Sri Aurobindo: He surpasses him indeed in the mass and force and abundant variety of his work and the protean energy of his genius. His inventiveness of form and range and variety of subject are prodigious; he turns to every quarter of the world, seizes on every human situation, seems to be trying to exhaust a study of all possible human personalities and minds and characters and turn his eye on every age and period of history and many countries and all possible scenes and extract from them their meaning and their interest for the satisfaction of his universal curiosity and his living and inexhaustible interest in the vividness and abundance of the life of earth and man. He has an equal interest in the human mind and its turns of thinking of all kinds and its human aims, ambitions, seekings and wants to pursue it everywhere in its ramiﬁcations, in its starts of individuality, peaks, windings, even all manner of borrowings of thought and feeling, nothing human is foreign to his research and pursuit, all enters into this prodigious embrace. This gives to his poetry a range and unceasing interest and richness of attraction which surpasses immeasurably all that his contemporaries can give us in wideness of the call of life, even though in them the poetic height to which they draw us may be greater than his. In his mass of creation he can be regarded as the most remarkable in invention and wideness, if not the most signiﬁcant builder and narrator of the drama of human life in his time.


Sri Aurobindo: Browning stands apart also from the other contemporary poets in the character and personality of his work. He is in many ways the very opposite of them all. He is the one robust and masculine voice among these artists, sceptics, idealists or dreamers, always original, vigorous, inexhaustible; with a great range of interests, a buoyant hold on life, a strong and clear eye, an assured belief and hope but no traditional conventionality, he alone adequately represents the curious, critical, eager, exploring mind of the age. He has depth and force and abundance of a certain kind of thought, which if not of the very ﬁrst greatness and originality, is open to all manner of questioning and speculation and new idea. His regard ranges over history and delights in its pictures of the stir and energy of life and its changing scenes, over man and his thought and character and emotion and action, looks into every cranny, follows every tortuous winding, seizes on each leap and start of the human machine.


Sri Aurobindo: He is a student, critic, psychologist, thinker. He seeks to interpret, like certain French poets, the civilisations and the ages. His genius is essentially dramatic; for though he has written in many lyrical forms, the lyric is used to represent a moment in the drama of life or character, and though he uses the narrative, his treatment of it is dramatic and not narrative, as when he takes an Italian and makes each personage relate or discuss it in such a way as to reveal his own motive, character, thought and passion. He does not succeed except perhaps once as a dramatist in the received forms because he is too analytic, too much interested in the mechanism of temperament, character, emotion and changing idea to concentrate sufﬁciently on their results in action; but he has an unrivalled force in seizing on a moment of the soul or mind and in following its convolutions as they start into dramatic thought, feeling and impulse. He of all these writers has hold of the substance of the work marked out for a poet of the age.


Sri Aurobindo: And with all these gifts we might have had in him the great interpretative poet, one might almost say, the Shakespeare of his time. But by the singular fatality which so often pursues the English poetical genius, the one gift needed to complete him was denied. Power was there and the hold of his material; what was absent was the essential faculty of artistic form and poetic beauty, so eminent in his contemporaries, a fatal deﬁciency. This great creator was no artist; this strength was too robust and direct to give forth sweetness. There was no lack of a certain kind of skill.


Sri Aurobindo: If not an artist in verse, Browning is a consummate technician, one might almost say a mechanician in verse; his very roughnesses and crudities and contortions have the appearance of device and calculation. He had an immense command of language and was never at a lack for forcible and efﬁcient expression, but in its base though not in all its turns it was the language of a vigorous and vivid and colourful prosaist rather than of a poet, of the intellect and not the imagination.  He could throw into it strong hues of the imagination, has sometimes though too seldom a vigorous richness and strong grace, achieves often a lyric elevation, but they supervene upon this base and do not ordinarily suffuse and change it or elevate it to a high customary level. Much strong and forceful work he did of a great and robust substance, won many victories, but the supreme greatness cannot come in poetry without the supreme beauty.  Arnold is a third considerable Victorian poet of the epoch, though he bulks less than the two more abundant writers who have till now held the ﬁrst place.


Sri Aurobindo: But as time goes on his ﬁgure emerges and assumes in quality though not in mass of work a ﬁrst importance. His poetic work and quality may even be regarded as ﬁner in its essence of poetic value if more tenuous in show of power than that of his two contemporaries. There is a return to the true classic style of poetry in the simplicity and straightforward directness of his diction and turn of thought that brings us back to the way of the earlier poets and gives a certain seriousness and power which we do not ﬁnd in the over-consciousness and the too studied simplicity or elaborate carefulness and purposeful artistry of the other poets of the time. This imparts a note of depth and sincerity to his passion and his pathos, a character of high seriousness to his reﬂection and meditative thought, a greatness and strength to his moments of height and elevated force which raise him above the ordinary levels around him and create an impression of the truest poetry, the most genuine in poetic value, if not in effect the greatest of this Victorian age. His simplicity is a true thing and not the overstudied false simplicity of Tennyson; his thought is free from the conventionality and platitude which constantly meets us in Tennyson’s thinking; he can achieve the strongest effects, even the romantic effect without the overwrought romantic colour of Rossetti, Swinburne’s overpitch or Tennyson’s too frequent overcharge and decorative preciosity of expression.


Sri Aurobindo: We are at ease with him and can be sure that he will not say too much but just what the true poet in him has to say and no more. For this reason he was able to bring into Victorian poetry the expression of the most characteristic trains of thought expressing the contemporary mind and temperament at its highest and best.  Tennyson voices the conventional English mind, Swinburne a high-pitched cry of revolt or a revolutionary passion for freedom or even for licence ; Rossetti and Morris take refuge in mediaevalism as they saw it: Arnold strikes out the more serious notes of contemporary thinking. He fails however to look beyond to the future.


Sri Aurobindo: In one respect of literary workmanship he does however anticipate future trends; for he makes a departure towards certain tendencies of modernist forms of verse. He made the ﬁrst attempt at any regular free verse and thus anticipated the modernist departure from metrical forms. He attempted also an imitation of the Greek dramatic form but not with Swinburne’s originality and the success achieved in.  This is the balance of the Victorian epoch; a considerable intellectual and artistic endeavour, contradicting, overcoming but still hampered by an ungenial atmosphere; two remarkable poets held back from the ﬁrst greatness, one by imperfection of form, the other by imperfection of substance; four artists of less range, but with work of an accomplished, but overpitched or thin or languorous beauty; an enrichment and strengthening of the language which makes it more capable of ﬁne and varied and curious thought, and the creation of an artistic conscience which may impose in the future a check on the impulse of an overabundant energy to imperfection of eager haste and vagary in execution. If the promise of the coming age is fulﬁlled, it may be remembered as a ﬁne, if limited period of preparation for the discovery of new, more beautiful and grander ﬁelds of poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XX  HE MOVEMENT away from the Victorian type in recent and contemporary English poetry cannot be said to have yet determined its ﬁnal orientation. But we may distinguish in its uncertain ﬂuctuations, its attempts in this or that direction certain notes, certain strong tones, certain original indications which may help us to disengage the ﬁnal whither of its seekings. In the mass it appears as a broadening of the English poetic mind into a full oneness with the great stream of modern thought and tendency, an opening up out of the narrower Victorian insularity to admit a greater strength, subtlety and many-sidedness of the intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: For this very reason it is still in the nature of a very uncertain feeling out in several directions which has not found itself and decided what shall be the centre and guide of its inspiration. There are experiments of all kinds in language and rhythm and subject and treatment, many notable names each with his special turn and personality, but no supreme decisive speech and no gathering up of the many threads into a great representative work. The whole of European literature at the present time is of this character; it is a ﬂuid mass with a hundred conﬂicting tendencies, a multitude of experiments, many minor formations, which has not yet run into any clear universal mould. All that can be done is to distinguish some common characteristics of an indicative value which emerge in the more signiﬁcant work and have touched more or less the performance of the lesser writers. Here we can get at least at a certain persistent element, certain potential issues.


