{"id":1725,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2013-12-01T15:50:32","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T23:50:32","slug":"28-the-soul-of-poetic-delight-and-beauty-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\/28-the-soul-of-poetic-delight-and-beauty-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-28_The Soul of Poetic Delight\u00a0and Beauty.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t The Soul of Poetic Delight<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t and Beauty<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE LIGHT<\/b> of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry
\nthe touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul
\nand form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life.
\nDelight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental
\nthings tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet, though they are often enough separated in our cruder vital and
\nmental experience. These twin powers meet, make a consonance of the perfect harmony of his work and are the first deities he
\nserves, all the others only group themselves about them, strive to be admitted to the soul of delight and the privilege of beauty and
\nhave to make themselves acceptable to them before they can mix with them in a compelling and attracting oneness. For the poet
\nthe moon of beauty and delight is a greater godhead even than the sun of truth or the breath of life, as in the symbolic image
\nof the Vedic moon-god Soma, whose plant of intoxication has to be gathered on lonely mountain heights in the moonlight and
\nwhose purified juice and essence is the sacred wine and nectar of sweetness,
\nrasa<\/i>, madhu<\/i>, amrta<\/i>, without which the gods them.<\/i> selves could not be immortal. A lightest trifle, if it manages to get
\nitself saturated with this sweetness of poetic delight and beauty, will be preserved for its sake, while the highest strenuous labour
\nof the thinking mind and the most forceful assertion of the lifepower, if deprived of or deficient in this subtlest immortalising
\nessence, may carry on for a time, but soon drops, grows old, sinks into the gulf of oblivion or has at most a lifeless survival<\/p>\n

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\n

\nand belongs to the dead history of literature, not to its eternal present. But beauty and delight, whatever form it takes,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for
\nwe may speak here of the two as one, \u2014 has an unaging youth, an eternal moment, an immortal presence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe imperative instinct for beauty and the aesthetic demand which set that among the first needs and was not satisfied with
\nanything else if this were neglected or put second in importance, are now things that are almost lost, nowhere general to the
\nhuman mind, but once they were the sign of the poetic and artistic peoples and the great ages of art and poetry and supreme
\ncreation. The ancient communities who created those fine manysided cultures which still remain the fountain-head of all our
\nevolving civilisation, had the instinct for beauty, the aesthetic turn of the temperament and formation of the mind almost,
\nit would seem, from the beginning, planted in their spirit and their blood, colouring their outlook so that even before they
\ngot the developed intellectual consciousness of it, they created instinctively in the spirit and form of beauty and that is quite
\nhalf the secret of the compelling and attractive power of the antique cultures. The earliest surviving poetry of ancient India was
\nphilosophical and religious, the Veda, the Upanishads, and our modern notions tend to divorce these things from the instinct of
\ndelight and beauty, to separate the religious and the philosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings
\nis their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming out spontaneously as a word of beauty, the
\nrevealed utterance of that universal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey of sweetness,
\nmadhvadam<\/i>
\npurusam<\/i>; and this high achievement was not surprising in these .<\/i>
\nancient deep-thinking men who discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by the bliss of the eternal
\nspirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda. The idea of beauty, the spontaneous satisfaction in it, the worship of it as
\nin itself something divine, became more intellectually conscious afterwards, was a dominant strain of the later Indian mind and
\ngot to its richest outward colour and sensuous passion in the work of the classical writers, while the expression of the spiritual
\n   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nthrough the aesthetic sense is the constant sense of Indian art, as it is also the inspiring motive of a great part of the later religion
\nand poetry. Japan and China, more especially perhaps southern China, for the north has been weighted by a tendency to a more
\nexternal and formal idea of measure and harmony, had in a different way this fusion of the spiritual and aesthetic mind and
\nit is a distinguishing stamp of their art and culture. The Persian had a sort of sensuous magic of the transforming aesthesis born
\nof psychic delight and vision. Ancient Greece did all its work of founding European civilisation by a union of a subtle and active
\nintelligence with a fine aesthetic spirit and worship of beauty. The Celtic nations again seem always to have had by nature a
\npsychic delicacy and subtlety united with an instinctive turn for imaginative beauty to which we surely owe much of the finer
\nstrain in English literature. But there these spontaneous miracles of fusion end and in the mind of later peoples who come in and
\ntake possession with a less innate, a more derivative culture, the sense of beauty works with a certain effort and is clogged by
\nmany heavier elements which are in conflict with and prevent the sureness of the aesthetic perception. There is in their cruder
\ntemperament and intelligence a barbaric strain which worships rudely the power and energy of life and is not at home with the
\ndelight of beauty, an ethical and puritanic strain which looks askance at art and beauty and pleasure, a heavy scholastic or a
\ndry scientific intellectual strain which follows after truth with a conscientious and industrious diligence but without vision and
\nfine aesthesis. And the modern mind, inheritor of all this past, is a divided and complex mind which strives at its best to get
\nback at the old thing on a larger scale and realise some oneness of its many strands of experience, but has not yet found the
\nright meeting-place; and it is besides still labouring under the disadvantage of its aberration into a mechanical, economical,
\nmaterialistic, utilitarian civilisation from which it cannot get free, though it is struggling to shake off that dullest side of it for
\nwhich a naked and unashamed riot of ugliness could be indulged in without any prickings of the spiritual conscience but rather
\nwith a smug self-righteousness in the hideous, the vulgar and the<\/p>\n

