{"id":1729,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:47","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1729"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:10:49","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:10:49","slug":"23-recent-english-poetry-4-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\/23-recent-english-poetry-4-vol-26-the-future-poetry","title":{"rendered":"-23_Recent English Poetry – 4.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRecent English Poetry \u00ad 4<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE INSPIRING<\/b> spirit and shaping substance of this new
\npoetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness
\nand presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning, but it is
\nnecessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change
\nthat is coming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging
\nof the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer, more intimate way of seeing, feeling, appreciating, interpreting
\nlife and Nature and existence. The thought of the middle and even the later nineteenth century was wide in its way, especially
\nin its range and breadth of surface or in comparison with the narrower thought of the preceding ages, but it was acute rather
\nthan profound, superficial even in its attempt at penetration. It sought for its food over a great country, but it did not wing
\nhigh in the breadth of the altitudes or plunge down into the largeness of the depths. Perhaps the distinction is best marked
\nby that significant movement of philosophic thought which now repelled by these limitations rejects the supremacy of the intellect
\nand seeks for the secret of things in the intuition, in the inmost suggestions of life, in the innate will and principle of action and
\npoints more or less obscurely through these things to a spirit or self or nameless somewhat superconscient to or at least greater
\nthan our intellectual mind and reason. The nineteenth century was intellectual, not intuitive, critical rather than creative, or
\ncreative mostly by the constructive force of the critical mind, \u2014 critically constructive, we may then say, rather than creative by
\nany direct insight and interpretation, \u2014 curiously observative of the phenomenon of life and Nature, concerned with many<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20131<\/font><\/font>92<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ninterests, patient, accurate and analytic in its method of scrutiny, occupied by a stress of many problems, moved by strong human
\nand democratic sympathies, attracted by intellectual ideals, but mechanical and outward in stress and rather curious and inventive than deep or fine in its aesthetic feeling. It has looked much at the body and life and active idea, but little at the deeper soul
\nand spirit of things. Poetry has been affected by the turn of the human mind in this age; it has been brilliant, curious, careful,
\ninventive, interested and interesting, moving over a great range of subjects, closely observative and even sometimes analytical, or
\nelaborately aesthetic, or expressive of some intellectual idealism, but without much height of wing or force from the depths or
\nstrong or fine spiritual suggestion. Or there has been only some occasional suggestion or isolated foretaste of these things. There
\nhas been much stress of thought, but not much deeply moved or spontaneous greatness of creation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe mind and soul of the race is now moving forward on the basis of what it has gained by a century of intellectual stir
\nand activity, towards a profounder mood and a more internal force of thought and life. The intellectual way of looking at
\nthings is being gradually transcended or is raising itself to a power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind
\nand reflective reason towards an intimate self-experience, from thought to vision, from intellectual experiment to intuitive experience, from life and Nature as observed by the eye of the intellect in their appearance to life and Nature as seen and felt
\nby the soul in their spirit and reality. Mankind is still engaged in thinking and searching with an immense stress of mental power,
\nbut it is now once more in search of its soul and of the spirit and deeper truth of things, although in a way very different
\nfrom that of its past cultural ages and on the whole with a greater power and subtlety of the mind, though not as yet, but
\nthat too seems predestined to come, with a greater power of the spirit. It is, to return to a phrase already used, in search of
\nour inmost and attempting already to find, though it has not yet altogether found, our inmost way of its sense, vision, idea,
\nexpression. This change, reflected in the poetry of the time is   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 19<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nnot an abrupt turn or a casting away of the immediate past from which it was born, but a rapid development of new viewpoints, a shedding of restrictions and limitations and husks and externalities, a transformation by the entrance of a new force
\nof the soul into possession of the gains of the intellectual age and a swift completion and filling of them out in a new flood
\nof light and an at once nearer and more extended sense of their meaning. The whole view and sense of existence has deepened
\ninto a greater subjectivity. For the subjectivity of the nineteenth century was a matter of the temperament, an activity of the
\nstrongly marked psychological individuality turned upon things held under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now
\nthere are coming a universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an attempt towards closeness and identity, a greater community
\nof the individual with the universal soul and mind. The wider interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing
\nits character. More strenuous than before, it is less concentrated on his outer life and creation, and even where it deals with
\nthem, it opens more understandingly to his future and to his inner possibilities, to the psychological and the spiritual sense
\nof his past, to the deeper significance of his present, to his self-creation. The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded
\nand there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our
\nkind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the finer impressions by which we enter into
\nthem and establish with her a spiritual relation or identity. The things that lie behind the material world are almost for the first
\ntime being touched and seen with a close and revealing intimacy. The communion of the human soul with the Divine is becoming
\nonce more a subject of thought and utterance, not now limited to the old religious and personal form, but enlightened by a sense
\nof the Infinite and Eternal which has arisen from and vivified the larger cosmic sense for which the thinking and discovery
\nof the last century was a training. This change amounts to a revolution of the whole attitude of man towards existence, but
\nit is commencing by an extension of the intellectual stress and a<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20131<\/font><\/font>94<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nconsequent breaking down of its bounds. A self-exceeding of the intellect and a growth of man into some first freedom and power
\nof an intuitive mentality supported by the liberated intelligence is in its initial travail of new birth. These things have not all
\narrived, but they are on the way and the first waves of the surge have already broken over the dry beaches of the age of reason. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis considerable change was intellectually anticipated and to some extent prepared in the last century itself by a strain, a
