{"id":1288,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","slug":"14-the-course-of-english-poetry-5-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\/14-the-course-of-english-poetry-5-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-14_The Course of English Poetry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 5.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font> <\/span>XIII<\/font><\/p>\n

\n The Course of English Poetry \u2013 5<\/font> <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/span>
\nA<\/font>
\nPOWER of poetry in a highly evolved language which describes so low a downward
\ncurve as to reach this dry and brazen intellectualism, must either perish by a
\ndull slow decay of its creative force and live flexibilities of
\nexpression,\u00a0 <\/span>-that has happened more than
\nonce in literary history, -or else be saved by a violent revulsion. But this
\nsaving revulsion, if it comes, is likely, if bold enough, to compensate for the
\npast prone descent by an equally steep ascension to an undreamed-of novelty of
\nillumined motive and revealing spirit. This is the economy of Nature\u2019s lapses
\nin the things of the mind no less than in the movements of life: these falls
\nare, -when the needed energy is within, -an obscure condition of unprecedented
\nelevations. In the recoil, in the rush or upwinging to the opposite extreme,
\nsome discovery is made which would otherwise have been long postponed or not at
\nall have arrived, doors are burst open which would have been passed by unseen
\nor resisted any less vehement or rapidly illumined effort to unlock them. On
\nthe other hand, it is a constant disadvantage of these revolutions -which are
\nin fact forced rapidities of evolution -that they carry in them premature light
\nand an element of quick unripeness by which a subsequent reaction and return to
\nlower levels becomes inevitable, because the contemporary mind is not really
\nready and what is accomplished is itself rather an intuitive anticipation than
\na firmly based knowledge and execution of the thing seen. All these familiar
\nphenomena are visible in the new turn, a swift and far- reaching upward curve,
\nwhich carries English poetry from the hard and glittering, well-turned and
\nwell-rhymed intellectual superficialities of a thin pseudo-classicism to its
\nsecond luminous outbreak of sight and inspiration.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Intellect, reason, a clarity of
\nthe understanding and arranging intelligence is not the highest power of our
\nbeing. If it were <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 89<\/p>\n

\n

our
\nsummit, many things which have now a great or a supreme importance for human
\nculture, religion, art, poetry, would either be a lure or graceful play of the
\nimagination and emotions, or though admissible and useful for certain human
\nends, would still be deprived of the truth of their own highest indications.
\nPoetry, even when it is dominated by intellectual tendency and motive, cannot
\nreally live and work by intellect alone; it is not created nor wholly shaped by
\nreason and judgment, but is an intuitive seeing and an inspired hearing. But
\nintuition and inspiration are not only spiritual in their essence, they are
\nrays from a greater and intenser Light than the tempered clarity of our
\nintellectual understanding. They may be turned fruitfully to a use which is not
\ntheir last or most intrinsic purpose, -used, in poetry, to give a deeper and
\nmore luminous force and heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or
\nto the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of
\nthought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or
\nwhich raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and
\nouter life of Nature and man. But\u00a0 <\/span>every
\npower in the end finds itself drawn towards its own proper home and own highest
\ncapacity at last to the expression of things spiritual and eternal and their
\npower and working in temporal things and must find in that interpretation their
\nown riches account, largest and most satisfied action, purest acme of native
\ncapacity, An ideal and spiritual poetry revealing the spirit in itself and in
\nthings, the unseen in the seen or above and behind it, unveiling ranges of
\nexistence which the physical mind ignores, pointing man himself to capacities
\nof godhead in being, truth, beauty, power, joy which are beyond the highest of
\nhis common or his yet realized values of existence, is the last potentiality of
\nthis creative, interpretative power of the human mind. When the eye of the poet
\nhas seen life externally or with a more vital inwardness, has risen to the
\nclarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives and
\nunderstands it, when his word has caught some revealing speech and rhythm of
\nwhat he has seen, much has been seized, but not the whole possible field of
\nvision; this other and greater realm <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 90<\/p>\n

\n

still
\nremains open for a last transcendence.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In
\nthis fourth turn of the evolution of English poetry we get, for the first time
\nin occidental literature, some falling of this higher light upon the poetic
\nmind, -except in so far as the ancient poets had received it through myth and
\nsymbol or a religious mystic here and there attempted to give his experience
\nrhythmic and imaginative form. But here there is the first poetic attempt of
\nthe intellectual faculty striving at the height of its own development to look
\nbeyond its own level directly into the unseen and the unknown and to unveil the
\nideal truth of its own highest universal conceptions. This was not an
\ninevitable outcome of the age that preceded Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley. For
\nthe intellectual endeavour had been in Milton inadequate in range, subtlety and
\ndepth, in those who followed paltry, narrow and elegantly null; a new larger
\nendeavour in the same filed might have been expected which would have set
\nbefore it the aim of a richer, deeper, wider, more curious intellectual
\nhumanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the
\nascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. To that eventually, following
\nthe main stream of European thought and culture, English poetry turned for a
\ntime in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century; that too was more
\nindistinctly the half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement which
\nintervenes between Pope and Wordsworth.\u00a0
\n<\/span>But this movement was obscure, faltering and poor in its achievement;
\nwhen the greater force came in, the influences that were abroad were those
\nwhich elsewhere found expression in the revolutionary idealism of the French
\nRevolution and in German transcendentalism and romanticism. Intellectual in
\ntheir idea and substance, they were, in the mind of five or six English poets,
\neach of them a remarkable individuality, carried beyond themselves by the
\nsudden emergence of some half-mystical Celtic turn of the national mind into
\nsupra-intellectual sources of inspiration. Insufficiently supported by any
\nadequate spiritual knowledge, unable to find securely the right and native word
\nof their own meaning, these greater tendencies faded away or were lost by the
\npremature end of the poets who might, had they lived, have given them a supreme
\nutterance. But still theirs was the dawn of whose light <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 91<\/p>\n

