{"id":1722,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:44","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1722"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:36:44","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:44","slug":"30-the-form-and-the-spirit-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\/30-the-form-and-the-spirit-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-30_The Form and the Spirit.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t The Form and the Spirit<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tA <\/font>CHANGE<\/b> in the spirit of poetry must necessarily bring
\nwith it a change of its forms, and this departure may be less or greater to the eye, more inward or more outward,
\nbut always there must be at least some subtle and profound alteration which, whatever the apparent fidelity to old moulds,
\nis certain to amount in fact to a transmutation, since even the outward character and effect become other than they were and
\nthe soul of substance and movement a new thing. The opening of the creative mind into an intuitive and revelatory poetry need
\nnot of itself compel a revolution and total breaking up of the old forms and a creation of altogether new moulds: it may, especially where a preparatory labour in that sense has been doing a work of modification and adaptation, be effected for the most
\npart by an opening up of new potentialities in old instruments and a subtle inner change of their character. Actually, however,
\nwhile the previous revolutions in the domain of poetry have moved within the limits of the normal and received action of
\nthe poetic intelligence, the upward and inward movement and great widening of which the human mind is now in labour is
\nan effort of such rapidity and magnitude that it appears like an irresistible breaking out of all familiar bounds and it is natural
\nthat the mentality in its effort at a completely new creation should wish to break too the old moulds as a restriction and a
\nfettering narrowness and be desirous of discovering novel and unprecedented forms, fitting tenements and temples of the freer,
\nsubtler, vaster spirit that is preparing to enter into occupation. To remould seems to be an insufficient change, the creation of
\na new body for a quite new spirit the commanded discovery and labour. There must certainly take place in order to satisfy the changed vision a considerable departure in all the main provinces of poetic creation, the lyric, the drama, the narrative<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>276<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nor epic, and the question for solution is how far and in what way the technique of each kind will necessarily be affected or should
\nwith advantage be transformed so as to allow free room for the steps and the constructive figures of a finer and ampler poetic
\nidea and a changed soul movement and a just correspondence to it in the art of the poet. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe lyrical impulse is the original and spontaneous creator of the poetic form, song the first discovery of the possibility of
\na higher because a rhythmic intensity of self-expression. It wells out from the intensity of touch and the spiritualised emotion
\nof a more delicate or a deeper and more penetrating sight and feeling in the experience, captures and sustains the inevitable
\ncadences of its joy or its attraction, sets the subtle measure of its feeling and keeps it by the magic of its steps in sound vibrating
\non the inner strings and psychic fibres. The lyric is a moment of heightened soul experience, sometimes brief in a lightness of
\naerial rapture, in a poignant ecstasy of pain, of joy or of mingled emotion or in a swift graver exaltation, sometimes prolonged
\nand repeating or varying the same note, sometimes linking itself in a sustained succession to other moments that start from it
\nor are suggested by its central motive. It is at first a music of simple melodies coming out of itself to which the spirit listens
\nwith pleasure and makes eternal by it the charm of self-discovery or of reminiscence. And the lyrical spirit may rest satisfied with
\nthese clear spontaneities of song or else it may prefer to weight its steps with thought and turn to a meditative movement or,
\ngreat-winged, assume an epic elevation, or lyricise the successive moments of an action, or utter the responses of heart to
\nheart, mind to mind, soul to soul, move between suggestions and counter-suggestions of mood and idea and feeling and devise a
\nlyrical seed or concentration of drama. The widest in range as it is the most flexible in form and motive of all the poetic kinds, the
\nothers have grown out of it by the assumption of a more settled and deliberate and extended speech and a more ample structure.
