{"id":1303,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1303"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:58","slug":"26-the-ideal-spirit-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\/26-the-ideal-spirit-of-poetry-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-26_The Ideal Spirit of Poetry.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\nc<\/font>hapter<\/font>
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span><\/span>XXV<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n


\nThe Ideal Spirit of Poetry<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n            T<\/font>0 ATTEMPT to presage the future turn or
\ndevelopment of mind or life in any of its fields is always a hazardous
\noccupation. Life and mind are not like physical Nature which runs in precise mechanical
\ngrooves; these are more mobile and freer powers. The gods of life and still
\nmore the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even when we can
\ndistinguish the main lines on which the working runs or has so far run, we are
\nstill unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will yet take or of
\nwhat new thing they are in labour. It is therefore impossible to predict what
\nthe poetry of the future will actually be like. We can see where we stand
\ntoday, but we cannot tell where we shall stand a quarter of a century hence.
\nAll that one can do is to distinguish for oneself some possibilities that lie
\nbefore the poetic mind of the race and to figure what it can achieve if it
\nchooses to follow out certain great open\u00adings which the genius of recent and
\ncontemporary poets has made free to us, but what path it will actually choose
\nto tread or what new heights attempt, waits still for its own yet undecided
\ndecision.<\/b><\/p>\n

What would be the ideal spirit of poetry in
\nan age of the increasingly intuitive mind? For the possibility of such an age
\nis that on which we have been dwelling. I have spoken in the beginning of the
\nMantra as the highest intensest revealing form of poetic thought and
\nexpression. What the Vedic poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and
\nrevealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realisation, to use the
\nponderous but necessary modern word, of some inmost truth of God and self and
\nman and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and
\ndeed. It was a thinking that came on the wings of a great soul rhythm, chandas<\/i>
\nFor the seeing could not be separated from the hearing; it was one act. Nor
\ncould the <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 199<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

living of the truth in oneself which we mean by realisation be
\nseparated from either, for the presence of it in the soul and its possession of
\nthe mind must precede or accompany in the creator or human channel that
\nexpression of the inner sight and hearing which takes the shape of the luminous
\nword. The Mantra is born through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking
\nmind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a
\nface or a form. And in the mind too of the fit out\u00adward hearer who listens to
\nthe word of the poet-seer, these three must come together, if our word is a
\nreal Mantra; the sight of the inmost truth must accompany the hearing, the
\npossession of the inmost spirit of it by the mind and its coming home to the
\nsoul must accompany or follow immediately upon the rhythmic message of the Word
\nand the mind’s sight of the Truth. That may sound a rather mystic account of
\nthe matter, but substan\u00adtially there could hardly be a more complete
\ndescription of the birth and effect of the inspired and revealing word, and it
\nmight be applied, though usually on a more lowered scale than was intended by
\nthe Vedic Rishis, to all the highest outbursts of a really great poetry. But
\npoetry is the Mantra only when it is the voice of the inmost truth and is
\ncouched in the highest power of the very rhythm and speech of that truth. And the
\nancient poets of the Veda and Upanishads claimed to be uttering the Mantra
\nbecause always it was this inmost and almost occult truth of things which they
\nstrove to see, and hear and speak and because they believed themselves to be
\nusing or finding its innate soul rhythms and the sacrificial speech of it cast
\nup by the divine Agni, the sacred Fire in the heart of man. The Mantra, in
\nother words, is a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely
\nburdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration
\nand ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the
\ninmost reality of things and\u00a0 <\/span>with its
\ntruth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are born from
\nthe living Truth. <\/b>Or,<\/span> let
\nus say, it is a su\u00adpreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is
\nfinite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.<\/p>\n

