{"id":1315,"date":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","slug":"25-new-birth-or-decadence-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\/25-new-birth-or-decadence-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-25_New Birth or Decadence.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

c<\/font>hapter<\/font> <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/b>
\nXXIV<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/font>New
\nBirth or Decadence?<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n                    A<\/font>T THIS point we stand in
\nthe evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a
\ncom\u00admon evolution, and I have singled it out to at<\/span> follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete
\nand suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve ‘of\/the<\/i>
\nhuman spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and, again,
\nbecause of all the modern European languages it has the largest freest poetic
\nenergy and natural power, it responds, on the whole, most directly of all of
\nthem \u2014 in spite of certain se\u00adrious limitations of the English mind \u2014 to the
\nfountain motives, the essential impetus of the soul of poetry in its ascent and
\nshows them, if not always in their greatest or most perfect, yet almost always
\nin their most characteristic and revealing form. Poetry, like everything else
\nin man, evolves. Its fundamental nature, function and law are no doubt always
\nthe same, because each thing and each activity too in our being must be
\nfaithful to the divine idea in it, to its Dharma, and can try to depart from it
\nonly on peril, whatever momentarily it may seem to gain, of eventual
\ninferiority and futility, or even of disintegration and death. But still there
\nis an evolution within this law of its being. And evo\u00adlution means a bringing
\nout of new powers which lay concealed in the seed or the first form; the simple
\ndevelops to the more complex, \u2014 more complex even in some apparent simplicity,
\n\u2014 the superficial gives place to the more and more profound, the lesser gives
\nplace to the greater nature of the common manifestation. But poetry is a
\npsychological phenomenon, the poetic impulse a highly charged force of
\nexpression of the mind and soul of man, and therefore in trying to follow out
\nits line of evolution it is the development of the psychological motive and
\npower, it is the kind of feeling, vision, mentality which is seeking in it for
\nits word and idea and form of beauty and it is the power of the soul<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 189<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

through which it finds expression or the level of
\nmind from which it speaks which we must distinguish to get a right idea of the
\npro\u00adgress of poetry. All else is subsidiary, variations of rhythm, language,
\nstructure; they are the form, the vehicle; they derive subtly and get their
\ncharacter and meaning from the psychologi\u00adcal power and the fundamental motive.<\/p>\n

If poetry is a highly-charged power of
\naesthetic expression of the soul of man, it must follow in its course of
\nevolution the development of that soul. I put it that from this point of view
\nthe soul of man like the soul of Nature can be regarded as an un\u00adfolding of the
\nspirit in the material world. Our unfolding has its roots in the soil of the
\nphysical life; its growth shoots up and out in many directions in the stalk and
\nbranches of the vital being; it puts forth the opulence of the buds of mind and
\nthere, nestling in the luxuriant leaves of mind and above it, out from the
\nspirit which was concealed in the whole process must blossom the free and
\ninfinite soul of man, the hundred-petalled rose of God. Man indeed, unlike
\nother forms of being in terrestrial Nature, though rooted in body, proceeds by
\nthe mind and all that is characteristic of him belongs to -the wonderful play
\nof mind taking up physicality and life and developing and enriching its gains
\ntill it can exceed itself and become a spiritual mind, the divine Mind in man.
\nHe turns first his view on the outward physical world and on his own life of
\noutward action and concentrates on that or throws into its mould his
\nlife-suggestions, his thought, his reli\u00adgious idea, and, if he arrives at some
\nvision of an inner spiritual truth, he puts even that into forms and figures of
\nthe physical life and physical Nature.1<\/sup> Poetry at a certain stage or
\nof a certain kind expresses this turn of the human mentality in word and in
\nform of beauty. It can reach great heights in this kind of mental mould, can
\nsee the physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision
\nand disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and outward
\nbeing and action of man; and in this type we have Homer,\u00a0 <\/span>Arrived to a greater depth of living, seeing
\nfrom a vivid half outward half inward turn of mind his thought and action and self
\nand world and Nature, man begins to feel more sensitively the passion and power
\nof life, its<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1<\/font><\/sup> As in the hymns of the Vedic Rishis.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

