{"id":1317,"date":"2013-07-13T01:34:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:13:33","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:13:33","slug":"24-recent-english-poetry-4-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\/24-recent-english-poetry-4-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-24_Recent English Poetry – 4.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


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

 <\/font>  Recent English Poetry \u2013 4<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n    <\/font><\/p>\n

\n            T<\/font>HE inspiring spirit and shaping substance of this
\nnew poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its
\nstyle to the intuitive closeness or directness and presses on it to bring in another
\nlaw of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its
\nmeaning, but it is necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a
\ncloser glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change that is
\ncoming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a
\ngreat and subtle deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind in the race and a
\nnew profounder, closer, more intimate way of seeing, feeling, appreciating,
\ninterpreting life and Nature and existence. The thought of the middle and even
\nthe later nineteenth century was wide in its way, especially in its range and
\nbreadth of surface or in comparison with the narrow thought of the preceding
\nages, but it was acute rather than profound, superficial even in its attempt at
\npenetration. It sought for its food over a great country, but it did not wing
\nhigh in f breadth of the altitudes or plunge down into the largeness of depths.
\nPerhaps the distinction is best marked by that sign cant movement of
\nphilosophic thought which now repelled these limitations rejects the supremacy
\nof the intellect and see for the secret of things in the intuition, in the
\ninmost suggestions of life, in the innate will and principle of action and
\npoints n or less obscurely through these things to a spirit or self or nameless
\nsomewhat superconscient to or at least greater than intellectual mind and
\nreason. The nineteenth century was intellectual, not intuitive, critical rather
\nthan creative, or creative mostly by the constructive force of the critical
\nmind, \u2014 critic constructive, we may then say, rather than creative by any
\ndirect insight and interpretation, \u2014 curiously observative of the phenomenon of
\nlife and Nature, concerned with many interests, patient<\/p>\n

 Page \u2013 176<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

accurate
\nand analytic in its method of scrutiny, occupied by a of many problems, moved
\nby strong human and democratic sympathies, attracted by intellectual ideals,
\nbut mechanical outward in stress and rather curious and inventive than deep or
\nfine in its aesthetic feeling. It has looked much at the body life and active
\nidea, but little at the deeper soul and spirit of things. Poetry has been
\naffected by the turn of the human in this age; it has been brilliant, curious,
\ncareful, inventive, interested and interesting, moving over a great range of
\nsubjects, closely observative and even sometimes analytical, or elaborately
\naesthetic, or expressive of some intellectual idealism, but without much height
\nof wing or force from the depths or strong or fine spiritual suggestion. <\/b>Or<\/span> there has been only some occasional
\nsuggestion or isolated foretaste of these things. There has been much stress of
\nthought, but not much deeply moved or spontaneous greatness of creation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mind and soul of the race is
\nnow moving forward on the basis of what it has gained by a century of
\nintellectual stir and activity, towards a profounder mood and a more internal
\nforce ought and life. The intellectual way of looking at things is gradually
\ntranscended or is raising itself to a power beyond it is moving through the
\nobserving mind and reflective m towards an intimate self-experience, from
\nthought to vision, from intellectual experiment to intuitive experience, from
\nlife and Nature as observed by the eye of the intellect in their appearance to
\nlife and Nature as seen and felt by the soul in their spirit and reality.
\nMankind is still engaged in thinking and searching with an immense stress of
\nmental power, but it is now once more in search of its soul and of the spirit
\nand deeper truth lings, although in a way very different from that of its past
\ncultural ages and on the whole with a greater power and subtlety of mind,
\nthough not as yet, but that too seems predestined me, with a greater power of
\nthe spirit. It is, to return to a phrase already used, in search of our inmost
\nand attempting already to find, though it has not yet altogether found, our
\ninmost way of its sense, vision, idea, expression. This change, reflected in
\nthe poetry of the time is not an abrupt turn or a casting of the immediate past
\nfrom which it was born, but a rapid <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 177<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

