{"id":1717,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:42","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1717"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:36:42","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:42","slug":"26-the-sun-of-poetic-truth-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\/26-the-sun-of-poetic-truth-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-26_The Sun of Poetic Truth.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t The Sun of Poetic Truth<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tW<\/font>HAT IS<\/b> the kind of Truth which we can demand from
\nthe spirit of poetry, from the lips of the inspired singer, or what do we mean when we speak of Truth as one
\nof the high powers and godheads of his work and of its light as a diviner sunlight in which he must see and shape from
\nits burning rays within and around him the flame-stuff of his creation? We have all our own notions of the Truth and that
\ngives an ambiguous character to the word and brings in often a narrow and limited sense of it into our idea of poetry. But first
\nthere is the primary objection, plausible enough if we look only at the glowing robe and not at the soul of creative expression,
\nthat the poet has nothing at all to do with any other kind of truth or with Truth at all for her own sake, but is a lover only
\nof Beauty, she his only worshipped goddess, and not truth but imagination her winged servant and the radiant messenger of the
\nMuse. If it cannot absolutely be said that most poetry is most feigning and the whole art amounts to a power of beautiful
\nfiction, yet it is apparent that the poet most succeeds when he takes outward or actual truth only as a first hint and steeps most
\nsubtly whatever crude matter it gives to his mind in the delightful hues of imagination and transmutes it into the unfettered beauty
\nof her shapes. That might seem at first sight to mean or so might be interpreted that truth and art are two unconnected or little
\nconnected things, and if truth is to be made at all the subjectmatter of art, it yet does not become art unless it has come out
\ntransfigured and, it may be, unrecognisable in the imagination’s characteristic process. But in fact it does not mean that, but
\nonly that art is not an imitation or reproduction of outward Nature, but rather missioned to give by the aid of a transmuting
\nfaculty something more inwardly true than the external life and appearance.
\n    <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tAnd next, there is the quite opposite idea, which one finds sometimes rampant and self-confident in an age of realism and
\nthe cult of vital power, that the truth which is the material of poetry and has to be set out and rhythmed in her process, is
\nthe reality of life in its most strenuous vital sense, the reality of what we see and hear and touch and vitally feel and energetically think with the most positive impact of the mind, the raw rough concrete and dynamic fact of experience to be transferred
\nwithout any real change into rhythmic form, relieved with image and dressed in its just idea and word. And we are even told that
\npoetry to be faithful to life must manage not only her seeing and expression, but her rhythmic movement so as to create some
\nsubjective correspondence with life, creep and trip and walk and run and bound along with it, reproduce every bang and stumble
\nand shuffle and thump of the vital steps, and then we shall get a quite new large and vigorous music and in comparison with its
\nsincere and direct power the old melodies will fade into false and flimsy sweetnesses of insipid artifice. Here what is demanded is
\nnot beauty but power or rather force. If beauty can get in, if she can dress herself in these new and strong colours, we shall
\ngratefully accept her, provided she is not too beautiful to be true and does not bring in again with her the unreal, the romantic
\nor remotely ideal or some novel kind of perverse1<\/font><\/sup> imagination. But if ugly, brutal and sordid things are shown powerfully in
\ntheir full ugliness, brutality and sordidness without any work of transmutation, so much the better since truth of life, force of vital
\nreality of whatever kind set and made vivid in a strong outlining illumination is what we shall henceforth demand of the artist in
\nverse. And it cannot be denied that the crudity of actual life so treated and heightened in art
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for art cannot merely reproduce,
\nit cannot help heightening \u2014 gives us a new sensation, becomes a crude and heady wine setting up an agreeable disturbance in
\nthe midriff and bowels and a violent satisfaction in the brain <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1<\/font><\/sup> In the sense in which a critic of some note, I am told, applies the epithet to Yeats’
\npoetry. I have not read the criticism, but the expression itself is a sufficient condemnation not of the poet, but of the mind
\n\t\t\t\u2014 and of its poetic theory \u2014 which can use such a word
\nin such a connection. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tand can be given by a powerful writer a wide appeal demanding
\nno effort of taste or understanding from the average man who makes the multitude. A robust muscular and masculine poetry
\nsuitable to the Anglo-Saxon genius can no doubt be the result of this kind of aesthesis. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThen again there is the old academic conception, truth of the cultivated intelligence, truth of reason, philosophic and scientific
\ntruth, or, more pertinent to the matter, truth of a certain selective imagination and taste consonant with reason and strong to give
\na tempered beauty to just presentation and idea, the classical or in its more formal shape the pseudo-classical aesthetic rule.