\nIt is therefore in the lyric nearest to the freshness of an original impulse that a new spirit in poetry is likely to become aware of
\nitself and feel out for its right ways of expression and to discover  <\/p>\n

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\n

\nwith the most adaptable freedom and variety its own essential motives and cadences, first forms and simpler structures before
\nit works out victoriously its greater motions or ampler figures in narrative and drama. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe freshest and most spontaneous liquidities of song utterance abounded in past literature at times when the direct
\nmovement of the life-spirit, whether confined to simple primary emotion and experience or deepening to the more vivid probings
\nof its own richer but still natural self-aesthesis, has been the fountain-head of a stirred poetic utterance. It is then that there
\ncome the pure lyric outbursts and the poet is content to sing and let the feeling create its own native moulds of music. The
\nthought satisfied with its own emotion is not too insistent to elaborate the lyrical form for its more intricate purposes or to
\ngive it certainly a weightier but almost inevitably a less simply rapturous movement. The intellectual ages sing less easily. It is
\ntheir care to cut and carve the lyrical form with a self-conscious and considering art and their practice arrives at measures and
\nmovements of a consummate literary perfection, much power of modulation, a moved thinking and sentiment deliberately
\nmaking the most of its own possibilities; but except in the voices of the one or two who are born with the capacity and need of
\nthe pure lyrical impulse, the too developed intellect cannot often keep or recover life’s first fine careless rapture or call the memory
\nof it into its own more loaded tones and measures. The lyric poetry of the ancient classical tongues is largely of this character
\nand we find it there confined to a certain number of highly developed forms managed with a perfect and careful technique,
\nand the movement of poetic feeling, sometimes grave, sometimes permitted a lighter and more rapid impulsion, is chastened and
\nsubdued to the service of the reflective poetic intelligence. The absolute simplicities and spontaneities of the soul’s emotion
\nwhich were the root of the original lyric impulse get only an occasional opportunity of coming back to the surface, and in
\ntheir place there is the movement of a more thoughtful and often complex sentiment and feeling, not freshets of song, but
\nthe larger wave of the chant and elegy and ode: the flowers<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>278<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tof the field and mountain self-sown on the banks or near the
\nsources are replaced by the blossoms of a careful culture. Still however reined in or penetrated and rendered grave by thought,
\nthe life of feeling is still there and the power and sincerity of the lyrical impulse abide as the base of the workings of the
\nmoved intelligence. But in the literary ages that are classical by imitation, there is ordinarily a great poverty, an absence or
\nthinness of the lyrical element, the sincerity and confident self-pleasure of the feeling indispensable to the lyrical movement
\nwither under the coldly observant and too scrutinising eye of the reflective reason, and the revival of song has to await the
\nromantic movement of interest of a more eager and a wider intelligence which will endeavour to get back to some joy of the
\nintimate powers of life and the vivid lyricism of the heart and the imagination. There is then a return by an imaginative effort
\nto old cultivated forms of lyrical expression and to early simple movements like the ballad motive and in the end a great variety
\nof experiments in new metrical moulds and subtle modifications of old structures, an attempt of the idea to turn back the thought
\nmind to grave or happy sincerities of emotion or impose on it a more absolute assent to bare simplicities of thought and feeling
\nand finally a living curiosity of the intelligence in the expression of all kinds and shades of sensation and emotion. The work of
\nthis developed poetic intellectuality differs from the early work whose spirit and manner it often tries hard to recover because
\nit is the thought that is primarily at work and the form less a spontaneous creation of the soul than a deliberately intelligent
\nstructure, and while the movement of the pure lyrical impulse is entirely shaped by the feeling and the thought only accompanies
\nit in its steps, here the thought actively intervenes and determines and cannot but sophisticate the emotional movement. This distinction has many consequences and most this pregnant result that even the simplicities of a developed poetical thought are
\nwilled simplicities and the end is a curiosity of work that has many triumphs of aesthetic satisfaction but not often any longer
\nthe native tones of the soul when the pure lyrical feeling was still possible.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013279<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tThe turn to a more direct self-expression of the spirit must find out its way first by the emergence of a new kind of lyrical sincerity which is neither the directness of the surface life emotions nor the moved truth of the thought mind seizing or observing the
\nemotion and bringing out its thought significances. There are in fact only two pure and absolute sincerities here, the power of the