This is a theory of poetry, a view of the rhythmic
\nand crea\u00adtive self-expression to which we give that name, which is very <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 200<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

different from any that we now hold, a sacred or hieratic ars poetica<\/i> only possible in days when
\nman believed himself to be near to the gods and felt their presence in his
\nbosom and could think he heard some accents of their divine and eternal wisdom
\ntake form on the heights of his mind. And perhaps no thinking age has been so
\nfar removed from any such view of our life as the one through which we have
\nrecently passed and even now are not well out of its shadow, the age of
\nmaterialism, the age of positive outward matter of fact and of scientific and
\nutilitarian reason. And yet curiously enough, \u2014 or naturally, since in the
\neconomy of Nature opposite creates itself out of opposite and not only like
\nfrom like, \u2014 it is to some far-off light at least of the view of ourselves at
\nour greatest of which such ideas were a concretised expression that we seem to
\nbe returning. For we can mark that although in very different circumstances, in
\nbroader forms, with a more complex mind and an enormously enlarged basis of
\nculture and civilisation, the gain and inheritance of many intermediate ages,
\nit is still to something very like the effort which was the soul of the Vedic
\nor at least the Vedantic mind that we almost appear to be on the point of
\nturning back in the circle of our course. Now that we have seen minutely what
\nis the material reality of the world in which we live and have some knowledge
\nof the vital reality of the Force from which we spring, we are at last
\nbeginning to seek again for the spiritual reality of that which we and all
\nthings are. Our minds are once more trying to envisage the self, the spirit of
\nMan and the spirit of the universe, intellectually, no doubt, at first, but
\nfrom that to the old effort at sight, at realisation within ourselves and in
\nall is not a very far step. And with this effort there must rise too on the
\nhuman mind the conception of the godheads in whom this Spirit, this marvellous
\nSelf and Reality which broods over the world, takes shape in the liberated soul
\nand life of the human being, his godheads of Truth and Freedom and Unity, his
\ngodheads of a greater more highly visioned Will and Power, his godheads of Love
\nand universal Delight, his godheads of universal and eternal Beauty, his
\ngodheads of a supreme Light and Harmony and Good. The new ideals of the race
\nseem already to be affected by some first bright shadow of these things, and
\neven though it be only a tinge, <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 201<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/div>\n

a flush colouring the duller atmosphere of our recent mentality,
\nthere is every sign that this tinge will deepen and grow, in the heavens to
\nwhich we look up if not at once in the earth of our actual life.<\/p>\n

But this new vision will
\nnot be as in the old times something hieratically remote, mystic, inward,
\nshielded from the profane, but rather a sight which will endeavour to draw
\nthese godheads again to close and familiar intimacy with our earth and embody
\nthem not only in the heart of religion and philosophy, nor only in the higher
\nnights of thought and art, but also, as far as may be, in the common life and
\naction of man. For in the old days these things were Mysteries, which men left
\nto the few, to the initiates and by so leaving them lost sight of them in the
\nend, but the en\u00addeavour of this new mind is to reveal, to divulge and to bring
\nnear to our comprehension all mysteries, \u2014 at present indeed making them too
\ncommon and outward in the process and depriving them of much of their beauty
\nand inner light and depth, but that defect will pass, \u2014 and this turn towards
\nan open realisation may well lead to an age in which man as a race will try to
\nlive in a greater Truth than has as yet governed our kind. For all that we
\nknow, we now tend to make some attempt to form clearly and live. His creation
\ntoo will then be moved by another spirit and cast on other lines.<\/p>\n

And if this takes place or even if there is
\nsome strong mental movement towards it, poetry may recover something of an old
\nsacred prestige. There will no doubt still be plenty of poetical writing which will
\nfollow the old lines and minister to the old commoner aesthetic motives, and it
\nis as well that it should be so, for the business of poetry is to express the
\nsoul of man to himself and to embody in the word whatever power of beauty he
\nsees; but also there may now emerge too and take the first place souls no
\nlonger niggardly of the highest flame, the poet-seer and seer-creator, the poet
\nwho is also a Rishi, master singers of Truth, hierophants and magicians of a
\ndiviner and more universal beauty. There has no doubt always been something of
\nthat in the greatest masters of poetry in the great ages, but to fulfil such a
\nrole has not often been the one fountain idea of their function; the mind of
\nthe age has made other demands on them, needed <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 202<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

at that time, and the highest things in this direction have been
\nrare self-exceedings and still coloured by and toned to the half light in which
\nthey sang. But if an age comes which is in common possession of a deeper and
\ngreater and more inspiring Truth, then its masters of the rhythmic word will at
\nleast sing on a higher common level and may rise more often into a fuller
\nintenser light and capture more constantly the greater tones of which this harp
\nof God, to use the Upanishad’s description of man’s created being, is secretly
\ncapable.<\/p>\n

