{"id":1313,"date":"2013-07-13T01:34:02","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:34:02","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:02","slug":"15-the-movement-of-modern-literature-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\/15-the-movement-of-modern-literature-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-15_The Movement of Modern Literature.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

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

\n     The Movement of Modern
\nLiterature<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/b>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font><\/span>P<\/font>OETRY
\nas the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernized mind
\nbegins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century.
\nThey are the free impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings.
\nWe se the initial tendencies which undergo a rapid growth of meaning and
\nchanges of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and
\nse3king have reached in the early twentieth a subtle intensity, refinement and
\nvariety of motives, a tense straining on many lines to find some last truth and
\nutterance which must end either in a lingering decadence or in a luminous and
\nsatisfied self-exceeding. From the beginning this modern movement, in
\nliterature as in thought, takes the form of an ever widening and deepening
\nintellectual and imaginative curiosity, a passion for knowledge, a passion for
\nfinding, an eye of intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of
\nnew truth and\u00a0 <\/span>discovery. The Renascence
\nwas an awakening of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reflection and
\nthe stirred discovery of the things of the life and the mind; but the fullness
\nof the modern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of the
\ninformed and clarified intellect to a wider curiosity, a much more extensive
\nadventure of discovery and an insistent need to know and possess the truth of
\nNature and man and the universe and whatever may lie hidden behind their first appearances
\nand suggestions. A long intellectual search for truth that goes probing always
\ndeeper into the physical, the vital and subjective, the action of body and
\nlife, mind and emotion and sensation and thought is now beginning to reach
\nbeyond these things or rather through their subtlest and strongest intensities
\nof sight and feeling towards the truth of the Spirit. The soul of the
\nRenascence was a lover of life and an amateur of knowledge; the modern spirit
\nis drawn by the cult of a clear, broad and <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 95<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

minute
\nintellectual and practical Truth; knowledge and a power of life founded on the
\npower of knowledge are the dominating necessities of its being. Poetry in this
\nage has followed intellectually and imaginatively the curve of this great
\nimpulse. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Continental literature displays the
\nmass of this movement with a much more central completeness and in a stronger
\nand more consistent body and outline than English poetry. In the Teutonic
\ncountries the intellectual and romantic literature of the Germans at the
\nbeginning with its background of transcendental philosophy, at the end the work
\nof the Scandinavian and Belgian writers with their only apparently opposite
\nsides of an intellectual or a sensuous realism and a sentimental or a
\npsychological mysticism,, the two strands sometimes separate, sometimes
\nmingled, among the Latins the like commencement\u00a0
\n<\/span>in the work of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Ch\u00e9nier, Hugo, the intermediate
\nartistic development of most of the main influences by the Parnassians, the
\nlike later turn towards the poetry of Mallarm\u00e9, Verlaine, D\u2019Annunzio,
\nstigmatized by some as the beginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of
\nthe curve. In English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on the
\nwhole a less clear and definite inspiration and there in spite of the greatness
\nof individual poets an inferior total effectivity; but at the beginning and the
\nend it has one higher note, a lifting of sight beyond the stress of the
\nintellect and the senses, which is reached either not at all or much less
\ndirectly realized with a less pure vision in the more artistically sound and
\nsufficient poetry of the Continent. Still the principal identical elements are
\ndistinguishable, sometimes very strongly pronounced and helped to some fullest
\nexpression by the great individual energy of imagination and force of character
\nwhich are the most distinct powers of the English poetic mind. Often they thus
\nstand out all the more remarkable by the magnificent narrowness of their
\nself-concentrated isolation. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Earliest among these many new forces
\nto emerge with distinctness is an awakening of the eye to a changed vision of
\nNature, of the imagination to a more perfect and intimate visualisation, of the
\nsoul to a closer spiritual communion. An imaginative, scrutinizing, artistic or
\nsympathetic dwelling on the details <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 96<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of
\nNature, her sights, sounds, objects, sensible impressions is a persistent
\ncharacteristic of modern and poetry; it is the poetic side of the same tendency
\nwhich upon the intellectual has led to the immeasurable development of the
\nobserving and analyzing eye of Science. The older poetry directed an occasional
\nobjective eye on Nature, turning a side glance from life or thought to get some
\ncolouring or decorative effect or a natural border or back-ground for life or
\nsomething that illustrated, ministered to or enriched the human thought or mood
\nof the moment at most for a casual indulgence of the imagination and senses in
\nnatural beauty. But the intimate subjective treatment of Nature, the penetrated
\nhuman response to her is mostly absent or comes only in rare and brief touches.
\nOn the larger scale her subjective life is realized not with an immediate
\ncommunion, but through myth and the image of divine personalities that govern
\nher powers. In all these directions modern poetry represents a great change of
\nour mentality and a swift and vast extension of our imaginative experience.
\nNature now lives for the poet as an independent presence, a greater or4 equal
\npower dwelling side by side with him or embracing and dominating his existence.
\nEven the objective vision and interpretation of her has developed, where it
\ncontinues at all the older poetic method, a much more minute and delicate eye
\nand touch in place of the large strong and simply beautiful or telling effects
\nwhich satisfied an earlier imagination. But where it goes beyond that fine
\noutwardness, it has brought us a whole world of new vision; working sometimes
\nby a vividly suggestive presentation, sometimes by a separation of effects and
\nan imaginative reconstruction which reveals aspects the\u00a0 <\/span>first outward view had hidden in, sometimes
\nby a penetrating impressionism which in its finest subtleties seems to be
\ncoming back by a detour to a sensuously mystical treatment, it goes within
\nthrough the outward and now not so much presents as recreates physical Nature
\nfor us through the imaginative vision.\u00b9 By that new creation it penetrates
\nthrough the form nearer to the inner truth of her being.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But the direct subjective approach
\nto Nature is the most<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\u00b9
\nI am
\nspeaking here of Western literature. Oriental art and poetry at any rate in the
\nfar East had already in a different way anticipated this more intimate and
\nimaginative seeing.<\/font>\u00a0 <\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 97<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

