{"id":1301,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:57","slug":"13-the-course-of-english-poetry-4-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\/13-the-course-of-english-poetry-4-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-13_The Course of English Poetry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 4.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

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

\n <\/font>   The Course of English
\nPoetry \u2013 4<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n <\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font><\/span><\/b>I<\/font>N
\nTHE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again
\nstruck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, of a great power of achievement
\nlimited by a characteristic defect which turns to failure, wastes the power
\nspent and makes the total result much inferior to what it should have been with
\nso much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius to raise it
\ninto the highest heights of the empyrean. The mind of this age went for its
\nsustaining influence and its suggestive models to Greece, Rome and France. That
\nwe inevitable; for these have been the three intellectual nations, their
\nliteratures have achieved, each following its own different way and spirit, the
\nbest in form and substance that that kind of inspiration can produce, and not
\nhaving the root of the matter in itself, the inborn intellectual depth and
\nsubtlety, the fine classical lucidity and aesthetic taste, if the attempt was
\nto be made at all, it was here that the English mind must turn. Steeping itself
\nin these sources, it might have blended with the classical clarity and form its
\nown masculine force and strenuousness, its strong imagination, its deeper colour
\nand profounder intuitive suggestiveness and arrived at something new and great
\nto which the world could have turned as another supreme element of its
\naesthetic culture. But the effect did not answer to the possibility. To have
\narrived at it, it was essential to keep, transmuted, all that was best in the
\nElizabethan spirit and to colour, enrich and sweeten with its touch the
\nclassical form and the intellectual motive. There was instead a breaking away,
\na decisive rejection, an entirely new attempt with no roots in the past. In the
\nend not only was the preceding structure of poetry abolished, but all its Muses
\nwere expelled; a stucco imitation classical temple, very elegant, very cold and
\nvery empty, was erected and the gods of satire and didactic commonplace set up
\nin a shrine which was <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 81<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

built
\nmore like a coffee-house than a sanctuary. A sterile brilliance, a set polished
\nrhetoric was the poor final outcome. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The age set out with a promise of
\nbetter things; for a time it seemed almost on the right path. Milton\u2019s early
\npoetry is the fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with
\nthe glow and beauty of a receding romantic colour, emotion and vital intuition.
\nMany softer influences have\u00a0 <\/span>woven themselves
\ntogether into his high language and rhythm and been fused in his personality
\ninto something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Suggestions and
\nsecrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their
\nhints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been
\nnourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty,
\nLucretian grandeur and Aeschylean sublimity coloured or mellowed by the
\nromantic elements and toned into each other under the stress of an original
\npersonality make the early Miltonic manner which maintains a peculiar blending
\nof greatness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse. The substance is
\noften slight, for it is as yet Milton\u2019s imagination rather than his soul or his
\nwhole mind that is using the poetic form, though the form itself is of a
\nfaultless beauty. But still here we already have the coming change, the turning
\nof the intelligence upon life to view it from its own intellectual centre of
\nvision. Some of the Elizabethans had attempted it, but with no great poetical
\nsuccess; when they wrote their best, then even though they tried to think
\nclosely and strongly, life took possession of the thought or rather itself
\nquivered out into thought-expression. Here, on the contrary, even in the two
\npoems that are avowedly expressions of vital moods, it is yet the intellect and
\nits imaginations that are making the mood a material for reflective brooding,
\nnot the life-mood itself chanting its own sight and emotion. In the minor
\nCarolean poets too we have some lingering of the colours of the Elizabethan
\nsunset, something of the life-sense and emotional value, but, much thinned and
\ndiluted, finally they die away into trivialities of the intelligence playing
\ninsincerely with the objects of the emotional being. For here too the idea
\nalready predominates, is already rather looking at the thing felt than taken up
\nin the feeling. Some of this work is even mystical, but that too <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 82<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