\n

we
\nshall find the
\nnoon in the age now
\nopening before us if it fulfils all its intimations. Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth
\nwere first explores of a new world of poetry other than that of the ancients or
\nof the intermediate poets, which may be the familiar realm of three aesthetic
\nfaculty in the future, must be in fact if we are not continually to describe
\nthe circle of efflorescence, culmination and decay within the old hardly
\nchanging circle. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Certain motives which led up to this
\nnew poetry are already visible in the work of the middle eighteenth century.
\nThere is, first, a visible attempt to break quite away from the prison of the
\nformal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of
\nimagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical
\ncult. Poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by
\na return to Miltonic blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form, -an
\ninfluence which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley,-to lyrical
\nmovements, but more prominently the classical ode form, or to freer and richer
\nmoulds of verse. Some pale effort is made to recover something of the
\nShakespearian wealth of language or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the
\npre-Restoration diction and to modify it to suit the intellectualised treatment
\nof thought and life which was now an indispensable element; for the old rich
\nvital utterance was no longer possible, an intellectualised speech had become a
\nfixed and a well-acquired need of a more developed mentality. Romanticism of
\nthe modern type now makes its first appearance in the choice of the subjects of
\npoetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quire in
\nthe grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze
\nof the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another
\nand a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished
\nfrom the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these newer
\nmotives are only incipient and unable to get free expression because there is
\nstill a heavy weight of the past intellectual tradition. Rhetoric yet loads the
\nstyle or, when it is avoided, still the purer tensity of poetic emotion is not
\naltogether found. Verse form tends to be still rather hard and external or else
\nineffective in its movement; the native lyric note has not yet returned, but
\nonly the <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 92<\/p>\n

\n

rhetorical
\nstateliness of the ode, not lyricised as in Keats and Shelley, or else lyrical
\nforms managed with only an outward technique but without any cry in them.
\nRomanticism is still rather of the intellect than in the temperament, sentiment
\nruns thinly and feebly and is weighted with heavy intellectual turns. Nature
\nand life and things are seen accurately as objects and forms, but not with any
\nvision, emotion or penetration into the spirit behind them. Many of the
\ncurrents which go to make up the great stream of modern poetry are beginning to
\nrun in thin tricklings, but still in a hard and narrow bed. There is no sign of
\nthe sudden wings of a splendid moment.\u00a0 <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

In Burns these new-born imprisoned spirit
\nbreak out from their bounds and get into a free air of natural, direct and
\nliving reality, find a straightforward speech and a varied running or bounding
\nmovement of freedom. This is the importance of this solitary voice from the
\nnorth in the evolution, apart from the intrinsic merits of his poetry. His work
\nhas its limitations; The language is often too intellectualised to give the
\nlyrical emotion, though it comes from the frank, unartificial and sturdy
\nintellect of a son of the soil; the view on life is close, almost too close to
\ngive the deeper poetic or artistic effect, but it deals much with outsides and
\nsurfaces and the commonnesses and realisms of action, sometimes only does it
\nsuggest to us the subtler something which gives lyrical poetry not only its
\nform and lilt and its power to stir, -all these he has, -but its more moving
\ninmost appeal. Nevertheless, Burns has in him the things which are most native
\nto the poetry of our modern times; He brings in the new naturalness, the
\nnearness of the fuller poetic mind, intellectualised, informed with the power
\nof clear reflective thought, to life and nature, the closely observing eye, the
\nstirring force of great general ideas, the spirit of revolt and self-assertion,
\nthe poignant sentiment, sometimes even a touch of the psychological subtlety.
\nThese things are in him fresh, strong, initial as in a forerunner impelled by
\nthe first breath of the coming air, but not in that finished possession of the
\nnew motives which is to be the greatness of the future master-singers. That we
\nbegin to get first in Wordsworth. <\/p>\n

Page \u2013
\n93<\/p>\n

\n

His
\nwas the privilege of the earliest initiation.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This new poetry has six great voices
\nwho fall naturally in spite of their pronounced differences into pairs,
\nWordsworth and Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Byron sets out
\nwith a strangely transformed echo of the past intellectualism, is carried
\nbeyond it by the elemental force of his personality, has even one foot across
\nthe borders of the spiritual, but never quite enters into that kingdom.
\nWordsworth breaks away with deliberate purpose from the past, forces his way
\ninto this new realm, but finally sinks under the weight of the narrower
\nintellectual tendencies which he carried with him into its amplitudes. Blake
\nand Coleridge open magical gates, pass by flowering side lanes with hedges
\nladen with supernatural blooms into a middle world whence their voices come to
\nus ringing with an unearthly melody. In Shelley the idealism and spiritual
\nimpulse rise to almost giddy heights in a luminous ether and are lost there,
\nunintelligible to contemporary humanity, only now beginning to return to us
\nwith their message. Keats, the youngest and in many directions the most gifted
\nof these initiators, enters the secret temple of ideal Beauty, but has not time
\nto find his way into the deepest mystic sanctuary. In his the spiritual seeking
\nstops abruptly short and prepares to fall away down a rich sensuous incline to
\nsubsequent poetry which turns from it to seek poetic Truth or pleasure through
\nthe senses and an artistic or curiously observing or finely psychologising
\nintellectualism. This dawn has no
\nnoon,
\nhardly even a morning.
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage – 94<\/font><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XIII  The Course of English Poetry \u2013 5    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A POWER of poetry in a highly evolved language which describes so low a…<\/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-1288","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\/1288","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=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}