any inner communion
\nbetween him and the universal Mother. A later tone brought in more of the
\nsubtleties of the vital soul of the natural world and a response of the moved
\nsensation and emotion of the life-spirit in us and out of this arose an
\nintellectual and aes\u00adthetic sense of hidden finer and subtler things and, more
\npro\u00adfound, in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Keats and Shelley an attempt
\nat communion with a universal presence in Nature and a living principle of
\npeace or light and love or univer\u00adsal power or conscious delight and beauty. A
\nmore deeply seeing and intimate poetry will take up these things into a yet
\ngreater Nature sense and vision and make us aware of the very self and soul and
\nconscious being of Nature, her profoundest psychic sug\u00adgestion and
\nsignificance, the spirit in her and the intuition of all that she keeps hidden
\nin her forms and veils and reveals more and more to the soul that has entered
\ninto unity with that spirit. The more intuitive human mind of the future,
\ndelivered from its present limitation of sympathy by the touch of the one self
\nin all being, will feel as has not been felt before a unity with other con\u00adsciousness
\nin Nature and hear the voice of self-revelation of all that is mute to us, the
\n‘soul and life of things that now seem inert <\/p>\n

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and lifeless, the soul and life of the animal
\nworld, the soul and life of the things that grow in silence and are enclosed in
\nthe absorbed dream of their own half-conscient existence. And it will open to
\nand interpret not only man and terrestrial Nature, for a poetry concerned with
\nthat alone excludes large ranges of self-experience, but other domains also of
\nour spirit. It will give the key of the worlds of supernature, and allow us to
\nmove among the beings and scenes, images and influences and presences of the
\npsychic kingdoms which are near to us behind their dark or luminous curtain and
\nwill not be afraid to enter into vaster realms of the self and other universal
\nstates and the powers that stand behind our life and the soul’s eternal spaces.
\nIt will do this not merely in a symbol of greatened human magnitudes, as the
\nold poets represented the gods, or in hues of romantic glamour or in the
\nfar-off light of a mystic remoteness, but with the close directness and reality
\nthat comes from intimate vision and feeling, and make these things a part of
\nour living experience.<\/p>\n

A poetry of large spiritual inspiration must
\nnecessarily be, when it is not dealing directly with eternal things and turns
\nits eye on the movement of time and the actual life and destiny of man, largely
\npresent and futurist in its insistence. The poet will continue though in a new
\nway and with a new eye to transfigure the. past for us, but will not feel that
\nneed to live in an imaginative preoccupation with the past which withdraws
\ncompelled from the unmanageable and transformable actuality of the present: for
\nto live in the spirit is to be able to distinguish the eternal in\u00a0 <\/span>the transient forms of the moment and to see
\ntoo in these forms a revelation of the spirit’s greater significances. His
\nvision will search all the ways of the present and interpret deeply to man the
\nsense of that which is making him and which he is making: <\/i>it will reveal
\nthe divinity in all its disguises, face all even that is ugly and terrible and
\nbaffling in the enigma of our actual human life, find its deeper aesthesis,
\ndisengage what is struggling untransformed in its outsides and make out of it
\nby poetic sympathy material of spiritual truth and beauty. This is a strain
\nthat has been growing in recent poetic creation and it suffers as yet too often
\nfrom an insufficient fineness of insight and a too crude handling, but, that
\nimmaturity once overcome, must hold <\/p>\n

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a large and assured place among the great poetic
\nmotives. But especially a clearer and more inspiring vision of the destiny of
\nthe spirit in man will be a large part of the poetry of the future. For the
\nspiritual eye is not only able to see the divinity in man as he is, the
\ndivinity in his struggle and victory and failure and even in his sin and
\noffence and littleness, but the spirit is master of the future, its past and
\npresent in time not only the half-formed stuff of its coming ages, but in a
\nprofound sense it is the call and attraction of the future that makes the past
\nand present, and that future will be more and more seen to be the growth of the
\ngod\u00adhead in the human being which is the high fate of this race that thinks and
\nwills and labours towards its own perfection. This is a strain that we shall
\nhear more and more, the song of the grow\u00ading godhead of the kind, of human
\nunity, of spiritual freedom, of the coming supermanhood of man, of the divine
\nideal seeking to actualise itself in the life of the earth, of the call to the
\nindivi\u00addual to rise to his godlike possibility and to the race to live in the
\ngreatness of that which humanity feels within itself as a power of the spirit
\nwhich it has to deliver into some yet ungrasped per\u00adfect form of clearness. To
\nembellish life with beauty is only the most outward function of art and poetry,
\nto make life more inti\u00admately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning
\nis its higher office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and
\nreveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation.<\/p>\n

These new voices must needs be the result of
\nthe growth of the power of the spirit on the mind of man which is the pro\u00admise
\nof a coming era. It is always indeed the spirit in him that shapes his poetic
\nutterance; but when that spirit is preoccupied with the outward life, the great
\npoets are those who make his common life and action and its surroundings
\nsplendid and beautiful and noble to him by the power of their vision; when it
\nis the intellect through which it labours, the great poets are those who give a
\nprofound enlightening idea and creative interpretation of the world and Nature
\nand all that man is and does and thinks and dreams, but when the spirit turns
\nto its own large intuitive will and vision, then it is yet profounder things to
\nwhich the great poet must give utterance, the inmost sense of things, the <\/span><\/p>\n

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inmost consciousness of Nature, the movement of
\nthe deepest soul of man, the truth that reveals the meaning of existence and
\nthe universal delight and beauty and the power of a greater life and the
\ninfinite potentialities of our experience and self-creation. These may not be
\nthe only strains, but they will be the greatest and those which the highest
\nhuman mind will demand from the poet and they will colour all the rest by their
\nopening of new vistas to the general intelligence and life sense of the race.
\nAnd whatever poetry may make its substance or its subject, this growth of the
\npower of the spirit must necessarily bring into it a more intense and revealing
\nspeech, a more inward and subtle and penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of
\nsight, a more vibrant and responsive sense, the eye that looks at all smallest
\nand greatest things for the significances that have not yet been discovered and
\nthe secrets that are not on the surface. That will be <\/i>the type of the
\nnew utterance and the boundless field of poetic discovery left for the
\ninspiration of the humanity of the future.<\/p>\n

\nPage – 256<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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