{"id":1718,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:43","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1718"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:12:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:12:38","slug":"08-the-character-of-english-poetry-2-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\/08-the-character-of-english-poetry-2-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-08_The Character of English Poetry – 2.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t <\/p>\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t The Character of English Poetry \u00ad 2
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tW<\/font>HAT KIND<\/b> or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind so constituted? The Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circumstance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations
\nhave in this field been conspicuous by their silence or the rarity of their speech. After the old rude epics, saga or Nibelungenlied,
\nwe have to wait till quite recent times for poetic utterance, nor, when it came, was it rich or abundant. In Germany, so rich
\nin music, in philosophy, in science, the great poetic word has burst out rarely: one brief and strong morning time illumined
\nby the calm, large and steady blaze of Goethe’s genius and the wandering fire of Heine, afterwards a long unlighted stillness.
\nIn the North here or there a solitary genius, Ibsen, Strindberg. Holland, another Teutonic country which developed an art of
\na considerable but almost wholly objective power, is mute in poetry.1<\/font><\/sup> It would almost seem that there is still something too
\nthick and heavy in the strength and depth of the Teutonic composition for the ethereal light and fire of the poetic word to
\nmake its way freely through the intellectual and vital envelope. What has saved the English mind from a like taciturnity? It
\nmust have been the mixture of other racial strains, sublimating this strong but heavy material temperament with a quicker and
\nmore impetuous element; the submerged Celtic genius must have pushed the rest from behind, intervening as a decisive force to
\nliberate and uplift the poetic spirit. And as a necessary aid we have the fortunate accident of the reshaping of a Teutonic tongue <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1<\/font><\/sup> I do not include here any consideration of contemporary names; it would be unsafe to go by the great reputations of today which may sink tomorrow to a much lower
\nstatus.  <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 5<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nby French and Latinistic influences which gave it clearer and more flowing forms and turned it into a fine though difficult
\nlinguistic material sufficiently malleable, sufficiently plastic for Poetry to produce in it both her larger and her subtler effects,
\nbut also sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies. A stuff of speech which, without being harsh and
\ninapt, does not tempt by too great a facility, but offers a certain resistance in the material, increases the strength of the artist by
\nthe measure of the difficulty conquered and can be thrown into shapes at once of beauty and of concentrated power. That is
\neminently the character of the English language. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAt any rate we have this long continuity of poetic production. And once supposing a predominantly Anglo-Saxon or, more strictly an Anglo-Norman national mind moved to express
\nitself in poetry, we should, ignoring for a moment the Celtic emergence, expect the groundwork to be a strong objective poetry, a powerful presentation of the forms of external life, a ready and energetic portrayal of action and character in action, the
\npleasant or the melancholy outsides of Nature, the robust play of the will and the passions, a vigorous flow of a strenuous vital
\nand physical verse creation. Even we might look for a good deal of deviation into themes and motives for which prose will always
\nbe the more adequate and characteristic instrument; we should not be surprised to meet here a self-styled Augustan age which
\nmakes these things the greater part of its realm and indulges with a self-satisfied contentment in a confident and obvious “criticism” of external life, preferring to more truly poetic forms and subjects the poetry of political and ecclesiastical controversy,
\ndidactic verse, satire. There would be in this Anglo-Norman poetry a considerable power of narrative and a great energy in
\nthe drama of character and incident; but any profounder use of the narrative and dramatic forms we would not look for,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nat most we might arrive in the end at some powerful dramatic analysis of character. The romantic element would be of an
\nexternal Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses; there would be no touch of the delicate
\nand beautiful imaginative, mystic and almost spiritual Celtic<\/p>\n

\n\tPage \u2013 <\/font>54<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nromanticism. We should have perhaps much poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate or
\nvigorous, prompt and direct or robustly powerful, but not the finer and subtler poetic thought which comes easily to the clear
\nLatin intellect. Form too of a kind we might hope for, though we could not be quite sure of it, but at best bright and plain or
\nstrongly balanced and not those greater forms in which a high and deep creative thought presides or those more exquisite of
\nwhich a delicate sense of beauty or a subtle poetic intuition is the magic builder. Both the greater and more profound depths
\nand magnitudes and the subtler intensities of style and rhythm would be absent; but there would be a boldly forcible or a
\nwell-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare
\nus for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden
\nand Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate finesse,
\nthe poetry of Browning. For this much we need not go outside the Anglo-Norman temperament. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat also would give, but subject to a potent alchemy of transformation, the basic form and substance of most English
\npoetry. That alchemy we can fairly attribute to the submerged Celtic element which emerges, as time goes on, in bright upstreamings and sometimes in exceptional outbursts of power. It comes up in a blaze of colour, light, emotion and imaginative
\nmagic; in a passionate hungering for beauty in its more subtle and delicately sensuous forms, for the ideal which escapes
\ndefinition and yet has to be seized and cast into interpretative lines; in a lyrical intoxication; in a charm of subtle romance.