distinctly
\nstriking characteristic turn of the modern mentality. The approach proceeds
\nfrom two sides which constantly meet each other and create between them a nexus
\nof experience between man and Nature which is the modern way of responding to
\nthe universal Spirit.\u00a0 <\/span>On one side there
\nis the subjective sense of Nature herself as a great life, a being, a Presence,
\nwith impressions, moods, emotions of here own expressed in her many symbols of
\nlife and stressing her objective manifestations. In the poets in whom this turn
\nfirst disengages itself, that is a living conscious view of here to which they
\nare constantly striving to give expression whether in a large sense of here
\npresence or in a rendering of its particular impressions. On the other side
\nthere is sensitive human response, moved in emotion or thrilling in sensation
\nor stirred by sheer beauty or responsive in mood, a response of satisfaction
\nand possession or of dissatisfied yearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt
\nto relate or harmonise the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the
\nhuman individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible and
\nsensible universe. Ordinarily it is through the imagination and the intellect
\nand the soul of sensibility that this approach is made; but there is also a
\ncertain endeavour to get through these instruments to a closer spiritual
\nrelation and, if not yet to embrace Nature by the Spirit in man, to harmonise
\nand unite the spiritual soul of man with the spiritual Presence in Nature. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Another widening of experience which
\nmodern poetry renders much more universally and with a constant power and
\ninsistence is a greater awakening of man to himself, to man in this warp and
\nweft of Space and Time and in the stress of the universe, to all that is meant
\nby his present, his past and his future. Here too we have a parallel
\nimaginative movement in poetry to the intellectual movement of thought and
\nscience with its large and its minute enquiry into the origins and antiquity
\nand history of the race, into the sources of its present development, into all
\nits physical, psychological, sociological being and the many ideal speculations
\nand practical aspirations of its future which have arisen from this new
\nknowledge of the human being and his possibilities. Formerly, the human mind in
\nits generality <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 98<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

