Sri Aurobindo: Yet on the other hand if this difﬁculty could once be overcome, then because of the profounder intensity of the power of poetical speech which this literature has developed, the very highest and most penetrating expression of these profoundest things would be possible. A nearer signiﬁcant imaging of them would be close to the hand here than could easily be achieved without much new fashioning of language in the Latin tongues whose speech has been cast in the mould of a clear or high intellectuality rather than into the native utterance of imaginative vision adventuring beyond the normal bounds of a high poetic intelligence. We see in modern French creation a constant struggle with this limitation: even we ﬁnd a poet like Mallarm´e driven to break the mould of French speech in his desperate effort to force it to utter what is to its natural clear lucidity almost unutterable. No such difﬁculty presents itself in English poetry; the depths, the vistas of suggestion, the power to open the doors of the inﬁnite are already there, ready to hand for the mind rightly gifted to evoke them, waiting and almost asking to be used for the highest purposes. Much less naturally ﬁtted for ﬁne prose utterance, this language has developed all the close lights and shades, the heights and depths, the recesses of fathomless sense needed by the poet.


Sri Aurobindo: It has to be seen how this has come about; for it has not been accomplished at all easily, but only by much seeking and effort. We observe ﬁrst that English poetry has covered the rising ﬁeld that lies before the genius of poetry by strictly successive steps, and these steps have followed the natural ascending order of our developing perceptions as the human consciousness rises from the ﬁrst physical view of things through the more inward life-vision, through the constructing and pondering intellect and last through a vivid or a brooding intuition to the gateways of the spirit. The English creative genius began by a quite external, a clear and superﬁcial substance and utterance. It proceeded to a deeper vital poetry, a poetry of the power and beauty and wonder and spontaneous thought, the joy and passion and pain, the colour and music of Life, in which the external presentation of life and things was taken up, but heightened, exceeded and given its full dynamic and imaginative content. From that it turned to an attempt at mastering the secret of the Latins, the secret of a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life, things and ideas.


Sri Aurobindo: Then came an attempt, a brilliant and beautiful attempt to get through Nature and thought and the veiled mind in life and Nature and its profounder aesthetic suggestions to some large and deep spiritual truth behind these things. This attempt did not come to perfect fruition; it stopped short partly because there had not been the right intellectual preparation or a sufﬁcient basis of spiritual knowledge and experience; only so much could be given as the solitary individual intuition of the poet could attain by a difﬁcult groping or a sudden sovereign effort. But partly also it failed because after the lapse into an age of reason the spontaneous or the intense language of spiritual poetry could not easily be found or, if found at times, could not be securely kept. So we get a deviation into a second age of intellectualism, an aesthetic or reﬂective poetry with a much wider range, but much less profound in its roots, much less high in its growth, the creation of a more informed, but less inspired intelligence. And partly out of this increasing wideness of the observing intelligence, partly by a dissatisfaction and recoil from these limitations has come the trend of a recent and contemporary poetry which seems at last to be approaching on some of its lines and in spite of many mistakes and divagations the secret of the utterance of profounder truth and the right magic of a speech and rhythm which will be the apt body and motion of its spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst deﬁnite starting-point of this long movement is the poetry of Chaucer. Then ﬁrst the rough poverty of the AngloSaxon mind succeeded in assimilating the French inﬂuence and reﬁned and clariﬁed by it its own rude speech and crude aesthetic sense. It is characteristic of the difﬁculty of the movement that as in its beginning, so at each important turn, or at least on the three ﬁrst occasions of a new orientation, it has had thus to go to school, to make almost a fresh start under the inﬂuences of a foreign culture and foreign poetic forms and motives. It has needed each time in spite of so much poetic originality and energy and genius a strong light of suggestion from outside to set it upon its way. All modern literatures have had indeed at one time or another to open out to this kind of external help and stimulus; but, once formed and in possession of themselves, they adopt these impresses more or less lightly and only as a secondary assistance.