A greater era of man’s living seems to be in
\npromise, what\u00adever nearer and earthier powers may be striving to lead him on a
\nside path away to a less exalted ideal, and with that advent there must come a
\nnew great age of his creation different from the past epochs which he counts as
\nhis glories and superior to them in its vision and motive. But first there must
\nintervene a poetry which will lead him towards it from the present faint
\nbeginnings. It will be aided by new views in philosophy, a changed and extended
\nspirit in science and new revelations in the other arts, in music, painting,
\narchitecture, sculpture, as well as high new ideals in life and new powers of a
\nreviving but no longer limited or obscu\u00adrantist religious mind. A glint of this
\nchange is already visible. And in poetry there is already the commencement of
\nsuch a greater leading; the conscious effort of Whitman, the tone of Carpenter,
\nthe significance of the poetry of A.E., the rapid immediate fame of Tagore are
\nits first signs. The idea of the poet who is also the Rishi has made again its
\nappearance. Only a wider spreading of the thought and mentality in which that
\nidea can live and the growth of an accomplished art of poetry in which it can
\ntake body, are still needed to give the force of permanence to what is now only
\nan incipient and just emerging power. Mankind satiated with the levels is
\nturning its face once more towards the heights, and the poetic voices that will
\nlead us thither with song will be among the high seer voices. For the great
\npoet interprets to man his present or reinterprets for him his past, but can
\nalso point him to his future and in all three reveal to him the face of the
\nEternal.<\/p>\n

An intuitive revealing poetry of the kind which we
\nhave in view would voice a supreme harmony of five eternal powers, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 203<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit. These are indeed the
\nfive greater ideal lamps or rather the five suns of poetry. And towards three
\nof them the higher mind of the race is in many directions turning its thought
\nand desire with a new kind and force of insistence. The intellectual side of
\nour recent progress has in fact been for a long time a constant arduous pursuit
\nof Truth in certain of its fields; but now the limited truth of yester\u00adday can
\nno longer satisfy or bind us: Much has been known and discovered of a kind
\nwhich had not been found or had only been glimpsed before, but the utmost of
\nthat much appears now very little compared with the infinitely more which was
\nleft aside and ignored and which now invites our search. The description which
\nthe old Vedic poet once gave of the seeking of divine Truth, ap\u00adplies vividly
\nto the mind of our age, "As it climbs from height to height, there becomes
\nclear to its view all the much that is yet to be done." But also it is
\nbeginning to be seen that only in some great awakening of the self and
\nspiritual being of man is that yet unlived truth to be found and that infinite
\nmuch to be achieved. It is only then that the fullness of a greater knowledge
\nfor man living on earth can unfold itself and get rid of its coverings and
\nagain on his deeper mind and soul, in the words of another Vedic poet-seer,
\n"New states come into birth, covering upon covering awaken to knowledge,
\ntill in the lap of the Mother one wholly sees." This new-old light is now
\nreturning upon our minds. Men no longer so completely believe that the world is
\na machine and they only so much transient thinking matter, a view of existence
\nin the midst of which, however helpful it might be to a victorious
\nconcentration on physical science and social eco\u00adnomy and material well-being,
\nneither religion nor philosophic wisdom could renew their power in the
\nfountains of the spirit nor art and poetry, which are also things of the soul
\nlike religion and wisdom, refresh themselves from their native sources of
\nstrength. Now we are moving back from the physical obsession to the
\nconsciousness that there is a soul and greater self within us and the universe
\nwhich finds expression here in the life and the body.<\/p>\n