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\n

\nignoble. The day when we get back to the ancient worship of delight and beauty, will be our day of salvation; for without these
\nthings there can be neither an assured nobility and sweetness in poetry and art, nor a satisfied dignity and fullness of life nor a
\nharmonious perfection of the spirit. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAn insufficiently profound and intimate perception of the
\nreal deep soul of poetic delight and beauty is the first obstacle to a recovery of the old strong soundness of the aesthetic sense
\nand spontaneity of the aesthetic impulse. This comes from the peculiar character of the modern intelligence and its want of
\nharmony between our internal selves and our external experience; there is little spontaneous joy of their meeting, an active
\nlabour to assimilate, but no happy, deep or satisfied possession either of self or life, a continual seeking but no repose in the
\nthing found, a feverish restlessness without home and abidingplace. The spirit of man can make its home in either one of two
\nthings, the depths of our self arrived at through vision of self-knowledge, through power of self-mastery or through ecstasy,
\nor a profound, a glad and satisfied acceptance of the truth, the delight and beauty of the world and life, of existence and
\nexperience. And either of these things can help too to bring in the other, \u2014 possess the inner self and life can become happy and
\nillumined by a full sense of its hidden significance, or get hold of the complete delight and beauty of life and the world and you
\nhave then only a thin layer of shining mist to break through to get also at the self and spirit behind it, the eater of the honey of
\nsweetness who is seated in the soul of man and extends himself through the universe. The ancient peoples had in a very large
\nmeasure this foundation of satisfaction and harmony, took the greatest interest in the reality of the inner self, as once in India
\nand China, the Atman, the Tao, and life and the world as its field of expression and self-experience or, like the Greeks, felt at once
\nthe naturalness and profundity of human existence and gave to it an immediate and subtle aesthetic response. The modern
\nmind on the contrary looks little into our deepest self, takes little interest in sounding that depth and has hardly any confidence
\nin its reality, and concentrates not on the truth and delight and   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nbeauty of life, but upon the stress of its results and circumstances, which in themselves have only an incidental and no satisfying
\nand harmonious meaning, and on the agitating or attractive turmoil of the mind excited by their contact or their siege.1<\/font><\/sup>
\nThis difference results in a fundamental difference of aesthesis. The pure aesthetic spirit ought to be left free, trusted in, made
\nmaster of its own action and creation and it will then create with greatness and beauty, in a calm and satisfied ecstasy, and
\nyet safely harmonise its action with the other spiritual powers of our existence, the need of the life-soul, the insistent seeking
\nof the thought-mind, the demand of the active will and the senses. But we now make the aesthetic sense and intelligence a
\nservant of these other powers; it is condemned to serve first and foremost our external interest in life or our interest in thought or
\nin troubled personality or the demand of the senses or passions and bidden to make them beautiful or vivid to us by an active
\naesthetic cerebration and artistic manufacture of the word or a supply of carefully apt or beautiful forms and measures. The
\nsecondary things are put in the first rank, the primary, the one thing needful has to get in as best it can to give some firm base
\nto the creation. This aesthesis aided by the vast curiosity of the modern intelligence has done some great and much interesting
\nwork, but it arrives with difficulty at the readily fused harmonies and assured stamp of the perfect way of spiritual creation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere is a profound intrinsic delight and beauty in all things and behind all experience whatever face it wears to the surface
\nmind, which makes it to a spirit housed within us other than its first appearance, makes it, that is to say, no longer a thing
\nexciting mental interest, pain, pleasure, but rather a revelation of the truth and power and delight of being and our feeling of it a
\nform of the universal Ananda of the old philosophical thinkers, the calm yet moved ecstasy with which the spirit of existence <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1<\/font><\/sup> This is the result perhaps of an ill-assimilated Christian influence intervening on the external vitalism of the Teutonic temperament and on Latin intellectualism, and
\nbringing in new needs and experiences which disturbed the mind and emotions without possessing the soul with peace or arriving at a harmony of spiritual emotion and spiritual
\nself-knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tregards itself and its creations. This deeper spiritual feeling, this
\nAnanda is the fountain of poetic delight and beauty. It springs from a supreme essence of experience, a supreme aesthesis which
\nis in its own nature spiritual, impersonal, independent of the personal reactions and passions of the mind, and that is why the
\npoet is able to transmute pain and sorrow and the most tragic and terrible and ugly things into forms of poetic beauty, because
\nof this impersonal joy of the spirit in all experience, whatever its nature. And as, therefore, the subject of the poet is all that he can
\nfeel of the infinite life of the spirit that creates in existence and all that he can seize of the infinite truth of God and Nature and
\nour own and the world’s being, so too what he brings out from his subject is all that he can pour into speech of his vision of
\neternal and universal beauty, all that he can express of the soul’s universal delight in existence. That is what he has to reveal, and
\nto make others share in, to render more expressive and firmly present to them what experience they have of it and help the race
\ntowards its greater fullness in the soul of man and embodiment in our mind and life. This Ananda is not the pleasure of a mood
\nor a sentiment or the fine aesthetic indulgence of the sense in the attraction of a form, superficial results and incidents which are
\noften mistaken for that much deeper and greater thing by the minor poetic faculty, the lesser artistic mind, but the enduring
\ndelight which, as the ancient idea justly perceived, is the essence of spirit and being and the beauty which all things assume when
\nthe spirit lives in the pure joy of creation and experience. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe universality of this delight and beauty does not mean
\nthat we can take whatever we will straight from life and experience, just as it is, and by making it precise and vivid through
\nword and image or dressing it in imaginative colour achieve poetic effect and beauty. That is the theory by which a great
\ndeal of our modern endeavour at poetry seems to be guided, as it is the ruling method of inferior poets and the mark too of the
\nlesser or unsuccessful or only partially successful work of greater writers. The error made is to confuse the sources of poetic delight
\nand beauty with the more superficial interest, pain and pleasure which the normal mind takes in the first untransmuted appeal
\n  <\/p>\n