Sri Aurobindo: But here we have a remodelling of the whole plan under foreign teaching. Chaucer gives English poetry a ﬁrst shape by the help of French romance models and the work of Italian masters; the Elizabethans start anew in dependence on Renaissance inﬂuences from France and Italy and a side wind from Spain; Milton goes direct to classical models; the Restoration and the eighteenth century take pliantly the pseudo-classical form from the contemporary French poets and critics. Still this dependence is only in externals; in the essential things of poetry some native character prevails, a new turn is rapidly given, an original power and method emerges; the dynamic vitality of the race was too great not to arrive at an immediate transmutation of the invading force.  The ﬁrst early motive and style of this poetry as it emerges in Chaucer strikes at once an English note. The motive is a direct and concrete poetic observation of ordinary human life and character.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no preoccupying idea, no ulterior design; life, the external ﬁgure and surface of things is reﬂected as near as possible to its native form in the individual mind and temperament of the poet. Chaucer has his eye ﬁxed on the object, and that object is the visible action of life as it passes before him throwing its ﬁgures on his mind and stirring it to a kindly satisfaction in the movement and its interest, a blithe sense of humour or a light and easy pathos. He does not seek to add anything to it or to see anything below it or behind its outsides.  He is not concerned to look at all into the souls or deeply into the minds of the men and women whose appearance, action and easily apparent traits of character he describes with so apt and observant a ﬁdelity. There is no call on the poet yet to ask himself what is the meaning of all this movement of life or the power in it or draw any large poetic idea from its vivid scheme and structure.


Sri Aurobindo: He is not moved to interpret life; a clear and happy presentation is his business. It is there simply in the sunlight with its familiar lines and normal colours, sufﬁciently interesting in itself, by its external action, and he has to record it, to give it a shape in lucid poetic speech and rhythm; for to turn it into stuff of poetry that and the sunlight of his own happy poetic temperament in which he bathes it is all he needs. The form he gives to it is within its limits and for its work admirably apt, sufﬁcient and satisfying, — altogether and excellently satisfying if we ask from it nothing more than it has to offer. Chaucer had captured the secret of ease, grace and lucidity from French romance poetry and had learned from the great Italians more force and compactness of expression than French verse had yet attained, a force diluted and a compactness lightened for his purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: But neither his poetic speech nor his rhythm has anything of the plastic greatness and high beauty of the Italians. It is an easy, limpid and ﬂowing movement, a well-spring of natural English utterance without depths in it, but limpid and clear and pure. It is a form just ﬁtted for the clear and pleasing poetic presentation of external life as if in an unsoiled mirror. At times it rises into an apt and pointed expression, but for the most part is satisﬁed with a ﬁrst primitive power of poetic speech; a subdued and well-tempered even adequacy is its constant gift.  Only once or twice does Chaucer, as if by accident, strike out a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters.


Sri Aurobindo: No other great poetical literature has had quite such a beginning. Others also started with a poetry of external life, Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with the historical epic of Ennius, French with the feudal romances of the Charlemagne cycle and the Arthurian cycle. But in none of these was the artistic aim simply the observant accurate presentation of Greek or Roman or feudal life. Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature.


Sri Aurobindo: Ennius’ object was to cast into poetical utterance the masculine and imperial spirit of Rome. So the spirit of catholic and feudal Europe transmutes life in the French romances and gives in its own way an ideal presentation of it which only misses greatness by the inadequacy of its speech and rhythmic movement and the diffuse prolixity of its form. Chaucer’s poetic method has no such great conscious idea or natural uplifting motive or spirit. Whether the colour he gives happens to be realistic or romantic, it falls within the same formula. It is the clear and vivid reﬂection of external life, with sometimes just a ﬁrst tinge of romantic illumination, in an observing mind that makes itself a shining poetic mirror.