\nAnd in this connection we have many familiar notions chasing each other across the field, such as on one side the compatibility
\nor incompatibility of philosophy and poetry or on the other the definition of poetry as substantially a criticism of life though set
\nin an artistic form and a high and serious tone. And associated with this view also we find very commonly a dislike of free
\nimagination and rich colour and the audacities of the fancy and the far-off and shrouded voices and things visionary, subtle
\nand remote. The aesthetic mind varies, follows its own bent, fashions its idea of poetic truth according to its own standard
\nof satisfaction and sets up as a canon and law its own manner of response; there is a multitude of counsels, and each has this
\ncommon characteristic that it overstresses one side of the norm of poetic creation. For the spirit of poetry is many-sided and
\nflexible in its processes, but firm and invariable in the central law of its nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe poetic Truth of which I am speaking has nothing to do with any of these limitations. Truth, as she is seen by us
\nin the end, is an infinite goddess, the very front and face of Infinity and Aditi herself, the illimitable mother of all the gods.
\nThis infinite, eternal and eternally creative Truth is no enemy of imagination or even of free fancy, for they too are godheads and
\ncan wear one of her faces or one of her expressive masks, while imagination is perhaps the very colour of her creative process,
\nher births and movements are innumerable, her walk supple and many-pathed, and through all divine powers and universal
\n   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nmeans she can find her way to her own riches, and even error is her illegitimate child and serves, though wantonly, rebelliously
\nand through many a giddy turn, her mother’s many-formed self-adaptive world-wide aim. Now it is something of this infinite
\nTruth which poetry succeeds in giving us with a high power, in its own way of beauty, by its own opulent appointed means. The
\nchannel is different from those of her other activities because the power is of another kind. Infinite Truth has her many distinct
\nways of expressing and finding herself and each way must be kept distinct and the law of one must not be applied to the law
\nof another form of her self-expression; and yet that does not mean that the material of one cannot be used as the material
\nof another, though it must be cast by a different power into a different mould, or that all do not meet on their tops. Truth of
\npoetry is not truth of philosophy or truth of science or truth of religion only, because it is another way of self-expression of
\ninfinite Truth so distinct that it appears to give quite another face of things and reveal quite another side of experience. A poet may
\nhave a religious creed or subscribe to a system of philosophy or take rank himself like Lucretius or certain Indian poets as a
\nconsiderable philosophical thinker or succeed like Goethe as a scientist as well as a poetic creator, but the moment he begins
\nto argue out his system intellectually in verse or puts a dressedup science straight into metre or else inflicts like Wordsworth or
\nDryden rhymed sermons or theological disputations on us, he is breaking the law. And even if he does not move so far astray,
\nyet the farther he goes in that direction even within the bounds of his art, he is, though it has often been done with a tolerable,
\nsometimes a considerable or total success, treading on unfirm or at any rate on lower ground. It is difficult for him there to
\nmaintain the authentic poetic spirit and pure inspiration. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor this is another cult and worship and the moment he
\nstands before the altar of the Muse, he has to change his robes of mind and serve the rites of a different consecration. He has
\nto bring out into the front that other personality in him who looks with a more richly irised seeing eye and speaks with a
\nmore rapturous voice. The others have not normally the same<\/p>\n

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\n

\njoy of the word because they do not go to its fountain-head, even though each has its own intense delight, as philosophy has
\nits joy of deep and comprehensive understanding and religion its hardly expressible rapture. Still it remains true that the poet may
\nexpress precisely the same thing in essence as the philosopher or the man of religion or the man of science, may even give us
\ntruth of philosophy, truth of religion, truth of science, provided he transmutes it, abstracts from it something on which the others
\ninsist in their own special form and gives us the something more which poetic sight and expression bring. He has to convert it into
\ntruth of poetry, and it will be still better for his art if he saw it originally with the poetic insight, the creative, intuitive, directly
\nperceiving and interpreting eye; for then his utterance of truth is likely to be more poetic, authentic, inspired and compelling.
