{"id":1305,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1305"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:59","slug":"11-the-course-of-english-poetry-2-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\/11-the-course-of-english-poetry-2-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-11_The Course of English Poetry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 2.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

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

\n       The Course of English
\nPoetry \u2013 2<\/font><\/span> 
\n<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n       
\n<\/font><\/span><\/b>B<\/font>EAUTIFUL as are many of its
\nproductions, powerful as it is in the mass, if we look at it not in detail, not
\nmerely revelling in beauty of line and phrase and image, in snatches of song and
\noutbursts of poetic richness and power, but as a whole, as definite artistic
\ncreation, this wealthiest age of English poetry bears a certain stamp of defect
\nand failure. It cannot be placed for a moment as a supreme force of excellence
\nin literary culture by the side of the great ages of Greek and Roman poetry,
\nbut, besides that, it falls short too in aesthetic effect and virtue in
\ncomparison with other poetic periods less essentially vigorous than itself; it
\nhas an inferior burden of meaning and, if a coursing of richer life-blood, no
\nsettled fullness of spirit and a less adequate body of forms. The great
\nmagician, Shakespeare, by his marvelous poetic rendering of life and the spell
\nhis poetry casts upon us, conceals this general inadequacy; the whole age which
\nhe embodies is magnified by his presence and the adjacent paler figures catch
\nsomething of the light and kinship of his glory and appear in it more splendid
\nthan they are. Shakespeare is an exception, a miracle of poetic force; he
\nsurvives untouched all adverse criticism, not because there are not plenty of
\nfairly large spots in this sun, but because there are not plenty of fairly
\nlarge spots in this sun, but because in any complete view of him, they
\ndisappear in the greatness of his light. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a
\nhigh order, great in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their
\nstature to an uplifting power in the age and not chiefly to their own intrinsic
\nheight of genius; and that power had many vices, flaws and serious limitations
\nwhich their work exaggerates willfully rather than avoids. The gold of this
\ngolden age of English poetry is often very beautifully and richly wrought, but
\nit is seldom worked into a perfect artistic whole; it disappears continually in
\nmasses of alloy, and there is on the whole more of a surface gold-dust than <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 65<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of
\nthe deeper yield of the human spirit.<\/p>\n

The defect of this Elizabethan work is most
\ncharacteristic and prominent in that part of it which has been vaunted as its
\nchief title to greatness, its drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe may be considered
\nseparately; but the rest of Elizabethan dramatic work is powerful in effort
\nrather than sound and noble in performance. All its vigorous presentation of
\nlife has not been able to keep it alive; it is dead or keeps only, to use
\nMr.Cousins\u2019 phrase, the dusty immortality of the libraries, and this in spite
\nof the attention drawn to it in quite recent times by scholars and critics and
\nthe hyperbolic eulogies two or three eminent writers have bestowed on it. This
\nis not to say that it has not merits and, in any way, very striking merits. The
\nElizabethan playwrights were men of a confident robust talent, some of them of
\nreal genius; they had the use of the language of an age in which the power of
\nliterary speech was a common possession and men were using language as a quite
\nnew and rich instrument, lavishly, curiously, exulting in its novel capacities
\nof expression; the first elements of the dramatic form, the temper and some of
\nthe primary faculties which go to make dramatic creation possible were there in
\nthe literary spirit of the age, and all of them in more or less degree
\npossessed these things and could use them. They have a certain force of vital
\ncreation, the faculty pf producing very freely a mass of incident and movement,
\nmuch power of exuberant dialogue, a knack of expression both in verse and prose
\nand of putting the language of the passions into the mouth of cleverly
\nconstructed human figures which walk actively about the stage, if not in quite a
\nnatural manner, yet with enough of it to give for the time the illusion of
\nliving creatures; and they had to give for the time the illusion of living
\ncreatures; and they had eminently a vigorous turn for the half romantic, half
\nrealistic reproduction of life and manners. Especially, it was a time in which
\nthere was a fresh and vivid interest in life and man and action, in the
\nadventure and wonder and appeal of the mere vital phenomenon of living and
\nfeeling and thinking, and their work is full of this freshness and interest.
\nAll this, it might be thought, is quite enough to create a great dramatic
\npoetry; and certainly if we require no more than this we shall give a prominent
\nplace to the Elizabethan drama, higher perhaps than to
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 66<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