development of new viewpoints, a shedding of
\nrestrictions and limitations and husks and externalities, a transformation by
\nthe entrance of a new force of the soul into possession of the gains of the
\nintellectual age and a swift completion and filling of them out in a new flood
\nof light and an at once nearer and more extended sense of their meaning. The
\nwhole view and sense of existence has deepened into a greater subjectivity. For
\nthe subjectivity of the nineteenth century was a matter of the temperament, an
\nactivity of the strongly marked psychological individuality turned upon things
\nheld under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now there are coming
\na universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an attempt towards closeness and
\nidentity, a greater community of the individual with the universal soul and
\nmind. The wider interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing
\nits character. More strenuous than before, it is less concentrated on his outer
\nlife and creation, and even where it deals with them, it opens more
\nunderstandingly to his future and to his inner possibilities, to the
\npsychological and the spiritual sense of his past, to the deeper significance
\nof his present, to his self-creation. The profounder ranges of his being are
\nnow sounded and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the
\ngreater individual and the communal or universal self of our kind. Nature is
\nseen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the finer impres\u00adsions
\nby which we enter into them and establish with her a spiri\u00adtual relation or
\nidentity. The things that lie behind the material world are almost for the
\nfirst time being touched and seen with a close and revealing intimacy. The
\ncommunion of the human soul with the Divine is becoming once more a subject of
\nthought and utterance, not now limited to the old religious and personal form,
\nbut enlightened by a sense of the Infinite and Eternal which has arisen from
\nand vivified the larger cosmic sense for which the thinking and discovery of
\nthe last century was a training. This change amounts to a revolution of the
\nwhole attitude of man towards existence, but if is commencing by an extension
\nof the intellectual stress and a consequent breaking down of its bounds. A
\nself-exceeding of the intellect and a growth of man into some first freedom and
\npower of an intuitive mentality supported by<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 178<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

the liberated intelligence is in its initial
\ntravail of new birth. These things have not all arrived, but they are on the
\nway and the first waves of the surge have already broken over the dry beaches
\nof the age of reason.<\/p>\n

This considerable change was intellectually
\nanticipated and to some extent prepared in the last century itself by a strain,
\na little thin in body, but high and continuous, of strenuous intellec\u00adtuality
\nwhich strove to rise beyond the level of the ordinary thought of the time to
\nthe full height and power of what the intellect of the race could then think
\nout or create in the light of the inheritance of our ages. A small number of
\nwriters, \u2014 in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best known
\namong these names, \u2014 build for us a bridge of transition from the intellectual
\ntranscendentalism of the earlier nineteenth cen\u00adtury across a subsequent
\nlow-lying scientific, utilitarian, exter\u00adnalised intellectualism, as if from
\nbank to bank across morass or flood, over to the age now beginning to come in
\ntowards us. But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman^ was the
\none prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths
\nand had some sense of that to which they are leading. He belongs to the largest
\nmind of the nineteenth century by the stress and energy of his intellectual
\nseeking, by his emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the cos\u00admic
\nand universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his democra\u00adtic enthusiasm, by
\nhis eye fixed on the future, by his intellectual reconciling vision at once of
\nthe greatness of the individual and the community of mankind, by his
\nnationalism and internationa\u00adlism, by his gospel of comradeship and fraternity
\nin our common average manhood, by almost all in fact of the immense mass of
\nideas which form the connecting tissue of his work. But he brings into them an
\nelement which gives them another potency and meaning and restores something
\nwhich in most of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and sicklied
\nover by an exces\u00adsive intellectual tendency more leaned to observe life than
\nstrong and swift to live it and which in the practicality of the time was
\ncaught up from its healthful soul of Nature and converted into a huge grinding
\nmechanism. He has the intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he
\nutters, an almost primitive force of vitality <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 179<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

delivered
\nfrom the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very
\nspirit of life, \u2014 that closeness he has more
\nthan any other poet since Shakespeare, \u2014 and
\nen\u00adnobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a broad and full
\nintellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made subject and object and
\nsubstance of a free and a powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is
\nmade one with the pulse of life and the grave reflective pallor and want of
\nblood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that vigorous union.
\nWhitman writes with a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear
\nself-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into speech,\u2014<\/p>\n