\nThis distinction between poetic and other truth, well enough felt but not always well observed, and their fusion and meetingplace are worth dwelling upon; for if poetry is to do all it can for us in the new age, it will include increasingly in its scope much
\nthat will be common to it with philosophy, religion and even in a broader sense with science, and yet it will at the same time
\ndevelop more intensely the special beauty and peculiar power of its own insight and its own manner. The poetry of Tagore
\nis already a new striking instance of what differently seen and followed out might have been a specifically philosophic and
\nreligious truth, but here turned into beauty and given a new significance by the transforming power of poetic vision. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe difference which separates these great things of the mind is a difference of the principal, the indispensable instrument we
\nmust use and of the appeal to the mind and the whole manner. There is a whole gulf of difference. The philosopher sees in the
\ndry light of the reason, proceeds dispassionately by a severe analysis and abstraction of the intellectual content of the truth,
\na logical slow close stepping from idea to pure idea, a method difficult and nebulous to the ordinary, hard, arid, impossible to
\nthe poetic mind. For the poetic mind sees at once in a flood of coloured light, in a moved experience, in an ecstasy of the
\ncoming of the word, in splendours of form, in a spontaneous   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nleaping out of inspired idea upon idea, sparks of the hoof-beats of the white flame horse Dadhikravan galloping up the mountain
\nof the gods or breath and hue of wing striking into wing of the irised broods of Thought flying over earth or up towards heaven.
\nThe scientist proceeds also by the intellectual reason but with a microscopic scrutiny which brings it to bear on an analysis of
\nsensible fact and process and on the correct measure and relation of force and energy as it is seen working on the phenomenal stuff
\nof existence, and joins continually link of fact with fact and coil of process with process till he has under his hand at least
\nin skeleton and tissue the whole connected chain of apparent things. But to the poetic mind this is a dead mechanical thing;
\nfor the eye of the poet loves to look on breathing acting life in its perfected synthesis and rhythm, not on the constituent measures,
\nstill less on the dissected parts, and his look seizes the soul of wonder of things, not the mechanical miracle. The method of
\nthese other powers moves by the rigorously based and patiently self-assured steps of the systematising intelligence and the aspect
\nof Truth which they uncover is a norm measured and cut out from the world of ideas and the world of sense by the eye of the
\nintellectual reason. The brooding philosopher or the discovering scientist cannot indeed do without the aid of a greater power,
\nintuition, but ordinarily he has to bring what that nearer more swiftly luminous faculty gives him into a more deliberate air
\nunder the critical light of the intelligence and establish it in the dialectical or analytical way of philosophy and science before
\nthe intellect as judge. The mind of the poet sees by intuition and direct perception and brings out what they give him by a
\nformative stress on the total image, and the aspect to which he thrills is the living truth of the form, of the life that inspires it,
\nof the creative thought behind and the supporting movement of the soul and a rhythmic harmony of these things revealed to his
\ndelight in their beauty. These fields and paths lie very wide apart, and if any voices from the others reach and claim the ear of the
\npoetic creator, they must change greatly in their form and suit themselves to the warmth and colour of his atmosphere before
\nthey can find right of entry into his kingdom.<\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tThe meeting is not here at the base, but on the tops. The philosopher’s reasoning intelligence discovers only a system of
\nthought symbols and the reality they figure cannot be seized by the intelligence, but needs direct intuition, a living contact,
\na close experience by identity in our self of knowledge. That is work not for a dialectical, but a bright revelatory thinking,
\na luminous body of intuitive thought and spiritual experience which carries us straight into sight, into vision of knowledge.
