{"id":1291,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1291"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:53","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:53","slug":"10-the-course-of-english-poetry-1-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\/10-the-course-of-english-poetry-1-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-10_The Course of English Poetry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 1.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

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

\n <\/font>      The Course of English
\nPoetry \u2013 1<\/font><\/span> <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/span><\/b>
\nT<\/font>HESE are the general
\ncharacteristics of English Poetry, the powers which have been at work in it.
\nFor we have to see first what are the spirit and temper that have stood behind and
\ncome to the front in a literature in order to understand the course that it has
\ntaken and the forms that it has assumed. The field which poetry covers is
\ncommon ground, but each nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative
\nquality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or
\nangle of its vision and the shape of its work. The English poetical genius was
\nevidently predestined by the complexity of its spirit and its union of opposite
\npowers to an adventurous consecutive seeking over the whole field; but it first
\npotentiality its limitations point to a more facile success in the concrete or
\nimaginative presentation of life, a more difficult success in the intellectual
\nor spiritual interpretation of life, while most difficult of all for it would
\nbe a direct presentation of the things beyond, of mystic realities or of the
\nhigher truths of the spirit. Yet, on the other hand, if this difficulty could
\nonce be overcome, then because of the profounder intensity of the power poetical
\nspeech which this literature has developed, the very highest expression of
\nthese things would be possible, a nearer expression than would be possible
\nwithout much fashioning to the poetry of the Latin tongues whose speech has
\nbeen cast in the mould of a clear or high intellectuality rather that into the
\nnative utterance of imaginative vision. We see in modern French creation a
\nconstant struggle with this limitation and, even, a poet like Mallarm\u00e9 breaking
\nthe mould of the French speech in his desperate effort to force it to utter
\nwhat is to its natural clear lucidity almost unutterable. No such difficulty
\npresents itself in English poetry; the depths, the vistas of suggestion, the
\npower to open the doors of the infinite are already there for the mind rightly <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 58<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

gifted
\nto evoke and use for the highest purposes. Much less naturally fitted for fine
\nprose utterance, the language has all the close lights and shades, the heights
\nand depths, the recesses of fathomless sense needed by the poet. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We have to see how this has come
\nabout; for it has not been accomplished at all easily, but only by much effort
\nand seeking. We observe first that English poetry has covered the field that
\nlies before the genius of poetry by successive steps which follow the natural
\nascending order of our developing perceptions. It began by a quite external, a
\nclear and superficial substance and utterance. It proceeded to a deeper vital
\npoetry, a poetry of the power and beauty and wonder and spontaneous thought,
\nthe joy and passion and pain, the colour and music of Life, in which the
\nexternal presentation of life and things was taken up, but exceeded and given
\nits full dynamic and imaginative content. From that it turned to an attempt at
\nmastering the secret of the Latins, the secret of a clear, measured and
\nintellectual dealing with life, things and ideas. Then came an attempt, a
\nbrilliant and beautiful attempt to get through Nature and thought and the
\nmentality in life and Nature and their profounder aesthetic suggestion to certain
\nspiritual truths behind them. This attempt could not come to perfect fruition,
\npartly because there had not been the right intellectual preparation or a
\nsufficient basis of spiritual knowledge and experience and only so much could
\nbe given as the solitary individual intuition of the poet could by a sovereign
\neffort attain, partly because after the lapse into an age of reason the
\nspontaneous or the intender language of spiritual poetry could not always be
\nfound or, if found, could not be securely kept. So we get a deviation into
\nanother age of intellectual, artistic or reflective poetry with a much wider
\nrange, but less profound in its roots, less high in its growth; and partly out
\nof this, partly by a recoil from it has come the turn of recent and contemporary
\npoetry which seems at last to be approaching the secret of the utterance of
\nprofounder truth with its right magic of speech and rhythm.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We get the first definite
\nstarting-point of this movement in the poetry of Chaucer when the rough poverty
\nof the Anglo-Saxon mind first succeeded in assimilating the French influence <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 59<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and
\nrefining and clarifying by that its speech and its aesthetic sense. It is
\ncharacteristic of the difficulty of the movement that as in its beginning, so
\nat each important turn, or at least on the three first occasions of a new
\norientation, it has had thus to go to school, to make almost a fresh start
\nunder the influences of a foreign culture and poetry, needing in spite of so
\nmuch poetic originality and energy and genius a strong light of suggestion from
\noutside to set it upon its way. All modern literatures have at one time or
\nanother needed this kind of external help, but once formed and in possession of
\nthemselves they adopt impresses more or less lightly and only as a secondary
\nassistance. But here we have remodelling of the whole plan under foreign
\nteaching Chaucer gives English poetry a first shape by the help of French
\nromance models and the work of Italian masters; the Elizabethans start anew in
\ndependence on Renaissance influences from France and Italy and a side wind from
\nSpain; Milton goes direct to classical models; the Restoration and the
\neighteenth century take pliantly the pseudo-classical form from the
\ncontemporary French poets and critics. Still this dependence is only in
\nexternals; in the essential things of poetry some native character prevails, a
\nnew turn is rapidly given, an original power and method emerges; the dynamic
\nvitality of the race was too great not to arrive almost at once at a
\ntransmutation. <\/p>\n