did
\nnot go very far in these directions. Its philosophy was speculative and
\nmetaphysical, but with little actuality except for the intellectual and
\nspiritual life of the individual, its science explorative of superficial
\nphenomenon rather than opulent both in detail and fruitful generalization; its
\nview of the past was mythological, traditional and national, not universal and
\nembracing, its view of the present limited in objective scope and, with certain
\nexceptions, of no very great subjective profundity; an outlook on the future
\nwas remarkable by its absence. The constant self-expansion of the modern mind
\nhas broken down many limiting barriers; a vast objective knowledge, an
\nincreasingly subtle subjectivity, a vivid living in the past, present and
\nfuture, a universal view of man as of Nature are its strong innovations. This
\nchange has found inevitably its vivid reflections in the wider many-sided
\ninterests, the delicate refinements, fine searchings, large and varied outlook
\nand profound inlook of modern poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The first widening breadth of this
\nuniversal interest in man, not solely the man of today and our own country and
\ntype or of the past tradition of our own culture, but man in himself in all his
\never-changing history and variety, came in the form of an age poetic and
\nromantic valuing of all that had been ignored and put aside as uncouth and
\nbarbarous by the older classical or otherwise limited type of mentality. It
\nsought out rather all that was unfamiliar and attractive by its unlikeness to
\nthe present, the primitive, the savage, mediaeval man and his vivid life and
\nbrilliant setting, the Orient very artificially seen through a heavily coloured
\nglamour, the ruins of the past, the life of the peasant or the solitary, the
\noutlaw, man near to Nature undisguised by conventions and uncorrupted by an
\nartificial culture or man in revolt against conventions, a willed preference
\nfor these strange and interesting aspects of humanity, as in Nature for her
\nwild and grand, savage and lonely scenes or her rich and tropical haunts or her
\nretired spots of self-communion. On one side a sentimental or a philosophic
\nnaturalism, on the other a flamboyant or many-hued romanticism, superficial
\nmediaevalism, romanticized Hellenism, an interest in the fantastic and the
\nsupernatural, tendencies of an intellectual or an ideal transcendentalism, are
\nthe salient constituting characters. They make up that <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 99<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

brilliant
\nand confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature, stretching
\nfrom Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and taking on its way Goethe, Shiller
\nand Heine, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, which forms a hasty transition
\nfrom the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is
\nalready becoming the modernism of yesterday. Much of it we can now see to have
\nbeen ill-grasped, superficial and tentative; much, as in Chateaubriand and in
\nByron, was artificial, a post and affectation; much, as in the French
\nRomanticists, merely bizarre, overstrained and overcoloured; a later criticism
\ncondemned in it a tendency to inartistic excitement, looseness of form, an
\nunintellectual shallowness or emptiness, an ill-balanced imagination. It laid
\nitself open certainly in some of its more exaggerated turns to the
\nreproach,-not justly to be alleged against the true romantic element in poetry,
\n-that the stumbling-block of romanticism is falsity. Nevertheless, behind this
\noften defective frontage was the activity of a considerable force of new truth
\nand power, much exceedingly great work was done, the view of the imagination
\nwas immensely widened and an extraordinary number of new motives brought in
\nwhich the later nineteenth century developed with a greater care and finish and
\nconscientious accuracy, but with crudities of its own and perhaps with a less
\nfine gust of self-confident genius and large inspiration.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The recoil from these primary
\ntendencies took at first the\u00a0 <\/span>aspect of a
\nstress upon artistic execution, on form, on balance and design, on meticulous
\nbeauty of language and a minute care and finished invention in rhythm. An
\nunimpassioned or only artistically impassioned portraiture and sculpture of
\nscene and object and idea and feeling, man and Nature was the idea that
\ngoverned this artistic and intellectual effort. A wide, calm and impartial
\ninterest in all subjects for the sake of art and a poetically intellectual
\nsatisfaction, -this poise had already been anticipated by Goethe, -is the
\natmosphere which it attempts to create around it. There is here a certain
\nimaginative reflection of the contemporary scientific, historic and critical
\ninterest in man, in his past and present, his creations and surroundings, a
\ncognate effort to be unimpassioned, impersonal, scrupulous, skeptically
\ninterested and reflective, though in poetry it loses the cold accuracy of
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 100<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

