{"id":1316,"date":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1316"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","slug":"02-introductory-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\/02-introductory-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-02_Introductory.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n


\nI<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n


\nTHE FUTURE POETRY<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n


\nII<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n


\nL<\/font>ETTERS O<\/font>N P<\/font>OETRY,
\nL<\/font>ITERATURE A<\/font>ND A<\/font>RT<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

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


\nIntroductory<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/font><\/p>\n

\nI<\/font>T IS<\/font> not often that we see
\npublished in India literary criticism which is of the first order, at once
\ndiscerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think. A
\nbook which recently I have read and more than once repressed with a yet
\nunexhausted pleasure and fruitfulness, Mr. James Cousins’ New Ways<\/i> in
\nEnglish Literature<\/i>, is eminently of this kind. It raises thought which goes
\nbeyond the strict limits of the author’s subject and suggests the whole question
\nof the future of poetry in the age which is coming upon us, the higher functions
\nopen to it, \u2014 as yet very imperfectly fulfilled, \u2014 and the part which English
\nliterature on the one side and the Indian mind and temperament on the other are
\nlikely to take in determining the new trend. The author is himself a poet, a
\nwriter of considerable force in the Irish movement which has given contemporary
\nEnglish literature its two greatest poets, and the book on every page attracts
\nand satisfies by its living force of style, its almost perfect measure, its
\ndelicacy of touch, its fineness and depth of observation and insight, its just
\nsympathy and appreciation. <\/p>\n

\nFor the purpose for which these essays have been, not indeed written, but put
\ntogether, the criticism, fine and helpful as it is, suffers from one great
\nfault, \u2014 there is too little of it. Mr. Cousins is satisfied with giving us the
\nessential, just what is necessary for a trained mind to seize intimately the
\nspirit and manner and poetic quality of the writers whose work he brings before
\nus. This is done sometimes in such a masterly manner that even one touch more
\nmight well have been a touch in excess.  <\/span>
\nThe essay on Emerson is a masterpiece in this kind; it gives perfectly in a few
\npages all that should be said about Emerson’s poetry and nothing that need not
\nbe said. But some of the essays, admirable in themselves, are too slight for our
\nneed. The book <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 1<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

is not
\nindeed intended to be exhaustive in its range. Mr. Cousins wisely takes for the
\nmost part, \u2014 there is one notable exception, \u2014 writers with whom he is in close
\npoetical sympathy or for whom he has a strong appreciation; certain name which
\nhave come over to our ears with some flourish of the trumpets of renown,
\nThompson, Mansfield, Hardy, do not occur at all or only in a passing allusion.
\nBut still the book deals among contemporary poets with Tagore<\/span>,
\nA.E., and Yeats, among recent poets with Stephen Phillips, Meredith, Carpenter,
\ngreat names all of them, not to speak of lesser writers. This little book with
\nits 135 short pages, not, be it understood, for the purposes of the English
\nreader interested in poetry, but for ours in India who have on this subject a
\ngreat ignorance and, most of us, a very poorly trained critical intelligence. We
\nneed something a little more ample to enchain our attention and fix in us a
\npermanent interest; a finger-post by the way is not enough for the Indian
\nreader, you will have to carry him some miles on the road if you would have him
\nfollow it. <\/p>\n

\nBut Mr. Cousins has done a great service to the Indian mind by giving it at all
\na chance to follow this direction with such a guide to point out the way. The
\nEnglish language and literature is practically the only window the Indian mind,
\nwith the narrow and meager and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses
\ninto the world of European thought and culture; but, at least as possessed at
\npresent, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for
\nall but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does not
\nstop with Byron and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of
\nsome of the contemporary poets; their readers are hardly enough to make a
\nnumber. In this matter of culture this huge peninsula, once one of the greatest
\ncentres<\/span> of civilisation<\/span>, has
\nbeen for long the most provincial of provinces; it has been a patch of tilled
\nfields round a lawyer’s office and a Government cutcherry<\/span>,
\na cross between a little district town and the most rural of villages, at its
\nlargest a dried-up bank far away from the great stream of the world’s living
\nthought and action, visited with no great force by occasional and belated waves,
\nbut for the rest a bare field for <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 2<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsluggish activities, the falsest possible education, knowledge always
\ntwenty-five or fifty years behind the time. The awakening brought by the opening
\nyears of the twentieth century patriotism, highly necessary for a nation which
\nhas distinctive contribution to make to the human spirit in its future
\ndevelopment, some new and great thing which it must evolve out of a magnificent
\npast for the opening splendours<\/span> of the future; but in
\norder that this may evolve rapidly and surely, it need a wide and sound
\ninformation, a richer stuff to work upon, a more vital touch with the life and
\nmaster tendencies of the world around it. Such books as this will be of
\ninvaluable help in creating what is now deficient. <\/p>\n

