{"id":1300,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","slug":"17-the-poets-of-the-dawn-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\/17-the-poets-of-the-dawn-1-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-17_The Poets of the Dawn \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 1.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span>XVI<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 1<\/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>T<\/font>HE superiority if the English poets
\nwho lead the way into the modern age is that sudden almost unaccountable
\nspiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but limited in one or two,
\nsplendid and supreme in its rare moments of vision and clarity, which breaks
\nout from their normal poetic mentality and strives constantly to lift their
\nthought and imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does not
\nseem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the contemporary poets of
\ncontinental Europe. But they have no clearly seen or no firmly based constant
\nidea of the greater work which this spirit demands from them; they get at its
\nbest only in an inspiration over which they have not artistic control, and they
\nhave only an occasional or uncertain glimpse of its self motives. Thus they
\ngiver to it often a form of speech and movement which is borrowed from their
\nintellect, normal temperament of culture rather than wells up as the native
\nchoice and rhythm of the spirit within, and they fall away easily to a lower
\nkind of work. They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets,
\nbut they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or
\nthat more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the
\ngreatness of Shakespeare and Spenser. <\/p>\n

This failure to grasp the conditions of
\nperfect intuitive and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the
\nattempt itself has not been understood by the critical mind of the nineteenth
\ncentury. That mind was heavily intellectualized, sometimes lucid, reasonable
\nand acute, sometimes cloudily or fierily romantic, sometimes scientific,
\nminutely delving, analytic, psychological, but in none of these moods and from
\nnone of these outlooks capable of understanding the tones of this light which
\nfor a moment flushed the dawning skies of its own age or tracing it to the deep
\nand luminous fountains from which it welled. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 111<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Taine\u2019s
\ngrotesquely misproportioned appreciation in which Byron figures as the colossus
\nand Titan of their age while the greater and more significant work of
\nWordsworth and Shelley is dismissed as an effective attempt to poetise a
\nGermanic transcendentalism, Carlyle\u2019s ill-tempered and dyspeptic depreciation
\nof Keats, Arnold\u2019s inability to see in Shelley anything but an unsubstantially
\nbeautiful poet of cloud and dawn and sunset, a born musician who had made a
\nmistake in taking hold of the word as his instrument, are extreme, but still characteristic
\nmisunderstandings. In our own day we see the singers who lead the van of the
\nfuture entering with a nearer intimacy into the domains of which these earlier
\npoets only just crossed the threshold, but the right art and technique of this
\npoetry have been rather found by the intuitive sense of their creators than yet
\nintellectually understood so as to disengage their form from the obstruction of
\nold-world ideas and standards of appreciation.<\/p>\n

Each essential motive of poetry must find
\nits own characteristic speech, its own layoff rhythms, \u2014even though metrically
\nthe mould may appear to be the same, \u2014its own structure and development in the
\nlyric, dramatic, narrative and, if that can still be used, the epic form and
\nmedium. The objective poetry of the intellect or the inspired reason, each has
\nits own spirit and,. Since the form and word are the measure, rhythm, body of
\nthe spirit must each develop its own body. There may be a hundred variations
\nwithin the type which spring from national difference, the past of the
\ncivilization, the cultural atmosphere, the individual idiosyncrasy, but some
\nfundamental likeness of spirit will emerge. Elizabethan poetry was the work of
\nthe life-spirit in a new, raw and vigorous people not yet tamed by a
\nrestraining and formative culture, a people with the crude tendencies of the
\noccidental mind rioting almost in the exuberance of a state of nature. The
\npoetry of the classical Sanskrit writers was the work of Asiatic minds,
\nscholars, court-poets in an age of immense intellectual development and an
\nexcessive, almost over-cultivated refinement, but still that too was a poetry
\nof the life-spirit. In spite of a broad gulf of difference we yet find an
\nextraordinary basic kinship\u00a0 <\/span>
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 112<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

between
\nthese too very widely separated great ages of poetry though there was never any
\npossibility of contact between that earlier oriental and this later occidental
\nwork, \u2014the dramas of Kalidasa and some of the dramatic romances of Shakespeare,
\nplays like the Sanskrit Seal of Rakshasa <\/i>and Toy-cart<\/i> and
\nElizabethan historic and melodramatic pieces, the poetry of the Cloud-Messenger<\/i>
\nand erotic Elizabethan poetry, the romantically vivid and descriptive narrative
\nmethod of Spenser\u2019s Faerie Queene<\/i> and the more intellectually romantic
\nvividness and descriptive elaborateness of the Line of Raghu<\/i> and the Birth
\nof the War-God. <\/i>This kinship arises from the likeness of essential motive
\nand psychological basic type and emerges and asserts itself in spite of the
\nenormous cultural division. A poetry of spiritual vision and the sense of
\nthings behind life and above the intellect must similarly develop from its
\nessence a characteristic voice, cry, mould of speech, natural way of
\ndevelopment, habits of structure. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The great poets of this earlier
\nendeavour had all to deal with the same central problem of creation and were
\nembarrassed by the same difficulty of a time which was not ready for work of
\nthis kind, not prepared for it by any past development, not fitted for it by
\nanything in the common atmosphere of the age. They breathed the rarity of
\nheights lifted far beyond the level of the contemporary surrounding
\ntemperament, intellect and life. But each besides had an immense development of
\nthat force of separate personality which is in art at least the characteristic
\nof our later humanity. Each followed his own way, was very little influenced by
\nthe others, was impelled by a quite distinct spiritual idea, worked it out in a
\nquite individual method and, when he fell away from it or short of it, failed
\nin his own way and by shortcomings peculiar to his own nature. There is nothing
\nof that common aim and manner which brings into one category the Elizabethan
\ndramatists or the contemporaries of Pope and Dryden. We have to cast an eye
\nupon them successively at their separate work and se how far they carried their
\nachievement and where they stopped short or else deviated from the path
\nindicated by their own highest genius.<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 113<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER\u00a0\u00a0 XVI  The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 1   \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 THE superiority if the English poets who lead the way into the modern age…<\/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-1300","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\/1300","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=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}