the
\ncritical intellect and assumes the artistic colour, emphasis, warmth of the
\nconstructive imagination. There is amidst a wide atmosphere of sceptical or
\npositive thinking an attempt to enter into the psychology of barbaric and
\ncivilized, antique, mediaeval and modern, occidental and oriental humanity, to
\nreproduce in artistic form the spirit of the inner truth and outer form of its
\nreligions, philosophic notions, societies, arts, monuments, constructions, to
\nreflect its past inner and outer history and present frames and mentalities.
\nThis movement too was brief in duration and soon passed away into other forms
\nwhich arose out of it, though they seemed a revolt against its principles. This
\napparent paradox of a development draped in the colours of revolt is a constant
\npsychological feature of all human evolution. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In this turn we are struck by its
\nmost glaring feature, the vehement waving of the revolutionary red flag of
\nrealism. Realism is in its essence an attempt to see man and his world as they
\nreally are without veils and pretences; it is imagination turning upon itself
\nand trying to get rid of its native tendency to give a personal turn or an
\nenhanced colouring to the object, art trying to figure as a selective process
\nof scientific observation and synthetised analysis. Necessarily, whenever it is
\nart at all, it betrays itself in the process. Its natural movement is away from
\nthe vistas of the past to a pre-occupation with the immediate present, although
\nit began with a double effort, to represent the past with a certain vividness
\nof hard and often brutal truth, not in the colours in which the ideally
\nconstructive imagination sees it through the haze of distance, and to represent
\nthe present too with the same harsh and violent actuality. But success in this
\nkind of representation of the past is impossible; for that alone can be brought
\nunder an accurate because an immediate observation. Scientific in its
\ninspiration, it subjects man\u2019s life and psychology to the scalpel and the
\nmicroscope, exaggerates all that strikes the first outward view of him, his
\nlittlenesses, imperfections, uglinesses, morbidities, and comes easily to
\nregard these things as the whole or the greater part of him and to treat life
\nas if it were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 101<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

material
\nNature: it ends, indeed almost begins, by an exaggeration and overstressing
\nwhich betrays its true character, the posthumous child of romanticism perverted
\nby a pseudo-scientific preoccupation. Romanticism also laid a constant stress
\non the grotesque, diseased, abnormal, but for the sake of artistic effect, to
\nadd another tone to its other glaring colours. Realism professes to render the
\nsame facts in the proportions of truth and science, but being art and not
\nscience, it inevitably seeks for pronounced and shades of natural truth in
\norder to arrive at a conspicuous vividness. In the same movement it falsifies
\nthe true measure of the ideal, which is a part of the totality of human life
\nand nature, by bringing the idealism in man down to the level of his normal
\ndaily littlenesses; it reduces it to a pretension and figment, ignoring the
\njustification of the idealistic element in art which is that the truth of the
\nideal consist essentially in its aspiration beyond the limitations of immediate
\nactuality, in what it ignores and what it attempts, lies open to the reproach
\naimed at romanticism; its stumbling-block is a falsity which pursues both its
\nidea and its method. Nevertheless this movement too behind its crudities has
\nbrought in new elements and motives. It has done very considerable work in
\nfiction and prose drama; in poetry, even, it has brought in some new strains
\namid the greater powers, but here it could not dominate, -for that would have
\nmeant the death of the very spirit of poetry whose breath of life is the
\nexceeding of outward reality. Realism is still with us, but has already evolved
\nout of itself another creative power whose advent announces its own passing.
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage – 102<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XIV      The Movement of Modern Literature    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 POETRY as the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernized mind begins with the…<\/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-1313","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\/1313","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=1313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}