Sri Aurobindo: The thing that strikes at once in a general view is that it is a period of transition, not yet a new age, but the preparation for a new age of humanity. Everywhere there is a seeking after some new thing, a discontent with the moulds, ideas and powers of the past, a spirit of innovation, a desire to get at deeper powers of language, rhythm, form, because a subtler and vaster life is in birth, there are deeper and more signiﬁcant things to be said than have yet been spoken, and poetry, the highest essence of speech, must ﬁnd a ﬁtting voice for them. The claim of tradition is still strong, but even those who keep most in the old ways, are impelled to ﬁll in their lines with more searching things of a more compelling substance, to strike from their instrument sounds, variations, meanings for which it had not before the capacity.  The attempt has not yet been supremely successful in its whole purpose, in spite of some poetic achievement of considerable beauty, originality and compass, but it has liberated at least with some initial force novel powers and opened fresh paths; a few bright streams of initiation meet the eye running to form some mighty Brahmaputra or Ganges which is not yet in sight, though we get here and there a blue Yamuna or white Saraswati or some large impetuous torrent making its way through open plain or magic woodland towards the great unseen conﬂuence.  There are many widely separate attempts, some ﬁne or powerful beginnings, as yet no large consummation.


Sri Aurobindo: The straining for a new power of rhythm is the ﬁrst indication of the coming change. Not quite so marked, not by any means so successful as the change in the type and power of poetical expression, it is still indicative; rhythm is the subtle soul of poetry and a change in the spirit of the rhythm must come if this change in the spirit of the poetry is fully to discover itself and altogether realise its own characteristic greatness and perfection. Mankind is moving to another spirit in its thought and life founded on another and deeper and larger truth of its inner being than it has yet in the mass been able to see, hold and put into form of living. This change must ﬁnd its echo and interpretation or even some of its power of revelation and initiation in poetry, and poetry to express this greater spirit must ﬁnd out a deeper, larger, more ﬂexible, or, if one may say so, more multitudinously expressive rhythm than the great poets of the past were under the necessity of using; something of the same change has to be achieved as has been successfully accomplished in music. We see accordingly some attempt to break or enlarge, deepen or subtilise the traditional moulds, to substitute others of a more delicate character or with a more varied and ﬂexible principle, to search out new packed or dissolved movements.


Sri Aurobindo: There have been some considerable successes, but nothing of such a complete, sweeping and satisfying force as would quite content a certain eagerness and impatient urge of the arriving age to ﬁnd a full rhythmic basis for its own way of self-expression. And so we ﬁnd too the attempt to initiate a violent and unprecedented revolution in the whole fundamental method of poetic rhythm.  This tendency in some writers goes no farther than an irregular use of metre which does not really carry us any farther towards the desired result and is in no way an improvement on the past since it has no true artistic principle to guide us to freer and more consummate harmonies. But pushed to its logical issue it has created the still growing form of free verse of which we now ﬁnd examples in most of the great literary languages and coupled with it a theory that this is the one future chance for poetry. Metre and rhyme are said to be played out, things of the past, which can no longer be allowed to chain and hamper the great and free movement which the enlarging spirit of poetry demands; as rhyme was in Milton’s later view only a dainty triﬂe which he ﬂung aside for the organ harmonies of his blank verse, so metre itself is a petty thing, half ornament, half fetter, which has to be ﬂung aside for some nobly self-governed democratic anarchy that is to develop from this new type.


Sri Aurobindo: That is a theory of very doubtful validity. In the hands of most of its exponents it seems to be in practice nothing but a licence for writing prose in variously cut lengths, prose breaking off at the end of a clause or in the middle of it to go on refreshed in the line below, — I have seen even a line of free verse consisting of a majestic solitary pronoun, — and that is more an eccentric method of printing than a new rhythm. But without accepting the theory in its intolerant entirety one can appreciate the motive which moved the greater masters and more skilful craftsmen of this form, if form it can be called, to make the innovation. There is something large and many-sided and constantly mutable in the life, thought and spirit of today which needs, to express it sympathetically, vast and ﬂowing movements or on the contrary brief, sudden and abrupt paces or the alternation of these and intermediate and variant lengths and turns: there is something at the same time densely full and singularly and minutely subtle in the modern thinking mind which is with difﬁculty accommodable by the restricted range of subtleties, variations and fullnesses of any given poetic measure. Why not then break away from all the old hampering restrictions and ﬁnd a new principle of harmony in accordance with the freedom, the breadth and largeness of view, the ﬁneness of feeling and sensation of the modern spirit, some form which shall have the liberty of prose and yet command the intensiﬁed heights and ﬂuctuations and falls of the cadence of poetry?


Sri Aurobindo: There is no reason why not, if the thing can be done, — the proof of these things lies in the execution; but it may be doubted whether the method used is the right method. At any rate it has not been fully justiﬁed even in the hands of its greatest or most skilful exponents. It is used, as in Whitman, to give the roll of the sea of life or the broad and varying movements of the spirit of humanity in its vigorous experience and aspiration, or, as in Carpenter, to arrive at the free and harmonious accession of the human intelligence to profound, large and powerful truths of the spirit, or, as in certain French writers, to mould into accurate rhythm the very substance and soul and characteristic movement of soul-states, ideas or objects described and seen. These are things that need to be done, but it remains to be seen whether they cannot be done in the recognised and characteristic movement of poetry, rather than in a compromise with prose cadences. The genius of poetic measure walking in the path opened by the ancient discovery of cadenced beat and concentrated rhythm has not yet exhausted itself, nor is there any proof that it cannot accommodate its power to new needs or any sign that it can only survive in an arrested senility or fall into a reﬁned decadence.


Sri Aurobindo: The most considerable representatives of this new and free form of poetic rhythm are English and American, Carpenter and Whitman. Tagore’s translations of his lyrics have come in as a powerful adventitious aid, but are not really to the point in the question at issue; for these translations are nothing but a rhythmically poetic prose and that kind of writing, cadenced prose poetry, a well recognised form, cannot and does not try to compete with the established principle of measure; it is an indulgence, a minor variation which has yet its deﬁnite place and serves certain purposes which could not otherwise be fulﬁlled with any adequacy. It is perhaps the only method for the work Tagore intended, a poetic translation of poetry reproductive of the exact thought and spiritual intention of the original; for a version in the ﬁxed measures of another language not only substitutes another mould for the original movement, but by the substitution gives it almost another soul, so powerful, distinct and creative a thing is poetic rhythm; but the more ﬂexible, less insistent cadence of poetic prose does not so seize on and recast the spirit of the original movement; it may even give a far-off minimised shadow, echo, illusion of it, if the same or a similar spirit is at work: it can never have the same power, but it may have some echo of a similar suggestion. When for instance Tagore writes in English, — we have a very beautiful delicately cadenced poetic prose and nothing more. Tagore is what some of the French writers of  are and Whitman and Carpenter are not, a delicate and subtle craftsman, and he has done his work with a perfect grace and spiritual ﬁneness; but there is no attempt to do anything more than the just work in hand, no intention of displacing the old way of poetry in which he has done in his own language such wonderful things, by a new principle of poetic movement.


Sri Aurobindo: If there were any such intention, it would have to be pronounced a failure. One has only to compare this English prose, beautiful as it is, with the original poetry to see how much has gone out with the change; something is successfully substituted which may satisfy the English reader, but can never satisfy the ear or the mind that has once listened to the singer’s own native and magical melodies. And this is so even though the intellectual substance, the intellectual precision and distinctness of the thought are often more effective, carry home more quickly in the translation, because in the original the intellectual element, the thought limits are being constantly overborne and are sometimes almost swallowed up by the waves of suggestion that come stealing in with the music: so much more is heard than is said that the soul listening goes ﬂoating into that inﬁnity and counts the deﬁnite contribution of the intelligence as of a lesser value.  Precisely there lies the greatest power of poetic rhythm for the very highest work that the new age has to do, and that it can be done by a new use of the poetic method without breaking the whole form of poetry, Tagore’s own lyrical work in his mother tongue is the best evidence.  Whitman’s aim is consciently, clearly, professedly to make a great revolution in the whole method of poetry, and


Sri Aurobindo: if anybody could have succeeded, it ought to have been this giant of poetic thought with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity. He is a great poet, one of the greatest in the power of his substance, the energy of his vision, the force of his style, the largeness at once of his personality and his universality. His is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modern’s ruder less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in this that he has the nearness to something elemental which makes everything he says, even the most common and prosaic, sound out with a ring of greatness, gives a force even to his barest or heaviest phrases, throws even upon the coarsest, dullest, most physical things something of the divinity; and he has the elemental Homeric power of sufﬁcient straightforward speech, the rush too of oceanic sound though it is here the surging of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not, is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness from its defects — that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki — and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine. Whitman will remain great after all the objections that can be made against his method or his use of it, but the question is whether what served his unique personality, can be made a rule for lesser or different spirits, and whether the defects which we see but do not and cannot weigh too closely in him, will not be fatal when not saved by his alluplifting largeness.