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\n

\nof thought and life and feeling. That in its first crude form or a little deepened by sensitiveness of emotion and a reflective
\nintelligence is the response to existence of the natural mind, the only instrument of the majority, and what it is apt to expect
\nfrom the poet is that this is what he too shall give to the world and only think it more profoundly, feel it more sensitively, live
\nit with a greater excitement and find for it beauty of word and attraction of rhythm. The poet has in him a double personality,
\na double instrument of his response to life and existence. There is in him the normal man absorbed in mere living who thinks
\nand feels and acts like others, and there is the seer of things, the supernormal man, the super-soul or delight-soul in touch
\nwith the impersonal and eternal fountains of joy and beauty who creates from that source and transmutes by its alchemy all
\nexperience into a form of the spirit’s Ananda. It is easy for him, if the demand of his genius is not constant or if he is not held back
\nby a natural fineness of the poetic conscience, to subject this deeper and greater power to the lower and general demand and
\nput it at the service of his superficial mental experience. He has then to rely on the charm and beauty of word and form to save
\nthe externality of his substance. But the genius in him when he is faithful to it, knows that this is not his high way of perfection nor
\nthe thing his spirit gave him to do; it is a spiritual transmutation of the substance got by sinking the mental and vital interests in a
\ndeeper soul experience which brings the inevitable word and the supreme form and the unanalysable rhythm. The poet is then
\nsomething more than a maker of beautiful word and phrase, a favoured child of the fancy and imagination, a careful fashioner
\nof idea and utterance or an effective poetic thinker, moralist, dramatist or storyteller; he becomes a spokesman of the eternal
\nspirit of beauty and delight and shares that highest creative and self-expressive rapture which is close to the original ecstasy that
\nmade existence, the divine Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis rapture, the Platonic divine possession and enthusiasm,
\nis born not of mental, but of soul experience, and the more the surface mind gets into the way, the more this divine passion is
\nweakened and diluted by a less potent spirit. The surface mind<\/p>\n