The first early motive and style of this
\npoetry as it emerges in Chaucer strikes at once an English note,. The motive is
\nthe poetic observation of ordinary human life and character -without any
\npreoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in
\nthe individual mind and temperament of the poet. Chaucer has his eye fixed on
\nthe object, and that object is the external action of life as it passes before
\nhim, throwing its figures on his kind and stirring it to a kindly satisfaction
\nin the movement and its interest, to a blithe sense of humour or a light and
\neasy pathos. He does not seek to add anything to it or to see anything below it
\nor behind its outsides, nor does he look at all into the souls are deeply into
\nthe minds of the men and women whose appearance, action and easily apparent
\ntraits of character he describes with so apt and observant a fidelity. He does
\nnot ask himself what is the meaning of all this <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 60<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

movement
\nof life or the power in it or draw any large poetic idea from it; he is not
\nmoved to interpret life, a clear and happy presentation is his business. It is
\nthere simply in the sunlight with its familiar lines and normal colours,
\nsufficiently interesting in itself, by its external action, and he has to
\nrecord it, to give it a shape in lucid poetic speech and rhythm; for to turn it
\ninto stuff of poetry that and the sunlight of his own happy poetic temperament
\nin which he bathes it is all he needs. And the form he gives it is within its
\nlimits and for its work admirably apt, sufficient and satisfying, -provided we
\nask from it nothing more than it has to offer us. Chaucer had learnt ease,
\ngrace and lucidity from the French romance poetry and from the great Italians a
\nsufficient force and compactness of expression which French verse had not yet
\nattained. But neither his poetic speech nor his rhythm has anything of the
\nplastic greatness and high beauty of the Italians. It is an easy, limpid and
\nflowing movement, a stream rather than a well, -for it has no depths in it, -of
\npure English utterance just fitted for the clear and pleasing poetic
\npresentation of external life as if in an unsullied mirror, at times rising
\ninto an apt and pointed expression, but for the most part satisfied with a
\nfirst primitive power of poetic speech, a subdued and well-tempered even
\nadequacy. Only once or twice does he by accident strike out a really memorable
\nline of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>No other great poetical literature
\nhas had quite such a beginning. Others also started with a poetry of external
\nlife, Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with the historical epic of Ennius,
\nFrench with the feudal romances of the Charlemagne cycle and the Arthurian cycle.
\nBut in none of these was the artistic aim simply the observant presentation of
\nGreek or Roman or feudal life. Homer gives us the life of man always at a high
\nintensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change
\nhe casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as
\nPhidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble.
\nWhen he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the
\nOdyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some
\nplane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a
\ngreater vision in a more lustrous air <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 61<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and
\nwe feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature. Ennius\u2019 object was like
\nVirgil\u2019s to cast into poetical utterance the spirit of Rome. So the spirit of
\nCatholic and feudal Europe transmutes life and gives in its own way an ideal
\npresentation of it which only misses greatness by the inadequacy of its speech
\nand rhythmic movement and the diffuse prolixity of its form. Chaucer\u2019s poetic
\nmethod has no such great idea or uplifting motive or spirit. Whether the colour
\nhe gives happens to be realistic or romantic, it falls within the same formula.
\nIt is the reflecting of an external life, with sometimes just a tinge of
\nromantic illumination, in an observing mind that makes itself a shining poetic
\nmirror.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The spirit of English poetry having
\nthus struck its first strong note, a characteristic English note, having got as
\nfar as the Anglo-Saxon mind refined by French and Italian influence could go in
\nits own proper was and unchanged nature, came suddenly to a pause. Many outward
\nreasons might be given for that, but none sufficient; for the real cause was
\nthat to have developed upon this line would have been to wander up and down in
\na cul-de-sac; it would have been no anticipate in a way in poetry the
\nself-imprisonment of Dutch art in a\u00a0
\n<\/span>strong externalism, of a fairer kind indeed, but still too physical and
\noutward in its motive. English poetry had greater things to do and it waited
\nfor some new light and more powerful impulse to come. Still this externals
\nmotive and method are native to the English mind and with many modifications
\nhave put their strong impress upon the literature. It is the method of English
\nfiction from Richardson to Dickens; it got into the Elizabethan drama and
\nprevented it, except in Shakespeare, from equaling the nobler work of other
\ngreat periods of dramatic poetry, which after its fresh start in the symbolism
\nof the Faery Queen<\/i> and vital intensity of Marlowe ought either to have
\ngot clear away from it or at least to have transmuted it by the infusion of
\nmuch higher artistic motives. To give only one instance in many, it got sadly
\nin the way of Tennyson, who yet had no real turn for the reproduction of life,
\nand prevented him from working out the fine subjective and mystic vein which
\nhis first natural intuitions had discovered in such work as the Lady of
\nShallot<\/i> and the Morte d\u2019Arthur<\/i>; we <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 62<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