\nIt casts into the mould a higher urge of thought than the vital common sense of the Saxon can give, not the fine, calm and
\nmeasured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect
\nand the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u201355<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsomething beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of creative sight. It brings in a look upon Nature which pierces
\nbeyond her outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her
\nwhich is most intimately spiritual. It awakens rare outbreaks of mysticism, a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos;
\nit refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuousness into a thing of
\nimaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception. It carries with it a seeking for exquisite lyrical form, touches narrative
\npoetry to finer issues, throws its romantic beauty and force and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and
\nmakes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing. At one period it strives to
\nrise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things. In language and
\nmusic it is always a quickening and refining force; where it can do nothing more, it breathes a more intimate energy; where it
\ngets its free characteristic movement, it creates that intensity of style and rhythm, that sheer force of imaginative vision and that
\npeculiar unseizable beauty of turn which are the highest qualities of English poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe varied commingling and separating of these two elements mark the whole later course of the literature and present as
\ntheir effect a side of failure and defect and a side of achievement. There are evidently two opposite powers at work in the same
\nfield, often compelled to labour in the same mind at a common production; and when two such opposites can coalesce,
\nseize each other’s motives and, fusing them, become one, the very greatest achievement becomes possible. For each fills in the
\nother’s deficiencies; they light each other up with a new light and bring in a fresh revelation which neither by itself could have
\naccomplished. The greatest things in English poetry have come where this fusion was effected in the creative mind and soul of
\nthe poet. But that could not always be done and there results from the failure a frequent uncertainty of motive, a stumbling
\nunsureness of touch, an oscillation, a habit of too often falling<\/p>\n

\n\tPage \u2013 <\/font>56<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nshort of the mark. It does not prevent great triumphs of poetic power, but it does prevent a high equality and sustained perfection of self-expression and certainty of form. We must expect inequality in all human work, but not necessarily on this scale
\nnor with so frequent and extensive a sinking below what should be the normal level. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo the same uncertainty may be attributed the rapid starts and turns of the course of English poetry, its want of conscious
\ncontinuity, \u2014 for there is a secret, underground and inevitable continuity which we have to dig for and disengage. It takes a
\nvery different course from the external life of the nation which has always been faithful to its inner motive and spirit and escaped from the shattering and suddenly creative changes that have at once afflicted and quickened the life of other peoples.