But the mind of today insists too and rightly
\ninsists on life, on humanity, on the dignity of our labour and action. We have<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 204<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

no longer any ascetic quarrel with our mother earth,
\nbut rather would drink full of her bosom of beauty and power and raise her life
\nto a more perfect greatness. Thought now dwells much on the idea of a vast
\ncreative will of life and action as the secret of existence. That way of
\nseeing, though it may give room for a greater power of art and poetry and
\nphilosophy and religion, for it brings in real soul-values, has by its
\nlimitation its own dangers. A spirit which is all life because it is greater
\nthan life, is rather the truth in which we shall most powerfully live. Aditi,
\nthe infinite Mother, cries in the ancient Vedic hymn to Indra the divine Power
\nnow about to be born in her womb, "This is the path of old discovered
\nagain by which all the gods rose up into birth, even by that upward way shouldst
\nthou be born in thy increase; but go not forth by this other to turn thy mother
\nto her fall," but if, refusing the upward way; the new spirit in process
\nof birth replies like the god, "By that way I will not go forth, for it is
\nhard to tread, let me come out straight on the level from thy side; I have many
\nthings to do which have not yet been done; with one I must fight and with
\nanother I must question after the Truth," then the new age may do great
\nthings, as the last also did great things, but it will miss the highest way and
\nend like it in a catas\u00adtrophe. There is no reason why we should so limit our
\nnew birth in time; for the spirit and life are not incompatible, but rather a
\ngreater power of the spirit brings a greater power of life. Poetry and art most
\nof all our powers can help to bring this truth home to the mind of man with an
\nillumining and catholic force, for while philosophy may lose itself in
\nabstractions and religion turn to an intolerant other-worldliness and
\nasceticism, poetry and art are born mediators between the immaterial and the
\nconcrete, the spirit and life. This mediation between the truth of the spirit
\nand the truth of life will be one of the chief functions of the poetry of the
\nfuture.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

The two other sister lamps of God, colour suns of
\nthe Ideal, which our age has most dimmed and of whose reviving light it is most
\nsadly in need, but still too strenuously outward and uti\u00adlitarian to feel
\nsufficiently their absence. Beauty and Delight, are also things spiritual and
\nthey bring out the very heart of sweet\u00adness and colour and flame of the other
\nthree. Truth and Life <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 205<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

have not their perfection until they are suffused and filled with
\nthe completing power of delight and the fine power of beauty and become one at
\ntheir heights with this perfecting hue and this secret essence of themselves;
\nthe spirit has no full revelation Without these two satisfying presences. For
\nthe ancient Indian idea is absolutely true that delight, Ananda, is the inmost
\nexpres\u00adsive and creative nature of the free self because it is the very essence
\nof the original being of the Spirit. But beauty and delight are also the very
\nsoul and origin of art and poetry. It is the signi\u00adficance and spiritual
\nfunction of art and poetry to liberate man into pure delight and to bring
\nbeauty into his life. Only there are grades and heights here as in everything
\nelse and the highest kinds of delight and beauty are those which are one with
\nthe highest Truth, the perfection of life and the purest and fullest joy of the
\nself-revealing Spirit. Therefore will poetry most find itself and enter most
\ncompletely into its heritage when it arrives at the richest harmony of these
\nfive things in their most splendid and ample sweetness and light and power; but
\nthat can only wholly be when it sings from the highest skies of vision and
\nranges through the widest widths of our being.<\/p>\n

These powers can indeed be possessed in every
\nscale, because on whatever grade of our ascent we stand, the Spirit, the divine
\nSelf of man is always there, can break out into a strong flame of manifestation
\ncarrying in it all its godheads in whatever form, and poetry and art are among
\nthe means by which it thus delivers itself into expression. Therefore the
\nessence of poetry is eternally the same and its essential power and the
\nmagnitude of the genius expended may be the same whatever the frame of the
\nsight, whether it be Homer chanting of the heroes in god-moved battle before
\nTroy and of Odysseus wandering among the wonders of remote and magic isles with
\nhis heart always turned to his lost and far-off human hearth, Shakespeare
\nriding in his surge of the manifold colour and music and passion of life, or
\nDante errant mid his terrible or beatific visions of Hell and Purgatory and
\nParadise, or Valmiki singing of the ideal man embodying God and egoistic giant
\nRakshasa embodying only fierce self-will approaching each other from their
\ndifferent centres of life and in their different law of being for the struggle
\ndesired by the gods, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 206<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