\nThe helpfulness of this suggestive work comes more home to me personally because
\nI have shared to the full the state of mere blank which is the ordinary
\ncondition of the Indian mind with regard to its subject. Such touch as in the
\nintellectual remoteness of India I have been able to keep up with the times, had
\nbeen with contemporary continental rather than contemporary English literature.
\nWith the latter all vital connection came to a dead stop with my departure from
\nEngland quarter of a century ago; it had for its last events the discovery of
\nMeredith as a poet in his Modern Love<\/i> and the perusal of Christ in
\nHades<\/i>,   <\/span>\u2014 some years before
\nits publication, \u2014 the latter an unforgettable date. I had long heard, standing
\naloof in giant ignorance, the great name of Yeats, but with no more than a
\nfragmentary and mostly indirect acquaintance with some of his work; A.E. only
\nlives for me in Mr. Cousins’ pages; other poets of the day are still represented
\nin my mind by scattered citations. In the things of culture such a state of
\nignorance is certainly an unholy state of sin; but in this immoral and imperfect
\nworld even sin has sometimes its rewards, and I get that now in the joy and
\nlight of a new world opening to me all in one view while I stand, Cortes-like,
\non the peak of the large impression created for me by Mr.Cousins<\/span>‘ book. For the light we get from a vital and
\nilluminative criticism from within by another mind can sometimes almost take the
\nplace of a direct knowledge. <\/p>\n

            <\/span>
\nThere disengages itself from these essays not so much a special point of view as
\na distinctive critical and literary temperament <\/p>\n


\nPage \u2013 3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

which
\nmay be perhaps not so much the  <\/span>whole
\nmind of the critic as the response to his subject in a mind naturally in
\nsympathy with it. Mr.Cousins<\/span> is a little nervous about
\nthis in his preface; he is apprehensive of being idealism and realism in
\nliterature has always seemed to me to be a little arbitrary and unreal, and
\nwhatever its value in drama fiction, it has no legitimate place in poetry. What
\nwe find here is a self-identification with what is best and most characteristic
\nof a new spirit in the age, a new developing aesthetic temper and outlook, \u2014 or
\nshould we rather say, inlook<\/span>? Its mark is a greater
\n(not exclusive) tendency to the spiritual rather than the merely earthly, to the
\nlife within and behind than to the life in front, and in its purest, which seems
\nto be its Irish form, a preference of the lyrical to the dramatic and of the
\ninwardly suggestive to the concrete method of poetical presentation. Every
\ndistinctive temperament has naturally the defect of an insufficient sympathy,
\noften a pronounced and intolerant antipathy towards all that departs from its
\nown motives. Moreover, contemporary criticism is beset with many dangers; there
\nis the charm of new thought and feeling and expression of tendency which blinds
\nus to the defects and misplaces or misproportions<\/span> to
\nour view the real merits of the expression itself; there are powerful
\ncross-currents of immediate attraction and repulsion which carry us from the
\ntrue track; especially, there is the inevitable want of perspective which
\nprevents us from getting a right vision of things too near us in time. And if,
\nin addition, one is oneself part of a creative movement with powerful tendencies
\nand a pronounced ideal, it becomes difficult to get away from the standpoint it
\ncreates to a larger critical outlook. From these reefs and shallows
\nMr.Cousins<\/span>‘ sense of measure and justice of appreciation largely,
\ngenerally indeed, preserve him, though not, I think, quite invariably. But still
\nit is not a passionless, quite disinterested criticism which we get or want from
\nthis book, but a much more helpful thing, an interpretation of work which
\nembodies the creative tendencies of the time by one has himself live in them and
\nhelped both to direct and to form.
\n <\/p>\n