Sri Aurobindo: The spirit of English poetry thus struck its ﬁrst strong note, a characteristic English note, got as far as the Anglo-Saxon mind reﬁned by French and Italian inﬂuence could go in its own proper way and unchanged nature, and then came suddenly to a pause. Many outward reasons might be given for that abrupt cessation, but none sufﬁcient; for the cause lay deeper in the inner destiny of this spirit. The real cause was that to have developed upon this line would have been to wander up and down in a cul-de-sac; it would have been to anticipate in a way in poetry the self-imprisonment of Dutch art in a strong externalism, of a fairer kind indeed, but still too physical and outward in its motive. English poetry had greater things to do and it waited for some new light and more powerful impulse to come. Still this external motive and method are native to the English mind and with many modiﬁcations have put their strong impress upon the literature.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the ostensible method of English ﬁction from Richardson to Dickens; it got into the Elizabethan drama and prevented it, except in Shakespeare, from equalling the nobler work of other great periods of dramatic poetry. It throws its limiting shade over English narrative poetry, which after its fresh start in the symbolism of the and the vital intensity of Marlowe ought either to have got clear away from this ﬁrst motive or at least to have transmuted it by the infusion of much higher artistic motives. To give only one instance in many, it got sadly in the way of Tennyson, who yet had no real turn for the reproduction of life, and prevented him from working out the ﬁne subjective and mystic vein which his ﬁrst natural intuitions had discovered in such work as the and the. Instead of any deepening of this new original note we have to put up with the and and the picturesque triviality of the which give us the impression of gentlemen and ladies of Victorian drawing-rooms masquerading as Celtic-mediaeval knights and dames. If there is a meaning of some kind in it all, that does not come home to us because it is lost in a falsetto mimicking of the external strains of life.


Sri Aurobindo: Certainly, it is useless to quarrel with national tendencies and characteristics which must show themselves in poetry as elsewhere; but English poetry had opened the gates of other powers and if it could always have lifted up the forms of external life by these powers, the substance of its work might then have meant much more to the world and the strength of its vision of things might constantly have equalled the power and beauty of its utterance. As it is, even poets of great power have been constantly drawn away by this tendency from the fulﬁlment of their more characteristic potentialities or misled into throwing them into inapt forms, and to this day there continues this confusion and waste of poetic virtue.  The new light and impulse that set free the silence of the poetic spirit in England for its ﬁrst abundant and sovereign utterance, came from the Renaissance in Italy and Spain and France. The Renaissance meant many things and it meant too different things in different countries, but one thing above all everywhere, the discovery of beauty and joy in every energy of life. The Middle Ages had lived strongly and with a sort of deep and sombre force, but, as it were, always under the shadow of death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire through suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the cross and on the other by the sword.


Sri Aurobindo: The Renaissance brings in the sense of a liberation from the burden and the obligation; it looks at life and loves it in excess; it is carried away by the beauty of the body and the senses and the intellect, the beauty of sensation and action and speech and thought, — but of thought hardly at all for its own sake, but thought as a power of life.  It is Hellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and things human,, but at ﬁrst a barbarised Hellenism, unbridled and extravagant, riotous in its vitalistic energy, too much overjoyed for restraint and measure.  Elizabethan poetry is an expression of this energy, passion and wonder of life, and it is much more powerful, disorderly and unrestrained than the corresponding poetry in other countries; for it has neither a past traditional culture nor an innate taste to restrain its extravagances. It springs up in a chaos of power and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by a stress within it for which there is no clear guiding knowledge except such as the instinctive genius of the age and the individual can give. It is constantly shot through with brilliant threads of intellectual energy, but is not at all intellectual in its innate spirit and dominant character.


Sri Aurobindo: It is too vital for that, too much moved and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose of rein; its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehement and inordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its own notes, revelling in image and phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent colours, of many-hued ﬁre, of threads of golden and silver light.  It bestowed on the nation a new English speech, rich in capacity, gifted with an extraordinary poetic intensity and wealth and copiousness, but full also of the excesses of new formation and its disorder. A drama exultant in action and character and passion and incident and movement, a lyric and romantic poetry of marvellous sweetness, richness and force are its strong fruits.  The two sides of the national mind threw themselves out for the ﬁrst time, each with its full energy, but within the limits of a vital, sensuous and imaginative mould, fusing into each other and separating and alternating in outbursts of an unrestrained joy of self-expression, an admirable confusion of their autonomous steps, an exhilarating and stimulating licence. The beauty and colour of one was dominant in its pure poetry, the vigour of the other took the lead in its drama, but both in Shakespeare were welded into a supreme phenomenon of poetic and dramatic genius.


