{"id":1289,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:52","slug":"07-the-national-evolution-of-poetry-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\/07-the-national-evolution-of-poetry-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-07_The National Evolution of Poetry.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

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

\n The National Evolution of Poetry<\/font><\/span><\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

T<\/font>HE work of the poet depends not only on
\nhimself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and
\nthe spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates
\nfor him. It is not to be understood by this that he is or need be entirely
\nlimited by this condition or that he is to consider himself as only a voice of
\nthe national mind or bound by the past national tradition and debarred from
\nstriking out a road of his own. In nations which are returning under
\ndifficulties to a strong self-consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at
\nthe present moment, this nationalism may be a living idea and a powerful
\nmotive. And in others which have had a vivid collective life exercising a
\ncommon and intimate influence on all its individuals or in those which have
\ncherished an acute sense of a great national culture and tradition, the more
\nstable elements of that tradition may exert a very conscious influence on the
\nmind of the poets, at once helping and limiting the weaker spirits, but giving
\nto genius an exceptional power for sustained beauty of form and a satisfying
\nperfection. But this is no essential condition for the birth of great poetry.
\nThe poet, we must always remember, creates out of himself and has the
\nindefeasible right to follow freely the breath of the spirit within him,
\nprovided he satisfies in his work the law of poetic beauty. The external forms
\nof his age and his nation only give him his starting-point and some of his
\nmaterials and determine to some extent the room he finds for the\u00a0 <\/span>free play of his poetic spirit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor do I mean to subscribe to the theory of
\nthe man and his milieu or the dogma of the historical school of criticism which
\nasks of us to study all the precedents, circumstances, influences,
\nsurroundings, all that created the man and his work, – as if there were not
\nsomething in him apart from all these which made all the difference, – and
\nsupposes that out of this the right estimate <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 38<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of
\nhis poetry will arise. But not even the right historical or psychological
\nunderstanding of him need arise out of this method, since we may very easily
\nread into him and his work things which may perhaps have been there before and
\naround him, but never really got into him. But the right poetical estimate we
\ncertainly shall not form if we bring in so much that is accidental and
\nunessential to cloud our free and direct impression. Rather the very opposite
\nis the true method of appreciation, to come straight the poet and his poem for
\nall we need essentially to know about them, – we shall get there all that we
\nreally want for any true aesthetic or poetic purpose, – and afterwards go
\nelsewhere for any minor elucidation or else to satisfy our scientific and historical
\ncuriosity things accidental are then much more likely to fall into their right
\nplace and the freshness of poetic appreciation to remain unobscured. But quite
\napart from its external and therefore unreal method, there is a truth in the
\nhistorical theory of criticism which is of real help towards grasping something
\nthat is important and even essential, if not for our poetic appreciation, yet
\nfor our intellectual judgment of a poet and his work.<\/span><\/p>\n

In poetry, as in everything else that aims
\nat perfection, there are always two elements, the eternal and the time element.
\nThe first is what really and always matters, it is that which must determine
\nour definitive appreciation, our absolute verdict, or rather our essential
\nresponse to poetry. A soul expressing the eternal spirit of Truth and Beauty
\nthrough some of the infinite variations of beauty, with the word for its
\ninstrument, that is, after all, what the poet is, and it is to a similar soul
\nin us seeking the same spirit and responding to it that he makes his appeal. It
\nis when we can get this response at its purest and in its most direct and
\nheightened awakening that our faculty of poetic appreciation becomes at once
\nsurest and most intense. It is, we may say, the impersonal enjoyer of creative
\nbeauty in us responding to the impersonal creator and interpreter of beauty in
\nthe poet; for it is the impersonal spirit of Truth and Beauty that is seeking
\nto express itself through his personality, and it is that which finds its own
\nword and seems itself to create in his highest moments of inspiration. And this
\nImpersonal is concerned with the creative idea and the motive of beauty which
\nis seeking expression and with the attempt <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 39<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

to
\nfind the perfect expression, the inevitable word and the rhythm that reveals.
\nAll else is subordinate accidenta1, the crude material and the conditioning
\nmedium of this essential endeavour.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still there is also the personality of the
\npoet and the personality of the hearer, the one giving the pitch and the form
\nof the success arrived at, while the other determines the characteristic
\nintellectual and aesthetic judgment to which its appeal arrives. The
\ncorrespondence or the dissonance between the two decides the relation between
\nthe poet and his reader and out of that arises what is personal in our
\nappreciation and judgment of his poetry. In this personal or time element there
\nis always much that is, merely accidental and often rather limits and deflects
\nour judgment than helps usefully to form it; How much that interferes can be
\nseen when we try to value contemporary poetry. It is a matter of continual
\nexperience that even critics of considerable insight and sureness of taste are
\nyet capable of the most extraordinarily wrong judgments, whether on the side of
\nappreciation or of depreciation, when they have to pass a verdict on their
\ncontemporaries. And this is because a crowd of accidental influences belonging
\nto the effect of the time and the mental environment upon our mentality
\nexercise an exaggerated domination and distort or colour the view of our mental
\neye upon its object. But apart from this there is always something essential to
\nour present personality which has a right to be heard. For we are all of us
\nsouls developing in a constant endeavour to get into unity with the, spirit in
\nlife through its many forms of manifestation and on many different lines. And
\nas there is in Indian Yoga a principle of adhikāra<\/i> something in the
\nimmediate power of a man’s nature that determines by its characteristics his
\nright to this or that way of Yoga, of union, which, whatever its merits or its
\nlimitations, is his right way because it is most helpful to him personally, so
\nin all our activities of life and mind there is this principle of adhikāra<\/i>.
\nThat which we can appreciate in poetry and still more the way in which we
\nappreciate it, is that in it and us which is most helpful to us and therefore,
\nfor the time being, at least, right for us in our attempt to get into union
\nwith the universal or the transcendent beauty through the revealing ideas and motives
\nand revealing forms of poetic creation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span>
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 40<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

