{"id":1692,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:34","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1692"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:18:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:18:14","slug":"14-the-movement-of-modern-literature-1-vol-26-the-future-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/26-the-future-poetry\/14-the-movement-of-modern-literature-1-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-14_The Movement of Modern-\u00a0Literature – 1.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter XIV <\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t Literature \u00ad 1<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tM<\/font>ODERN<\/b> poetry carrying in it the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised mind
\nbegins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Here are the free, impetuous but often
\nnarrow sources of these wider flowings. Here we see the initial tendencies which have undergone a rapid growth of meaning
\nand changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and seeking have reached in the early twentieth a
\nquite unprecedented subtle intensity, refinement and variety of motives and even a tense straining on many lines to find in everything some last occult truth and hitherto unimagined utterance, to go beyond all that poetry has ever done. This is in its very
\nnature an effort which must end either in a lingering, a hectic extravagant or dull exhausted decadence or in a luminous and
\nsatisfied self-exceeding. At the very beginning and still more and increasingly afterwards this modern movement, in literature as
\nin thought and science, takes the form of an ever widening and deepening intellectual and imaginative curiosity, an insatiable
\npassion for knowledge, an eager lust of finding, a seeking eye of intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of an endless new truth and discovery. The Renascence was an awakening of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reflection and the
\nstirred discovery of all that is brilliant and curious in the things of the life and the mind on their surface; but the fullness of the
\nmodern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of the informed and clarified intellect to a wider curiosity, a much
\nmore extensive adventure of discovery and an insistent need to penetrate deeper and know and possess the truth of Nature
\nand man and the universe, \u2014 both their outer truth and process    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>107<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nand whatever deeper mystery may lie hidden behind their first appearances and suggestions. And now it is culminating in something that promises to go beyond it, to bring about a new futurist rather than modernist age in which the leader of the march shall
\nbe intuition rather than the reasoning and critical intelligence. The long intellectual search for truth that went probing always
\ndeeper into the physical, the vital and the subjective, into the action of body and life, into the yet ill-grasped motions of mind
\nand emotion and sensation and thought, is now beginning to reach beyond these things or rather through their subtlest and
\nstrongest intensities of sight and feeling towards the truths of the Spirit. The soul of the Renascence was a lover of life and an
\namateur of knowledge; but the modern spirit has been drawn rather by the cult of a clear, broad and minute intellectual and
\npractical Truth: the dominating necessity of its being is a straining after knowledge and a power of life founded on the power of
\nknowledge. Poetry in the modern age has followed intellectually and imaginatively the curve of this great impulse. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tContinental literature displays the mass of this movement with a much more central completeness and in a stronger and
\nmore consistent body and outline than English poetry. In the Teutonic countries the intellectual and romantic literature of
\nthe Germans at the beginning with its background of transcendental philosophy, at the end the work of the Scandinavian
\nand Belgian writers with their only apparently opposite sides of an intellectual or a sensuous realism and a sentimental or a
\npsychological mysticism, the two strands sometimes separate, sometimes mingled, among the Latins the like commencement
\n\u00b4 in the work of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Chenier, Hugo, the
\nintermediate artistic development of most of the main influences by the Parnassians, the like later turn towards the poetry of
\n\u00b4 Mallarme, Verlaine, D’Annunzio, stigmatised by some as the
\nbeginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of the curve. In English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on
\nthe whole a less clear and definite inspiration and there is in spite of the greatness of individual poets an inferior total effectivity;
\nbut at the beginning and the end it has one higher note, a lifting<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>108<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tof sight beyond the stress of the intellect and the senses, which is
\n\t\t\treached either not at all or much less directly realised with a less
\n\t\t\tpure vision in the more artistically sound and sufficient poetry of
\n\t\t\tthe Continent. Still the principal identical elements are
\n\t\t\tdistinguishable, sometimes very strongly pronounced and helped to
\n\t\t\tsome fullest expression by the great individual energy of
\n\t\t\timagination and force of character which are the most distinct
\n\t\t\tpowers of the English poetic mind. Often they thus stand out all the
\n\t\t\tmore remarkable by the magnificent narrowness of their
\n\t\t\tself-concentrated isolation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEarliest among these many new forces to emerge with distinctness is
\n\t\t\tan awakening of the eye to a changed vision of Nature, of the
\n\t\t\timagination to a more perfect and intimate visualisation, of the
\n\t\t\tsoul to a closer spiritual communion. An imaginative, scrutinising,
\n\t\t\tartistic or sympathetic dwelling on the details of Nature, her
\n\t\t\tsights, sounds, objects, sensible impressions is a persistent
\n\t\t\tcharacteristic of modern art and poetry; it is the poetic side of
\n\t\t\tthe same tendency which upon the intellectual has led to the
\n\t\t\timmeasurable development of the observing and analysing eye of
\n\t\t\tScience. The poetry of older times directed an occasional objective
\n\t\t\teye on Nature, turning a side glance from life or thought to get
\n\t\t\tsome colouring or decorative effect or a natural border or
\n\t\t\tbackground for life or something that illustrated, ministered to or
\n\t\t\tenriched the human thought or mood of the moment, at most for a
\n\t\t\tcasual indulgence of the imagination and senses in natural beauty.