Sri Aurobindo: It is on the whole the greatest age of utterance, though not of highest spirit and aim, through which the genius of English poetry has yet travelled, unsurpassed in its spontaneous force and energy, unsurpassed in its brilliance of the expressive word and the creative image.   Chapter X HE ELIZABETHAN age, perhaps the era of most opulent output in the long history of English poetic genius, is abundant, untrammelled and unbridled in its power, but not satisfying in its performance. Beautiful as are many of its productions, powerful as it is in the mass, if we look at it not in detail, not merely revelling in beauty of line and phrase and image, in snatches of song and outbursts of poetic richness and creative force, but as a whole, in its total artistic creation, it bears a certain stamp of defect and failure. It cannot be placed for a moment as a supreme force of excellence in literary culture by the side of the great ages of Greek and Roman poetry which started with an equal, if different creative impetus, but more self-knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: But, unhappily, it falls short too in aesthetic effect and virtue in comparison with other poetic periods less essentially vigorous and mobile in their plastic force; it has an inferior burden of meaning and, if a coursing of richer life-blood, no settled fullness of spirit and a less adequate body of forms.  The great magician, Shakespeare, by his marvellous poetic rendering of life and the spell his poetry casts upon us, conceals this general inadequacy of the work of his time: the whole age which he embodies is magniﬁed by his presence and the adjacent paler ﬁgures catch something of the light and kinship of his glory and appear in it more splendid than they are. But Shakespeare is an exception, a genius that transcends all laws, a miracle of poetic force; he survives untouched all adverse criticism, not because there are not plenty of fairly large spots in this sun, but because in any complete view of him they disappear in the greatness of his lustre. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a high order, great in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their stature to an uplifting power in the age and not chieﬂy to their own intrinsic height of genius; and that power had many vices, ﬂaws and serious limitations which their work exaggerates wilfully rather than avoids, so that it is only exceptionally free from glaring ﬂaws.


Sri Aurobindo: The gold of this golden age of English poetry is often very beautifully and richly wrought, but it is seldom worked into a perfect artistic whole; it disappears continually in masses of alloy, and there is on the whole more of a surface gold-dust than of the deeper yield of the human spirit.  The defect of this Elizabethan work is most characteristic and prominent in that part of it which has been vaunted as its chief title to greatness, its drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe can be looked at in their separate splendours; but the rest of Elizabethan dramatic work is a brilliantly smoky nebula, powerful in effort rather than sound and noble in performance. All its vigorous presentation of life has not been able to keep it alive; it is dead or keeps only “the dusty immortality of the libraries”, and this in spite of the attention drawn to it in quite recent times by scholars and critics and the hyperbolic eulogies of two or three eminent writers. This is not to say that it has not merits and, in a way, very striking merits.


Sri Aurobindo: The Elizabethan playwrights were men of a conﬁdent robust talent; some of them had real, if an intermittent genius. They had too the use of the language of an age in which the power of literary speech was a common possession and men were handling the language with delight as a quite new and rich instrument, lavishly and curiously, turning it this way and that, moulding and new-moulding it, exulting in its novel capacities of expression. The ﬁrst elements of the dramatic form, the temper and some of the primary faculties which go to make dramatic creation possible were there in the literary spirit of the age, and all these writers in more or less degree possessed these things and could use them. A certain force of vital creation was common to them all, a vigorous turn for the half romantic, half realistic reproduction of life and manners. The faculty of producing very freely a mass or a stream of incident and movement was there, much power of exuberant dialogue, a knack of expression both in verse and prose, some skill in the trick of putting the language of the passions into the mouth of cleverly constructed human ﬁgures which walk actively about the stage, if not in a quite natural manner, yet with enough of it to give for the time the illusion of living creatures.