\nThe revolutions of the spirit of English poetry are extreme and violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can
\nmark off first the early English poetry which found its solitary greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an
\nabsolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and black Nirvana. The magnificent Elizabethan outburst has another motive, spirit
\nand manner of expression which seem to have nothing to do with the past; it is a godhead self-born under the impulse of a new age
\nand environment. As this fades away, we see standing high and apart the lonely figure of Milton with his strenuous effort at an
\nintellectual poetry cast in the type of the ancients. The age which succeeds, hardly linked to it by a slender stream of Caroline
\nlyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan
\nform and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden. Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst
\nof wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the
\nspirit. The Victorian period did not deny their influences; it felt them in the first form of its work, and we might have expected
\nit to have gone nobly forward and brought to some high or beautiful issue what had been only a great beginning that did not
\narrive at its full fruition. But it did nothing of the kind; it deviated    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>57<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ninto a new way which has nothing to do with the finer spirit of the preceding poets. Descending it fell away into an intellectual,
\nhalf-artistic, carefully but not finely or sovereignly wrought and mostly superficial and external poetry. And afterwards we have
\nthis age which is still trying to find itself, but in its most characteristic tendencies seems to start from a summary rejection of the
\nVictorian forms and motives. These reversals and revolutions of the spirit are not in themselves a defect or a disability; on the
\ncontrary, they open the door to large opportunities and unforeseen achievements. English poetical literature has been a series
\nof bold experiments less shackled by the past than in countries which have a stronger sense of cultural tradition. Revolutions
\nare distracting things, but they are often good for the human soul; for they bring a rapid unrolling of new horizons. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHere comes in the side of success and greatness in this poetry. There is a force which overrides its defects and compensates
\nrichly for its limitations; its lapses and failures are the price it pays for its gains. For nowhere else has individual genius found
\nso free a field; nowhere has it been able to work so directly out of itself and follow so boldly its own line of poetic adventure. Form
\nis a great power, but sureness of form is not everything. A strong tradition of form gives a firm ground upon which genius can
\nwork in safety, protected from its own wanderings; but it limits and stands in the way of daring individual adventure. The spirit
\nof adventure, if its path is strewn with accidents, stumblings or fatal casualties, brings, when it does succeed, new revelations
\nwhich are worth all the price paid for them. English poetry is full of such new revelations. Its richness, its constant freshness,
\nits lavish expenditure of genius exulting in chainless freedom, delivered from all meticulous caution, its fire and penetrating
\nforce of imagination, its lambent energy of poetic speech, its constant self-liberation into intensest beauty of self-expression
\nare the rewards of its courage and its liberty. These things are of the greatest value in poetry. They lead besides to possibilities
\nwhich are of the highest importance to the poetry of the future. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe may briefly anticipate and indicate in what manner. We have to
\n\t\t\taccept one constant tendency of the spirit<\/p>\n

\n\tPage \u2013 <\/font>58<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tpoetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, feeling and passion and to give that its full force and make of it the basis and the source and, not only
\nthe point of reference, but the utility of all else. A strong hold upon this life, the earth-life, is the characteristic of the English
\nmind, and it is natural that it should take possession of its poetry. The pure Celtic genius leans towards the opposite extreme: it
\nseems to care little for the earth-life for its own sake and has little hold on it or only a light and ethereal hold; it accepts it as
\na starting-point for the expression of other-life, but is attracted by all that is hidden and secret. The Latin mind insists on the
\npresentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which life is the visible
\nexpression, \u2014 not the remoter, the spiritual or soul-truths, but those which present themselves to the clarities of the intelligence.
\nBut the English mind looks at life and loves it for its own sake, in all its externalities, its play of outer individualities, its immediate
\nsubjective idiosyncrasies. Even when it is strongly attracted by other motives, the intellectual, the aesthetic or the spiritual, it
\nseldom follows these with a completely disinterested fidelity, but comes back with them on the external life and tries to subject
\nthem to its mould and use them for its purpose. This turn is not universal, \u2014 Blake escapes from it; nor is it the single dominant
\npower, \u2014 Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have their hearts elsewhere: but it is a constant power; it attracts even the poets
\nwho have not a real genius for it and vitiates their work by the immixture of an alien motive. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis objective and external turn might be strong enough in some other arts,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 fiction, for instance, or painting or sculpture,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 to create a clear national tradition and principle of form, but not easily in poetry. For here the mere representation of life
\ncannot be enough, however vivid or however strongly subjected to the law of poetic beauty it may be. Poetry must strive at least
\ntowards a presentation from within and not at simple artistic reproduction; and the principle of presentation must be something more than that of the eye on the visible object. It is by a process from within, a passing of all one meets, thinks or feels
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>59<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthrough some kind of intimately subjective vision that life is turned into poetry. If this subjective medium is the inspired reason or the intuitive mind, the external presentation of life gives place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its
\nactual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge. But in English poetry the