Sri Aurobindo: A giant can pile up Pelion and Ossa and make of it an unhewn chaotic stair to Olympus, but others would be better and more safely employed in cutting steps of marble or raising by music a ladder of sapphires and rubies to their higher or their middle heavens. Personality, force, temperament can do unusual miracles, but the miracle cannot always be turned into a method or a standard.  Whitman’s verse, if it can be so called, is not simply a cadenced prose, though quite a multitude of his lines only just rise above the prose rhythm. The difference is that there is a constant will to intensify the fall of the movement so that instead of the unobtrusive ictus of prose, we have a fall of the tread, almost a beat, and sometimes a real beat, a meeting and parting, sometimes a deliberate clash or even crowding together of stresses which recall the spirit of the poetical movement, though they obey no recognised structural law of repetitions and variations.  In this kind of rhythm we ﬁnd actually three different levels — the distinction may be a little rough, but it will serve, — a gradation which is very instructive.


Sri Aurobindo: First we have a movement which just manages to be other than prose movement, but yet is full of the memory of a certain kind of prose rhythm. Here the ﬁrst defect is that the ear is sometimes irritated, sometimes disappointed and baulked by a divided demand, memory or expectation, hears always the prose suggestion behind pursuing and dragging down the feet of the poetic enthusiasm. It is as if one were watching the “aerial walk” of a Hathayogin who had just conquered the force of gravitation, but only to the extent of a few inches, so that one is always expecting the moment which will bring him down with a bump to mother earth. It is something like a skimming just above the ground of prose, sometimes a dragging of the feet with a frequent touch and upkicking of the dust, for inevitably the poetic diction and imaginative power of style fall to the same level. Much of Whitman’s work is in this manner; he carries it off by the largeness and sea-like roll of the total impression, but others have not the same success, — even the French craftsmen are weighed down, — and in them the whole has a draggled and painful effect of an amphibious waddling incertitude.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is a nobler level at which he often keeps which does not get out of sight of the prose plain or lift up above all its gravitation, but still has a certain poetic power, greatness and nobility of movement. But it is still below what an equal force would have given in the master measures of poetry.  But the possibilities of an instrument have to be judged by its greatest effects, and there are poems, lines, passages in which Whitman strikes out a harmony which has no kinship to nor any memory of the prose gravitation, but is as far above it as anything done in the great metrical cadences. And here, and not only in Whitman, but in all writers in this form who rise to that height, we ﬁnd that consciously or unconsciously they arrive at the same secret principle, and that is the essential principle of Greek choric and dithyrambic poetry turned to the law of a language which has not the strong resource of quantity.  Arnold deliberately attempted such an adaptation but, in spite of beautiful passages, with scant success; still when he writes such a line as it is this choric movement that he reproduces.


Sri Aurobindo: Whitman’s ﬁrst poem in and a number of others are written partly or throughout in this manner. When he gives us the dactylic and spondaic harmony of his lines, one of them wanting only one foot to be a very perfect hexameter or the subtly varied movement of this other passage, one has almost the rhythmical illusion of listening to a Sophoclean or Aeschylean chorus. In the opening stanzas of the noble , there is a continuous iambic metrical stress, but with the choric movement. One ﬁnds the same thing sometimes in French, — one poem at least of the kind I have seen of wonderful beauty, — though the success is not so easy in that language. Tagore has recently attempted a kind of free verse in Bengali, not so good as his regular metres, though melodious enough, as everything must be that is written by this master musician of the word, and throughout there is the same choric or dithyrambic principle of movement.


Sri Aurobindo: This then seems to be the natural high-water mark of free poetical rhythm; it is a use of the poetic principle of measure in its essence without the limitations of a set form. Evidently much can be done in this rhythmical method. But it is yet doubtful whether in languages which lack the support of quantitative measure, poetical expression in this form can carry home with at all the same force as in the received ways of word-music.  We may get some idea of the limitations of the form by one or two examples from the poetry of Carpenter I ﬁnd quoted by Mr. Cousins in his essay. Carpenter with a poetic faculty of a high order, a prophet of democracy and of the Self, like Whitman, but of a higher more spiritual truth of the Self, has like him found it impossible to restrain the largeness of his vision and personality in the bonds of metrical poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: In both we see that the prophet and thinker predominate over the poet and artist. Less rough and great than the epic voice from the other side of the ocean, his poetry has a more harmonious, limpid and meditative fullness.  But the lesser abundance of force and drive makes us feel more the limitations of his form. The thought is not only great, but poetically great and satisfying, the expression as form of thought is noble and admirable, but we miss the subtler rhythmic uplift of the poetic enthusiasm which is given to minds of much less power by the inspiring cadence and the ordered measures of the poetic spirit,. His ﬂow is ordinarily of the middle kind with occasional choric turns and movements, but the latter do not carry with them the full force of the intenser poetic cadence.


Sri Aurobindo: To cite one passage, — Whitman would have broken that up into ﬁve lines and got by it a more distinct and forcible effect, — for the breath of poetry best rises and falls in brief and intense lengths; so printed, it would be at once apparent that we have a varied choric movement, a little stumbling into half-prose just before the end, but otherwise admirable, with two sudden turns of great poetic force, where the movement is precisely that of the Greek chorus.  But the total effect is the sense of what one might almost call a noble and chanting superprose rhythm.  This appears more clearly in another passage where Carpenter’s movement is more at its normal level. He begins with a strain which is only just distinguishable from the prose strain, but suddenly rises from it to the beginning of a choric elevation, then comes the full choric rise, where, if the line had only ended with the parenthesis, it would have been a strain of perfect choric poetry, magniﬁcently thought, imaged and cadenced, but the closing words spoil the effect, for they are a sharp descent towards the prose level. There are too elevations rising up from a rhythmical prose cadence but lifted high by the scriptural nobility of phrase and spiritual turn which we get so often in Carpenter.


Sri Aurobindo: These ﬂuctuations appear then to be inherent in the form and it seems to me that being in their nature a constant fall from the striving after a sustained perfection, they take away altogether from the claims of this “free verse”. In lesser writers there is a similar but much more pronounced inadequacy; they rise little and fall or drag along with the most easily satisﬁed self-content in lowness. But that poets of great power should be satisﬁed with these deﬁciencies of their instrument and their most cultured readers accept them without question, indicates an inferiority, almost a depravation in the modern ear, or at least a great remissness in the austerity of the search after perfection. It is now sometimes said that the lines of poetry should follow the lines of life, and life, it might be contended, is of this kind, thought itself is of this kind, and the rhythm of poetry gains in sincerity by following them. But art is not of this kind, the poetic spirit is not of this kind; the nature of art is to strive after a nobler beauty and more sustained perfection than life can give, the nature of poetry is to soar on the wings of the inspiration to the highest intensities and keep winging, as far as may be, always near to them.


Sri Aurobindo: A form which in the name of freedom remits and relaxes this effort, whatever its other merits and advantages, means a laxity of effort and is a dangerous downward concession.  But there is another objection which may be denied, but seems to me true, that this kind of verse does not give its full spiritual value to the poet’s speech. Carpenter has a power of substance, thought-vision, image, expression which is very rare and in all these respects he would have been recognised as not only equal but superior to many who have enjoyed in their own day the reputation of poets of the ﬁrst rank. That he is not so recognised is due to the inferior form, a form legitimate enough for lesser uses, but not easily capable of the greatest poetic effects. Whitman too for all his energy loses in this way; even his greatest things do not go absolutely and immediately home, or having entered they do not so easily seize on the soul, take possession and rest in a calm, yet vibrating mastery.


Sri Aurobindo: The real poetic cadence has that power, and to make the full use of it is the sign of the greatest masters; it has in it then something magical, immediate and miraculous, an unanalysable triumph of the spirit. But this other movement has not that stamp, it does only a little more than a highly concentrated prose might do, and this is because of the three indispensable intensities of poetry it may have intensity of thought and soul-substance, intensity of expression, but the intensity of rhythm, which is poetry’s primal need, is lowered and diluted, — even, one feels, to a certain extent in its choric movements : by that lowering the two other intensities suffer, the poet himself tends to loosen them to the level of his movement. If that is so, those who use the form to meet the demands of the new age, are on the wrong track. But a demand is there and it indicates a real need.


