{"id":1713,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:16:39","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:16:39","slug":"22-recent-english-poetry-3-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\/22-recent-english-poetry-3-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-22_Recent English Poetry – 3.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t Recent English Poetry \u00ad 3<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE RHYTHMIC<\/b> change which distinguishes the new
\npoetry, may not be easy to seize at the first hearing, for it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body,
\ncommencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there
\nis a change too, more readily tangible, in the language of this poetry, in that fusion of a concentrated substance of the idea
\nand a transmuting essence of the speech which we mean by poetic style. But here too, if we would understand in its issues
\nthe evolution of poetic speech in a language, it is on the subtler things of the spirit, the significant inner changes that we must
\nkeep our eye; for it is these that determine the rest and are the heart of the matter. We take little account of the psychology of
\npoetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an
\ninspiration. But this is an insufficient account; for imagination is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at
\ndifferent levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination. What we
\nmean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the
\nordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign
\nbreathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos
\n<\/i>of which Plato has spoken. But it is
\nseldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of
\nits divine origin, \u2014 ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed
\nsubstance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed
\n    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 18<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsome superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character,
\nvalue and force of the word of the poet vary according to the action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the
\nchange, \u2014 the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imaginative or reflective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence.
\nThe Tantric theory of Speech, the inspired seeing and creative goddess enthroned in our various soul-centres in her several
\nforms and with her higher and higher stations, becomes here an actual and luminously perceptible truth of our being. But also
\nthere is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has
\nits share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping
\ntouch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is the
\nepochs when there is in the mind of a race some enthusiastic outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power,
\nintermediary of the inspirations of the spirit or its revelations, that make the great ages of poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn English literature this period was the
\n\t\t\tElizabethan. Then the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn
\n\t\t\tof direct intuitive power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and
\n\t\t\tdivine fashion in its utterance which it had not at all before and
\n\t\t\thas hardly had afterwards. Even the lesser poets of the time are
\n\t\t\ttouched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and condenses
\n\t\t\tto a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the
\n\t\t\tintuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be
\n\t\t\tmeasured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost
\n\t\t\tat their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and
\n\t\t\tfeeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive
\n\t\t\tbeing. We take Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe was a very parfit gentle knight, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tand then pass on to Shakespeare’s rapid seizing of the intuitive
\ninevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>184<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tOf moving accidents by flood and field, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf hair-breadth scapes in the imminent deadly breach, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\twhere with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of
\ndirectness. The one speaks from the poetic intellect and satisfies by a just and pleasing expression, in the other the words get, one
\nmight say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality
\nand give us immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill of the life they describe and interpret. It is not merely a difference of
\nthe measure of the genius, but of its source. This language of Shakespeare’s is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere
\nthe royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and not merely at life and in this most myriad-minded of poets it
\ntakes like life itself many tones, but that intuitive readiness to get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the
\nheart of the thing itself is almost always its secret. From that, he might have said, could he have given a better account of his own
\nworking, and not by any mere mirroring of things in Nature, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt was my hint to speak, such was the process. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each other
\nin a single phrase of many suggestions, \u2014 for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near
\nto it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in
\nMacbeth<\/i>, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRaze out the written troubles of the brain, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd with some sweet oblivious antidote <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhich weighs upon the heart.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013185<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nHis is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare’s images are not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce
\nand visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper
\nstuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent;
\nfor an example, <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nShe should have died hereafter; <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere would have been a time for such a word, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\twhich has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in its
\n\t\t\tutterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on each other,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI have lived long enough; my way of life <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIs fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor
\n\t\t\tbecome one, as in the last speeches of Antony, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI am dying, Egypt, dying; only <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI here importune death awhile, until <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf many thousand kisses the poor last <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI lay upon thy lips. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind
\nrapidly and powerfully at work; but always too, \u2014 and this is the important distinction,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 that mediator between the secret
\nspirit and our ordinary surface mentality works in him through and behind the life vision to give the vital impression, the vital
\npsychology, the life-burden of the thought, the emotion, the act or the thing seen in Nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe movement that immediately followed, abandoned this power which Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had brought
\ninto English poetry; it sought after a language cut into the precision or full with the suggestions of the poetical intellect, and
\nit gained something by its sacrifice; it purified the language, got rid of Elizabethan conceit and extravagance, laid a clearer basis
\nof thought, went back to ordinary speech and raised it into a<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>186<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nfit instrument of the poetical imagination. But it lost this Shakespearian directness of intuitive vision and spontaneous power of
\nutterance. Gray in a notable passage observes and laments the loss, without penetrating into its cause and nature, and he tried
\nsometimes in his own way, within the cadre of an intellectualised language, to recover something of the power. The later poets
\nget a compensation in other directions by a heightening of the clarified thought and imagination, but the basic substance of
\nthe speech seems to have irrecoverably changed and its more tenuous spirit and make impose on the searching audacities of
\nthe intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative intelligence. Shelley’s <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOur sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tKeats’ <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA thing of beauty is a joy for ever, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor his <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo that large utterance of the early Gods,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t or Wordsworth’s<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t the heavy and the weary weight <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf all this unintelligible world, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tgive the force and pitch and measure of this often clear, strong, large and luminous, but less intensely surprising and uplifting