\nattempt is to be or at least to appear true to the actual lines of life, to hold up a mirror to Nature. It is the mirror then
\nwhich has to do the poetising of life; the vital, the imaginative, the emotional temperament of the poet is the reflecting medium
\nand it has to supply unaided the creative and poetical element. We have then a faithfully unfaithful reflection which always
\namounts to a transformation, because the temperament of the poet lends to life and Nature its own hues, its own lines, its own
\nmagnitudes. But the illusion of external reality, of an “imitation” of Nature is created,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the illusion which has been for so long
\na first canon of Western artistic conceptions, \u2014 and the English mind which carries this tendency to an extreme, feels then that it
\nis building upon the safe foundation of the external and the real; it is satisfied of the earth even when it is singing in the heavens. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut this sole reliance on the temperament of the poet has certain strong results. It gives an immense importance to individuality, much greater than that which it must always have in poetical creation: the transformation of life and Nature in the
\nindividuality becomes almost the whole secret of this poetry. Therefore English poetry is much more powerfully and consciously personal and individual than that of any other language; it aims much less directly at the impersonal and universal. This
\nindividual subjective element creates enormous differences between the work of poets of the same age; they cannot escape from
\nthe common tendencies, but give to them a quite independent turn and expression and subordinate them to the assertion of
\nthe individuality; in other literatures, until recently, the reverse has oftener happened. Besides, the higher value given to the
\nintensity of the imaginative, vital or emotional response favours and is perhaps a first cause of that greater intensity of speech
\nand immediate vision which is the strength of English poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>60<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nFor since the heightening cannot come mainly from the power and elevation of the medium through which life is seen, as in
\nGreek and ancient Indian poetry, it has to come almost entirely from the individual response in the poet, his force of personal
\nutterance, his intensity of personal vision. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThree general characteristics emerge. The first is a constant
\nreference and return of the higher poetical motives to the forms of external life, as if the enriching of that life were its principal
\nartistic aim. The second is a great force of subjective individuality and personal temperament as a leading power of poetic
\ncreation. The third is a great intensity of speech and ordinarily of a certain kind of direct vision. But in the world’s literature
\ngenerally these are the tendencies that have been on the increase and two of them at least are likely to be persistent. There is
\neverywhere a considerable stressing of the individual subjective element, a drift towards making the most of the poet’s personality, an aim at a more vivid response and the lending of new powers of colour and line from within to the vision of life and
\nNature, a search for new intensities of word and rhythm which will translate into speech a deeper insight. In following out the
\npossible lines of the future the defect of the English mind is its inability to follow the higher motives disinterestedly to their
\ndeepest and largest creative results, but this is being remedied by new influences. The entrance of the pure Celtic temperament
\ninto English poetry through the Irish revival is likely to do much; the contribution of the Indian mind in work like Tagore’s may
\nact in the same direction. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf this change is effected, the natural powers of the English
\nspirit will be of the highest value to the future poetry. For that poetry is likely to move to the impersonal and universal, not
\nthrough the toning down of personality and individuality, but by their heightening to a point where they are liberated into
\nthe impersonal and universal expression. Subjectivity is likely to be its greater power, the growth to the universal subjective enriched by all the forces of the personal soul-experience. The high intensity of speech which English poetry has brought to bear
\nupon all its material, its power of giving the fullest and richest    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>61<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nvalue to the word and the image, is needed for the expression of the values of the spiritual, which will be one of the aims of a
\nsupreme intuitive utterance. If the pursuit of the higher godheads into their own sphere will be one of its endeavours, their return
\nupon the earth-life to transform our vision of it will be its other side. If certain initial movements we can even now see in English
\npoetry outline and emphasise themselves in the future, this long stream of strong creation and utterance may arrive at a point
\nwhere it will discover a supreme utility for all its past powers. It may go deeper within itself and find and live in the greater spirit
\nwhich has till now only occasionally broken into its full native utterance. Arriving at a more comprehensive spiritual motive it
\nmay successfully interweave into it the conflicting lines of its past forces. It may achieve clear and powerful forms of a new
\nintuitive utterance in which the Anglo-Celtic spirit will find its highest harmonised and perfect self-expression. The Elizabethan
\npoet wrote in the spacious days of its first birth into greatness, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOr who can tell for what great work in hand <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe greatness of our style is now ordained? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat powers it shall bring in, what spirits command? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt has since brought in many powers, commanded many spirits; but it may be that the richest powers, the highest and greatest
\nspirit yet remain to be found, brought in, commanded, put into the service of the greatest work and achievement of which our
\nevolving humanity is capable.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>62<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter VIII    The Character of English Poetry \u00ad 2   WHAT KIND or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind…<\/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-1718","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\/1718","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=1718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9594,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions\/9594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}