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident that Whitman and Carpenter could not have expressed themselves altogether in the existing forms, even if they had made the attempt. But if the new age is to express itself with the highest poetical power, it must be by new discoveries within the principle of the intenser poetical rhythm. The recent or living masters may not have done this, though we may claim that some beginnings have been made, but the new age is only at its commencement; the decisive departures, the unforeseen creations may yet be due which will equip it with an instrument or many instruments suited to the largeness, depth and subtlety of the coming spirit.  Chapter XXI HE EFFECTIVE stream of poetry in the English tongue has followed no such strong distinctive turn as would be able to sweep the effort of rhythmic expression along with it in one mastering direction. The poets of this age pursue much more even than their predecessors the bent of their personality, not guided by any uniting thought or standard of form, and have no other connecting link than the subtle similarities which the spirit of the age always gives to its work of creation.


Sri Aurobindo: But the present age is so loose, ﬂuid and many-motived that this subtler community is not easily tangible and works out in much less of an open family resemblance than in the Victorian poets or their predecessors. Only in the Celtic revival in Ireland have there been a number of considerable writers united by a common artistic motive and ideal, and it may be for that reason that a certain persistent thing which is striving to be and to get expression in the poetry of the time ﬁnds itself in a ﬁrst illumination, emerges as a conscious power and seeks for its adequate form and rhythm. But we ﬁnd it elsewhere too in obscurer forms; on this element we may pause to lay stress while we leave aside as of less importance the crowding variety of other temperamental and personal emphasis which hides it from view or chokes up its channels of emergence. This subtler element, although far from being yet victorious over the tradition of the past or the more clamorous powers of the present, is the most original, the most unworked and fruitful in promise for the future and represents the highest possibility of a greater coming poetry.  A distinct spiritual turn, the straining towards a deeper, more potent, supra-intellectual and supravital vision of things is its innermost secret of creative power.


Sri Aurobindo: Now increasingly the highest turn of the human mind indicates a large opening of its vision to the self as well as the person of man and the spirit of Nature, to supernature, to the cosmic, the universal and the eternal, but without any loosing of the hold on life and earth, which is likely to survive and govern thought and creation and the forms of our living when the present multitude of standpoints, all the conﬂict and chaos of a manifold seeking and new formation, have resolved themselves into the harmony of a centralising and embracing outlook. That inﬁnite self-discovery would be the logical outcome of the movement of the past and the present century and the widest possibility and best chance open to the human spirit: taking up the thought of the ages into a mightier arc of interpretation and realisation, it would be the crowning of one and the opening of a new and greater cycle.  The poets of yesterday and today, Whitman, Carpenter, the Irish poets, Tagore, but also others in their degree are forerunners of this new spirit and way of seeing, prophets sometimes, but at others only illumined by occasional hints or by side rays of a light which has not ﬂooded all their vision. I may take for my purpose four of them whose names stand behind or are still with us and their station already among those whose work endures, Meredith and Phillips among recent English poets, A. E. and Yeats of the Irish singers. There is a very great difference of the degree and power with which the spirit has opened to them its secret and a great difference too in the turn which they give to its promptings.


Sri Aurobindo: The two English poets have it at moments in a high clarity, but at others it is only a suggestion behind which gives a penetrating, original and profound tone to their work. This is their native secret when they go deepest into themselves, a thing they get sometimes into clear speech perhaps by right of their Celtic inheritance; but they work in the English tradition, follow other attractions, bear the burden of a tendency of aesthetic feeling, form and treatment which lead away from the pursuit of the direct seeking and the perfect manner. The consistent note we get more constantly in the Irish poets who, freer in mind from this past tradition, though something of it must cling perhaps to all who write in the English tongue, unless they start with the superb revolutionary deﬁance of Whitman, — are able to strike out with a less encumbered gait into new paths of thought and movement. They have too an original well of inspiration in the Celtic spirit, temperament and tradition from which they draw a magical and delicate draught of other air naturally stimulative of a subtler and more spiritual vision: they escape, and that is another supreme advantage, from the overstress of the intellectual and vital notes which in their English kindred and compeers take from the direct purity of utterance of their spirit. None of them has indeed the large and puissant voice of Whitman or his dominant force of poetic personality, though they have what he has not or did not care to evolve, the artistic faculty and genius, but each has a high peculiar power in his own way of light, is at his best, and the best is not infrequent even in the least of them, a poet of the ﬁrst rank.


Sri Aurobindo: The greatness of scope and uniﬁed plenitude of power is absent which would have been needed to make any one of them a grand representative voice of the time. But they lead and prepare, they strike great new notes, open or at least give hints of great new ways for a future poetry.  One thing that comes home to us when we take a comparative view of this poetry, when we look at the inmost strands of the expression at which it arrives in these four poets, all of them among its boldest and most original and therefore most revealing representatives, is a certain common element behind their differences; this we ﬁnd in a novel use of rhythmic movement, a sudden new moving force, turn, stamp and fashion in the minting of the gold and silver of their language and as the secret of this departure a quite other innate or conscious aim, not always manifest in the visible form of the substance, though that too is there in plenty, but in the way of seeing the object on which the inner eye is turned, whether it be idea, thing or person, significant emotion or glint of soul-power in man or revealing object or suggestive hint in Nature. This aim we may perhaps best express if we take up and modify a phrase of Meredith’s when he speaks of the hampered human voice that could never say hampered by the austerity of its wisdom or the excess of its sense and passion. But if it is rarely that this sweetest way is found — yet do we not get near to it sometimes in Yeats and Tagore? — at least this new turn of the poetic voice is characteristically an endeavour to see and to say our inmost in the inmost way.


Sri Aurobindo: The natural turn of poetry, that which gives to it its soul of superiority to other ways of human utterance, is the endeavour of the interpretative cast of its mind always to look beyond the object, even to get behind it and evoke from a something that was waiting for us within its own inevitable speech and rhythm.  That inwardness is the triumph of great poetical speech, whether the poet has his eye like Homer on physical object and power of action and the externalised thought and emotion which they throw up into the surface roll of life, or else like Shakespeare on the surge of the life-spirit and its forms of character and passion and its waves of self-interpreting thought and reﬂection, or on the play of the detached or half-detached seeing intellect or the inspired reason, or on the strainings of the desire-soul of man striving to ﬁnd the delight of things in the thousand-coloured threads of the double web of our existence. The manner and yield of poetry vary according to the depth we penetrate into that inner something which is hidden by layer upon layer of many an intervening medium, but which offers and gives itself wonderfully in all of them, yet seems to retreat always and invites to a profounder pursuit and discovery; it varies according to the insistence of the eye on the object or its liberation into the greater signiﬁcance of which the object is only the seizable symbol, or according as we are stopped by the medium or break through it to some truth of the one thing in all which throws out in these various sheaths such different richnesses of form, colour and suggestion of idea and sound, but is yet one in all things to the soul that can discover its eternal unity.  But this new way of seeing is a ﬁrst effort to get through the object and the medium and employ them only as suggestive instruments, to break beyond the life-force and the emotion, the imagination and the idea, not to be stopped by these things, though using the inmost life-stress, the inmost releasing force of the emotion, the inmost plunge of the imagination or its most searching power of form, colour and symbol, the inmost penetrating subtlety of the idea and to arrive at what we may call the soul-sense, the soul-sound and as far as may be the soulword interpretative of some yet deeper revealing truth in all their objects. There is in most recent poetry that counts, though less here, more there, some element of this kind of straining, force, pressure on sound and word and vision, and though it often turns into strange, obscure and devious paths, obstructed by the insistence of the superﬁcial desire-soul or weighted by the intellect, — the two powers in us which modern humanity has developed into an exaggerated predominance, — still it reaches out towards this effort to see our inmost in the inmost way, and when it gets free, delivers voices of a supreme power, vision and purity.