\nnative intuition of itself by life which has for its result a direct and obvious identity of the thing felt and its expression, and
\nthe power of identity of the spirit when it takes up thought and feeling and life and makes them one with some inmost absolute
\ntruth of their and our existence. There is a power too of the sincerities of thought, but that is an intermediary between life
\nand the spirit and only poetic when it fills itself with the sense of one of the others or links them together or aids to bring
\nthem to oneness. It is therefore a transition from the lyricism of life weighted by the stresses of thought to the lyricism of the
\ninmost spirit which uses but is beyond thought that has to be made. And here we notice a significant tendency, an endeavour
\nto present life in an utmost clarity of its intention and form and outline stripped and discharged of the thought’s abundant
\nadditions, made naked of the haze of the reflective intelligence, the idea being that we shall thus get at its bare truth and feeling,
\nits pure vital intuition where that starts out of the subconscious suggestion and meets the seeing mind and a conscious identity
\ncan be created with its sense in our souls by the revealing fidelity of the expression. There is often added to this endeavour
\nthe injunction that the rhythmic movement should follow the fluctuations of life with a subtle adaptation of the verbal music,
\nand this notion is used to justify the now common free or else irregular and often broken-backed verse which is supposed to
\nbe the medium of a subtler correspondence than is at all possible to the formal rigidity of fixed metres. But in actual fact this kind
\nof verse, whatever its power of lyric intention, sensibly fails to give us the satisfaction of a true lyrical form, because it ignores
\nthe truth that what sustains the lyrical spirit is the discovery and consistent following of some central cadence revealing the very
\nspirit of the feeling and not at all the sole pursuit of its more<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20132<\/font><\/font>80<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\noutward movements and changes: these can only rightly come in as a modulation of the constant essential music. This double
\nneed may possibly be met by a very skilful free movement, but not so easily, straightforwardly and simply as in a fidelity, much
\nmore really natural than these overdone niceties, to the once discovered fixed cadence. And besides the bare truth of the vital
\nintuition is not that inmost truth of things our minds are striving to see; that is something much greater, profounder, more infinite
\nin its content and unending in its suggestion; not our identity in sight and spiritual emotion with the limited subconscient intention of life, but rather a oneness with something in it at once superconscient, immanent and comprehensive of which that is
\nonly a blind index will be the moving power of a greater utterance. And until we have found, whether by spiritual experience
\nor poetic insight, this identity and its revelations in ourselves and in things, we shall not have laid a sound and durable basis
\nfor the future creation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe essential and decisive step of the future art of poetry will
\nperhaps be to discover that it is not the form which either fixes or reveals the spirit but the spirit which makes out of itself the
\nform and the word and this with so sure a discovery, once we can live in it and create out of it without too much interference from
\nthe difficult and devising intellect, that their movement becomes as spontaneously inevitable as the movements and their mould
\nas structurally perfect as the magical formations of inconscient Nature. Nature creates perfectly because she creates directly
\nout of life and is not intellectually self-conscious, the spirit will create perfectly because it creates directly out of self and is
\nspontaneously supra-intellectually all-conscious. It is no doubt this truth of a spiritually just and natural creation that some of
\nthe present ideas and tendencies are trying to adumbrate, but not as yet as understandingly as one could desire. The decisive
\nrevealing lyrical outburst must come when the poet has learnt to live creatively only in the inmost spiritual sight and identity of
\nhis own self with the self of his objects and images and to sing only from the deepest spiritual emotion which is the ecstasy of
\nfeeling of that identity or at least of some extreme nearness to   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013281<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nits sheer directness of touch and vision. And then we may find that this Ananda, this spiritual delight, for it is something more
\nintimate and rapturous than emotion, has brought with it an unprecedented freedom of manifold and many-suggestioned and
\nyet perfectly sufficient and definite formation and utterance. The poetry born from the inmost spirit will not bind the poet in any
\nlimiting circle or narrow theory of an intellectual art principle, but create at will according to the truth of the spirit’s absolute
\nmoments. According to the innate rightnesses of the motive and its needed cadence the spirit will move him to discover infinite
\npossibilities of new spiritual measure and intonation in timeold lyrical rhythms or to find a new principle of rhythm and