Page – 190<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

joy and pain, its wonder and terror and beauty and
\nromance, to turn everything into moved thought and sentiment and sensation of
\nthe life-soul, the desire soul in him which first forces itself on his
\nintrospection when he begins to go inward. Poetry too takes this turn, rises
\nand deepens to a new kind-of greatness; and at the summit in this kind we have
\nShakespeare.<\/p>\n

This way of seeing and creating, in which
\nthought is involved in life and the view is that of the life-spirit feeling,
\nthinking, imagining, carried forward in its own surge of self. cannot perma\u00adnently
\nhold the greater activities of the mental being. He ceases to identify himself
\nentirely with the passion, the emotion, the thought-suggestions of life; for he
\nneeds to know from a freer height what it is and what he is, to get a clear
\ndetached idea of its workings, to dominate his emotions and vital intuitions
\nand see with the calm eye of his reason, to probe, analyse, get at the law and
\ncause and general and particular rule of himself and Na\u00adture. He does this at
\nfirst on large and comparatively bare lines dwelling only on the salient
\ndetails for a first strong and provi\u00adsionally adequate view. Poetry following
\nthis movement takes on the lucid, restrained, intellectual and ideal classic
\nform, in which high or strong ideas govern and develop the presentation of life
\nand thought in an atmosphere of clear beauty and the vision of the satisfied intelligence;
\nthat is the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets. But afterwards the
\nintelligence sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to all manner of
\nthe possibilities of truth and to a crowding stream and mass of inte\u00adrests, a
\nnever satisfied minuteness of detail, an endless succession of pregnant
\ngeneralisations. This is the type of modern intellectualism.\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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

The poetry which arises from this mentality
\nis full of a teem\u00ading many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external
\nand life motives not for their own. sake, but to make them food for the poetic
\nintelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the
\nrealistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking,
\nmakes many experiments and combina\u00adtions, passes through many phases. The true
\nclassic form is then no longer possible; if it is tried, it is not quite
\ngenuine, for what informs it is no longer the classic spirit; it is too crowded
\nwith <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 191<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive,
\nresponsive to\u00a0 <\/span>many things; no new
\nParthenon can be built whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in
\nthe pure and lucid spacing of the idea and the word: the mind of man has become
\ntoo full, complex, pregnant with subtle and not easily expressible things to be
\ncapable of that earlier type of perfection. The romantic strain is a part of
\nthis wider intelligence, but the pure and genuine romanticism of the
\nlife-spirit which cares nothing for thought except as it enriches its own
\nbeing, is also no longer possible. If it tries to get back to that, it falls
\ninto an affectation, an intellectual pose and, whatever genius may be expended
\nupon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure
\nof modern romanticism in Germany
\nand France. In
\nGermany,\u00a0 <\/span>Goethe and Heine alone got away
\nfrom this falsity and were able to use this strain its proper way as one
\nenriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the
\nrest of \u00a0<\/span>German literary creation of the
\ntime is interesting and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is
\nintimately alive and true, afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained
\npoetic impulse she turned aside to music on the one side and on the other to
\nphilosophy and science for her field. The French mind got away very soon from
\nromanticism and, though greatly enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went
\non to a more genuine intellectual and intellectually aesthetic form of
\ncreation. In England
\nwith the greater spontaneity of its poetic spirit the mistake never went so
\nfar. The poetry of the time of Wordsworth and Shelley is sometimes called
\nromantic poetry, but it was not so in its essence, but only in certain of its
\nmoods and motives. It lives really by its greater and more characteristic
\nelement, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth’s force of ethical thought
\nand communion with Nature, by Shelley’s imaginative transcendentalism, Keats’
\nworship of Beauty, Byron’s Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge’s
\nsupernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other
\nnature, Blake’s command of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there,
\nowing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and
\ntherefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a
\nrecord of failures. Realism is a<\/span>
\nmore native turn of <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 192<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