have
\nto be satisfied instead with the Princess<\/i> and Enoch Arden<\/i> and the
\npicturesque triviality of the Idylls of the King<\/i> which give us the
\nimpression of gentlemen and ladies of Victorian drawing-rooms masquerading as
\nCeltic-mediaeval knights and dames with a meaning of some kind in it all that
\ndoes not come home to us because it is lost in a falsetto mimicking of the
\nexternal strains of life. Certainly, it is useless to quarrel with national
\ntendencies and characteristics which must show themselves in poetry as
\nelsewhere; but English poetry had opened the gates of other powers and if it
\ncould always have lifted up the forms of external life by these powers, the
\nsubstance of its work might then have meant much more to the world and the
\nstrength of its vision of things might constantly have equaled the power and
\nbeauty of its utterance. As it is, even poets of great power are being
\nconstantly led away by this tendency from the fulfillment of their more
\ncharacteristic potentialities. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The
\nnew light and impulse that set free the silence of the poetic spirit in England
\nfor its first abundant and sovereign utterance, came from the Renaissance in
\nFrance and Italy. The Renaissance meant many things and it meant too different
\nthings in different countries, but one thing above all everywhere, the
\ndiscovery of beauty and joy in every energy of life. The Middle Ages had lived
\nstrongly and with a sort of deep and somber force, but, as it were, always
\nunder the shadow of death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire
\nthrough suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the cross
\nand on the other by the sword. The Renaissance brings in the sense of a
\nliberation from the burden and the obligation; it looks at life and loves it in
\nexcess; it is carried away by the beauty of the body and the senses and the
\nintellect, the beauty of sensation and action and speech and thought, -of
\nthought hardly at all for its own sake, but thought as a power of life. It is
\nHellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and thins human, nihil
\nhunmani alienum<\/i>\u00b9, but at first a barbarized Hellenism, unbridled and
\nextravagant, riotous in its vitalistic energy, too much overjoyed for restraint
\nand measure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Elizabethan poetry is an expression
\nof this energy, passion<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\u00b9Nothing
\nhuman is alien to me,<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 63<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and
\nwonder of life, and it is much more powerful, disorderly and unrestrained than
\nthe corresponding poetry in other counties having neither a past traditional
\nculture nor an innate taste to restrain its extravagances. It springs up in a
\nchaos of power and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by a
\nstress within it for which there no clear guiding knowledge except such as the
\ninstinctive genius of the age and the individual can give. It is constantly
\nshot through with brilliant threads of intellectual energy, but is not at all
\nintellectual in its innate spirit and dominant character. It is too vital for
\nthat, too much moved and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose
\nof rein; its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehement and
\ninordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its notes, reveling in image
\nand phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent colours, of many-hued fire of threads
\nof golden and silver light.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It bestowed on the nation a new
\nEnglish speech, rich in capacity, gifted with an extraordinary poetic intensity
\nand wealth and copiousness, but full also of the disorder and excess of new
\nformation. A drama exultant in action and character passion and incident and
\nmovement, a lyric and romantic poetry of marvelous sweetness, richness and
\nforce are its strong fruits. Here the two sides of the national mind throw
\nthemselves out for the first time with a full energy, but within the limits of
\na vital, sensuous and imaginative mould, the one dominant in its pure poetry,
\nthe other ordinarily in its drama, but both in Shakespeare welded into a
\nsupreme phenomenon of poetic and dramatic genius. It is on the whole the
\ngreatest age of utterance, -though not of highest spirit and aim, -of the
\ngenius of English poetry. <\/p>\n

Page – 64<\/span><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER IX        The Course of English Poetry \u2013 1    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 THESE are the general characteristics of English Poetry, the powers which have been…<\/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-1291","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\/1291","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=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}