\nPage \u2013 4<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

Mr.Cousins<\/span>‘ positive criticism is almost always fine, just
\nand inspired by a warm glow of sympathy and understanding tempered by
\ndiscernment, restraint and measure; whatever the future critic, using his scales
\nand balance, may have to take away from it, will be, one would imagine, only by
\nway of a slight alteration of stress here and there. His depreciations, though
\ngenerally sound enough, are not, I think, invariably as just as his
\nappreciations. Thus his essay on the work of J.M.Synge<\/span>,
\n"The Realist on the Stage", is, in sharp distinction from the rest of the book,
\nan almost entirely negative and destructive criticism, strong and interesting,
\nbut written from the point of view of the ideals and aims of the Irish literary
\nmovement against a principle of work which seemed entirely to depart from them,
\nyet we are allowed to get some glimpse of a positive side of dramatic power
\nwhich the critic does not allow us, but leaves us rather to guess at.
\nMr.Cousins<\/span> seems to me to take the dramatist’s theory of his own art more
\nseriously than it should be taken; for the creator can seldom be accepted \u2014
\nthere may of course be exceptions, rare instances of clairvoyant self-sight \u2014 as
\na sound exponent of his own creative impulse. He is in his central inspiration
\nthe instrument of a light and power by motives which were the contribution of
\nhis own personal effort, but which are often quite subordinate or even
\naccidental side-lights of the lower brain-mind, not the central moving force.<\/p>\n

Mr.Cousins<\/span> has pointed out clearly enough that art can never
\nbe a copy of life. But it is also true, I think, that that is not the secret
\nobject of most realism, whatever it may say about itself; realism is in fact a
\nsort of nether idealism, or, perhaps more correctly, sometimes an inverse,
\nsometimes a perverse romanticism which tries to get a revelation of creative
\ntruth by an effective force of presentation, by an intensity, often an
\nexaggeration at the opposite side of the complex phenomenon of life. All art
\nstarts from the sensuous and sensible, or takes it as a continual point of
\nreference or, at the lowest, uses it as a symbol and a fount of images; even
\nwhen it soars into invisible worlds, it is from the earth that it soars; but
\nequally all art worth the name must go<\/p>\n


\nPage \u2013 5<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

beyond
\nthe visible, must reveal, must show us something that is hidden, and in its
\ntotal effect not reproduce but create. We may say that the artist creates an
\nideal world of his own, not necessarily in the sense of ideal perfection, but a
\nworld that exists in the idea, the imagination and vision of the creator. More
\ntruly, he throws into significant form a truth he has seen, which may be truth
\nof hell or truth of heaven or an immediate truth behind things terrestrial or
\nany other, but is never merely the external truth of earth. By that ideative<\/span> truth and the power, the perfection and the beauty
\nof his presentation and utterance of it, his work must be judged.<\/p>\n

\nSome occasional utterances in this book seem to spring from very pronounced
\nidiosyncrasies of its distinctive literary temperament or standpoint and cannot
\nalways be accepted without reservation. I do not myself share its rather
\ndisparaging attitude towards the dramatic form and motive or its comparative
\ncoldness towards the architectural faculty and impulse in poetry. When Mr.Cousins<\/span> tells us that "its poetry and not its drama will
\nbe the thing of life" in Shakespeare’s work, I feel that the distinction is not
\nsound all through, that there is a truth behind it, but it is overstated. Or
\nwhen still more vivaciously he dismisses Shakespeare the dramatist "to a dusty
\nand reverent immortality in the libraries" or speaks of the "monstrous net of
\nhis life’s work" which but for certain buoys of line and speech "might sink in
\nthe ocean of forgetfulness", I cannot help feeling that this can only be at most
\nthe mood of the hour born of the effort to get rid of the burden of its past and
\nmove more freely towards its future, and not the definitive verdict of the
\npoetic and aesthetic mind on what has been so long the object of its sincere
\nadmiration and a powerful presence and influence. Perhaps I am wrong, I may be
\ntoo much influenced by my own settled idiosyncrasies of an aesthetic temperament
\nand being impregnated with an early cult for the work of the great builders in
\nSanskrit and Greek, Italian and English poetry. At any rate, this is true that
\nwhatever relation we may keep with the great masters of the past, our present
\nbusiness is to go beyond and not to repeat them, and it must always be the
\nlyrical motive and spirit which find a new secret and begin a new creation; for
\nthe lyrical is the primary <\/p>\n