suffers
\nfrom the same characteristic; the opening of an age of intellect was not the
\ntime when a great mystical poetry could be created. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In the end we find the change
\ncomplete; colour has gone, sweetness has vanished, song has fallen into a dead
\nhush: for a whole long century the lyrical faculty disappears from the English
\ntongue, to reawaken again first in the Celtic north. Only the grandiose epic
\nchant of Milton breaks the complete silence of genuine poetry; but it is a
\nMilton who has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth,
\nlost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all delicacies of colour and grace
\nand sweetness to express only in fit greatness of speech and form the
\nconception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination
\nhad constructed out his intellectual beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his
\nsoul,. One might speculate on what we might have had if, instead of writing
\nafter the long silence during which he was absorbed in political controversy
\nuntil public and private calamities compelled him to go back into himself, he
\nhad written his master work in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style
\nand vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent
\nand otherwise perfect. As it is, it is by Paradise Lost<\/i> that he occupies
\nhis high rank among the poets; that is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of
\nEnglish poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetical expression
\ndisciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and
\nmeasured perfection of form.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Paradise Lost <\/i>is assuredly a great
\npoem, one of the five great epical poems of European literature, and in certain
\nqualities it reaches heights which no other of them had attained, even though
\nas a whole it comes a long way behind them. Rhythm and speech have never
\nattained to mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an
\nequal sublimity. And to a great extent Milton has done in this respect what he
\nhad set out to do; he has given English poetic speech a language of
\nintellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic expression except those
\nwhich are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very
\ngrain poetry and in its very grain intellectual <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 83<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

thought-utterance.
\nThis is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and
\nMilton has fulfilled it, adding at the same time that peculiar grandeur in both
\nthe soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the
\nrhythm which belongs to him alone of poets. These qualities are, besides,
\neasily sustained throughout, because with him they are less and art, great
\nartist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural
\nsound of its motion. His aim too is high, his subject loftier than that of any
\none of his predecessors except Dante; there is nowhere any more magnificently
\nsuccessful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the
\nliving spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and
\npain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he
\nwas born. If the rest had been equal to the opening, there would have been no
\ngreater poem, few as great in literature. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Here, too, the performance failed
\nthe promise. Paradise Lost commands admiration, but as a whole, apart from its
\nopening, it has failed either to go home to the heart of the world and lodge
\nitself in its imagination or to enrich sovereignly what we may describe as the
\nacquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the
\npoem that does neither of these things, however fine its powers of language and
\nrhythm, has missed its best aim. The reason is not to be found in the disparity
\nbetween Milton\u2019s professed aim, which was to justify the ways of God to man,
\nand his intellectual means for fulfilling it. The theology of the Puritan
\nreligion was a poor enough aid for so ambitious a purpose, but the Scriptural
\nlegend treated was still quite sufficient poetically if only it had received
\nthroughout a deeper interpretation. Dante\u2019s theology, though it has the advantage
\nof the greater richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval
\nCatholicism, is still intellectually insufficient, but through his primitive
\nsymbols Dante has seen and has revealed things which make his work poetically
\ngreat and sufficient,. It is here that Milton has failed. Nor is the failure
\nmainly intellectual. It is true that he had not an original intellectuality,
\nhis mind was rather scholastic and traditional, but he had an originally soul
\nand personality and the vision of a poet. To justify the ways of God <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 84<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

to
\nman intellectually is not the province of poetry; what it can do, is to reveal
\nthem. Yet just here is the pointy of failure. Milton has seen Satan and Death and
\nSin and Hell and Chaos; there is a Scriptural greatness in his account of these
\nthings: he has not so seen God and heaven and man or the soul of humanity at
\nonce divine and fallen, subject to evil and striving for redemption; here there
\nis no inner greatness in the poetic interpretation of his materials. In other
\nwords, he has ended by stumbling over the rock of offence that always awaits
\npoetry in which the intellectual element becomes too predominant, the fatal
\ndanger of a failure of vision. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This failure extends itself to all
\nthe elements of his later poetry; it is definitive and he never, except in
\npassages, recovered from it. His language and rhythm remain unfalteringly great
\nto the end, but they are only a splendid robe and the body they clothe is a
\nnobly carved but lifeless image. His architectural structure is always greatly
\nand classically proportioned; but structure has two elements or, perhaps we
\nshould say, two methods, that which is thought out and that which grows from an
\ninward artistic and poetic vision. Milton\u2019s structures are thought out; they
\nhave not been seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measure and
\nfree inspired lines of perfection. The difference becomes evident by a simple
\ncomparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less
\ninspired and vital than theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of
\nVirgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong
\nintellectual strain in it and of putting forward as its aim the play of
\nimaginative thought in the service of the poetical intelligence; but that must
\nbe supported very strongly by the emotion or sentiment or by the imaginative
\nvision to which the idea opens. Milton\u2019s earlier work is suffused by his power
\nof imaginative vision, the opening books of Paradise Lost <\/i>are upborne by
\nthe greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and
\nsound and the greatness of its sight. But in the later books and still more in
\nthe Samson Agonistes<\/i> and the Paradise Regained<\/i> this flame sinks;
\nthe sight, the thought become intellectually externalized. Milton writing
\npoetry could never fail in a certain greatness and power, nor could he descend,
\nas
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 85<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