\nlittle thin in body, but high and continuous, of strenuous intellectuality which strove to rise beyond the level of the ordinary
\nthought of the time to the full height and power of what the intellect of the race could then think out or create in the light
\nof the inheritance of our ages. A small number of writers \u2014 in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best
\nknown among these names, \u2014 build for us a bridge of transition from the intellectual transcendentalism of the earlier nineteenth
\ncentury across a subsequent low-lying scientific, utilitarian, externalised intellectualism, as if from bank to bank across morass
\nor flood, over to the age now beginning to come in towards us. But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was
\nthe one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they
\nare leading. He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth century by the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking, by
\nhis emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the cosmic and universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his
\ndemocratic enthusiasm, by his eye fixed on the future, by his intellectual reconciling vision at once of the greatness of the
\nindividual and the community of mankind, by his nationalism and internationalism, by his gospel of comradeship and fraternity in our common average manhood, by almost all in fact of the immense mass of ideas which form the connecting tissue of
\nhis work. But he brings into them an element which gives them another potency and meaning and restores something which in
\nmost of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and sicklied over by an excessive intellectual tendency more leaned
\nto observe life than strong and swift to live it and which in the  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>195<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\npracticality of the time was caught up from its healthful soul of nature and converted into a huge grinding mechanism. He has
\nthe intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he utters, an almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous
\nmechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life, \u2014 that closeness he has more than any other poet
\nsince Shakespeare, \u2014 and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a
\n\t\t\tbroad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made
\n\t\t\tsubject and object and substance of a free and a powerful thinking,
\n\t\t\tbut this insistence of thought is made one with the pulse of life
\n\t\t\tand the grave reflective pallor and want of blood of an overburdened
\n\t\t\tintellectualism is healed by that vigorous union. Whitman writes
\n\t\t\twith a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear
\n\t\t\tself-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into
\n\t\t\tspeech, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOne’s-self I sing, a simple separate person <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tYet utter the word Democratic, the word En Masse . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf Life immense in passion, pulse and power, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Modern Man I sing. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNo other writer of the time has had this large and definite consciousness of the work of a modern poet as a representative voice
\nof his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation conceived as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind,
\nof universal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and action. His creation, triumphing over all defect and shortcoming,
\ndraws from it a unique broadness of view, vitality of force and sky-wide atmosphere of greatness. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut beyond this representation of the largest thought and life and broadest turn to the future possible to his age, there is something else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards what is now opening to man around or above, towards a vision
\nof new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence. Whitman by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on
\nthe things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20131<\/font><\/font>96<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things,
\nwho awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their
\noneness. That which the old Indian seers called the mahā<\/font>n
\nā<\/font>tmā<\/font><\/i>, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast
\nstrain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, \u2014 the French poets, influenced in their form and substance by Whitman, have
\nseized on this element with the clear discernment and intellectual precision and lucidity of the Latin mind and given it the name of
\nunanimism, \u2014 is the subject of some of his highest strains. He gets to it
\n\t\t\trepeatedly through his vision of the past opening to the ideal
\n\t\t\tfuture, the organic universal movement of bygone nations and ages
\n\t\t\tand the labour and creation of the present and some nobler coming
\n\t\t\tturn to a freedom of unified completion, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe journey done, the journeyman come home, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd man and art with Nature fused again . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Almighty leader now for once has signalled with his wand. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd some part of his work, as in the Passage to India<\/i>, opens out even into a fuller and profounder sense of its meaning. He sees
\nit here as a new voyage of the human spirit, \u2014 “O farther sail!” <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSail forth, steer for the deep waters only . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd we will risk the ship, ourselves and all . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tO daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd with a singularly clear first seeing of the ideal goal and the
\nideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe circumnavigation of the world begin, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf man, the voyage of his mind’s return, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo reason’s early paradise, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBack, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAgain with fair creation.    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>197<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tHe casts forward too the ideal heart of this wider movement of man
\n\t\t\tinto the sense of the divine unity which is its completion, brings
\n\t\t\tout the divinity of the soul in man and its kinship to the divinity
\n\t\t\tof the Eternal, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tO Thou transcendent, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNameless, the fibre and the breath, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLight of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHow should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if
\n\t\t\tout of myself <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI could not launch to those superior universes? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSwiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAt nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, O actual Me, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd, lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThou matest Time, smilest content at Death, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of space,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tand he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to