Sri Aurobindo: And what it must lead to in the end if it gets to its end, does not stop short or turn aside after some other lure, must be some direct seeing by the soul of the soul or self everywhere in its own delivered force of vision, — the direct vision of Indian aspiration,, — not the sensuous or the imaginative or the intellectual or the vital insistence, but a greater Potency using and surmounting them, the Soul’s own delivered self-vision in all things and delight of its own greatness and light and beauty. That is the turn of mind which is now making itself heard in effort, though not in full mastery, stammered here, there sung with a slight, delicate and subtle sweetness or with an initial load of rare or crowding suggestion, but waiting still the splendour of the master song that shall rise into the light of the spirit, —  The inmost seeing must bring out of itself to be poetically effective the inmost word and sound, must ﬁnd out a luminous purity of its steps or a profound depth of its movement, must be said in the inmost way. Rhythm is the most potent, founding element of poetic expression, and though most modern poets depend or at least lean more heavily on force of thought and substance than on the greater musical suggestions of rhythm, — Shelley, Swinburne, Yeats are exceptions, — there must always be a change in this basis of the poet’s art when there is a substantial change of the constituting spirit and motive. Especially when there is this more subtle spiritual aim, the rhythmical movement becomes of a new importance.


Sri Aurobindo: Whether as an aid to help out by the subtle meaning of the cadence the total spiritual suggestion of the speech or, more supremely, to bring in out of the depths, as great music does, some surge or outwelling of the inﬁnite movement and cry of the spirit and bear like a jewel of light on its breast the outbreak of the inevitable revealing word, it must be persuaded to ﬁnd some new unity of measure and speech, the thought echoing with the very native sound of its Idea. We ﬁnd accordingly the beginning, sometimes something more, of another spirit in the movement of this poetry. These poets use for the most part old established metrical forms or variations of them; when there are departures, they do not go very far from the familiar base: but in their way of using them we are as far as possible in its intrinsic principle from the method of the older poets. The change may be described as a more complete subordination of the metrical insistence to the inner suggestion of the movement. The old poets depended greatly on the metrical fall, made much of the external mould and its possible devices and ﬁlled it with the tones of life or thought or the excitement of the thing that possessed them and moved them to speech.


Sri Aurobindo: Shakespeare’s lines, are a supreme instance of the manner, or Milton’s or any of his stately rolling lines or periods of organ music will do for a great illustration. Pope and Dryden simply overdid the reliance on measure and chained themselves up in a monotony of pointed metrical effect. The succeeding poets got back to the greater freedoms of tone and used them in a new way, but the principle remains the same, — as in Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s both of them examples of the ordinary base used with a deep simplicity of single tone and a melodious insistence; or otherwise, where the tone on the contrary makes the most of the mould, or, The base of the old poetry is a march, a walk or a lilt, a measured ﬂow, roll or surge, — or it is with less competent metrists a tripping trot, dance or gallop: but even in the freest movements there is a prevailing metrical insistence. In the new movement the old base is there, but whatever show it may make, its real importance tends to drop into a very second place.


Sri Aurobindo: Insistence of tone has taken full possession of or even conquered the insistence of the fall. A spiritual intonation, not content to ﬁll and at its strongest overﬂow the metrical mould, but insistent to take it into itself and carrying it rather than carried in it, is the secret of its melody or its harmony. There is here the sound of the coming in, perhaps only the ﬁrst suggestion of a new music.  The main reliance on the metrical stress can leave room in powerful hands for very great rhythms, but it has its limitations, from which different poets try to get release by different devices. Milton sought it in variations of pause and the engulﬁng swell of periods of large and resonant harmony, Swinburne by the cymbal clang of his alliterations and a rush and surge of assonant lyrical sound, Browning by a calculated roughness.


Sri Aurobindo: Shakespeare himself under a great stress of crowding life and thought suggestions simply broke the back and joints of his instrument and tortured it into shapes from which he got out masterfully irregular harmonies sometimes of a great power, a process of which we may perhaps see in Whitmanesque free verse the far-off logical consequence. These more recent poets, whatever metrical devices they may use, depend upon something else, on a method which at its clearest becomes a principle of pure sound intonation.  Phillips’ blank verse which is of a very original mould, is built on this principle. The poet ﬁrst gets as his basis the most simple, direct and easy form possible of the metre, which he can loosen as much as possible, suppress or shift or add as many stresses as he chooses, or on the contrary weigh extraordinarily upon his stresses so as to give an impression of long space or burdened lingering or some echo of inﬁnite duration; but in either case the object is to get free room for the play of tone.  Four lines come together, in which there are only three stresses, in the last one might almost say two and a half, a small number of quantitatively long syllables are the physical support of the verse, — as if quantity were trying to come back to ﬁrst importance in a language of stresses, — and the rest is made up of varying minor tones. Or the long drawn out syllables are brought in in great abundance, in a variety of combinations, closely packed and largely spaced, as in or, or again, These and others are the means used, but at their back is the principle of a free intonation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the tone that builds the verse, gives it its real form and the metrical mould, forced to become and to do whatever the tone chooses, whatever is needed for the intonation of the inmost thought, is a ﬂexible convenience and a needed restraint, — for if loosened or freely spaced, it is not broken, — but no longer a chain and hardly felt even as a limitation. The signiﬁcance is that the poet has a rhythm of thought and spirit already sounding somewhere within him and in bringing it out he imposes it consciously on his outer instrument with an imperious sovereignty and does not get to it, like the older masters, as the result of a faithful observance of the metrical harmony.  The other poets use a different, less open and forceful outer method, but the same principle emerges in greater or less degree as if by some spiritual necessity. Meredith’s poetry belongs to an earlier technique, observes faithfully the metrical law, but the subtler thing is already coming: some curious turn is given to the beat which persistently compels it to serve some dominant soultone of the thought and seeing and to dance attendance on that, as in the four lines already quoted from, or else there is the turn towards long spaces and lingering tones where the metrical sound ﬂoats and seems always on the point of drowning in some deep sea of inner intonation, — a description which might well be applied to the whole drift and cause of this spiritual principle of rhythm. A. E. is not a great rhythmist, he is too preoccupied with his vision, more of a truth-seer than a truth-hearer of the Spirit, but when the hearing comes, the, somehow or other without any expenditure of device the full spiritual intonation rises up and takes possession of the music, — to give one instance only,


Sri Aurobindo: And in Yeats, a supreme artist in rhythm, this spiritual intonation is the very secret of all his subtlest melodies and harmonies and reveals itself whether in the use of old and common metres which cease to be either old or common in his hands or in delicate new turns of verse. We get it in his blank verse, taken at random, — or in the mounting ﬂight of that couplet on the ﬂaming multitude or heard through the slowly errant footfalls of that other, but most of all in the lyrical movements, —  There we have, very near to the ear of the sense, that inaudible music ﬂoating the vocal music, the song unheard, or heard only behind and in the inner silence, to catch some echo of which is the privilege of music but also the highest intention of poetical rhythm.  Beyond all analysis or set provision of means that is the constant attempt to which poetry must move, if this new realm is to open to its footsteps, not to suit the metre to the intellectual or even the emotional sense or to cast it in the moulds of life, but to seize some sound, some intonation of the voice of the soul, the lyric or the epic or the large or simple measures of its meditation and creation, which, as the old Vedic theory would say, initiate, roll out and support all the steps of the universe.  This intoned music in which the outer form becomes an external subtle means and suggestion, but the building power is other and brings in a spiritual accompaniment which is the real thing we have to listen to, opens at least one line on which we can arrive at that greater hearing whose wave can bring with it the inspiring word of a higher vision.


Sri Aurobindo: For the musical tone of the older poetry is the simply sensuous, the emotional, the thought or the life tone with the spiritual cadence as the result of some strong intensity of these things, but here is some beginning of a direct spiritual intonation.  Chapter XXII  HE RHYTHMIC change


Sri Aurobindo: which distinguishes the new poetry , may not be easy to seize at the ﬁrst hearing, for it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body, commencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there is a change too, more readily tangible, in the language of this poetry, in that fusion of a concentrated substance of the idea and a transmuting essence of the speech which we mean by poetic style. But here too, if we would understand in its issues the evolution of poetic speech in a language, it is on the subtler things of the spirit, the signiﬁcant inner changes that we must keep our eye; for it is these that determine the rest and are the heart of the matter. We take little account of the psychology of poetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an inspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: But this is an insufﬁcient account; for imagination is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at different levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination. What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine of which Plato has spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, — ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character, value and force of the word of the poet vary according to the action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the change, — the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imaginative or reﬂective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: The Tantric theory of Speech, the inspired seeing and creative goddess enthroned in our various soul-centres in her several forms and with her higher and higher stations, becomes here an actual and luminously perceptible truth of our being. But also there is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has its share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping touch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is the epochs when there is in the mind of a race some enthusiastic outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power, intermediary of the inspirations of the spirit or its revelations, that make the great ages of poetry.  In English literature this period was the Elizabethan. Then the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn of direct intuitive power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and divine fashion in its utterance which it had not at all before and has hardly had afterwards.