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Yet utter the word
\nDemocratic, the word En Masse..<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Of Life immense in
\npassion, pulse, and power, <\/i><\/p>\n

Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine,<\/i><\/p>\n

The Modern Man I sing.<\/i><\/p>\n

No other writer of the time has had this
\nlarge and definite con\u00adsciousness of the work of a modern poet as a
\nrepresentative voice of his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation
\nconceived as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind, of
\nuniversal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and action. His creation,
\ntriumphing over all defect and shortcoming, draws from it a unique broadness of
\nview, vitality of force and sky-wide atmosphere of greatness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

But beyond this representation of the largest
\nthought and life and broadest turn to the future possible to his age, there is
\nsomething else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards what is
\nnow opening to man around or above, towards a vision of new reaches and a
\nprofounder interpretation of exis\u00adtence. Whitman by the intensity of his
\nintellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at
\nsome first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater
\nself in the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening
\ndown through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater
\nself of Nature and of the<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 180<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over
\nlings, who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense their oneness. That
\nwhich the old Indian seers called the mahān
\nātmā<\/i> Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast
\nstrain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, \u2014 the French poets,
\ninfluenced in their form and substance by Whitman have seized on this element
\nwith the clear discernment and intellectual precision and lucidity of the Latin
\nmind and given it the name of unanimism, \u2014 is the subject of some of his
\nhighest strains. He gets to it repeatedly through his vision of the past
\nopening to the ideal future, the organic universal movement of bygone nations
\nand ages and the labour and creation of the present and some nobler coming turn
\nto a freedom of unified completion, \u2014<\/p>\n

The journey done, the journeyman come home,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

And man and art with Nature fused again… <\/i><\/p>\n

The Almighty leader now for once has signalled with <\/i><\/p>\n

his wand.<\/i><\/p>\n

And some part of his work, as in the Passage
\nto<\/u> India,<\/i> opens out even into a fuller and profounder sense of its
\nmeaning. He sees it here as a new voyage of the human spirit, \u2014 "0 farther
\nsail!"<\/p>\n

Sail forth\u2014steer for the deep waters only…<\/i><\/p>\n

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,<\/i><\/p>\n

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and
\nall…<\/i><\/p>\n

O
\ndaring joy,-but safe! are they not all the seas of God?<\/i><\/p>\n

And with a singularly clear first seeing of
\nthe ideal goal and the ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and
\nvital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure, <\/p>\n

The circumnavigation of the world begin,<\/i><\/p>\n

Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,<\/i><\/p>\n

To reason’s early paradise,<\/i><\/p>\n

Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent
\nintuitions,<\/i><\/p>\n

Again with fair creation. <\/i><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 181<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

He casts forward too the ideal heart of this wider
\nmovement of man into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion, brings
\nout the divinity of the soul in man and its kinship to the divinity of the
\nEternal, \u2014<\/p>\n

0 Thou transcendent,<\/i><\/p>\n

Nameless,
\nthe fibre and the breath,<\/i><\/p>\n

Light of the light, shedding forth universes,
\nthou centre of<\/i><\/p>\n

them,<\/i><\/p>\n

Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,…<\/i><\/p>\n

How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how<\/i><\/p>\n

speak,
\nif out of myself<\/i><\/p>\n

I could not launch to those superior universes?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Swiftly I shrivel at
\nthe thought of God, <\/i><\/p>\n

At nature and its wonders. Time and Space and Death,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But that I, turning,
\ncall to thee, 0 soul, 0 actual Me,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>And, lo, thou gently
\nmasterest the orbs,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Thou matest Time,
\nsmilest content at Death,<\/i><\/p>\n