the
\nGreek or any other. But these things are enough only to produce plays which
\nwill live their time on the stage and in the library; they are not, by
\nthemselves, sufficient for great dramatic creation. Somethi9ng else is needed
\nfor that, which we get in Shakespeare, in Racine, Corneille and Moli\u00e8re, in
\nCalderon, in the great Greeks, in the Sanskrit dramatists; but these other
\nElizabethans are rather powerful writers and playwrights than inspired dramatic
\npoets and creators. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Dramatic poetry cannot live by the
\nmere presentation of life and action and the passions, however truly they may
\nbe portrayed or however vigorously and abundantly. Its object is something
\ngreater and its conditions of success much more onerous. It must have, to begin
\nwith, as the fount of its creation or in its heart an interpretative vision and
\nin 6hat vision an explicit or implicit idea of life and the human being; and
\nthe vital presentation which is its outward instrument, must arise out of that
\nharmoniously, whether by spontaneous creation, as in Shakespeare, or by the
\ncompulsion of an intuitive artistic will, as with the Greeks. This
\ninterpretative vision and idea have in the presentation to seem to arise out of
\nthe inner life of vital types of the human soul or individual representatives
\nof it through an evolution of speech leading to an evolution of action, -speech
\nbeing the first important instrument, because through it the poet reveals the
\naction of the soul, and outward action, and event, even when it is
\nconsiderable, and the consummating event, even though loud and violent, are
\nonly either its symbol or else its condition of culmination. Finally, all this
\nhas to be cast into a close dramatic form, a successful weaving of
\ninterdependent relations, relations of soul to soul, of speech to speech, of
\naction to action, the more close and inevitable the better, because so the
\ntruth of the whole evolution comes home to us. And if it is asked what in a
\nword is the essential purpose of all this creation, I think we might possibly
\nsay that drama is the poet\u2019s vision of some part of the world-act in the life
\nof the human soul, it is in a way his vision of
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 67<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Karma,
\nin an extended and very flexible sense of the word; and at its highest point it
\nbecomes a poetic rendering or illustration of the Aeschylean drasanti
\npathein<\/i>, \u201cthe doer shall feel the effect of his act\u201d, in an inner as well
\nas an outer, a happy no less than an austere significance, whether that effect
\nbe represented as psychological or vital, whether it comes to its own through
\nsorrow and calamity, ends in a judgment by laughter or finds an escape into
\nbeauty and joy, whether the presentation be tragic or comic pr tragic-comic or
\nidyllic. To satisfy these conditions is extremely difficult and for that reason
\nthe great dramatists are sop few in their number, -the entire literature of the
\nworld has hardly given us more than a dozen. The difficult evolution of
\ndramatic poetry is always more hard to lead than the lyric which is poetry\u2019s native
\nexpression, or than the narrative which is its simpler expansion.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The greatness of a period of
\ndramatic poetry can be measured by the extent to which these complex conditions
\nwere understood in it or were intuitively practiced. But in the mass of the Elizabethan
\ndrama the understanding is quite absent and the practice comes, if at all, only
\nrarely, imperfectly and by a sort of accident. Shakespeare himself seems to
\nhave divined these conditions or contained them in the shaping flame of his
\ngenius rather than perceived them by the artistic intelligence. The rest have
\nordinarily no light of interpretative vision, no dramatic idea. Their tragedy
\nand comedy are both oppressively external; this drama presents, but does not at
\nall interpret; it is an outward presentation of manners and passions and lives
\nby vigour of action and a quite outward-going speech; it means absolutely
\nnothing. The tragedy is irrational, the comedy has neither largeness nor
\nsubtlety of idea; they are mixed together too without any artistic connection
\nsuch as Shakespeare manages to give to them so as to justify thoroughly their
\ncoexistence, The characters are not living beings working out their mutual
\nKarma, but external figures of humanity jostling each other on a crowded stage,
\nmere tossing drift of the waves of life. The form of the drama too is little
\nmore than a succession of speech and incident,\u00b9<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\u00b9Ben Jonson is an exception. He
\nhas the idea of construction, but his execution is heavy and uninspired, the
\nwork of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist.<\/font> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 68<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