or some mystic Vamadeva or Vishwamitra voicing in
\nstrange vivid now forgotten symbols the action of the gods and the glories of
\nthe Truth, the battle and the journey to the Light, the double riches and the
\nsacrificial climbing of the soul to Immortality. For whether it be the inspired
\nimagination fixed on earth or the soul of life or the inspired reason or the
\nhigh intuitive spiritual vision which gives the form, the genius of the great
\npoet will seize on some truth of being, some breath of life, some power of the spirit
\nand bring it out with a certain supreme force for his and our de\u00adlight and joy
\nin its beauty. But nevertheless the poetry which can keep the amplitude of its
\nbreadth and nearness of its touch and yet see all things from. a higher height
\nwill, the rest being equal, give more and will more fully satisfy the whole of
\nwhat we are and therefore the whole of what we demand from this most complete
\nof all the arts and most subtle of all our means of aesthetic self-expression.<\/p>\n

The poetry of the future, if it
\nfulfils in amplitude the promise now only there in rich hint, will kindle these
\nfive lamps of our being, but raise them up more on high and light with them a
\nbroader country, many countries indeed now hidden from our view, will make them
\nnot any longer lamps in some limited temple of beauty, but suns in the heavens
\nof our highest mind and illuminative of our widest as well as our inmost life.
\nIt will be a poetry of a new largest vision of himself and Nature and God and
\nall things which is offering itself to man and of its possible realisation in a
\nnobler and more divine manhood; and it will not sing of them only with the
\npower of the imaginative intelligence, the exalted and ecstatic sense or the
\nmoved joy and passion of life, but will rise to look at them from an intenser
\nlight and embody them in a more revealing force of the word. It will be first
\nand most a poetry of the intuitive reason, the intuitive .senses, the intuitive
\ndelight-soul in us, getting from this enhanced source of inspiration a more
\nsovereign poetic enthusiasm and ecstasy, and then, it may even be, rise towards
\na still greater power of revelation nearer to the direct vision and word of the
\nOvermind from which all creative inspiration comes.<\/p>\n

A poetry of this kind need not be at all something
\nhigh and <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 207<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

remote or beautifully and delicately intangible,
\nor not that alone, but will make too the highest things near, close and
\nvisible, will sing greatly and beautifully of all that has been sung, all that we
\nare from outward body to very God and Self, of the finite and the infinite, the
\ntransient and the Eternal, but with a new reconciling and fusing vision that
\nwill make them other to us than they have been even when yet the same. If it
\nwings to the heights, it will not leave earth unseen below it, but also will
\nnot confine itself to earth, but find too other realities and their powers on
\nman and take all the planes of existence for its empire. It will take up and
\ntransform the secrets of the older poets and find new undis\u00adcovered secrets,
\ntransfigure the old rhythms by the insistence of the voice of its deeper
\nsubtler spirit and create new characteristic harmonies, reveal other greater
\npowers and spirits of language, proceeding from the past and present yet will
\nnot be limited by them or their rule and forms and canon, but compass its own
\naltered perfected art of poetry. This at least is its possible ideal endeavour,
\nand then the attempt itself would be a rejuvenating elixir and put the poetic
\nspirit once more in the shining front of the powers and guides of the
\never-progressing soul of, humanity. There it will lead in the journey like the
\nVedic Agni, the fiery giver of the word, yuvā kavih, priyo atithir amartyo mandrajihvah.
\nrtacit, rtāvā,<\/span><\/i> the Youth, the Seer, the beloved and
\nimmortal Guest with his honied tongue of ecstasy, the Truth-conscious, the
\nTruth-finder, born as a flame from earth and yet the heavenly messenger of the
\nImmortals. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 208<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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