And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of
\nspace, \u2014<\/i><\/p>\n

and he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to conscious
\nfruition in oneness, \u2014<\/p>\n

Greater than stars or suns, <\/i><\/p>\n

Bounding, 0 soul, thou journeyest forth:<\/i><\/p>\n

What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>What aspirations,
\nwishes outvie thine and ours, 0 soul?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>What dreams of the
\nideal? what plans of purity?<\/i><\/p>\n

perfection,
\nstrength?<\/i><\/p>\n

What cheerful willingness for others\u2019 sake to give up all?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/sup>For others\u2019
\nsake to suffer all?<\/i><\/p>\n

Reckoning ahead, 0 soul, when thou, the time achieved,.. <\/i><\/p>\n

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim<\/i><\/p>\n

attained, <\/i><\/p>\n

As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother<\/i><\/p>\n

found,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The
\nYounger melts in fondness in his arms. <\/i><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 182<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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


\n\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b>These
\npassages, \u2014 one of the seers of old time reborn in ours might so have expressed
\nhimself in a modern and intellectualised language, \u2014 send forward an arclight
\nof prophetic expression on what is at the very heart of the new movement of
\nhumanity. It is in some degree an indication of that which the twentieth
\ncentury is slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own in a
\ncloser actuality of insight and experience.<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

The idea in these and cognate passages anticipates
\nthe new age, but the language and method are still that of the poetic intellect
\nstraining to some fullest power of its intelligence and speech-force, and the
\nthought and writing of those who follow Whitman, like the French
\n"unanimist" poets, bear the<\/i> same character. At the centre of
\nEnglish poetry, in England itself, we have found another turn of intuitive
\nspeech which is more native to that closer actuality of experience for which we
\nseek, a turn and power brought about perhaps by the greater fire of-poetic
\ngenius and imagination, the special gift of the Anglo-Celtic mind, which leaps
\nat once to the forceful, native, instinctive<\/span> energy of poetic expression of the thing it has to say. The
\nfull idea of that thing, the large and clearly conceived substance of thought
\nand vision which should fill this mould of intuitive utterance, we do not get
\nin any considerable degree or range, \u2014 again perhaps because of the inferior
\nturn for large and straight thinking on the great scale, a full-orbed thinking
\nwith a sustained and total conception, which is the defect of the English
\nmind,\u2014 but we have constant partial intuitions in detail and a treatment of
\nlife and thought and nature which presses towards the greater coming
\nsignificance. That is as yet only one strain of recent poetry, but it is the
\nmost powerful and original and turns someti\u00admes almost with a full face towards
\nthe future. These are strong touches only, but they give already some
\nimpression and mould of the thing that has to be, the ultimate creation. A new
\nintuitive interpretation of the soul and mind of man, of the soul and mind in
\nNature, a thought which casts its fathom beyond the passion of life and the
\nclarity of the intelligence and starts sounding a suggestion of the hidden and
\nthe infinite in all it touches is the shaping power and the mode of this
\nutterance.<\/p>\n

The citations I have already given to illustrate the new <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 183<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

rhythm and language indicate also this power and
\nthought-turn in the substance. A few more citations from the same poets may
\nhelp to bring it out with more precision. The early and greater poetry of
\nPhillips has much of this stamp, \u2014 afterwards he un\u00adhappily turned to a more
\noutward dramatic motive which was not the true and original bent of his genius,
\nbut even there his best is that which prolongs the high beauty of his first
\ninspiration. He has no great conscious range of poetical thinking, but all the
\nmore remarkable is the power with which this new influence comes out in what he
\ncan give us. We note a new treatment of life and human emotion. The love of
\nIdas for Marpessa is not satisfied with the old forms of passion and feeling
\nand imaginative idea\u00adlism, there are here other notes which carry the
\nindividual emo\u00adtion out of itself and strive to cast it into unity with the
\nlife of Nature and the whole past life and love of humanity and the eternal
\ncontinuity of passion and seeking and all the suggestion of the Infinite. The
\nvery passion for physical beauty takes on this almost mystic character; it is
\nthe passion for a body<\/p>\n

packed with sweet<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Of all this world, that cup of brimming June, <\/i><\/p>\n