\nconscious fruition in oneness,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tGreater than stars or suns, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth; <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat love than thine and ours could wider amplify? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat aspirations, wishes outvie thine and ours, O soul? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection,
\n\t\t\tstrength? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor others’ sake to suffer all? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tReckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achieved, . . . <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSurrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attained, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAs filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Younger melts in fondness in his arms.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese passages,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 one of the seers of old time reborn in ours
\nmight so have expressed himself in a modern and intellectualised language, \u2014 send forward an arclight of prophetic expression on
\nwhat is at the very heart of the new movement of humanity. It is<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u20131<\/font><\/font>98<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tin some degree an indication of that which the twentieth century
\nis slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own in a closer actuality of insight and experience. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe idea in these and cognate passages anticipates the new age, but the language and method are still that of the poetic
\nintellect straining to some fullest power of its intelligence and speech-force, and the thought and writing of those who follow
\nWhitman, like the French “unanimist” poets, bear the same character. At the centre of English poetry, in England itself, we
\nhave found another turn of intuitive speech which is more native to that closer actuality of experience for which we seek, a turn
\nand power brought about perhaps by the greater fire of poetic genius and imagination, the special gift of the Anglo-Celtic mind,
\nwhich leaps at once to the forceful, native, instinctive energy of poetic expression of the thing it has to say. The full idea of that
\nthing, the large and clearly conceived substance of thought and vision which should fill this mould of intuitive utterance, we do
\nnot get in any considerable degree or range, \u2014 again perhaps because of the inferior turn for large and straight thinking on
\nthe great scale, a full-orbed thinking with a sustained and total conception, which is the defect of the English mind,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 but we
\nhave constant partial intuitions in detail and a treatment of life and thought and nature which presses towards the greater coming significance. That is as yet only one strain of recent poetry, but it is the most powerful and original and turns sometimes
\nalmost with a full face towards the future. These are strong touches only, but they give already some impression and mould
\nof the thing that has to be, the ultimate creation. A new intuitive interpretation of the soul and mind of man, of the soul and mind
\nin Nature, a thought which casts its fathom beyond the passion of life and the clarity of the intelligence and starts sounding a
\nsuggestion of the hidden and the infinite in all it touches is the shaping power and the mode of this utterance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe citations I have already given to illustrate the new rhythm and language indicate also this power and thought-turn
\nin the substance. A few more citations from the same poets may help to bring it out with more precision. The early and greater
\n    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>199<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\npoetry of Phillips has much of this stamp, \u2014 afterwards he unhappily turned to a more outward dramatic motive which was
\nnot the true and original bent of his genius, but even there his best is that which prolongs the high beauty of his first inspiration.
\nHe has no great conscious range of poetical thinking, but all the more remarkable is the power with which this new influence
\ncomes out in what he can give us. We note a new treatment of life and human emotion. The love of Idas for Marpessa is not satisfied with the old forms of passion and feeling and imaginative idealism, there are here other notes which carry the individual
\nemotion out of itself and strive to cast it into unity with the life of Nature and the whole past life and love of humanity and the
\neternal continuity of passion and seeking and all the suggestion of the Infinite. The very passion for physical beauty takes on this
\nalmost mystic character; it is the passion for a body <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\npacked with sweet <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf all this world, that cup of brimming June, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat jar of violet wine set in the air, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat palest rose sweet in the night of life. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut, says Idas, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNot for this only do I love thee, but <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBecause Infinity upon thee broods, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd thou art full of whispers and of shadows. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThou meanest what the sea has striven to say <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSo long, and yearned up to the cliffs to tell; <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThou art what all the winds have uttered not, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat the still night suggesteth to the heart. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThy voice is like to music heard ere birth, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSome spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThy face remembered is from other worlds. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt has been died for though I know not where, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt has been sung of though I know not when. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI am aware of other times and lands, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOf births far back, of lives in many stars.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font><\/font>200<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nHere we have the reconciliation, already suggested by Whitman, of the full power and meaning of the individual with the full
\npower and meaning of the universal, eternal and infinite, but it is concentrated and brought to bear on a single feeling for
\nits enlargement with a great power of intuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet and become
\none with the universal and infinite \u2014 Tennyson’s knowing of what God and man is from a deep and intimate perception of all
\nthat is meant by Nature in a single little flower in the crannies \u2014 is a very characteristic and indicative feature of this new poetry. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe same turn emerges in a more indirect and subtle, but not less significant way of treatment even in lines which apparently