\nmanner. English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the
\nGreek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate
\nturn, a power of fire and ether which has become native to it, a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there
\nin its beginnings. This imaginatively intellectual basis of speech remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut at the same time there emerges, at times, a certain effort to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompanied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>187<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ninspiration. When we try to put a name on it, \u2014 a thing which the poet himself seldom does successfully, for the creative instinct
\ndoes not usually care to burden itself with a too intellectual self-consciousness,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 we can see that this is an attempt to return
\nto the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive expression on a subtler and more ethereal level. The clarified
\nintellect observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately
\nand powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds; and if the direct intuitive power can be got to work on the level just above
\nthe ordinary thinking mind where that mind opens through the full intuitive intelligence to a greater supra-intellectual mass and
\nsubtlety of light, it will bring in the revelation and inspiration of mightier and profounder things than when it works from behind
\nthe mind \u2014 even the vividly thinking mind of life and its vital sight and feeling. For here, on the lower level, we get at most,
\nas in Shakespeare, at the spirit in life with all its power of vital thought and its potency of passion and emotion; but there we
\nshall get the greater spirit which embraces life, but shows us too all that is behind it, all that it dimly means and strives in
\nembarrassed act and thought to bring into expression. Of this effort and this new thing we get magical first indications in the
\npre-Victorian poets, as in Wordsworth’s <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd beauty born of murmuring sound <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShall pass into her face, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor see the first motion towards it, the first seeking for a suitable
\nstyle, as in Keats’ <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDeep in the shady sadness of a vale <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFar sunken from the healthy breath of morn, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFar from the fiery noon and eve’s one star, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tbut also though less often, a sudden leaping out of the thing itself,
\n\t\t\t\u2013<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSolitary thinkings such as dodge <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tConception to the very bourne of heaven, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>188<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tor<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe journey homeward to habitual self.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese lines of Keats are Shakespearian in their quality, they have
\nrecovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and
\ninner truth other than Shakespeare’s; by the passage through the detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of
\nthe realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision. In
\nthe Victorian poets we get occasionally the same tendency in a stronger but less happy force; for it is weighted down by an
\nincreased intellectuality, in Browning by the robust strenuousness of the analytic intelligence, in Tennyson by the tendency
\nto mere trimming of expression or glitter and wealth of artistic colour; but we have its voice sometimes, as in this line of the
\nLotos-Eaters<\/i>, \u2014<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPortions and parcels of the dreadful past. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut it has not yet arrived, it is still seeking for itself, beating fitfully at the gates of the greater intuitive vision and expression. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut in more recent work it is precisely the recovery of this supreme power of speech on that loftier and subtler level which
\nto one who comes freshly to this poetry breaks out with a sense of satisfying surprise and discovery. It is not complete; it is not
\neverywhere; it is only just rising from the acquired basis of the previous heights of expression to its own realm; but it is there
\nin a comparative abundance and it is the highest strain of its intensities. We find it in Meredith; when he writes of “Colour,
\nthe soul’s bridegroom,” he has got the intimate revealing image of this fuller and higher intuitive manner, or in his lark’s <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tsilver chain of sound <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf many links without a break: <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\twhen he writes, again,   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013189<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nNor know they joy of sight <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWho deem the wave of rapt desire must be <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIts wrecking and last issue of delight, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\the has got the perfected turn of the direct intuitive word of
\nthought in its more crowded manner of suggestion, \u2014 the kinship in the last line to the Shakespearian manner is close,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 as
\ntoo its more clear and limpid speech in other turns, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe song seraphically free <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFrom taint of personality; <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tand in the lines, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDead seasons quicken in one petal spot <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf colour unforgot, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\the has it ready for an intuitive and vivid spiritual interpretation of Nature. We find it in Phillips’ <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDreadful suspended business and vast life <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPausing, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor in his trees <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMotionless in an ecstasy of rain. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the Irish poets it comes with less of the Shakespearian kinship, though Yeats has often enough a different but corresponding
\nmanner, but most characteristically in a delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive entrance into the
\nmystery of things, as in lines like A. E.’s <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIs thrilled by fires of hidden day <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd haunted by all mystery, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor passages already quoted from Yeats, or, to give one other
\ninstance, his <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhen God goes by with white footfall.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20131<\/font><\/font>90<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nThis is a style and substance which recovers something that had been lost and yet is new and pregnant of new things in English
\nliterature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is sufficient at present to indicate this new power of language. But we must see whence it arises and to what possibility it points in the widening of the realms of poetic interpretation. It
\npoints to a greater thing than has yet been achieved and it is itself a higher achievement,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 apart from all question of the force and
\ngenius of individual poets. Shakespeare is still \u2014 though need he be always? \u2014 immeasurably the largest name in English poetry;
\nbut still, however preeminent his genius, there remain greater things to be seen by the poet than Shakespeare saw and greater
\nthings to be said in poetry than Shakespeare said, \u2014 and here we have an indication of the way on which they lie and of the
\ngates which open to their hiding-place and own home of light and self-revelation.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013191<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XXII    Recent English Poetry \u00ad 3   THE RHYTHMIC change which distinguishes the new poetry, may not be easy to seize at the…<\/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-1713","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\/1713","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=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9605,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions\/9605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}