That
\njar of violet wine set in the air, <\/i><\/p>\n

That
\npalest rose sweet in the night of life.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

But,
\nsays Idas,<\/p>\n

Not
\nfor this only do I love thee, but<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Because Infinity upon thee broods, <\/i><\/p>\n

And
\nthou art full of whispers and of shadows. <\/i><\/p>\n

Thou
\nmeanest what the sea has striven to say<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>So long, and yearned up to the cliffs to tell:<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thou
\nart what all the winds have uttered not,<\/i><\/p>\n

What
\nthe still night suggesteth to the heart.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;<\/i><\/p>\n

Thy
\nface remembered is from other worlds. <\/i><\/p>\n

It
\nhas been died for though I know not where. <\/i><\/p>\n

It
\nhas been sung of though I know not when. <\/i><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 184<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

I am aware of other times and lands, <\/i><\/p>\n

Of births far back, of lives in many stars.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Here we have the reconciliation, already suggested
\nby Whitman, of the full power and meaning of the individual with the full power
\nand meaning of the universal, eternal and infinite, but it is concentrated and
\nbrought to bear on a single feeling for its enlargement with a great power of
\nintuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet
\nand become one with the universal and infinite \u2014 Tennyson’s knowing of what God
\nand man is from a deep and intimate perception of all that is meant by Nature
\nin a single little flower in the crannies \u2014 is a very characteristic and
\nindicative feature of this new poetry.<\/p>\n

The same turn emerges in a
\nmore indirect and subtle, but not less significant way of treatment even in
\nlines which apparently seek only to concentrate for the thought the essence of
\na common human idea and emotion. When the poet speaks of<\/p>\n

Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Durable
\nfrom the daily dust of life,\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>.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

or of Marpessa’s maternal human longing,<\/p>\n

\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\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\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\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\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\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\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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

And he shall give me passionate children, not <\/i><\/p>\n

Some radiant god that will despise me quite, <\/i><\/p>\n

But clambering limbs and little hearts that err,<\/i><\/p>\n

the<\/span> thought in itself is not
\nuncommon, but what makes it uncommon is the turn of the utterance which by an
\nintuitive pressure towards some deeper significance of the personal thought and
\nemotion carries it beyond the personality of the idea and feeling into a
\nsuggestion of profound universality, a rhythm and light of some entire
\nvibration from the depths of life caught up and held by a human self-knowledge.
\nThe same force of suggestion emerges in the treatment of Nature, whether it
\ntakes the form of an intensity of sensation,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 185<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

the moment deep<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>When we
\nare conscious of the secret dawn<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Amidst the
\ndarkness that we feel is green<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

or passes through that intensity to the sense
\nof the very soul and emotion of what seems to us in less seeing moods an
\ninconscient and inanimate Nature, as in the<\/p>\n

trees<\/i><\/p>\n

Motionless
\nin an ecstasy of rain.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

Meredith with his greater force of thinking gives us the clear
\nsignificance of what is here only a powerful indication, a seeing identity of
\nthe soul of man with the hidden soul in earth-nature:<\/p>\n

I neighbour the invisible<\/i><\/p>\n

So
\nclose that my consent<\/i><\/p>\n

Is
\nonly asked for spirits masked<\/i><\/p>\n

To
\nleap from trees and flowers.<\/i><\/p>\n

And
\nthis because with them I dwell<\/i><\/p>\n

In
\nthought, while calmly bent<\/i><\/p>\n

To
\nread the lines dear earth designs<\/i><\/p>\n

Shall
\nspeak her life on ours.<\/i><\/p>\n

And the same turn emerges too in direct thought on the large aspects
\nof life, as in such a phrase as<\/p>\n