Sri Aurobindo: Especially, it was a time in which there was a fresh and vivid interest in life and man and action, in the adventure and wonder and appeal of the mere vital phenomenon of living and feeling and thinking, and their work is full of this freshness and interest and intense spontaneous delight in living and acting. All this, it might be thought, is quite enough to build a great dramatic poetry; and certainly, if we require no more than this, we shall give a prominent place to the Elizabethan drama, higher perhaps than to the Greek or any other. But these things are enough only to produce plays which will live their time on the stage and in the library; they are not, by themselves, sufﬁcient for great dramatic creation. Something else is needed for that, which we get in Shakespeare, in Racine, Corneille and Moli`ere, in Calder´on, in the great Greeks, in the leading Sanskrit dramatists; but these other Elizabethans show themselves in the bulk of their work to be rather powerful writers and playwrights than inspired dramatic poets and creators.  Dramatic poetry cannot live by the mere presentation of life and action and the passions, however truly they may be portrayed or however vigorously and abundantly pushed across the scene.


Sri Aurobindo: Its object is something greater and its conditions of success much more onerous. It must have, to begin with, as the fount of its creation or in its heart an interpretative vision and in that vision an explicit or implicit seeing idea of life and the human being; and the vital presentation which is its outward instrument, must arise out of that deeper sight harmoniously, whether by a spontaneous creation, as in Shakespeare, or by the compulsion of an intuitive artistic will, as with the Greeks. This interpretative vision and seeing idea have in the presentation to seem to arise out of the inner life of a few vital types of the human soul or individual representatives of its enigma and to work themselves out through an evolution of speech leading to an evolution of action. And of these two speech in the drama is the ﬁrst and more important instrument, because through it the poet reveals the action of the soul; outward action and event are only the second, important, but less essential, reducible even to an indispensable minimum, because the outward movements serve only to make visible and concrete to us the result of the inner action and have no other intrinsic purpose. In all very great drama the true movement and result is psychological; and the outward action, even when it is considerable, and the consummating event, even though loud and violent, are either its symbol or else its condition of culmination.


Sri Aurobindo: All has to be cast into a close dramatic form, a successful weaving of interdependent relations, relations of soul to soul, of speech to speech, of action to action, the more close and inevitable the better, because so the truth of the whole evolution comes home to us. And if it is asked what in a word is the essential purpose of all this creation, I think we might possibly say that drama is the poet’s vision of some part of the world-act in the life of the human soul, it is in a way his vision of Karma, in an extended and very ﬂexible sense of the word; and at its highest point it becomes a poetic rendering or illustration of the Aeschylean, “the doer shall feel the effect of his act,” in an inner as well as an outer, a happy no less than an austere signiﬁcance, whether that effect be represented as psychological or vital, whether it comes to its own through sorrow and calamity, ends in a judgment by laughter or ﬁnds an escape into beauty and joy, whether the presentation be tragic or comic or tragi-comic or idyllic. To satisfy these conditions is extremely difﬁcult and the great dramatists are few in their number; the entire literature of the world has hardly given us more than a dozen. The difﬁcult evolution of dramatic poetry is always more hard to lead than the lyric which is poetry’s native expression, or than the narrative which is its simpler expansion.  The greatness of a period of dramatic poetry can be measured by the extent to which these complex conditions were understood in it or were intuitively practised.


Sri Aurobindo: But in the mass of the Elizabethan drama the understanding is quite absent and the practice comes, if at all, only rarely, imperfectly and by a sort of accident. Shakespeare himself seems to have divined these conditions or contained them in the shaping ﬂame of his genius rather than perceived them by the artistic intelligence. The rest have ordinarily no light of interpretative vision, no dramatic idea.  Their tragedy and comedy are both oppressively external; this drama presents, but does not at all interpret; it is an outward presentation of manners and passions and lives by vigour of action and a quite outward-going speech; it means absolutely nothing.  The tragedy is irrational, the comedy has neither largeness nor subtlety of idea; they are mixed together too without any artistic connection such as Shakespeare manages to give to them so as to justify thoroughly their coexistence.