\n\t\t\tBut the intimate subjective treatment of Nature, the penetrated
\n\t\t\thuman response to her is mostly absent or comes only in rare and
\n\t\t\tbrief touches. On the larger scale her subjective life is realised
\n\t\t\tnot with an immediate communion, but through myth and the image of
\n\t\t\tdivine personalities that govern her powers. In all these directions
\n\t\t\tmodern poetry represents a great change of our mentality and a swift
\n\t\t\tand vast extension of our imaginative experience. Nature now lives
\n\t\t\tfor the poet as an independent presence, a greater or equal power
\n\t\t\tdwelling side by side with him or embracing and dominating his
\n\t\t\texistence. Even the objective vision and interpretation of her has
\n\t\t\tdeveloped, where it continues at all the older poetic method, a much
\n\t\t\tmore   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>109<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tminute and delicate eye and touch in place of the large, strong and
\n\t\t\tsimply beautiful or telling effects which satisfied an earlier
\n\t\t\timagination. But where it goes beyond that fine outwardness, it has
\n\t\t\tbrought us a whole world of new vision; working sometimes by a
\n\t\t\tvividly suggestive presentation, sometimes by a separation of
\n\t\t\teffects and an imaginative reconstruction which reveals aspects the
\n\t\t\tfirst outward view had hidden in, sometimes by a penetrating
\n\t\t\timpressionism which in its finest subtleties seems to be coming back
\n\t\t\tby a detour to a sensuously mystical treatment, it goes within
\n\t\t\tthrough the outward and now not so much presents as recreates
\n\t\t\tphysical Nature for us through the imaginative vision.1<\/font><\/sup> By that new
\n\t\t\tcreation it penetrates through the form nearer to the inner truth of
\n\t\t\ther being. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the direct subjective approach to Nature is the most distinctly
\n\t\t\tstriking characteristic turn of the modern mentality. The approach
\n\t\t\tproceeds from two sides which constantly meet each other and create
\n\t\t\tbetween them a nexus of experience between man and Nature which is
\n\t\t\tthe modern way of responding to the universal Spirit. On one side
\n\t\t\tthere is the subjective sense of Nature herself as a great life, a
\n\t\t\tbeing, a Presence, with impressions, moods, emotions of her own
\n\t\t\texpressed in her many symbols of life and stressing her objective
\n\t\t\tmanifestations. In the poets in whom this turn first disengages
\n\t\t\titself, that is a living conscious view of her to which they are
\n\t\t\tconstantly striving to give expression whether in a large sense of
\n\t\t\ther presence or in a rendering of its particular impressions. On the
\n\t\t\tother side there is a sensitive human response, moved in emotion or
\n\t\t\tthrilling in sensation or stirred by sheer beauty or responsive in
\n\t\t\tmood, a response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied
\n\t\t\tyearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise
\n\t\t\tthe soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human
\n\t\t\tindividual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible
\n\t\t\tand sensible universe. Ordinarily it is through the imagination <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1<\/font><\/sup> I am speaking here of Western literature. Oriental art and poetry
\n\t\t\tat any rate in the far East had already in a different way
\n\t\t\tanticipated this more intimate and imaginative seeing.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-110<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tand the intellect and the soul of sensibility that this approach is
\n\t\t\tmade; but there is also a certain endeavour to get through these
\n\t\t\tinstruments to a closer spiritual relation and, if not yet to
\n\t\t\tembrace Nature by the Spirit in man, to harmonise and unite the
\n\t\t\tspiritual soul of man with the spiritual Presence in Nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnother widening of experience which modern poetry renders much more
\n\t\t\tuniversally and with a constant power and insistence is a greater