\nstructure or to make visible developments which will keep past treasures of sound and yet more magically innovate than can be
\ndone by any breaking up of forms in order to build a new order out of chaos. The intimate and intuitive poetry of the future will
\nhave on the one side all the inexhaustible range and profound complexities of the cosmic imagination of which it will be the
\ninterpreter and to that it must suit a hundred single and separate and combined and harmonic lyrical tones of poignantly or richly
\nmoved utterance, and on the other it will reach those bare and absolute simplicities of utter and essential sight in which thought
\nsublimates into a translucidity of light and vision, feeling passes beyond itself into sheer spiritual ecstasy and the word rarefies
\ninto a pure voice out of the silence. The sight will determine the lyrical form and discover the identities of an inevitable rhythm
\nand no lesser standard prevail against the purity of this spiritual principle. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA spiritual change must equally come over the intention and form of the drama when once the age has determined
\nits tendencies, and this change is already foreshadowed in an evolution which is still only at its commencement and first tentatives. Hitherto there have been two forms consecrated by great achievements, the drama of life, whether presenting only vivid
\noutsides and significant incidents and morals and manners or expressive of the life-soul and its workings in event and character and passion, and the drama of the idea or, more vitally,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20132<\/font><\/font>82<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof the idea-power that is made to work itself out in the life movement, lay its hold on the soul’s motions, create the type,
\nuse the character and the passion for its instruments and at its highest tension appear as an agent of the conflict of ideal
\nforces that produce the more lofty tragedies of human action. The paucity of great creation in the modern drama after one
\nvery considerable moment of power and vision has been due largely to an inability to decide between these two motives or to
\ndiscover a great poetic form for the drama of the idea or effect in the poetic imagination some fusion of the intellectual and
\nthe life motive which would be an effective dramatic rendering of the modern way of seeing man and his life. The only recent
\nvital and effective dramatic writing has been in prose and that has taken the questionable shape of the problem play which is
\npeculiarly congenial to the dominating interests of the highly intellectualised but always practical mind of humanity today.
\nThe poetic form has long been for the most part a reproduction of past moulds and motives without any roots of vitality in
\nthe living mind of the age; but recently there has been a more inward and profounder movement which promises some chance
\nof replacing this sort of unsatisfying imitation by a novel and a sincerer kind of dramatic poetry. An attempt has been initiated to create an inner drama of the soul with the soul itself for the real stage. There is in the spirit and the forms of this
\nendeavour a predominance as yet of the lyrical rather than the dramatic motive, an insufficient power of making the characters
\nliving beings rather than unsubstantial types or shadows of soul movements or even the figures of a veiled allegory and parable;
\nand there is needed perhaps for a greater vitality a freer and more nobly aesthetic stage which would not be limited by the
\nexternal realism that now stands in the way of a living revival of the poetic and artistic theatre. Nevertheless this attempt is a
\ntrue though not a complete index of the direction the creative mind must take in the future. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe soul of man, a many-motioned representative of the world-spirit, subsisting and seeking for itself and its own meanings amid the laws and powers and moving forces of the universe <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 28<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nand discovering and realising its spiritual relations with others will be the vision and intention of a dramatic poetry fully reflective of the now growing intuitive mind of the future. All drama must be a movement of life and of action because its mode of
\npresentation is through the speech of living beings and the interaction of their natures, but equally the real interest except in the
\nleast poetic kinds is an internal movement and an action of the soul because dramatic speech is poetically interesting only when
\nit is an instrument of human self-expression and not merely a support for a series of stirring incidents. The drama of the future
\nwill differ from the romantic play or tragedy because the thing which dramatic speech will represent will be something more
\ninternal than the life soul and its brilliant pageant of passion and character. The external web of events and action, whether
\nsparing or abundant, strongly marked or slight in incidence, will only be outward threads and indices and the movement
\nthat will throughout occupy the mind will be the procession of the soul phases or the turns of the soul action: the character,
\nwhether profusely filled in in detail in the modern fashion or simply and strongly outlined in the purer ancient method, will
\nnot be mistaken for the person, but accepted as only an inner life notation of the spirit: the passions, which have hitherto