\nseek only to concentrate for the thought the essence of a common human idea and emotion. When the poet speaks of <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBeautiful friendship tried by sun and wind, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tDurable from the daily dust of life, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor of Marpessa’s maternal human longing, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd he shall give me passionate children, not <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSome radiant god that will despise me quite, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut clambering limbs and little hearts that err, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tthe thought in itself is not uncommon, but what makes it uncommon is the turn of the utterance which by an intuitive pressure
\ntowards some deeper significance of the personal thought and emotion carries it beyond the personality of the idea and feeling
\ninto a suggestion of profound universality, a rhythm and light of some entire vibration from the depths of life caught up and
\nheld by a human self-knowledge. The same force of suggestion emerges in the treatment of Nature, whether it takes the form
\nof an intensity of sensation, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tthe moment deep <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhen we are conscious of the secret dawn <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAmidst the darkness that we feel is green,
\n    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>201<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nor passes through that intensity to the sense of the very soul and emotion of what seems to us in less seeing moods an inconscient
\nand inanimate Nature, as in the <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\ntrees <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMeredith with his greater force of thinking gives us the clear
\nsignificance of what is here only a powerful indication, a seeing identity of the soul of man with the hidden soul in earth-nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI neighbour the invisible <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSo close that my consent <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIs only asked for spirits masked <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo leap from trees and flowers. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd this because with them I dwell <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn thought, while calmly bent <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo read the lines dear earth designs <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tShall speak her life on ours. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd the same turn emerges too in direct thought on the large aspects of life, as in such a phrase as <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLonely antagonist of destiny, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tor that which describes <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe listless ripple of oblivion, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tlines which give us by some deep suggestion to the spiritual
\nsight a whole abiding soul aspect of man and the universe in a single revealing expression. The effort of poetry of this kind of
\ninspiration may be defined by adapting another expression of Meredith’s, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo spell the letters of the sky and read <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA reflex upon earth else meaningless.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font><\/font>202<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nAnd the fullness of that which it points to beyond itself, is a movement to unite the life of the earth, not lessened, not denied,
\nnot cast away, but accepted, with its own hidden spiritual reality, the one crucial movement necessary for man before he can reach
\nthat perfection which the race shall have on its heights, when <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNot forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo stature of the Gods they shall attain. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThey shall uplift their earth to meet her Lord, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThemselves the attuning chord. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is in substance the same strain that arises finally from the more puissant voice of Whitman, but it has if a less forceful,
\na profounder touch, \u2014 a more delicate, intimate and spiritual closeness of seeing, experience and utterance is its charm and
\ndistinction. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe indications that we get in these and other English poets
\nopen to a clearer totality in the two great Irish voices. They have, helped by the strand of a spiritual lucidity of thought in the finer
\nCeltic mind, a sustained and conscious idea of the thing that is most inwardly stirring them to utterance. That shapes into a singular light, delicacy and beauty the whole of Yeats’ poetry. Here I must be content to note three of its more distinctive features,
\nthe remarkable interweaving into one, whether against a background of Irish tradition and legend or by a directer thought, of
\nthe earthly life of man with the unseen psychical life which, if we could only see it, as we can when we go back from the frontage of
\nthings into the inner soul-spaces, presses upon the earth-life and supports it, so that at times our world seems only its detached
\nprojection; the reading through the signs of life of the brighter letters of an ideal and eternal Beauty; the insistence, even when
\ntouching exclusively our external life, on the suggestion of finer soul-values which exceed its material meanings. The poetry of
\nA. E. is still more remarkable. What the others suggest or give us in more or less luminous glimpses, he casts into concentrated
\nexpression from a nearer spiritual knowledge, \u2014 as when he   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 20<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tstrikes out in a brief verse the living spiritual perception of the
\n\t\t\tuniversal and infinite source of love, \u2014 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe bade adieu to love the old, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe heard another lover then, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhose forms are myriad and untold, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSigh to us from the hearts of men. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHe lives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry is an indistinct or a less distinct aspiration, and his whole self-expression is bathed, perhaps rendered sometimes a little remote and unseizable by its immergence, in an unusual light, the light of
\nthe spirit breaking through the veils of the intelligence in which it has to find its means of speech. This is not the frank marriage
\nand close unity of the earth and heavens of which Whitman and Meredith speak, but a rare, high and exclusive pinnacle of the
\nsoul’s greater sight. The rest of this side of recent poetry is a climbing or pointing up from the earth-levels to the heights of
\nTruth; but from one region of those loftiest elevations this sight looks down and opens its eye of light on the life of man and the
\ncycles of the universe.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>204<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XXIII   Recent English Poetry \u00ad 4   THE INSPIRING spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar…<\/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-1729","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\/1729","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=1729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9589,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions\/9589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}