\nThe first effort of philosophy is to know for the sake of pure understanding, but her greater height is to take Truth alive in the
\nspirit and clasp and grow one with her and be consciously within ourselves all the reality we have learned to know. But that is
\nprecisely what the poet strives to do in his own way by intuition and imagination, when he labours to bring himself close to and
\nbe one by delight with the thing of beauty which awakes his joy. He does not always seize the very self of the thing, but to do so
\nlies within his power. The language of intuitive thinking moves always therefore to an affinity with poetic speech and in the
\nancient Upanishads it used that commonly as its natural vehicle. “The Spirit went abroad, a thing pure, bright, unwounded by
\nsin, without body or sinew or scar; the Seer, the Thinker, the Self-born who breaks into being all around us, decreed of old
\nall things in their nature from long eternal years.” “There sun shines not nor moon nor star nor these lightnings blaze nor
\nthis fire; all this world is luminous only with his light.” Are we listening, one might ask, to the voice of poetry or philosophy
\nor religion? It is all three voices cast in one, indistinguishable in the eternal choir. And there is too and similarly a pure intuitive
\nscience which comes into the field when we enter the ranges of the psychical and spiritual being and can from there work for
\nthe discovery of greater secrets of the physical or at least of the psycho-physical world. Indian Yoga founds itself on that greater
\nprocess, and there, though as in all true science the object is an assured method of personal discovery or living repetition and
\npossession of past discovery and a working out of all the thing found, there is too a high final intention to hold the truth, the
\nlight found in our inner power of being and turn it to a power of    <\/p>\n

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\n

\nour psychical self, our spirit, our self of knowledge and will, our self of love and joy, our self of life and action. This too, though
\nnot the same thing in form, is akin to the higher work of poetry when it acts, as the ancients would have had it consciously act,
\nas a purifier and builder of the soul. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe initial function of religion again is to make clear the
\napproaches of the soul to the Highest, to God. And it does that at first by laying on the mind a scheme of religious knowledge
\nor guiding creed and dogma, a taming yoke of moral instruction or purifying law of religious conduct and an awakening call of
\nreligious emotion, worship, cult, and so far it is a thing apart in its own field, but in its truly revealing side of intuitive being
\nand experience we find that the essence of religion is an aspiration and adoration of the soul towards the Divine, the Self, the
\nSupreme, the Eternal, the Infinite, and an effort to get close to and live with or in that or to enjoy in love and be like or one with
\nthat which we adore. But poetry also on its heights turns to the same things in ourselves and the world, not indeed with religious
\nadoration, but by a regarding closeness and moved oneness in beauty and delight. The characteristic method and first field of
\nall these things is indeed wide apart, but at their end when they come into their deepest spirit, they begin to approach each
\nother and touch; and because of this greater affinity philosophy, psychic and spiritual science and religion are found in the ancient
\nIndian culture woven into one unity, and when they turn to the expression of their most intimate experience, it is always the
\npoetic word which they use. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe steps of Poetry rise to these heights on her own side of
\nthe mountain of the gods. Poetry comes into being at the direct call of three powers, inspiration, beauty and delight, and brings
\nthem to us and us to them by the magic charm of the inspired rhythmic word. If it can do that at all perfectly, its essential work
\nhas been done. It is in its beginning concerned with close and simple natural things and, when it grows more subtle, still it has
\nonly to create a power of beauty, move the soul with aesthetic delight and make it feel and see, and its function seems at an
\nend. The kind does not seem to matter, and it has nothing to do<\/p>\n

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\n

\nprimarily or directly, nor at any time in a set formal will taking that as its function and aim, with the presentation of intellectual
\nconcepts to the reason or with truth of science or with moral betterment or the working out of religious aspiration, not often
\neven with so near a thing to it as religious emotion and love. But yet because of that greater affinity we see it actually doing
\nwhat is an equivalent to these things by its own power, in a strange and beautiful mould, with an indirect and yet subtly