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\n

\nis powerfully attracted by the stir of the outward passion and excitement, the stress of immediate thought, life and action,
\nhastens to embody it in speech or in deed and has no leisure to transmute life into those greater abiding values of which the
\nsoul in its depths is alone capable. But the higher faculties are given us as keys to a deeper experience; the seer, the poet, the
\nartist, the children of the spirit’s light and intuition are only true to themselves when they live in the depths of the soul, refuse to
\nbe hurried away by the surface call of mind and life and wait rather for their own greater voices. The poetry which insists
\non an external effectiveness, on immediate thought and life and experience, may seize very powerfully the ear of the moment,
\nbut is singularly frail in its affectation of power and even if it has strength of body, is hollow and null inside; it fails because it is
\nconcerned with immediately vital things perhaps, but not with that which is immortal. That is just why patriotic poetry, war
\npoetry or poetry of the occasion and the moment are so difficult to write greatly and, although it would seem that these things
\nare among the most dynamic and should move most easily to powerful utterance, are oftenest poor in poetic substance and
\ninferior in value. For life they may be dynamic, but they are not so readily dynamic for art and poetry, and precisely because the
\nvital interest, the life attraction is so strong that it is difficult to draw back from the external to the spiritual delight and the
\nspiritual significance. A great poet may do it sometimes, because the constant instinct of his genius is to look beyond the surface
\nand the moment to that which is universal and eternal behind the personal experience and the occasion is only for him an
\nexcuse for its utterance. The drama of action and mere passion is for the same reason short-lived in its gusto of vitality, fades in
\na century or less into a lifeless mask, while the drama of the soul abides, because it gets near to the subtler eternal element, the
\nsoul’s essential aesthesis, the spirit’s delight in self-creation and experience. Philosophical and religious poetry too fails so often
\nby a neglect of the same fine distinction, because the interest of the thought pursued by the intellectual activity, the interest of the
\nmind in its surface religious ideas and feelings get the upper hand   <\/p>\n

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\n

\nand do not consent to sink themselves in the spiritual emotion of the seeing of truth and the abiding spiritual experience. The
\nmental and vital interest, pleasure, pain of thought, life, action is not the source of poetic delight and beauty and can be turned
\ninto that deeper thing only when they have sunk into the soul and been transmuted in the soul’s radiant memory into spiritual
\nexperience, \u2014 that perhaps was what the Greeks meant when they made Mnemosyne the eternal mother of the muses; the
\npassions can only change into poetic matter when they have been spiritualised in the same bright sources and have undergone the
\npurification, the katharsis<\/i>, spoken of by the Greek critic; the life values are only poetic when they have come out heightened and
\nchanged into soul values. The poetic delight and beauty are born of a deeper rapture and not of the surface mind’s excited interest
\nand enjoyment of life and existence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ancient Indian critics defined the essence of poetry as
\nrasa <\/i>and by that word they meant a concentrated taste, a spiritual essence of emotion, an essential aesthesis, the soul’s pleasure
\nin the pure and perfect sources of feeling. The memory of the soul that takes in, broods over and transmutes the mind’s thought,
\nfeeling and experience, is a large part of the process which comes by this aesthesis, but it is not quite the whole thing; it is rather
\nonly a common way by which we get at something that stands behind, the spiritual being in us which has the secret of the
\nuniversal delight and the eternal beauty of existence. That which we call genius works or comes out from something deep within
\nwhich calls down the word, the vision, the light and power from a level above the normal mind and it is the sense of the inrush
\nfrom above which makes the rapture and the enthusiasm of illumination and inspiration. That source, when we know better
\nthe secrets of our being, turns out to be the spiritual self with its diviner consciousness and knowledge, happier fountains of
\npower, inalienable delight of existence. The cultures that were able directly or indirectly to feel the joy of this self and spirit, got
\ninto the very strain of their aesthesis the touch of its delight, its Ananda, and this touch was the secret of the generalised instinct
\nfor beauty which has been denied to a later mind limited by <\/p>\n