as
\nin a story, with a culminating violent or happy ending, which comes not because
\npsychologically it must, but because a story has to have a release of ending,
\nor, if tragic, its point of loud detonation. To make up for their essential
\ndefects these poets have to heap up incident and situation and assail us with
\nvehement and often grossly exaggerated speech and passion, frequently tearing
\nthe passion into glaringly coloured tatters, almost always overstraining or in
\nsome way making too much of it. They wish to pile on us the interest of life in
\nwhose presentation their strength lies, to accumulate in a mass, so as to carry
\nus away, things attracting, things amusing, things striking, things horrible;
\nthey will get at us through the nerves and the lower emotional being, -and in
\nthis they succeed eminently, -since they cannot get at us through a higher
\nintellectual and imaginative appeal. The evolution of the action is rather
\ntheatrically effective than poetic, the spirit and the psychology melodramatic
\nrather than dramatic. Nor are these radical dramatic defects atoned for by any
\ngreat wealth of poetry, for their verse has more often some formal merit and a
\ngreat air of poetry than its essence, -though there are exceptions as in lines
\nand passages of Peele and Webster. The presentation of life with some poetic
\ntouch but without any transforming vision or strongly suffusing power in the
\npoetic temperament is the general character of their work. It is necessary to
\nemphasise these defects because indiscriminate praise of these poets helps to
\nfalsify or quite exclude the just artistic view of the aim of sound dramatic
\ncreation, and imitation of the catching falsities of this model has been the
\nreal root of the inefficacy of subsequent attempts in the dramatic form even by
\npoets of great gifts. It explains the failure of even a mind which had the true
\ndramatic turn, a creator like Browning, to achieve drama of the first
\nexcellence. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Marlowe alone of the lesser
\nElizabethans dramatists stands apart from his fellows, not solely by his strong
\nand magnificent vein of poetry, but because he knows what he is about; he alone
\nhas some clearly grasped aim, but it is\u00a0
\n<\/span>a sound aim on the higher levels of the dramatic art. He knows that the
\nhuman soul in action is his subject and Karma the power of the theme, and he <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 69<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

attempts
\ntop create a drama of human will throwing itself on life, the will egoistic and
\nAsuric, conquering only to succumb to the great adversary Death or breaking
\nitself against the forces its violence has brought into hostile play. This is
\ncertainly a high and fit subject for tragic creation and his highly coloured
\nand strongly cut style and rhythm are well-suited for its expression.
\nUnhappily, Marlowe had the conception, but not any real power of dramatic
\nexecution. He is unable to give the last awakening breath of life to his
\nfigures; in the external manner so common in English poetry and fiction he
\nrather constructs than evolves, portrays than throws out into life, paints up
\nor sculptures from outside than creates from within, which is yet the sole true
\nmethod of poetic or at least of dramatic creation. He has not, either, the
\nindispensable art of construction; only in one of his tragedies does he vitally
\nrelate together his characters and their action throughout, and even that,
\nthough a strong work, falls far short of the greatness of a masterpiece. He had
\ntoo, writing for the Elizabethan stage, to adopt a model which was too complex
\nfor the strong simplicity of his theme and the narrow intensity of his genius,
\nand he had, working for that semi-barbarous public, to minister to tastes which
\nwere quite incongruous with his purpose and which he had not flexibility enough
\nto bring within its scope or to elevate towards its level. In cacti, Marlowe
\nwas not a born dramatist; his true genius was lyrical, narrative and epic.
\nLimited by his inborn characteristics, he succeeds in bringing out his poetic
\nmotive only in strong detached scenes and passages or in great culminating
\nmoments in which the lyrical cry and the epic touch break out through the form
\nof drama.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Shakespeare stands out alone, both
\nin his own age when so many were drawn to the form and circumstances were
\nfavourable to this kind of genius, and in all English literature, as the one
\ngreat and genuine dramatic poet, but this one is indeed equal to a host. He
\nstands out too as quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his
\ncontemporaries resemble him only in externals; they have the same outward form
\nand crude materials, but not the inner dramatic method by which he transformed
\nand gave them a quite other meaning and value; and later romantic drama, though
\nit has tried hard to imitate the Shakespearian <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 70<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