\n Page \u2013 6<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\npoetical motive and spirit and the dramatic and epic must wait for it to open
\nfor them their new heaven and new earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have referred to these points which are
\nonly side issues or occasional touches in Mr.Cousins<\/span>‘
\nbook, because they are germane to the question which it most strongly raises,
\nthe future of English poetry and of the world’s poetry. It is still uncertain
\nhow that future will deal with the old quarrel between idealism and realism, for
\nthe two tendencies these names roughly represent are still present in the
\ntendencies of recent work. More generally, poetry always sways between two
\nopposite trends, towards predominance of subjective vision and towards an
\nemphasis on objective presentation; and it can rise too beyond these to a
\nspiritual plane where the distinction is exceeded, the divergence reconciled.
\nAgain, it is not likely that the poetic imagination will ever give up the
\nnarrative and dramatic form of its creative impulse; a new spirit in poetry,
\neven though primarily lyrical, is moved always to seize upon and do what it can
\nwith them, \u2014 as we see in the impulsion which has driven Maeterlinck, Yeats, Rabindranath<\/span> to take hold of the dramatic form for
\nself-expression as well as the lyrical in spite of their dominant subjectivity.
\nWe may perhaps think that this was not the proper form for their spirit, that
\nthey cannot get there a full or a flawless success; but who shall lay down rules
\nfor creative genius or say what it shall or shall not attempt? It follows its
\nown course and makes its own shaping experiments. And it is interesting to
\nspeculate whether the new spirit in poetry will take and use with modifications
\nthe old dramatic and narrative forms, as did Rabindranath<\/span>
\nin his earlier dramatic attempts, or quite transform them to its own ends, as he
\nhas attempted in his later work. But after all these are subordinate issues.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

It will be more fruitful to take the main
\nsubstance of the matter for which the body of Mr.Cousins<\/span>‘
\ncriticism gives a good material. Taking the impression it creates for a
\nstarting-point and the trend of English poetry for our main text, but casting
\nour view farther back into the past, we may try to sound what the future has to
\ngive us through the medium of the poetic mind and its power for creation and
\ninterpretation. The issues of recent activity are still doubtful and it would be
\nrash to make any <\/p>\n

Page \u2013 7<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tconfident prediction; but there is one possibility which this book
\n\t\t\tstrongly suggests and which it is at least interesting and may be
\n\t\t\tfruitful to search and consider. That possibility is the discovery
\n\t\t\tof a closer approximation to what we might call the mantra<\/i> in
\n\t\t\tpoetry that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at
\n\t\t\tonce from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of the
\n\t\t\tTruth, \u2014 the discovery of the word, the divine movement, the form of
\n\t\t\tthought proper to the reality which, as
\n\t\t\tMr.Cousins<\/span>
\n\t\t\texcellently says, " lies in the apprehension of a something stable
\n\t\t\tbehind the instability of word and deed, something that is
\n\t\t\treflection of the fundamental passion of humanity for something
\n\t\t\tbeyond itself, something that is a dim foreshadowing of the divine
\n\t\t\turge which is prompting all creation to unfold itself and to rise
\n\t\t\tout of its limitations towards its Godlike possibilities".  <\/span>
\n\t\t\tPoetry in the past has done that in moments of supreme elevation; in
\n\t\t\tthe future there seems to be some chance of its making it a more
\n\t\t\tconscious aim and steadfast endeavour<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 8<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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