\ndirect touch. The poet too brings out sometimes as if by accident, sometimes with a conscious intention the same essential
\ntruths as the philosopher or the man of religion. An instance or two will be sufficient to show the approximation and the
\ndifference. Religion brings us a command to love our neighbour as ourselves and even our enemies, a thing impossible to our
\nnormal nature, a law honoured with the consent of the lips and universally ignored in the observance. A few only seeking
\nperfection in spiritual experience discover in it the natural rule of our real and our highest being, quite possible if we can only
\nget some abiding realisation of that secret oneness which is the foundation of the law of universal love. Then, not seeking this at
\nall but only poetic delight or, if you are so inclined, the criticism of life, we listen to Creon’s fierce reproach to Antigone
\n\t\t\tthat in her refusal to hate the national enemy she stands
\n\t\t\tunnaturally apart from the mind and heart of all her people and hear
\n\t\t\tsuddenly start out the high and proud reply of one lonely and doomed
\n\t\t\tbut inflexibly true to her nature, her soul’s will under the shadow
\n\t\t\tof a cruel death, "Not to join in hate, but to join in love was I
\n\t\t\tborn!" The Athenian poet intended no moral instruction, calls up no
\n\t\t\treligious emotion into his line, is concerned only with a crucial
\n\t\t\tsituation in life, the revolt of natural affection against the rigid
\n\t\t\tclaim of the law, nation, State. It is a simple cry of the voice of
\n\t\t\tnature and life, yet there breathes behind it a greater thought
\n\t\t\twhich is not so far from the truth underlying religious teaching and
\n\t\t\tspiritual experience. The poet, his eyes fixed on life, shows us as
\n\t\t\tif by accident the seed in our normal nature which can grow into the
\n\t\t\tprodigious spiritual truth of universal love. He has to do it in his
\n\t\t\town way in the mould of poetic <\/p>\n

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\n

\nbeauty and delight, and if we judge by such instances, we shall say that so only he has to do it, to cast as if casually the seed of
\nthe beauty and delight of some high mood of life and nature into the mind and pass on leaving it to its work on the soul’s reflecting
\nemotional experience, perhaps hardly himself knowing what he has done since he is absorbed in sight and satisfied with the joy
\nof beautiful creation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd yet actually we find that we cannot quite set these
\nlimits or they are not regarded by poets of a high order. The poet of the Gita has the conscious intention of laying the form
\nof unity on the soul of the hearer and moving him to seek the full experience. “He is the greatest Yogin who, come happiness by that or come grief, sees wherever he turns his eyes all equally in the image of his self.” That is something high, grave,
\ncouched in the language of the inspired reason, uplifted in the original by a sweet and noble diction and rhythm, religious and
\nphilosophical in its strain and yet poetical, because it adds to the fundamental idea the visualising and bringing home of the
\nspiritual experience, the sustaining emotion of the thing felt and a touch of its life. And in the much older Yajur Veda we find
\nbreaking out with a different, a more moved and less reflective voice the same truth of experience, the same touch on the
\nsoul, “Where I am wounded, make me firm and whole. May all creatures gaze on me with the eye of the Friend, may I gaze
\non all creatures, may we all gaze on all with the eye of the Friend.” There poetry and religious emotion become powerfully
\nfused and one in the aspiration to the heart’s perfection and the loving unity of all life. The same uniting alchemy and fusion
\ncan take place between truth of philosophy and poetic truth and it is continually found in Indian literature. And so too all the
\nold Rig Veda, all the Vaishnava poetry of North and South had behind it an elaborate Yoga or practised psychical and spiritual
\nscience, without which it could not have come into birth in that form. Today much of the poetry of Tagore is the sign of such a
\nSadhana, a long inheritance of assured spiritual discovery and experience. But what is given whether directly or in symbol
\nor in poetic image is not the formal steps of the Sadhana, but<\/p>\n

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\n

\nthe strongly felt movement and the living outcome, the vision and life and inner experience, the spirit and power and body of
\nsweetness and beauty and delight. The tracing of close and too meticulous bounds round the steps of poetic truth or turning
\nof its wide continental spheres into some limiting magic circle seems therefore to have no real foundation. One may almost