Sri Aurobindo: Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being. We take Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity, — and then pass on to Shakespeare’s rapid seizing of the intuitive inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us, — where with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of directness. The one speaks from the poetic intellect and satisﬁes by a just and pleasing expression, in the other the words get, one might say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality and give us immediately the inmost vital ﬁbre and thrill of the life they describe and interpret. It is not merely a difference of the measure of the genius, but of its source.


Sri Aurobindo: This language of Shakespeare’s is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and not merely at life and in this most myriad-minded of poets it takes like life itself many tones, but that intuitive readiness to get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the heart of the thing itself is almost always its secret. From that, he might have said, could he have given a better account of his own working, and not by any mere mirroring of things in Nature, We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each other in a single phrase of many suggestions, — for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in, His is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare’s images are not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce and visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper stuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent; for an example, which has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in its utterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on each other, — or become one, as in the last speeches of Antony, — But all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind rapidly and powerfully at work; but always too, — and this is the important distinction, — that mediator between the secret spirit and our ordinary surface mentality works in him through and behind the life vision to give the vital impression, the vital psychology, the life-burden of the thought, the emotion, the act or the thing seen in Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The movement that immediately followed, abandoned this power which Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had brought into English poetry; it sought after a language cut into the precision or full with the suggestions of the poetical intellect, and it gained something by its sacriﬁce; it puriﬁed the language, got rid of Elizabethan conceit and extravagance, laid a clearer basis of thought, went back to ordinary speech and raised it into a ﬁt instrument of the poetical imagination. But it lost this Shakespearian directness of intuitive vision and spontaneous power of utterance. Gray in a notable passage observes and laments the loss, without penetrating into its cause and nature, and he tried sometimes in his own way, within the cadre of an intellectualised language, to recover something of the power. The later poets get a compensation in other directions by a heightening of the clariﬁed thought and imagination, but the basic substance of the speech seems to have irrecoverably changed and its more tenuous spirit and make impose on the searching audacities of the intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative intelligence. Shelley’s Keats’ or his or Wordsworth’s give the force and pitch and measure of this often clear, strong, large and luminous, but less intensely surprising and uplifting manner.


Sri Aurobindo: English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate turn, a power of ﬁre and ether which has become native to it, a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there in its beginnings. This imaginatively intellectual basis of speech remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era.  But at the same time there emerges, at times, a certain effort to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompanied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic inspiration. When we try to put a name on it, — a thing which the poet himself seldom does successfully, for the creative instinct does not usually care to burden itself with a too intellectual selfconsciousness, — we can see that this is an attempt to return to the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive expression on a subtler and more ethereal level. The clariﬁed intellect observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately and powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds; and if the direct intuitive power can be got to work on the level just above the ordinary thinking mind where that mind opens through the full intuitive intelligence to a greater supra-intellectual mass and subtlety of light, it will bring in the revelation and inspiration of mightier and profounder things than when it works from behind the mind — even the vividly thinking mind of life and its vital sight and feeling.


Sri Aurobindo: For here, on the lower level, we get at most, as in Shakespeare, at the spirit in life with all its power of vital thought and its potency of passion and emotion; but there we shall get the greater spirit which embraces life, but shows us too all that is behind it, all that it dimly means and strives in embarrassed act and thought to bring into expression. Of this effort and this new thing we get magical ﬁrst indications in the pre-Victorian poets, as in Wordsworth’s or see the ﬁrst motion towards it, the ﬁrst seeking for a suitable style, as in Keats’ but also though less often, a sudden leaping out of the thing itself, — or  These lines of Keats are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and inner truth other than Shakespeare’s ; by the passage through the detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of the realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision. In the Victorian poets we get occasionally the same tendency in a stronger but less happy force; for it is weighted down by an increased intellectuality, in Browning by the robust strenuousness of the analytic intelligence, in Tennyson by the tendency to mere trimming of expression or glitter and wealth of artistic colour; but we have its voice sometimes, as in this line of the , —


Sri Aurobindo: But it has not yet arrived, it is still seeking for itself, beating ﬁtfully at the gates of the greater intuitive vision and expression.  But in more recent work it is precisely the recovery of this supreme power of speech on that loftier and subtler level which to one who comes freshly to this poetry breaks out with a sense of satisfying surprise and discovery. It is not complete; it is not everywhere; it is only just rising from the acquired basis of the previous heights of expression to its own realm; but it is there in a comparative abundance and it is the highest strain of its intensities. We ﬁnd it in Meredith; when he writes of “Colour, the soul’s bridegroom,” he has got the intimate revealing image of this fuller and higher intuitive manner, or in his lark’s when he writes, again, he has got the perfected turn of the direct intuitive word of thought in its more crowded manner of suggestion, — the kinship in the last line to the Shakespearian manner is close, — as too its more clear and limpid speech in other turns, and in the lines, he has it ready for an intuitive and vivid spiritual interpretation of Nature. We ﬁnd it in Phillips’ or in his trees


Sri Aurobindo: In the Irish poets it comes with less of the Shakespearian kinship, though Yeats has often enough a different but corresponding manner, but most characteristically in a delicate and ﬁne beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive entrance into the mystery of things, as in lines like A. E.’s or passages already quoted from Yeats, or, to give one other instance, his This is a style and substance which recovers something that had been lost and yet is new and pregnant of new things in English literature.  It is sufﬁcient at present to indicate this new power of language. But we must see whence it arises and to what possibility it points in the widening of the realms of poetic interpretation. It points to a greater thing than has yet been achieved and it is itself a higher achievement, — apart from all question of the force and genius of individual poets. Shakespeare is still — though need he be always? — immeasurably the largest name in English poetry; but still, however preeminent his genius, there remain greater things to be seen by the poet than Shakespeare saw and greater things to be said in poetry than Shakespeare said, — and here we have an indication of the way on which they lie and of the gates which open to their hiding-place and own home of light and self-revelation.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXIII  HE INSPIRING spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness and 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 necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change that is coming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer, more intimate way of seeing, feeling, appreciating, interpreting life and Nature and existence. The thought of the middle and even the later nineteenth century was wide in its way, especially in its range and breadth of surface or in comparison with the narrower thought of the preceding ages, but it was acute rather than profound, superﬁcial even in its attempt at penetration. It sought for its food over a great country, but it did not wing high in the breadth of the altitudes or plunge down into the largeness of the depths.


Sri Aurobindo: Perhaps the distinction is best marked by that signiﬁcant movement of philosophic thought which now repelled by these limitations rejects the supremacy of the intellect and seeks for the secret of things in the intuition, in the inmost suggestions of life, in the innate will and principle of action and points more or less obscurely through these things to a spirit or self or nameless somewhat superconscient to or at least greater than our intellectual mind and reason. The nineteenth century was intellectual, not intuitive, critical rather than creative, or creative mostly by the constructive force of the critical mind, — critically constructive, we may then say, rather than creative by any direct insight and interpretation, — curiously observative of the phenomenon of life and Nature, concerned with many interests, patient, accurate and analytic in its method of scrutiny, occupied by a stress of many problems, moved by strong human and 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 and spirit of things. Poetry has been affected by the turn of the human mind in this age; it has been brilliant, curious, careful, inventive, interested and interesting, moving over a great range of subjects, closely observative and even sometimes analytical, or elaborately aesthetic, or expressive of some intellectual idealism, but without much height of wing or force from the depths or strong or ﬁne spiritual suggestion. Or there has been only some occasional suggestion or isolated foretaste of these things.


Sri Aurobindo: There has been much stress of thought, but not much deeply moved or spontaneous greatness of creation.  The mind and soul of the race is now moving forward on the basis of what it has gained by a century of intellectual stir and activity, towards a profounder mood and a more internal force of thought and life. The intellectual way of looking at things is being gradually transcended or is raising itself to a power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind and 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 by the soul in their spirit and reality. Mankind is still engaged in thinking and searching with an immense stress of mental power, but 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 from that of its past cultural ages and on the whole with a greater power and subtlety of the mind, though not as yet, but that too seems predestined to come, with a greater power of the spirit. It is, to return to a phrase already used, in search of our inmost and attempting already to ﬁnd, though it has not yet altogether found, our inmost way of its sense, vision, idea, expression.