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\n

\nintellectual activity, practical utility and the externals of life: we have to go for it to exceptional individuals gifted with a finer
\nstrain, but the wide-spread aesthetic instinct has been lost and has yet to be recovered for the common mind and recognised
\nonce more as a part of human perfection as indispensable as intellectual knowledge and at least as necessary to happiness
\nas vital well-being. But this Ananda, this delight, this aesthesis which is the soul of poetic beauty works like other things, like
\npoetic truth or the poetic breath of life, on different levels, in different provinces of its action, with the same law that we have
\nobserved in the rest, of the emergence of a richer and profounder face of itself the more it gets inward and upward from the less
\nto the more occult powers of its revelation. This finer soul of delight throws itself out on the physical mind and being, takes
\nup its experiences and turns them by its own innate and peculiar power into things of beauty, fuses into itself the experiences of
\nthe life soul and transmutes to beauty their power and passion in the surge of its poetic ecstasy, takes up all life and form into
\nthe reflective thought-mind and changes them in the beauty and rapture of thought discovering and embodying new values of
\nsoul and Nature and existence. And in all its working there is felt its own essence of an intuitive delight which acts in these
\nmoulds and gets into them whatever it can of its own intimate and eternal delight values. But when that intuitive mind self-finding, self-seeing, self-creating in a higher power of light and vision than is possible on the intellectual or other levels gets out
\ninto full play, and now there is some sign of this emergence, then we come nearer to the most potent sources of universal
\nand eternal delight and beauty, nearer to its full and wide seeing, and its all-embracing rapture. This inner mind is the first native
\npower of the self and spirit dropping its lower veils and the very life and aesthesis of the spirit in its creation is a life of
\nself-experiencing spiritual delight and a luminous Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe beauty and delight of such a greater intuitive inspiration, a poetry of this spiritual Ananda making all existence luminous and wonderful and beautiful to us may be one of the
\ngifts of the future. It is that of which we stand in need and    <\/p>\n

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\n

\nof which there is some promise in the highest strains that we have now begun to hear. This change will mean that poetry may
\nresume on a larger scale, with a wider and more shining vision the greater effect it once had on the life of the race in the noble
\nantique cultures. At one time poetry was a revelation to the race of the life of the gods and man and the meaning of the world and
\nthe beauty and power of existence and through its vision and joy and the height and clarity of its purpose it became creative
\nof the life of the people. Ananda, the joy of the spirit in itself carrying in it a revelation of the powers of its conscious being,
\nwas to the ancient Indian idea the creative principle, and ancient poetry did thus creatively reveal to the people its soul and its
\npossibilities by forms of beauty and suggestions of power in a way we have to a great extent lost by our later pettier use of
\nthis always great art and medium. One might almost say that ancient India was created by the Veda and Upanishads and that
\nthe visions of inspired seers made a people. That sublime poetry with its revelation of godhead and the joy and power of life and
\ntruth and immortality or its revelation of the secrets of the self and the powers of its manifestation in man and the universe
\nand of man’s return to self-knowledge got into the very blood and mind and life of the race and made itself the fountain-head
\nof all that incessant urge to spirituality which has been its distinguishing gift and cultural motive. The Mahabharata and the
\nRamayana revealing to it in forms of noble beauty and grandiose or beautiful or telling types of character the joy of its forms of
\nlife, the significance of its spiritual, ethical and aesthetic ideals, the powers and dangers of the human soul, its godheads and its
\ntitanisms have played a great and well-recognised formative part second only to religion and the stress of religio-social training in
\nthe life of the Indian peoples. And even later the religious poetry of the Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas has entered powerfully into
\nthe life of the nation and helped to shape its temperament and soul-type. The effect of the Homeric poems in Greece, the intimate connection of poetry and art with the public life of Athens sprang from a similar but less steep height of poetic and artistic
\nmotive. The epic poems revealed the Hellenic people to itself <\/p>\n