this kind of intelligence, and it invades poetry
\ntoo to a certain extent, but if it dominates, then poetry must decline and cease.
\nThe poetry of an age of many-sided intellectualism can live only by its
\nmany-sidedness and by making everything as it comes a new material for the
\naesthetic creations of the observing, thinking, constructing intelligence.<\/p>\n

But then comes the new vital question in this
\ncultural evolu\u00adtion,\u2014in what is this intellectualism to culminate? For if it
\nleads to nothing beyond itself, it must end, however brilliant its work, in a
\npoetic decadence, and that must come nearer, the more intellect dominates the
\nother powers of our being. The in\u00adtellect moves naturally between two limits,
\nthe abstractions or solving analyses of the reason ‘and the domain of positive
\nand practical reality; its great achievements are in these two fields or in a
\nmediation between them, and it can do most and go far\u00adthest, can achieve its
\nmost native and characteristic and there\u00adfore its greatest and completest work
\neither in philosophy or in science. The age of developed intellectualism in
\nGreece killed poetry; it ended in the comedy of Menander, the intellectual
\nartificialities of Alexandrianism, the last flush of beauty in the aesthetic
\npseudo-naturalism of the Sicilian pastoral poetry; phi\u00adlosophy occupied the
\nfield. In the more rich and complex modern mind this result could not so easily
\ncome and has not yet come. At the-same time the really great, perfect and
\nsecurely charac\u00adteristic work of the age has not been in the field of art and
\npoetry, but in critical thought and science. Criticism and science, by a
\ntriumphant force of abstraction and analysis turned on the world of positive
\nfact, have in this period been able to become enormously effective for life.
\nThey have been able to reign sovereignly, not so much by their contributions to
\npure know\u00adledge, but by their practical, revolutionary and constructive force.
\nIf modern thought with its immense scientific achieve\u00adment has not enriched
\nlife at its base or given it a higher and purer action, \u2014 it has only created a
\nyet unrealised possibility in that direction by its idealistic side, \u2014 it has
\nwonderfully equipped it with powerful machinery and an imposing paraphernalia
\nand wrought conspicuous and unprecedented changes in its super\u00adstructure. But
\npoetry in this atmosphere has kept itself alive not <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 193<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

by any native and spontaneous power born of
\nagreement between its own essential spirit and the spirit of the age, but by a
\ngreat effort of the imagination and aesthetic intelligence labouring for the
\nmost part to make the best of what material it could get in the shape of new
\nthought and new viewpoints for the poetic criticism or the thoughtful
\npresentation of life. It has been an aesthetic byplay rather than a leading or
\nsometimes even premier force in the cultural life of the race such as it was in
\nthe ancient ages and even, with a certain limited action, in more recent times.<\/p>\n

That a certain decline, not of the activity
\nof the poetic mind, but of its natural vigour, importance and effective power
\nhas been felt, if not quite clearly appreciated in its causes, we can see from
\nvarious significant indications. Throughout the later nineteenth century one
\nobserves a constant apprehension of approaching aesthetic decadence, a tendency
\nto be on the look-out for it and to find the signs of it in innovations and new
\nturns in art and poetry. The attempt to break the whole mould of poetry and
\nmake a new thing of it so that it may be easier to handle and may shape itself
\nto all the turns, the high and low, noble and common, fair or unseemly
\nmovements of the modern mind and its varied interest in life, is itself due to
\na sense of some difficulty, limita\u00adtion and unease, some want of equation
\nbetween the fine but severely self-limiting character of this kind of creative
\npower and the spirit of the age. At one time indeed it was hardily predicted
\nthat since the modern mind is increasingly scientific and less and less
\npoetically and aesthetically imaginative, poetry must neces\u00adsarily decline and
\ngive place to science, \u2014 for much the same reason, in fact, for which
\nphilosophy replaced poetry in Greece. On<\/span>
\nthe opposite side it was sometimes suggested that the poetic mind might become
\nmore positive and make use of the materials of science or might undertake a
\nmore intellectual though always poetic criticism of life and might fill the
\nplace of philosophy and religion which were supposed for a time to be dead or
\ndying powers in human nature; but this came to the same thing, for it meant a
\ndeviation from the true law of aesthetic creation and only a more protracted
\ndecadence.<\/p>\n