Lonely antagonist of destiny,<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>or that which
\ndescribes<\/p>\n

The listless ripple of oblivion,<\/i><\/p>\n

lines which give us by some deep suggestion
\nto the spiritual sight a whole abiding soul aspect of man and the universe in a
\nsingle revealing expression. The effort of poetry of this kind of inspiration
\nmay be defined by adapting another expression of Meredith’s,<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 186<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

To spell the letters of the sky and read<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>A reflex upon earth
\nelse meaningless.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the fullness of that which it points to
\nbeyond itself, is a movement to unite the life of the earth, not lessened, not
\ndenied, not cast away, but accepted, with its own hidden spiritual reality, the
\none crucial<\/span> movement necessary
\nfor man before he can reach that perfection which the race shall have on its heights, when <\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain,<\/i><\/p>\n

Not
\nforfeiting the beast with which they are crossed,<\/i><\/p>\n

To
\nstature of the Gods they shall attain.<\/i><\/p>\n

They shall uplift their earth to meet her Lord,<\/i><\/p>\n

Themselves
\nthe attuning chord.<\/i><\/p>\n

This is in substance the
\nsame strain that arises finally from the more puissant voice of Whitman, but it
\nhas if a less forceful, a profounder touch, \u2014 a more delicate, intimate and
\nspiritual closeness of seeing, experience and utterance is its charm and
\ndistinction.\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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

The indication that we get in these and other
\nEnglish poets opens to a clearer totality in the two great Irish voices. They have,
\nhelped by the strand of a spiritual lucidity of thought in the finer Celtic
\nmind, a sustained and conscious idea of the thing that is most inwardly
\nstirring them to utterance. That shapes into a singular light, delicacy and
\nbeauty the whole of Yeats\u2019 poetry. Here I must be content to note three of its
\nmore distinctive fea\u00adtures, the remarkable interweaving into one, whether
\nagainst a background of Irish tradition and legend or by a directed thought, of
\nthe earthly life of man with the unseen psychical life which, if we could only
\nsee it, as we can when we go back from the front \u00adage of things into the inner
\nsoul-spaces, presses upon the earth-life and supports it, so that at times our
\nworld seems only its detached projection; the reading through the signs of life
\nof the brighter letters of an ideal and eternal Beauty; the insistence, even
\nwhen touching exclusively our external life, on the sugges\u00adtion of finer
\nsoul-values which exceed its material meanings. The poetry of A.E. is still
\nmore remarkable. What the others <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 187<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

suggest or give us in more or less luminous
\nglimpses, he casts into concentrated expression from a nearer spiritual
\nknowledge, \u2014 as when he strikes out in a brief verse the living spiritual per\u00adception
\nof the universal and infinite source of love, \u2014<\/p>\n

We bade adieu to love the old,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>We heard another lover
\nthen,<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Whose forms are myriad
\nand untold, <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Sigh to us from the
\nhearts of men.<\/i><\/p>\n

He<\/span>
\nlives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry is an indistinct or
\na less distinct aspiration, and his whole self-expression is bathed, perhaps
\nrendered sometimes a little remote and unseizable by its immergence, in an
\nunusual light, the light of the spirit breaking through the veils of the
\nintelligence in which it has to find its means of speech. This is not the frank
\nmarriage and close unity of the earth and heavens of which Whitman and Meredith
\nspeak, but a rare, high and exclusive pinnacle of the soul’s greater sight. The
\nrest of this side of recent poetry is a climbing or pointing up from the
\nearth-levels to the heights of Truth; but from one region of those loftiest
\nelevations this sight looks down and opens its eye of light on the life of man
\nand the cycles of the universe.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 188<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

chapter XXIII    Recent English Poetry \u2013 4                 THE inspiring spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its…<\/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-1317","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\/1317","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=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9596,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions\/9596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}