\nthough not quite say that there is nothing in infinite Truth that the poet cannot make his material, even if it seems to belong
\nto other provinces of the mind, because all forms of human experience approach each other on their sides of intuition and
\ninner life and vision and all meet in the spirit. The condition, the limitation is only in the way and manner,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 but that means
\nenormously much, \u2014 the necessity of the purely poetic way of seeing and the subjection of the thing seen to the law of poetic
\nharmony and moved delight and beauty. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe real distinction therefore is in the primary or essential
\naim of poetry and in the imperative condition which that aim lays upon the art. Its function is not to teach truth of any particular kind, nor indeed to teach at all, nor to pursue knowledge nor to serve any religious or ethical aim, but to embody beauty
\nin the word and give delight. But at the same time it is at any rate part of its highest function to serve the spirit and to illumine and
\nlead through beauty and build by a high informing and revealing delight the soul of man. And its field is all soul experience, its
\nappeal is to the aesthetic response of the soul to all that touches it in self or world; it is one of the high and beautiful powers
\nof our inner and may be a power of our inmost life. All of the infinite Truth of being that can be made part of that life, all that
\ncan be made true and beautiful and living to that experience, is poetic truth and a fit subject matter of poetry. But there are
\nalways three things which we find present in the utterance and which may be taken as the tests of its measure of power. First
\nthere is a force of inspired seeing which gives us the appeal of some reality of self or mind or world, whether in this material
\nfield or the other planes of universal existence or of our own being to which imagination is one of the gates, a seeing which
\nbrings to us the power of its truth and the beauty of its image   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nand gives it body in the mind by the word. Then there must be the touch, presence, breath of the very life, not the outward
\nonly, but the inward life, not an imitation by force of speech or the holding up of a mirror to some external movement or form
\nof Nature, but a creative interpretation which brings home to us as much as may be of what she is or things or we are. And
\nagain that must carry in it and arouse in us an emotion of its touch on the soul, not the raw emotion of the vital parts,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nthough that comes in in certain kinds of poetry, \u2014 but a spiritual essence of feeling to which our inner strands can vibrate.
\nThe intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the breath of poetry should give us along with them, or it may even
\nbe apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of things, their very power which springs in the last resort from
\n\u00af \u00af<\/i> something eternal in their heart and secrecy, hrdaye guhayam<\/i>,
\n.<\/i> expressive even in the moments and transiences of life. The soul
\nof the poet, and the soul too of the hearer by a response to his word, enters into some direct contact through vision and straight
\ntouch and emotion, possesses and feels at its strongest by a union in our own stuff of being, a moved identity. A direct spiritual
\nperception and vision called by us intuition, however helped or prepared by other powers, can alone avail to give us these
\nthings. Imagination is only the poet’s most powerful aid for this discovery and interpretative creation, fancy a brilliant opener of
\nhidden or out-of-the-way doors. The finding of a new image is itself a joy to the poet and the hearer because it reveals some new
\nsignificant correspondence or sheds a stronger disclosing light on the thing seen and makes it stand out and live more opulently,
\nluminously, with a greater delight of itself in the mind. The poet having to bring home something, even in things common, which
\nis not obvious to surface experience, avails himself of image, symbol, whatever is just, beautiful, meaningful, suggestive. His
\nfictions are not charming airy nothings, but as with every true artist significant figures and creations which serve to bring very
\nreal realities close to the spirit, and their immortality is the immortality of truth. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is in this sense that we can speak of the sun of poetic truth<\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tin whose universal light the poet creates. But all depends on
\nhow he sees or uses the light. He can catch this or that sight in an isolated ray, or sometimes lights with it his own personality
\nand kindles a lamp in the house of his own being, or looks through its radiance over the material earth and the forms and