And behind these uneasy suggestions lay the
\none fact that for causes already indicated an age of reason dominated by the <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 194<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

critical, scientific or philosophic intelligence
\nis ordinarily un\u00adfavourable and, even when it is most catholic and ample,
\ncannot be quite favourable to great poetic creation. The pure intellect cannot
\ncreate poetry. The inspired or the imaginative reason does indeed play an
\nimportant, sometimes a leading part, but even that can only be a support or an
\ninfluence; the thinking mind may help to give a final shape, a great and large
\nform, sammahemā manīsayā,<\/i> as the Vedic poets said of the
\nMantra, but the word must start first from a more intimate sense in the heart
\nof the inner being, h<\/span>rdā tas<\/span><\/span>t<\/span>ān;<\/span><\/i>
\nit is the spirit within and not the mind without that is the fount of poetry.
\nPoetry too is an inter\u00adpreter of truth, but in the forms of an innate beauty,
\nand not so much of intellectual truth, the truths offered by the critical mind,
\nas of the intimate truth of being. It deals not so much with things thought as
\nwith things seen, not with the authenticities of the analytic mind, but with
\nthe authenticities of the synthetic vision and the seeing spirit. The
\nabstractions, generalisations, minute precisions of our ordinary intellectual
\ncerebration are no part of its essence or texture; but it has others, more
\nluminous, more subtle, those which come to us after passing through the medium
\nand getting drenched in the light of the intuitive and revealing mind. And
\ntherefore when the general activity of thought runs predominantly into the
\nformer kind, the works of the latter are apt to proceed under rather anaemic
\nconditions, they are affected by the pervading atmosphere; poetry either ceases
\nor falls into a minor strain or takes refuge in virtuosities of its outer
\ninstruments and aids or, if it still does any considerable work, lacks the
\nsupreme spontaneity, the natural perfection, the sense of abun\u00addant ease or
\nelse of sovereign mastery which the touch of the spirit manifests even amidst
\nthe fullest or austerest labour of its creation.<\/p>\n

But this incompatibility is not the last word
\nof the matter. The truth which poetry expresses takes two forms, the truth of
\nlife and the truth of that which works in life, the truth of the inner spirit.
\nIt may take its stand on the outer life and work in an inti\u00admate identity,
\nrelation or close dwelling upon it, and then what it does is to bring some
\nlight of intuitive things, some power of revelation of the beauty that is truth
\nand the truth that is beauty <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 195<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