Sri Aurobindo: The characters are not living beings working out their mutual Karma, but external ﬁgures of humanity jostling each other on a crowded stage, mere tossing drift of the waves of life. The form of the drama too is little more than a succession of speech and incident, as in a story, with a culminating violent or happy ending, which comes not because psychologically it must, but because a story has to have a release of ending, or, if tragic, its point of loud detonation. To make up for their essential defects these poets have to heap up incident and situation and assail us with vehement and often grossly exaggerated speech and passion, frequently tearing the passion into glaringly coloured tatters, almost always overstraining or in some way making too much of it. They wish to pile on us the interest of life in whose presentation their strength lies, to accumulate in a mass, so as to carry us away, things attracting, things amusing, things striking, things horrible; they will get at us through the nerves and the lower emotional being, — and in this they succeed eminently, — since they cannot get at us through a higher intellectual and imaginative appeal. The evolution of the action is rather theatrically effective than poetic, the spirit and the psychology melodramatic rather than dramatic.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor are these radical dramatic defects atoned for by any great wealth of poetry, for their verse has more often some formal merit and a great air of poetry than its essence, — though there are exceptions as in lines and passages of Peele and Webster. The presentation of life with some surface poetic touch but without any transforming vision or strongly suffusing power in the poetic temperament is the general character of their work. It is necessary to emphasise these defects because indiscriminate praise of these poets helps to falsify or quite exclude the just artistic view of the aim of sound dramatic creation, and imitation of the catching falsities of this model has been the real root of the inefﬁcacy of subsequent attempts in the dramatic form even by poets of great gifts. It explains the failure of even a mind which had the true dramatic turn, a creator like Browning, to achieve drama of the ﬁrst excellence.  Marlowe alone of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists stands apart from his fellows, not solely by his strong and magniﬁcent vein of poetry, but because he knows what he is about; he alone has some clearly grasped dramatic idea.


Sri Aurobindo: And not only is he conscious of his artistic aim, but it is a sound aim on the higher levels of the dramatic art. He knows that the human soul in action is his subject and Karma the power of the theme, and he attempts to create a drama of the human will throwing itself on life, the will egoistic and Asuric, conquering only to succumb to the great adversary Death or breaking itself against the forces its violence has brought into hostile play. This is certainly a high and ﬁt subject for tragic creation and his boldly coloured and strongly cut style and rhythm are well-suited for its expression.  Unhappily, Marlowe had the conception, but not any real power of dramatic execution. He is unable to give the last awakening breath of life to his ﬁgures; in the external manner so common in English poetry and ﬁction he rather constructs than evolves, portrays than throws out into life, paints up or sculptures from outside than creates from within, — and yet it is this other inward way that is the sole true method of poetic or at least of dramatic creation.


Sri Aurobindo: He has not, either, the indispensable art of construction; only in one of his tragedies does he vitally relate together his characters and their action throughout, and even that, though a strong work, falls far short of the greatness of a masterpiece. He had too, writing for the Elizabethan stage, to adopt a model which was too complex for the strong simplicity of his theme and the narrow intensity of his genius. And he had, working for that semi-barbarous public, to minister to tastes which were quite incongruous with his purpose and which he had not ﬂexibility enough to bring within its scope or to elevate towards its level. In fact, Marlowe was not a born dramatist; his true genius was lyrical, narrative and epic. Limited by his inborn characteristics, he succeeds in bringing out his poetic motive only in strong detached scenes and passages or in great culminating moments in which the lyrical cry and the epic touch break out through the form of drama.


Sri Aurobindo: Shakespeare stands out alone, both in his own age when so many were drawn to the form and circumstances were favourable to this kind of genius, and in all English literature, as the one great and genuine dramatic poet; but this one is indeed equal to a host. He stands out too as quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in externals; they have the same outward form and crude materials, but not the inner dramatic method by which he transformed and gave them a quite other meaning and value.  Later romantic drama, not only in England but elsewhere, though it has tried hard to imitate the Shakespearian motive and touch, has been governed by another kind of poetic mind; its intrinsic as distinguished from its external method has been really different. Romantic drama, in Hugo and in others, takes hold of life, strings together its unusual effects and labours to make it out of the way, brilliant, coloured, conspicuous.