Sri Aurobindo: This change, reﬂected in the poetry of the time is not 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 of the soul into possession of the gains of the intellectual age and a swift completion and ﬁlling of them out in a new ﬂood of light and an at once nearer and more extended sense of their meaning. The whole view and sense of existence has deepened into a greater subjectivity. For the subjectivity of the nineteenth century was a matter of the temperament, an activity of the strongly marked psychological individuality turned upon things held under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now there are coming a universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an attempt towards closeness and identity, a greater community of the individual with the universal soul and mind. The wider interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing its character. More strenuous than before, it is less concentrated on his outer life and creation, and even where it deals with them, it opens more understandingly to his future and to his inner possibilities, to the psychological and the spiritual sense of his past, to the deeper signiﬁcance of his present, to his selfcreation.


Sri Aurobindo: The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our kind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the ﬁner impressions by which we enter into them and establish with her a spiritual relation or identity. The things that lie behind the material world are almost for the ﬁrst time being touched and seen with a close and revealing intimacy.  The communion of the human soul with the Divine is becoming once more a subject of thought and utterance, not now limited to the old religious and personal form, but enlightened by a sense of the Inﬁnite and Eternal which has arisen from and viviﬁed the larger cosmic sense for which the thinking and discovery of the last century was a training. This change amounts to a revolution of the whole attitude of man towards existence, but it is commencing by an extension of the intellectual stress and a consequent breaking down of its bounds.


Sri Aurobindo: A self-exceeding of the intellect and a growth of man into some ﬁrst freedom and power of an intuitive mentality supported by the liberated intelligence is in its initial travail of new birth. These things have not all arrived, 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.  This considerable change was intellectually anticipated and to some extent prepared in the last century itself by a strain, a little thin in body, but high and continuous, of strenuous intellectuality which strove to rise beyond the level of the ordinary thought 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 of the inheritance of our ages. A small number of writers — in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best known among these names, — build for us a bridge of transition from the intellectual transcendentalism of the earlier nineteenth century across a subsequent low-lying scientiﬁc, utilitarian, externalised intellectualism, as if from bank to bank across morass or ﬂood, over to the age now beginning to come in towards us.  But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was the one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they are leading.


Sri Aurobindo: He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth century by the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking, by his emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the cosmic and universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his democratic enthusiasm, by his eye ﬁxed on the future, by his intellectual reconciling vision at once of the greatness of the individual 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 his work. But he brings into them an element which gives them another potency and meaning and restores something which in most of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and sicklied over by an excessive intellectual tendency more leaned to observe life than strong and swift to live it and which in the practicality of the time was caught up from its healthful soul of nature and converted into a huge grinding mechanism. He has the intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he utters, an almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life, — that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare, — and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a broad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made subject and object and substance of a free and a powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is made one with the pulse of life and the grave reﬂective pallor and want of blood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that vigorous union. Whitman writes with a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear self-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into speech, —


Sri Aurobindo: No other writer of the time has had this large and deﬁnite consciousness of the work of a modern poet as a representative voice of his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation conceived as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind, of universal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and action. His creation, triumphing over all defect and shortcoming, draws from it a unique broadness of view, vitality of force and sky-wide atmosphere of greatness.  But 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 of new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence.  Whitman by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some ﬁrst profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in the 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, who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their oneness. That which the old Indian seers called the, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast strain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, — the French poets, inﬂuenced in their form and substance by Whitman, have seized on this element with the clear discernment and intellectual precision and lucidity of the Latin mind and given it the name of unanimism, — is the subject of some of his highest strains.


Sri Aurobindo: He gets to it repeatedly through his vision of the past opening to the ideal future, the organic universal movement of bygone nations and ages and the labour and creation of the present and some nobler coming turn to a freedom of uniﬁed completion, —  And some part of his work, as in the, opens out even into a fuller and profounder sense of its meaning. He sees it here as a new voyage of the human spirit, — “O farther sail!”  And with a singularly clear ﬁrst seeing of the ideal goal and the ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure.  He casts forward too the ideal heart of this wider movement of man into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion, brings out the divinity of the soul in man and its kinship to the divinity of the Eternal, — and he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to conscious fruition in oneness, These passages, — one of the seers of old time reborn in ours might so have expressed himself in a modern and intellectualised language, — send forward an arclight of prophetic expression on what is at the very heart of the new movement of humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: It is in some degree an indication of that which the twentieth century is slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own in a closer actuality of insight and experience.  The idea in these and cognate passages anticipates the new age, but the language and method are still that of the poetic intellect straining to some fullest power of its intelligence and speech-force, and the thought and writing of those who follow Whitman, like the French “unanimist” poets, bear the same character. At the centre of English poetry, in England itself, we have found another turn of intuitive speech which is more native to that closer actuality of experience for which we seek, a turn and power brought about perhaps by the greater ﬁre of poetic genius and imagination, the special gift of the Anglo-Celtic mind, which leaps at once to the forceful, native, instinctive energy of poetic expression of the thing it has to say. The full idea of that thing, the large and clearly conceived substance of thought and vision which should ﬁll this mould of intuitive utterance, we do not get in any considerable degree or range, — again perhaps because of the inferior turn for large and straight thinking on the great scale, a full-orbed thinking with a sustained and total conception, which is the defect of the English mind, — but we have 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 almost with a full face towards the future.


Sri Aurobindo: These are strong touches only, but they give already some impression and mould of 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 in Nature, a thought which casts its fathom beyond the passion of life and the clarity of the intelligence and starts sounding a suggestion of the hidden and the inﬁnite in all it touches is the shaping power and the mode of this utterance.  The citations I have already given to illustrate the new rhythm and language indicate also this power and thought-turn in the substance. A few more citations from the same poets may help to bring it out with more precision. The early and greater poetry of Phillips has much of this stamp, — afterwards he unhappily turned to a more outward dramatic motive which was not the true and original bent of his genius, but even there his best is that which prolongs the high beauty of his ﬁrst inspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: He has no great conscious range of poetical thinking, but all the more remarkable is the power with which this new inﬂuence comes 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 emotion 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 eternal continuity of passion and seeking and all the suggestion of the Inﬁnite. The very passion for physical beauty takes on this almost mystic character; it is the passion for a body  But, says Idas, Here we have the reconciliation, already suggested by Whitman, of the full power and meaning of the individual with the full power and meaning of the universal, eternal and inﬁnite, but it is concentrated and brought to bear on a single feeling for its enlargement with a great power of intuitive and revealing suggestion.


Sri Aurobindo: This enlarging of the particular to meet and become one with the universal and inﬁnite — Tennyson’s knowing of what God and man is from a deep and intimate perception of all that is meant by Nature in a single little ﬂower in the crannies — is a very characteristic and indicative feature of this new poetry.  The same turn emerges in a more indirect and subtle, but not less signiﬁcant way of treatment even in lines which apparently seek only to concentrate for the thought the essence of a common human idea and emotion. When the poet speaks of or of Marpessa’s maternal human longing, the thought in itself is not uncommon, but what makes it uncommon is the turn of the utterance which by an intuitive pressure towards some deeper signiﬁcance of the personal thought and emotion carries it beyond the personality of the idea and feeling into a suggestion of profound universality, a rhythm and light of some entire vibration from the depths of life caught up and held by a human self-knowledge. The same force of suggestion emerges in the treatment of Nature, whether it takes the form of an intensity of sensation, or passes through that intensity to the sense of the very soul and emotion of what seems to us in less seeing moods an inconscient and inanimate Nature, as in the  Meredith with his greater force of thinking gives us the clear signiﬁcance of what is here only a powerful indication, a seeing identity of the soul of man with the hidden soul in earth-nature.


Sri Aurobindo: And the same turn emerges too in direct thought on the large aspects of life, as in such a phrase as or that which describes lines which give us by some deep suggestion to the spiritual sight a whole abiding soul aspect of man and the universe in a single revealing expression. The effort of poetry of this kind of inspiration may be deﬁned by adapting another expression of Meredith’s, And the fullness of that which it points to beyond itself, is a movement to unite the life of the earth, not lessened, not denied, not cast away, but accepted, with its own hidden spiritual reality, the one crucial movement necessary for man before he can reach that perfection which the race shall have on its heights, when This is in substance the same strain that arises ﬁnally from the more puissant voice of Whitman, but it has if a less forceful, a profounder touch, — a more delicate, intimate and spiritual closeness of seeing, experience and utterance is its charm and distinction.  The indications that we get in these and other English poets open 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 Celtic 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.