This is the individual aspect of the
\npersonal or time element. But there is also a, larger movement to which we
\nbelong, both ourselves and the poet and his poetry; or rather it is the same movement
\nof the general soul of mankind in the same endeavour towards the same
\nobjective. In poetry this shows itself in a sort of evolution from the
\nobjective to the inward from the inward to the spiritual, an evolution which
\nhas many curves and turns and cycles, many returns upon past motives and
\nimperfect anticipations of future motives, a general labour of self enlargement
\nand self-finding. It is a clear idea of this evolution which may most helpfully
\ninform the historical or evolutionary element in our judgment and appreciation
\nof poetry. And this general movement we see working itself out in different
\nforms and on different lines through the souls of the nations and peoples who
\nhave arrived at a strong self-expression by the things of the mind, art and
\nthought and poetry. These things do not indeed form the whole of the movement
\neven as they do not make up the whole of the life of the people; they rather
\nrepresent its highest points, – or the highest with the exception of the
\nspiritual, in the few nations that have powerfully developed the spiritual
\nforce within, – and in them we best see the inner character and aim of that
\nline of the movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

This general, evolution has its own natural
\nperiods or ages; but as with the stone, bronze and other ages discovered by the
\narchaeologists, their time periods do not correspond in all the peoples which
\nhave evolved them. Moreover, they do not always follow each other in quite the
\nsame order; for in things psychological the Spirit in the world varies his
\nmovements more freely than in things physical. There, besides, he can
\nanticipate the motives of a higher stratum of psychological development while
\nyet he lives the general life of a lower stratum; so too when he has got on to
\na higher level of development, he may go strongly back to a past and inferior
\nmotive and see how it works out when altered by the motives and powers of the
\nsuperior medium. There is too here a greater complexity of unseen or half-seen
\nsubconscient and superconscient tendencies and influences at work upon the
\ncomparatively small part of us which is conscious of what it is doing. And very
\noften a nation in its self-expression <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 41<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

is
\nboth helped and limited by what has been left behind from the evolution of a
\npast self which, being dead, yet liveth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, the Indian spirit could seize
\npowerfully the spiritual motive in an age which lived a strenuous objective
\nlife and was strongly objective in its normal outward mentality, and could
\nexpress it at first in the concrete forms proper to that life and mentality
\nconverted into physical symbols of the supraphysical and then, by a rapid
\nliberation, in its own proper voice, so producing the sacred poetry of the Veda
\nand Upanishads. An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its blood could seize
\nintellectually on the motives of Catholic Christianity and give them a clear
\nand supreme expression in Dante while all Germanised Europe had only been
\nstammering in the faltering infantile accents of romance verse or shadowing
\nthem out in Gothic stone, successfully in the most material form of the
\nspiritual. In another direction, when it seized upon the romantic life motive,
\nthe meeting-place of the Teuton and the Celt, we see it losing entirely the
\nmystically sentimental Celtic element, Italianising it into the sensuousness of
\nTasso, and Italianising the rest into an intellectualised, a half imaginative,
\nhalf satiric play with the superficial motives of romance, – the inevitable
\nturn of the Italianised Roman spirit. On the other hand, the English spirit,
\nhaving got rid of the Latin culture and holding the Celtic mind for a long time
\nat bay, exiled into the Welsh mountains or parked beyond the pale in Ireland
\nfollowed with remarkable fidelity the natural curve and stages of the
\npsychological evolution of poetry, taking several centuries to arrive at the
\nintellectual motive and more to get at something like the spiritual.
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Generally, every nation or people has or
\ndevelops a spirit in its being a special soul-form of the human all-soul and a
\nlaw of its nature which determines the lines and turns of its evolution. All
\nthat it takes from its environment it naturally attempts to assimilate to this
\nspirit, transmute into stuff of this soul-form, make apt to and governable by
\nthis law of its nature. All its self-expression is in conformity with them.
\nAnd\u00a0 <\/span>its poetry, art and thought are the
\nexpression of this self and of the greater possibilities of its self to which
\nit moves. The individual poet and <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 42<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

his
\npoetry are part of its movement. Not that they are limited by the present
\ntemperament and outward forms of the national mind; they may exceed them. The
\nsoul of the poet may be like a star and dwell apart; even, his work may seem
\nnot merely a variation from but a revolt against the limitations of the
\nnational mind. But still the roots of his personality are there in its spirit
\nand even his variation and revolt are an attempt to bring out something that is
\nlatent and suppressed or at least something which is trying to surge up from
\nthe secret all-sou1 into the soul-form of the nation. Therefore to appreciate
\nthis national evolution of poetry and the relations of the poet and his work
\nwith it cannot but be fruitful if we observe them from the point of view not so
\nmuch of things external to poetry, but of its own spirit and characteristic
\nforms and motives. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 43<\/span><\/p>\n

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