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\n

\nin the lucid and clear nobility and beauty of an uplifting of life and an aesthetic sense of the humanity and divinity of man; the
\nlater art and poetry interpreted to Athens her religious ideas, her thought, her aesthetic instincts, the soul of grandeur and beauty
\nof her culture. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd in all these instances, as in others like the art and poetry of Japan and of China, a more or less profoundly intuitive creation from the depths and expression through poetic delight
\nof the soul of a people has been the secret of this effect and this power of creation or influence. But in other times and places
\npoetry has been more a servant of aesthetic pleasure than a creative master of life and great spiritual agent; when it is at
\nall great, it cannot fail to be that to a certain extent, but it has not so acted as a whole, centrally, in the same large and
\neffective way or with the same high conscience of its function. It has leaned too much on the surface or external interests of
\nlife for the pleasure of the intellect and imagination and failed too much to create life from within by a deeper delight in the
\npower of vision of the soul and spirit. The high energy of English poetry has done great and interesting things; it has portrayed life
\nwith charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us
\nin Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed
\ncommonplace in Pope and Dryden, played with elegance and beauty on the lesser strings with the Victorians or cast out here
\nand there a profounder strain of thought or more passionate and aspiring voice, and if the most spiritual strains have been
\nfew, yet it has dreamed in light in Shelley or drawn close in Wordsworth to the soul in Nature. And it may seem hard to
\nsay in the face of all this splendour and vigour and glow and beauty and of the undeniable cultural influence, that something
\nwas too often lacking which would have made the power of this poetry more central and intimate and a greater direct force on
\nthe life of the people, and yet this is, I think, true in spite of exceptions, not only here, but of almost all the later European
\nliterature. To get back to a profounder centre, to create from  <\/p>\n

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\n

\nwithin in a more universal power of the spirit and its vision and delight of existence will supply the missing element and make
\npoetry once again young and mighty and creative and its word deeply effective on life by the power of a greater Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe mind of man, a little weary now of the superficial pleasure of the life and intellect, demands, obscurely still, not yet
\nperceiving what will satisfy it, a poetry of the joy of self, of the deeper beauty and delight of existence. A merely cultured poetry
\nfair in form and word and playing on the surface strings of mind and emotion will not serve its purpose. The human mind is
\nopening to an unprecedented largeness of vision of the greatness of the worlds, the wonder of life, the self of man, the mystery of
\nthe spirit in him and the universe. The future poetry must seek in that vision its inspiration, and the greater its universality of joy in
\nexistence, the more it seeks through intuitive sight and aesthesis the deepest fountains of poetic delight and beauty, the more it
\nwill become powerfully creative of a greater life for the race. The modern poet is perfectly right in a way in breaking down
\nin whatever direction the bounds erected by the singers of the past around their magic palace and its grounds; he must claim
\nall things in heaven or earth or beyond for his portion: but that care for a fine poetic beauty and delight which they safeguarded
\nby excluding all or most that did not readily obey its law or turn to fair material of poetic shaping, he must preserve as jealously
\nand satisfy by steeping all that he finds in his wider field in that profoundest vision which delivers out of each thing its spiritual
\nAnanda, the secret of truth and beauty in it for which it was created; it is in the sense of that spiritual joy of vision, and not
\nin any lower sensuous, intellectual or imaginative seeing, that Keats’ phrase becomes true for the poet, beauty that is truth,
\ntruth that is beauty, and this all that we need to know as the law of our aesthetic knowledge. He is right too in wishing to make
\npoetry more intimately one with life, but again in this sense only, in going back to those creative fountains of the spirit’s
\nAnanda from which life is seen and reshaped by the vision that springs from a moved identity,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the inmost source of the authentic poet vision. The beauty and delight of all physical things<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>266<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nillumined by the wonder of the secret spiritual self that is the inhabitant and self-sculptor of form, the beauty and delight of
\nthe thousand-coloured, many-crested, million-waved miracle of life made a hundred times more profoundly meaningful by the
\ngreatness and the sweetness and attracting poignancy of the self-creating inmost soul which makes of life its epic and its drama
\nand its lyric, the beauty and delight of the spirit in thought, the seer, the thinker, the interpreter of his own creation and being
\nwho broods over all he is and does in man and the world and constantly resees and shapes it new by the stress and power of
\nhis thinking, this will be the substance of the greater poetry that has yet to be written. And that can be discovered only if and so
\nfar as the soul of man looks or feels beyond even these things and sees and voices the eternal and knows its godheads and gets
\nto some close inward touch of the infinite ecstasy which is the source of the universal delight and beauty. For the nearer we
\nget to the absolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man and the universe and the receptive and creative spiritual emotion
\nwhich needs for its voice the moved tones of poetic speech.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>267<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter IV    The Soul of Poetic Delight  and Beauty   THE LIGHT of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they…<\/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-1725","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\/1725","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=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9702,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions\/9702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}