did
\nWordsworth and others, below his well attained poetical level, but the supreme
\nvitalising fire has sunk; the method and idea retain sublimity, the deeper
\nspirit has departed. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Much greater, initial and essential
\nwas the defect in the poetry that followed. Here all is unredeemed
\nintellectuality and even the very first elements of the genuine poetic
\ninspiration are for the most part, one might almost say, entirely absent. Pope
\nand Dryden and their school, except now and then, -Dryden especially has lines
\nsometimes in which he suddenly rises above his method, -are busy only with one
\naim, with thinking in verse, thinking with a clear force, energy and point or
\nwith a certain rhetorical pomp and effectiveness, in a well-turned and
\nwell-polished metrical system. That seems to have been their sole idea of
\n\u201cnumbers\u201d, of poetry, and it is an idea of unexampled falsity. No doubt this
\nwas a necessary phase, and perhaps, the English mind being what it then was,
\nbeing always so much addicted in its poetry to quite the reverse method, it had
\nto go to an extreme, to sacrifice even for a time man7y of its native
\npowers\u00a0 <\/span>in order to learn as best it
\ncould how to arrive at the clear and straightforward expression of thought with
\na just, harmonious and lucid turn; an inborn gift in all the Latin tongues, in
\na half-Teutonic speech attacked by the Celtic richness of imagination it had to
\nbe acquired. But the sacrifice made was great and cost much effort of recovery
\nto the later development of the language. These writers got rid of the
\nElizabethan confusions, the involved expression, the lapses into trailing and
\nawkward syntax, the perplexed turn in which ideas and images jostle and stumble
\ntogether, fall into each other\u2019s arms and strain and burden the expression in a
\nway which is sometimes stimulating; they got rid too of the crudeness and
\nextravagance; but also of all the rich imagination and vision, the sweetness,
\nlyrism, grace and colour. They replaced it with mere point and false glitter.
\nThey got rid too of Milton\u2019s Latinisms and poetic inversions, -though they
\nreplaced them by some merely rhetorical artifices or their own, – dismissed his
\ngreat and packed turns of speech and replaced his grandeurs by what they
\nthought to be noble style, though it was no more than spurious rhetorical pomp.
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 86<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Still
\nthe work they had to do they did effectively, with talent, energy, even a
\ncertain kind of genius.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Therefore, if the substance of this
\npoetry had been of real worth, it would have been less open to depreciation and
\nneed not have excited so vehement a reaction or fallen so low from its
\nexaggerated pride of place. But the substance was on a par with, often below
\nthe method. It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it
\nsubstituted for the strength and weight of the Latin manner an exceeding
\nsuperficiality and triviality. It followed more really contemporary French
\nmodels, but missed their best ordinary qualities, their culture taste, tact of
\nexpression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry,
\nwhich though it may suffer by its excessive cult of reason and taste or its
\nrhetorical tendency, m run often in too thin a stream, has yet ideas, power, a
\nstrong nobility of character in Corneille, a fine grace of poetic sentiment in
\nRacine. But this poetry cares nothing for such gifts: it is occupied with expressing
\nthought, but its thought is of little or no value; for the most part it is
\nbrilliant commonplace, and even ideas which have depths behind them become
\nshallow and external by the way of their expression. The thought of these
\nwriters has no real eye on life except when it turns to satire. Therefore that
\nis the part of their work which is still most alive; for here the Anglo-Saxon
\nspirit gets back to itself, leaves the attempt at a Gallicised refinement,
\nfinds its own robust vigour and arrives at a brutal, but still genuine and
\nsometime really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy, driving force
\nis, however, a general merit of the verse of Pope and Dryden and in this one
\nrespect they excel their nearest French exemplars. Their expression is striking
\nin its precision, each couplet rings out with a remarkable force of finality
\nand much coin of their minting has passed into common speech and citation: it
\nis not gold of poetry for all that, but it is well-gilt copper coin of good
\ncurrency. But all turns to a monotonous brilliance of language, a monotonous
\ndecisiveness and point of rhythm. It has to be read by couplets and passages,
\nfor each poem is only a long string of these and except in one instance the
\ntrue classical gift, the power of structure is quite wanting. The larger
\nthought-power which is necessary for structure was absent. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 87<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

This
\nintellectual age of English poetry did its work, but, as must happen when there
\nis in art a departure from what is best in the national mind, ended in a
\nfailure and for a time even a death of the true poetic faculty. <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 88<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XII     The Course of English Poetry \u2013 4    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 IN THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one…<\/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-1301","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\/1301","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=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}