\n\t\t\tawakening of man to himself, to man in this warp and weft of Space
\n\t\t\tand Time and in the stress of the universe, to all that is meant by
\n\t\t\this present, his past and his future. Here too we have a parallel
\n\t\t\timaginative movement in poetry to the intellectual movement of
\n\t\t\tthought and science with its large and its minute enquiry into the
\n\t\t\torigins and antiquity and history of the race, into the sources of
\n\t\t\tits present development, into all its physical, psychological,
\n\t\t\tsociological being and the many ideal speculations and practical
\n\t\t\taspirations of its future which have arisen from this new knowledge
\n\t\t\tof the human being and his possibilities. Formerly, the human mind
\n\t\t\tin its generality did not go very far in these directions. Its
\n\t\t\tphilosophy was speculative and metaphysical, but with little
\n\t\t\tactuality except for the intellectual and spiritual life of the
\n\t\t\tindividual, its science explorative of superficial phenomenon rather
\n\t\t\tthan opulent both in detail and fruitful generalisation; its view of
\n\t\t\tthe past was mythological, traditional and national, not universal
\n\t\t\tand embracing; its view of the present was limited in objective
\n\t\t\tscope and, with certain exceptions, of no very great subjective
\n\t\t\tprofundity; an outlook on the future was remarkable by its absence.
\n\t\t\tThe constant self-expansion of the modern mind has broken down many
\n\t\t\tlimiting barriers; a vast objective knowledge, an increasingly
\n\t\t\tsubtle subjectivity, a vivid living in the past, present and future,
\n\t\t\ta universal view of man as of Nature are its strong innovations.
\n\t\t\tThis change has found inevitably its vivid reflections in the wider
\n\t\t\tmanysided interests, the delicate refinements, fine searchings,
\n\t\t\tlarge and varied outlook and profound inlook of modern poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe first widening breadth of this universal interest in man, not
\n\t\t\tsolely the man of today and our own country and type or of the past
\n\t\t\ttradition of our own culture, but man in himself in    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>111<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tall his ever-changing history and variety, came in the form of an
\n\t\t\teager poetic and romantic valuing of all that had been ignored and
\n\t\t\tput aside as uncouth and barbarous by the older classical or
\n\t\t\totherwise limited type of mentality. It sought out rather all that
\n\t\t\twas unfamiliar and attractive by its unlikeness to the present; its
\n\t\t\timagination was drawn towards the primitive, the savage, to
\n\t\t\tmediaeval man and his vivid life and brilliant setting, to the
\n\t\t\tOrient very artificially seen through a heavily coloured glamour, to
\n\t\t\tthe ruins of the past, to the life of the peasant or the solitary,
\n\t\t\tthe outlaw, to man near to Nature undisguised by conventions and
\n\t\t\tuncorrupted by an artificial culture or man in revolt against
\n\t\t\tconventions: there is a willed preference for these strange and
\n\t\t\tinteresting aspects of humanity, as in Nature for her wild and
\n\t\t\tgrand, savage and lonely scenes or her rich and tropical haunts or
\n\t\t\ther retired spots of self-communion. On one side a sentimental or a
\n\t\t\tphilosophic naturalism, on the other a flamboyant or many-hued
\n\t\t\tromanticism, superficial mediaevalism, romanticised Hellenism, an
\n\t\t\tinterest in the fantastic and the supernatural, tendencies of an
\n\t\t\tintellectual or an ideal transcendentalism, are the salient
\n\t\t\tconstituting characters. They make up that brilliant and confusedly
\n\t\t\tcomplex, but often crude and unfinished literature, stretching from
\n\t\t\tRousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and taking on its way Goethe,
\n\t\t\tSchiller and Heine, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, which
\n\t\t\tforms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to
\n\t\t\tthe modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of
\n\t\t\tyesterday. Much of it we can now see to have been ill-grasped,
\n\t\t\tsuperficial and tentative; much, as in Chateaubriand and in Byron,