Sri Aurobindo: Shakespeare does not do that, except rarely, in early imitative work or when he is uninspired. He does not need to lay violent hands on life and turn it into romantic pyrotechnics; for life itself has taken hold of him in order to recreate itself in his image, and he sits within himself at its heart and pours out from its impulse a throng of beings, as real in the world he creates as men are in this other world from which he takes his hints, a multitude, a riot of living images carried on a manycoloured sea of revealing speech and a never failing surge of movement. His dramatic method seems indeed to have usually no other intellectual purpose, aesthetic motive or spiritual secret: ordinarily it labours simply for the joy of a multiple poetic vision of life and vital creation with no centre except the life-power itself, no coordination except that thrown out spontaneously by the unseizable workings of its energy, no unity but the one unity of man and the life-spirit in Nature working in him and before his eyes. It is this sheer creative of the life-spirit which is Shakespeare; abroad everywhere in that age, it incarnates itself in him for the pleasure of poetic self-vision.  All Shakespeare’s powers and limitations — for it is now permissible to speak of his limitations — arise from this character of the force that moved him to poetic utterance.


Sri Aurobindo: He is not primarily an artist, a poetic thinker or anything else of the kind, but a great vital creator and intensely, though within marked limits, a seer of life. His art itself is life arranging its forms in its own surge and excitement, not in any kind of symmetry, — for symmetry here there is none, — nor in ﬁne harmonies, but still in its own way supremely and with a certain intimately metric arrangement of its many loose movements, in mobile perspectives, a succession of crowded but successful and satisfying vistas. While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life. His way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of ﬁne thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result. His development of human character has a sovereign force within its bounds, but it is the soul of the human being as seen through outward character, passion, action, — the life-soul, and not either the thought-soul or the deeper psychic being, still less the profounder truth of the human spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Something of these things we may get, but only in shadow or as a partial reﬂection in a coloured glass, not in their own action. In his vision and therefore in his poetic motive Shakespeare never really either rises up above life or gets behind it; he neither sees what it reaches out to nor the great unseen powers that are active within it. At one time, in two or three of his tragedies, he seems to have been striving to do this, but all that he does see then is the action of certain tremendous life-forces, which he either sets in a living symbol or indicates behind the human action, as in, or embodies, as in , in a tragically uncontrollable possession of his human characters. Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere externalised action, for it lives from within and more deeply than our external life. This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, but Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through those forms to see his own images behind them.


Sri Aurobindo: More than any other poet Shakespeare has accomplished mentally the legendary feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra; his power of vision has created a Shakespearian world of his own, and it is, in spite of its realistic elements, a romantic world in a very true sense of the word, a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and hampered ﬁnds a greater enlarged and intense breath of living, an ultra-natural play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude.  It is needful in any view of the evolution of poetry to note the limits within which Shakespeare did his work, so that we may ﬁx the point reached; but still within the work itself his limitations do not matter. And even his positive defects and lapses cannot lower him, because there is an unfailing divinity of power in his touch which makes them negligible. He has, however much toned down, his share of the Elizabethan crudities, violences, extravagances; but they are upborne on a stream of power and end by falling in into the general greatness of his scheme. He has deviations into stretches of half prosaic verse and vagaries of tortured and bad poetic expression, sometimes atrociously bad; but they are yet always very evidently not failures of power, but the wilful errors of a great poet, more careful of dramatic truth and carried on by his force of expression than bound to verbal perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: We feel obliged to accept his defects, which in another poet our critical sense would be swift to condemn or reject, because they are part of his force, just as we accept the vigorous errors of a great personality. His limitations are very largely the condition of his powers. Certainly, he is no universal revealer, as his idolators would have him be, — for even in the life-soul of man there are a multitude of things beyond him; but to have given a form so wonderful, so varied, so immortally alive, in so great a surge of the intensest poetical expression, to a life-vision of this kind and this power, is a unique achievement of poetic genius. The future may ﬁnd for us a higher and profounder, even a more deeply and ﬁnely vital aim for the dramatic form than any Shakespeare ever conceived; but until that has been done with an equal power, grasp and fullness of vision and an equal intensity of revealing speech, he keeps his sovereign station. The claim made for him that he is the greatest of poets may very well be challenged, — he is not quite that, — but that he is ﬁrst among dramatic poets cannot well be questioned.