Sri Aurobindo: Here I must be content to note three of its more distinctive features, the remarkable interweaving into one, whether against a background of Irish tradition and legend or by a directer thought, of the 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 things into the inner soul-spaces, presses upon the earth-life and supports it, so that at times our world seems only its detached projection; the reading through the signs of life of the brighter letters of an ideal and eternal Beauty; the insistence, even when touching exclusively our external life, on the suggestion of ﬁner soul-values which exceed its material meanings. The poetry of A. E. is still more remarkable. What the others suggest or give us in more or less luminous glimpses, he casts into concentrated expression from a nearer spiritual knowledge, — as when he strikes out in a brief verse the living spiritual perception of the universal and inﬁnite source of love, — He lives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry is an indistinct or a less distinct aspiration, and his whole selfexpression is bathed, perhaps rendered sometimes a little remote and unseizable by its immergence, in an unusual light, the light of the spirit breaking through the veils of the intelligence in which it has to ﬁnd its means of speech. This is not the frank marriage and close unity of the earth and heavens of which Whitman and Meredith speak, but a rare, high and exclusive pinnacle of the soul’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 Truth; 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 cycles of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XXIV  T THIS point we stand in the evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a common evolution, and I have singled it out to follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve of the human spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and, again, because of all the modern European languages it has the largest freest poetic energy and natural power, it responds on the whole most directly of all of them — in spite of certain serious limitations of the English mind — to the fountain motives, the essential impetus of the soul of poetry in its ascent and shows them, if not always in their greatest or most perfect, yet almost always in their most characteristic and revealing form. Poetry like everything else in man evolves.


Sri Aurobindo: Its fundamental nature, function and law are no doubt always the same, because each thing and each activity too in our being must be faithful to the divine idea in it, to its dharma, and can try to depart from it only on peril, whatever momentarily it may seem to gain, of eventual inferiority and futility, or even of disintegration and death. But still there is an evolution within this law of its being. And evolution means a bringing out of new powers which lay concealed in the seed or the ﬁrst form; the simple develops to the more complex, — more complex even in some apparent simplicity, — the superﬁcial gives place to the more and more profound, the lesser gives place to the greater nature of the common manifestation.  But poetry is a psychological phenomenon, the poetic impulse a highly charged force of expression of the mind and soul of man, and therefore in trying to follow out its line of evolution it is the development of the psychological motive and power, it is the kind of feeling, vision, mentality which is seeking in it for its word and idea and form of beauty and it is the power of the soul through which it ﬁnds expression or the level of mind from which it speaks which we must distinguish to get a right idea of the progress of poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: All else is subsidiary, variations of rhythm, language, structure; they are the form, the vehicle; they derive subtly and get their character and meaning from the psychological power and the fundamental motive.  If poetry is a highly charged power of aesthetic expression of the soul of man, it must follow in its course of evolution the development of that soul. I put it that from this point of view the soul of man like the soul of Nature can be regarded as an unfolding of the spirit in the material world. Our unfolding has its roots in the soil of the physical life; its growth shoots up and out in many directions in the stalk and branches of the vital being ; it puts forth the opulence of the buds of mind and there, nestling in the luxuriant leaves of mind and above it, out from the spirit which was concealed in the whole process must blossom the free and inﬁnite soul of man, the hundredpetalled rose of God.


Sri Aurobindo: Man indeed, unlike other forms of being in terrestrial Nature, though rooted in body, proceeds by the mind and all that is characteristic of him belongs to the wonderful play of mind taking up physicality and life and developing and enriching its gains till it can exceed itself and become a spiritual mind, the divine Mind in man. He turns ﬁrst his view on the outward physical world and on his own life of outward action and concentrates on that or throws into its mould his life-suggestions, his thought, his religious idea, and, if he arrives at some vision of an inner spiritual truth, he puts even that into forms and ﬁgures of the physical life and physical Nature.  Poetry at a certain stage or of a certain kind expresses this turn of the human mentality in word and in form of beauty. It can reach great heights in this kind of mental mould, can see the physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer. Arrived to a greater depth of living, seeing from a vivid half outward half inward turn of mind his thought and action and self and world and Nature, man begins to feel more sensitively the passion and power of life, its joy and pain, its wonder and terror and beauty and romance, to turn everything into moved thought and sentiment and sensation of the life-soul, the desire soul in him which ﬁrst forces itself on his introspection when he begins to go inward.


Sri Aurobindo: Poetry too takes this turn, rises and deepens to a new kind of greatness; and at the summit in this kind we have Shakespeare.  This way of seeing and creating, in which thought is involved in life and the view is that of the life-spirit feeling, thinking, imagining, carried forward in its own surge of self, cannot permanently hold the greater activities of the mental being. He ceases to identify himself entirely with the passion, the emotion, the thought-suggestions of life; for he needs to know from a freer height what it is and what he is, to get a clear detached idea of its workings, to dominate his emotions and vital intuitions and see with the calm eye of his reason, to probe, analyse, get at the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature. He does this at ﬁrst on large and comparatively bare lines dwelling only on the salient details for a ﬁrst strong and provisionally adequate view. Poetry following this movement takes on the lucid, restrained, intellectual and ideal classic form, in which high or strong ideas govern and develop the presentation of life and thought in an atmosphere of clear beauty and the vision of the satisﬁed intelligence; that is the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets.


Sri Aurobindo: But afterwards the intelligence sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to all manner of the possibilities of truth and to a crowding stream and mass of interests, a never satisﬁed minuteness of detail, an endless succession of pregnant generalisations. This is the type of modern intellectualism.  The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations, passes through many phases. The true classic form is then no longer possible; if it is tried, it is not quite genuine, for what informs it is no longer the classic spirit; it is too crowded with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, responsive to many things; no new Parthenon can be built whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid spacings of the idea and the word: the mind of man has become too full, complex, pregnant with subtle and not easily expressible things to be capable of that earlier type of perfection. The romantic strain is a part of this wider intelligence, but the pure and genuine romanticism of the life-spirit which cares nothing for thought except as it enriches its own being, is also no longer possible.


Sri Aurobindo: If it tries to get back to that, it falls into an affectation, an intellectual pose and, whatever genius may be expended upon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure of modern romanticism in Germany and France. In Germany, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the rest of German literary creation of the time is interesting and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is intimately alive and true, and afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained poetic impulse; she turned aside to music on the one side and on the other to philosophy and science for her ﬁeld. The French mind got away very soon from romanticism and, though greatly enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went on to a more genuine intellectual and intellectually aesthetic form of creation.  In England with the greater spontaneity of its poetic spirit the mistake never went so far.


Sri Aurobindo: The poetry of the time of Wordsworth and Shelley is sometimes called romantic poetry, but it was not so in its essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives.  It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth’s force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley’s imaginative transcendentalism, Keats’ worship of Beauty, Byron’s Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge’s supernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake’s command of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a record of failures. Realism is a more native turn of this kind of intelligence, and it invades poetry too to a certain extent, but if it dominates, then poetry must decline and cease. The poetry of an age of many-sided intellectualism can live only by its many-sidedness and by making everything as it comes a new material for the aesthetic creations of the observing, thinking, constructing intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: But then comes the now vital question in this cultural evolution, — in what is this intellectualism to culminate? For if it leads to nothing beyond itself, it must end, however brilliant its work, in a poetic decadence, and that must come nearer, the more intellect dominates the other powers of our being. The intellect moves naturally between two limits, the abstractions or solving analyses of the reason and the domain of positive and practical reality; its great achievements are in these two ﬁelds or in a mediation between them, and it can do most and go farthest, can achieve its most native and characteristic and therefore its greatest and completest work either in philosophy or in Science. The age of developed intellectualism in Greece killed poetry; it ended in the comedy of Menander, the intellectual artiﬁcialities of Alexandrianism, the last ﬂush of beauty in the aesthetic pseudo-naturalism of the Sicilian pastoral poetry; philosophy occupied the ﬁeld.