\nfirst movements of her children or searches with the lustre the surge of the life-soul and its passion and power or discovers
\nthe lesser or the greater secrets of the mind and heart of man, or looks upwards through a loftier flood of beams and sees the midworlds and heavens and the actions of the gods and the scenes and moments of an immortal life. And sometimes the dark sun
\nof the Vedic image lodging in the blind cave gives him a negative light; a darkness visible revealing darkness immeasurable shows
\nhim the gloomy secrets of some city of dreadful Night, shadow of Hades or lowest Tartarean clot of Hell. The sun of Truth may
\nbe still for him below the verge with its light already on the tops and flushing the chill of the snows, ride regal in heaven or gravely
\nsunken or splendid in some setting light. He may stand on the earth or wander winged like the symbolic birds of the Veda still
\nin the terrestrial atmosphere or rise into worlds beyond nearer to the sun and see in a changed light all that is below. And one
\nor two may perhaps be strong to look with unblinded eyes into the source of all light, see that splendour which is its happiest
\nform of all, to which approaching or entering one can say “He am I”, discover the identity of his spirit with all things and find
\nin that oneness the word of light which can most powerfully illumine our human utterance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd where then is the highest range of sight into which the mind of the poet can rise and according to the power of his
\ngenius find a deeper and deeper and larger and larger truth of already spoken things and of new things to be spoken and as
\nyet unattempted in prose or rhyme? If some kind of intuitive seeing is at the back of his imaginative vision and the real power
\nthat calls down the inspired word, it will be when he can rise to its source and live in the fullness of a highest intuitive mind
\nwhich is greater than the awakened sense, intuitive life-vision or inspired reason, though it will see all that they can see, that
\n  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>239<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nhe will get his fullest power, deepest sight, broadest scope. To throw light on the self of things in some power and beauty of it
\nis after all the native aim of poetry, and that can be done entirely by this greatest intuitive mind, for it can bring near or going
\nbeyond itself actually reach the vision of identity, that seeing of our whole self and the self of the world which is the last object
\nand the highest spirit of all our mental powers and seekings. The poetry which will accomplish that will be able to see, though in
\nanother way than that of philosophy and religion, the self of the Eternal, to know God and his godheads, to know the freedom
\nand immortality which is our divinest aim, to see in the delight of a union in beauty the self of the Infinite, the self of Nature
\nand the whole self of man. But so to see the self is to meet the spirit in everything and the spirit reveals to us the inner and the
\ninmost truth of all that comes from it, life and thought and form and every image and every power. Much has been done by the
\nart of rhythmic self-expression; much remains to be done. To express these greatest things and to gather up all that man has
\ncome and is yet coming to see and know and feel in a new and greater light and give to him the universal spirit and power of
\nbeauty and delight behind all this existence is a work that will open to poetry a larger territory and the perfect greatness of its
\nfunction. A beginning of such an endeavour we have seen to be the noblest strain in recent work; the possibility of a refreshed
\nand long continued vitality and a hardly exhaustible fount of inspiration lies in that direction. The Veda speaks in one of its
\nsymbolic hints of the fountain of eternal Truth round which stand the illumined powers of thought and life. There under
\nthe eyes of delight and the face of imperishable beauty of the Mother of creation and bride of the eternal Spirit they lead their
\nimmortal dance. The poet visits that marvellous source in his superconscient mind and brings to us some strain or some vision
\nof her face and works. To find the way into that circle with the waking self is to be the seer-poet and discover the highest power
\nof the inspired word, the Mantra.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>240<\/font><\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter II    The Sun of Poetic Truth   WHAT IS the kind of Truth which we can demand from the spirit of poetry, from…<\/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-1717","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\/1717","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=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}