motive
\nand touch, has been governed by another kind of poetic mind and its external
\nmethod has been really different. It takes hold of life, strings together its
\nunusual effects and labours to make it out of the way, brilliant, coloured,
\nconspicuous. Shakespeare does not do that, except rarely, in early imitative
\nwork or when he is uninspired. He does not need to lay violent hands on life
\nand turn it into romantic pyrotechnics; for life itself has taken hold of him
\nin order to recreate itself in his image, and he sits within himself at its
\nheart and pours out from its impulse a throng of beings, as real in the world
\nhe creates as men are in this other world from which he takes his hints, a
\nmultitude, a riot of living images carried on a many-coloured sea of revealing
\nspeech and a never failing surge of movement. His dramatic method seems indeed
\nto have usually no other intellectual purpose, aesthetic motive or spiritual
\nsecret: ordinarily it labours simply for the joy of a multiple poetic vision of
\nlife and vital creation with no centre except the life-power itself, no
\ncoordination except that thrown out spontaneously by the unseizable workings of
\nits energy, no unity but the one unity of man and the life-spirit in Nature
\nworking in him and before his eyes. It is this sheer creative Ananda of the
\nlife-spirit which is Shakespeare; abroad everywhere in that age it incarnates
\nitself in him for the pleasure of poetic self-vision.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>All Shakespeare\u2019s powers and
\nlimitations, -for it is now permissible to speak of his limitations, -arise
\nfrom this character of the force that moved him to poetic utterance. He is not
\nprimarily an artist, a poetical thinker or anything else of the kind, but a
\ngreat, vital creator and intensely, though within marked limits, a seer of
\nlife. His art itself is life arranging its forms in its own surge and
\nexcitement, not in any kind of symmetry, -for symmetry here there is none, -nor
\nin fine harmonies, but still in its own way supremely and with a certain
\nintimately metric arrangement of its many loose movements, in mobile
\nperspectives, a succession of crowded but successful and satisfying vistas.
\nWhile he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not
\nthink for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not
\nso much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in
\nhim through many mouths, <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 71<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

in
\nmany moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for
\nany clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual
\nresult. His development of human character has a sovereign force within its
\nbounds, but it is the soul of the human being as seen through outward
\ncharacter, passion, action, the life-soul, and not either the thought-soul or
\nthe deeper psychic being or the profounder truth of the human spirit. Something
\nof these things we may get, but only in shadow or as a partial reflection in a
\ncoloured glass, not in their own action. In his vision and therefore in his
\npoetic motive Shakespeare never really either rises up above life or gets
\nbehind it; he neither sees what it reaches out to nor the great unseen powers
\nthat are active within it. At one time, in two or three of his tragedies, he
\nseems to have been striving to do this, but all that he does see then is
\nthe\u00a0 <\/span>action of certain tremendous
\nlife-forces which he either sets in a living symbol or indicates behind the
\nhuman action, as in Macbeth<\/i>, or embodies, as in King Lear,<\/i> in a
\ntragically uncontrollable possession of his human characters. Nevertheless, his
\nis not a drama of mere externalized action, for it lives from within and more
\ndeeply than our external life. This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross
\nforms, but Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through those
\nforms to see his own images behind them. More than any other poet Shakespeare
\nhas accomplished mentally the legendary f4eat of the impetuous sage Viswamitra;
\nhis power of vision has created a Shakespearean world of his own, and it is, in
\nspire of its realistic elements, a romantic world in a very true sense of the
\nword, a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external
\nrealities, where what is here dulled and hampered finds a greater enlarged and
\nintense breath of living, an ultra-natural play of breath, curiosity and
\namplitude. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is needful in any view of the
\nevolution of poetry to note the limits within which Shakespeare did his work,
\nso that we may fix the point reached; but still within the work itself his
\nlimitations do not matter. And even his positive defects and lapses cannot
\nlower him, because there is an unfailing divinity of power in his tough which
\nmakes them negligible. He has, however much toned down, his share of the
\nElizabethan crudities,
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage – 72<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