into the outer things of life, even into those
\nthat are most common, obvious, of daily occurrence. But also it may get back
\ninto the truth of the inner spirit and work in an intimate identity relation or
\nclose dwelling upon it, and then what it will do is to give a new revelation of
\nour being and life and thought and Nature and the material and the psychical
\nand spiritual worlds. That is the effort to which it seems to be turning now in
\nits most characteristic, effective and beautiful manifestations. But it cannot
\nfully develop in this sense unless the general mind of the age takes that turn.
\nThere are signs that this will indeed be the out come of the new direction
\ntaken by the modern mind, not an intellectual petrifaction or a long spinning
\nin the grooves of a critical intellectualism, but a higher and more authentic
\nthinking and living. In The human intelligence seems on the verge of an attempt
\nto rise through the intellectual into an intuitive mentality; it is no longer
\ncontent to regard the intellect and the world of positive fact as all or the
\nintellectual reason as a sufficient mediator between life and the spirit, but
\nis beginning to perceive that there is a spiritual mind which, can admit us to
\na greater and more comprehensive vision. This does not mean any sacrifice of
\nthe gains of the past, but a raising and extending of them not only by a
\nseeking of the inner as well as the outer truth of things, but also of all that
\nbinds them together and a bringing of them into true relation and oneness. A
\nfirst opening out to this new way of seeing is the sense of the work of Whitman
\nand Carpenter and some of the recent French poets, of Tagore and Yeats and
\nA.E., of Meredith and some others of the English poets. There are critics who
\nregard this tendency as only another sign of decadence; they see in it a morbid
\nbrilliance, a phosphorescence of decay or the phosphorescence which we observe
\non the sea when the sun has gone <\/i>down and night occupies the waters. But
\nthis is to suppose that poetry can only repeat what it has done in the past and
\naccomplish no new and great thing and that a clear, strong or brilliant dealing
\nwith the outer mind and world is its last word and the one condition of its
\nhealthy creativeness. There is much that is morbid, perverse or unsound in some
\nrecent poetry; but his comes from an artificial prolongation of the past or a
\ntemporary mixed straining, it does not belong to that element in the
\n <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 196<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

new poetry which escapes from it and turns firmly
\nto the things of the future. Decadence arrives when in the decline of a culture
\nthere is nothing more to be lived or seen or said, or when the poetic mind
\nsettles irretrievably into a clumsy and artificial repetition of past forms and
\nconventions or can only escape from them into scholastic or aesthetic
\nprettinesses or extravagance. But an age which brings in large and new vital
\nand spiritual truths, truths of our being, truths of the self of man and the
\ninner self of Nature and opens vast untrod ranges to sight and imagination, is
\nnot likely to be an age of decadence, and a poetry which voices these things, \u2014
\nunless its creative power has been fatally atrophied by long conventionalism,
\nand that is not at present our case, \u2014 is not likely to be a poetry of
\ndecadence.<\/p>\n

The more perfectly intuitive poetry of the
\nfuture, supposing it to emerge successfully from its present incubation, find
\nitself and develop all its possibilities, will not be a mystic poetry recondite
\nin expression or quite remote from the earthly life of man. Some element of the
\nkind may be there; for always when we open into these fields, mysteries more
\nthan the Orphic or the Eleusinian revive and some of them are beyond our means
\nof expression; but mysticism in its unfavourable or lesser sense comes when
\neither we glimpse but do not intimately realise the now secret things of the
\nspirit or, realising, yet cannot find their direct language, their intrinsic
\nway of utterance, and have to use obscurely luminous hints or a thick drapery
\nof symbol, when we have the revelation, but not the inspiration, the sight but
\nnot the word. And remoteness comes when we cannot relate the spirit with life
\nor bring the power of the spirit to transmute the other members of our being.
\nBut the new age is one which is climbing from a full intellectuality towards
\nsome possibility of an equal fullness of the intuitive mind, and the full
\nintuitive mind, not that of glimpses, but of a luminous totality, opens to the
\nmind of revelation and inspiration. The aesthetic mind, whether it take form in
\nthe word of the poet or in the word of the illumined thinker, the prophet or
\nthe seer, can be one of the main gateways. And what the age will aim at is
\nneither materialism nor an intuitive vitalism nor a remote detached
\nspirituality, but a harmonious and luminous totality of man’s being. Therefore
\nto this <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 197<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

poetry the whole field of existence will be open
\nfor its subject God and Nature and man and all the worlds, the field of the
\nfinite and the infinite. It is not a close, even a high close and <\/i>ending
\nin this or any field that the future offers to us, but a new and higher
\nevolution, a second and greater birth of all man\u2019s powers and his being and
\naction and creation. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 198<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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