\n\t\t\twas artificial, a pose and affectation; much, as in the French
\n\t\t\tRomanticists, merely bizarre, overstrained and overcoloured; a later
\n\t\t\tcriticism condemned in it a tendency to inartistic excitement,
\n\t\t\tlooseness of form, an unintellectual shallowness or emptiness, an
\n\t\t\till-balanced imagination. It laid itself open certainly in some of
\n\t\t\tits more exaggerated turns to the reproach, \u2014 not justly to be
\n\t\t\talleged against the true romantic element in poetry, \u2014 that the
\n\t\t\tstumbling-block of romanticism is falsity. Nevertheless behind this
\n\t\t\toften defective frontage was the activity of a considerable <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-112<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tforce of new truth and power, much exceedingly great work was done,
\n\t\t\tthe view of the imagination was immensely widened and an
\n\t\t\textraordinary number of new motives brought in which the later
\n\t\t\tnineteenth century developed with a greater care and finish and
\n\t\t\tconscientious accuracy, but with crudities of its own and perhaps
\n\t\t\twith a less fine gust of self-confident genius and large
\n\t\t\tinspiration. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe recoil from these primary tendencies took at first the aspect of
\n\t\t\ta stress upon artistic execution, on form, on balance and design, on
\n\t\t\tmeticulous beauty of language and a minute care and finished
\n\t\t\tinvention in rhythm. An unimpassioned or only artistically
\n\t\t\timpassioned portraiture and sculpture of scene and object and idea
\n\t\t\tand feeling, man and Nature was the idea that governed this artistic
\n\t\t\tand intellectual effort. A wide, calm and impartial interest in all
\n\t\t\tsubjects for the sake of art and a poetically intellectual
\n\t\t\tsatisfaction, \u2014 this poise had already been anticipated by Goethe, \u2014
\n\t\t\tis the atmosphere which it attempts to create around it. There is
\n\t\t\there a certain imaginative reflection of the contemporary
\n\t\t\tscientific, historic and critical interest in man, in his past and
\n\t\t\tpresent, his creations and surroundings, a cognate effort to be
\n\t\t\tunimpassioned, impersonal, scrupulous, sceptically interested and
\n\t\t\treflective. In poetry, however, it loses the cold accuracy of the
\n\t\t\tcritical intellect and assumes the artistic colour, emphasis, warmth
\n\t\t\tof the constructive imagination: but even here there is the same
\n\t\t\ttendency to a critical observation of man and things and world
\n\t\t\ttendencies and a reflective judgment sometimes overweighting the
\n\t\t\tnatural tendency of poetry to the living and creative presentation
\n\t\t\twhich is its native power. There is amidst a wide atmosphere of
\n\t\t\tsceptical or positive thinking an attempt to enter into the
\n\t\t\tpsychology of barbaric and civilised, antique, mediaeval, and
\n\t\t\tmodern, occidental and oriental humanity, to reproduce in artistic
\n\t\t\tform the spirit of the inner truth and outer form of its religions,
\n\t\t\tphilosophic notions, societies, arts, monuments, constructions, to
\n\t\t\treflect its past inner and outer history and present frames and
\n\t\t\tmentalities. This movement too was brief in duration and soon passed
\n\t\t\taway into other forms which arose out of it, though they seemed a
\n\t\t\trevolt against its  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 11<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tprinciples. This apparent paradox of a development draped in the
\n\t\t\tcolours of revolt is a constant psychological feature of all human
\n\t\t\tevolution. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn this turn we are struck by its most glaring feature, the vehement
\n\t\t\twaving of the revolutionary red flag of realism. Realism is in its
\n\t\t\tessence an attempt to see man and his world as they really are
\n\t\t\twithout veils and pretences; it is imagination turning upon itself
\n\t\t\tand trying to get rid of its native tendency to give a personal turn
\n\t\t\tor an enhanced colouring to the object, art trying to figure as a