violences,
\nextravagances, but they are upborne on a stream of power and end by falling in
\ninto the general greatness of his scheme. He had deviations into stretches of
\nhalf prosaic verse and vagaries of tortured and bad poetic expression,
\nsometimes atrociously bad; but they are yet always very evidently not failures
\nof dramatic truth and carried on by his force of expression than bound to
\nverbal perfection. We feel obliged to accept his defects, which in another poet
\nour critical sense would be swift to condemn or reject, because they are part
\nof his force, just as we accept the vigorous errors of a great personality. His
\nlimitations are very largely the condition of his powers. Certainly, he is no
\nuniversal revealer, as his idolaters would have him be, -for even in the
\nlife-soul of man there are things beyond him, -but to have given a form so
\nwonderful, so varied, so immortally alive, in so great a surge of the intensest
\npoetical expression, to a life-vision of this kind and this power, is a unique
\nachievement of poetical genius. The future may find for us a higher and
\nprofounder, even a more deeply and finely vital aim for the dramatic form than
\nany Shakespeare ever conceived, but until that has been done with an equal
\npower, grasp and fullness of vision and an equal intensity of revealing speech,
\nhe keeps his sovereign station. The claim made for him that he is the greatest
\nof poets may very well be challenged, -he is not quite that, -but that he is
\nfirst among dramatic poets cannot well be questioned. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>So far then the English poetic
\nspirit had got in the drama, and it has never got any farther. And this is
\nprincipally because it has allowed itself to be obsessed by the Elizabethan
\nformula; for it has clung not merely to the Shakespearian form, -which might
\nafter due modification still be used for certain purposes, especially for a
\ndeeper life-thought expressing itself through the strong colours of a romantic
\ninterpretation, -but to the whole crude inartistic error of that age. Great
\npoets, poets of noble subjective power, delicate artists, fine thinkers and
\nsingers, all directly they turn to the dramatic form, begin to externalise
\nfatally; they become violent, they gesticulate, they press to the action and
\nforget to have an informing thought, hold themselves <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 73<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

bound
\nto the idea of drama as a robust presentation of life and incident and passion.
\nAnd because this is not a true idea and, in any case, it is quite inconsistent
\nwith the turn of their own genius, they fail inevitably. Dryden stumbling
\nheavily through his rhymed plays, Wordsworth of all people, the least
\nElizabethan of poets, penning with a conscientious dullness his Borderers,<\/i>
\nByron diffusing his elemental energy in bad blank verse and worse dramatic
\nconstruction, Keats turning from his unfinished Hyperion<\/i> to wild
\nschool-boy imitations of the worst Elizabethan type, Shelley eve,, forgetting
\nhis discovery of new and fine literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the
\nElizabethan violences of the Cenci, <\/i>Tennyson, Swinburne, even after Atalanta,\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>following the same ignis fatuus, a very
\nflame of fatuity and futility, are all victims of the same hypnotism. Recently
\na new turn is visible; but as yet it is doubtful whether the right conditions
\nfor a renovation of the dramatic form and a true use of the dramatic motive
\nhave all come into being. At any rate the predestined creator, if he is to
\ncome, is not yet among us. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 74<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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