\nbeen prominently brought forward as the central stuff of the drama, will be reduced to their proper place as indicative colour
\nand waves on the stream of spiritual self-revelation. And this greater kind will differ too from the classical tragedy of which
\nthe method was some significant and governing idea working out its life issues, because the idea will only be to a larger
\nhuman mind better instructed in the secret of existence the self-view by the soul of its own greater and more intimate issues
\nand of the conscient turns of its existence. The personage of the play will be the spirit in man diversified or multitudinous in
\nmany human beings whose inner spiritual much more intimately than their external life relations will determine the development,
\nand the culminations will be steps of solution of those spiritual problems of our existence which after all are at the root of and
\ninclude and inform all the others. The drama will be no longer an <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20132<\/font><\/font>84<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ninterpretation of Fate or self-acting Karma or of the simple or complex natural entanglements of the human life-movement,
\nbut a revelation of the Soul as its own fate and determiner of its life and its karma and behind it of the powers and the
\nmovements of the spirit in the universe. It will not be limited by any lesser idealisms or realisms, but representing at will this and
\nother worlds, the purpose of the gods and the actions of men, man’s dreams and man’s actualities each as real as the other, the
\nstruggles and the sufferings and the victories of the spirit, the fixities of Nature and her mutabilities and significant perversions
\nand fruitful conversions, interpret in dramatic form the inmost truth of the action of man the infinite. It will not be limited
\neither by any old or new formal convention, but transmute old moulds and invent others and arrange according to the truth of
\nits vision its acts and the evolution of its dramatic process or the refrain of its lyrical or the march of its epic motive. This clue at
\nleast is the largest and the most suggestive for a new and living future creation in the forms of the drama. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe spirit and intention of the narrative and epic forms of poetry must undergo the same transmuting change. Hitherto the
\npoetical narrative has been a simple relation or a vivid picturing or transcript of life and action varied by description of surrounding circumstance and indication of mood and feeling and character or else that with the development of an idea or a mental
\nand moral significance at the basis with the story as its occasion or form of its presentation. The change to a profounder motive
\nwill substitute a soul significance as the real substance, the action will not be there for its external surface interest but as a vital
\nindication of the significance, the surrounding circumstance will be only such as helps to point and frame it and bring out its
\naccessory suggestions and mood and feeling and character its internal powers and phases. An intensive narrative, intensive in
\nsimplicity or in richness of significant shades, tones and colours, will be the more profound and subtle art of this kind in the
\nfuture and its appropriate structures determined by the needs of this inner art motive. A first form of the intensive and spiritually significant poetic narrative has already been created and   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>285<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nattempts to replace the more superficially intellectual motives, where the idea rather supervened upon the story or read into it
\nthe sense of its turns or its total movement, but here the story tends more to be the living expression of the idea and the idea
\nitself vibrant in the speech and description and action the index of a profounder soul motive. The future poetry will follow this
\ndirection with a more and more subtle and variable inwardness and a greater fusion and living identity of soul motive, indicative idea, suggestive description and intensely significant speech and action. The same governing vision will be there as in lyric
\nand drama; the method of development will alone be different according to the necessities of the more diffused, circumstanced
\nand outwardly processive form which is proper to narrative. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe epic is only the narrative presentation on its largest
\ncanvas and at its highest elevation, greatness and amplitude of spirit and speech and movement. It is sometimes asserted that
\nthe epic is solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest
\nto the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry
\nno longer possible now or in the future. This is to mistake form and circumstance for the central reality. The epic, a great poetic
\nstory of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed
\ncreation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the
\ncenturies or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure
\nfor the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his
\ngreatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His
\nindeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny
\nof the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>286<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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