\n\t\t\tselective process of scientific observation and synthetised
\n\t\t\tanalysis. Necessarily, whenever it is art at all, it betrays itself
\n\t\t\tin the process. Its natural movement is away from the vistas of the
\n\t\t\tpast to a preoccupation with the immediate present, although it
\n\t\t\tbegan with a double effort, to represent the past with a certain
\n\t\t\tvividness of hard and often brutal truth, not in the colours in
\n\t\t\twhich the ideally constructive imagination sees it through the haze
\n\t\t\tof distance, and to represent the present too with the same harsh
\n\t\t\tand violent actuality. But success in this kind of representation of
\n\t\t\tthe past is impossible; it carries in it always a sense of
\n\t\t\tartificiality and willed construction. Realism tends naturally to
\n\t\t\ttake the present as its field; for that alone can be brought under
\n\t\t\tan accurate because an immediate observation. Scientific in its
\n\t\t\tinspiration, it subjects man’s life and psychology to the scalpel
\n\t\t\tand the microscope, exaggerates all that strikes the first outward
\n\t\t\tview of him, his littlenesses, imperfections, uglinesses,
\n\t\t\tmorbidities, and comes easily to regard these things as the whole or
\n\t\t\tthe greater part of him and to treat life as if it were a
\n\t\t\tpsychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon
\n\t\t\tmaterial Nature: it ends, indeed almost begins, by an exaggeration
\n\t\t\tand overstressing which betrays its true character, the posthumous
\n\t\t\tchild of romanticism perverted by a pseudoscientific preoccupation.
\n\t\t\tRomanticism also laid a constant stress on the grotesque, diseased,
\n\t\t\tabnormal, but for the sake of artistic effect, to add another tone
\n\t\t\tto its other glaring colours. Realism professes to render the same
\n\t\t\tfacts in the proportions of truth and science, but being art and not
\n\t\t\tscience, it inevitably seeks for pronounced effects by an evocative
\n\t\t\tstress which falsifies the <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-114<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tdispositions and shades of natural truth in order to arrive at a
\n\t\t\tconspicuous vividness. In the same movement it falsifies the true
\n\t\t\tmeasure of the ideal, which is a part of the totality of human life
\n\t\t\tand nature, by bringing the idealism in man down to the level of his
\n\t\t\tnormal daily littlenesses; in attempting to show it as one strand in
\n\t\t\this average humanity, it reduces it to a pretension and figment; it
\n\t\t\tignores the justification of the idealistic element in art which is
\n\t\t\tthat the truth of the ideal consists essentially in its aspiration
\n\t\t\tbeyond the limitations of immediate actuality, in what our strain
\n\t\t\ttowards self-exceeding figures and not in the moment’s failure to
\n\t\t\taccomplish. Realism on both those sides, in what it ignores and what
\n\t\t\tit attempts, lies open to the reproach aimed at romanticism; its
\n\t\t\tstumbling-block is a falsity which pursues both its idea and its
\n\t\t\tmethod. Nevertheless this movement too behind its crudities has
\n\t\t\tbrought in new elements and motives. It has done very considerable
\n\t\t\twork in fiction and prose drama; in poetry, even, it has brought in
\n\t\t\tsome new strains and greater powers, but here it cannot dominate
\n\t\t\twithout risking to bring about the death of the very spirit of
\n\t\t\tpoetry whose breath of life is the exceeding of outward reality.
\n\t\t\tRealism is still with us, but has already evolved out of itself
\n\t\t\tanother creative power whose advent announces its own passing.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>115<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XIV    The Movement of Modern  Literature \u00ad 1   MODERN poetry carrying in it the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-26-the-future-poetry","wpcat-38-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692","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=1692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9612,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1692\/revisions\/9612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}