Sri Aurobindo: So far then the English poetic spirit had got in the drama, and it has never got any farther. And this is principally because it has allowed itself to be obsessed by the Elizabethan formula; for it has clung not merely to the Shakespearian form, — which might after due modiﬁcation still be used for certain purposes, especially for a deeper life-thought expressing itself through the strong colours of a romantic interpretation, — but to the whole crude inartistic error of that age. Great poets, poets of noble subjective power, delicate artists, ﬁne thinkers and singers, all directly they turn to the dramatic form, begin fatally to externalise; they become violent, they gesticulate, they press to the action and forget to have an informing thought, hold themselves bound to the idea of drama as a robust presentation of life and incident and passion. And because this is not a true idea and, in any case, it is quite inconsistent with the turn of their own genius, they fail inevitably. Dryden stumbling heavily through his rhymed plays, Wordsworth of all people, the least Elizabethan of poets, penning with a conscientious dullness his , Byron diffusing his elemental energy in bad blank verse and worse dramatic construction, Keats turning from his unﬁnished to wild schoolboy imitations of the worst Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and ﬁne literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the Elizabethan violences of the, Tennyson, Swinburne, even after , following the same ignis fatuus, a very ﬂame of fatuity and futility, are all victims of the same hypnotism.


Sri Aurobindo: Recently a new turn is visible; but as yet it is doubtful whether the right conditions for a renovation of the dramatic form and a true use of the dramatic motive have come into being. At any rate the predestined creator, if he is to come, is not yet among us.  Chapter XI HE ELIZABETHAN drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it has a great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The rest of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and ﬁrm intellectual value.


Sri Aurobindo: Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curiosity and beauty of the mere expression of thought than for its light and its vision. The poetry which comes out of this mood is likely to have great charm and imaginative, emotional or descriptive appeal, but may very well miss that depth of profounder substance and that self-possessing plenitude of form which are the other and indispensable elements of a rounded artistic creation. Beauty of poetical expression abounds in an unstinted measure, but for the music of a deeper spirit or higher signiﬁcance we have to wait; the attempt at it we get, but not often all the success of its presence.  Spenser, the poet of second magnitude of the time, gives us in his work this beauty in its fullest abundance, but also the limited measure of that greater but not quite successful endeavour. The  is indeed a poem of unfailing imaginative charm and its two opening cantos are exquisite in execution; there is a stream of liquid harmony, of curiously opulent, yet ﬁnely tempered description, of ﬂuid poetical phrase and minutely seen image.


Sri Aurobindo: For these are Spenser’s constant gifts, the native form of his genius which displays more of descriptive vision than of any larger creative power or narrative force. An inspired idea is worked out; a little too much lost in detail and in the diffusion of a wealthy prolixity, it still holds well together its rather difﬁcult and entangling burden of symbols and forms and achieves in the end some accomplished totality of ﬁne poetic effect. But if we read on after this ﬁne opening and look at the poem as a whole, the effect intended fails, not because it happened to be left unﬁnished, nor even because the power in it is not equally sustained and is too evidently running thinner and thinner as it proceeds, but because it could not have come to a successful completion. Kalidasa’s was left unﬁnished, or ﬁnished by a very inferior hand, yet even in the fragment there is already a masterly totality of effect; there is the sense of a great and admirable design. Virgil’s, though in a way ﬁnished, did not receive those last touches which sometimes make all the difference between perfection and the approach to it; and we feel too, not a failure of art, — for that is a defect which could never be alleged against Virgil, — but a relative thinning of the supporting power and inspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: Still the consummate artistic intelligence of the poet has been so steadily at work, so complete from the very inception, it has so thought out and harmonised its idea from the beginning that a ﬁne and ﬁrm total effect is given. But here there is a defect of the artistic intellect, a vice or insufﬁciency in its original power of harmonising construction, characteristic of the Elizabethan, almost of the English mind.  Spenser’s intention seems to have been to combine in his own way the success of Ariosto with the success of Dante. His work was to have been in its form a rich and beautiful romance; but it must be too at the same time a great interpretation by image and symbol, not here of the religious or spiritual, but of the ethical meaning of human life. A faery-tale and a vivid ethical symbol in one is his conception of his artistic task.


Sri Aurobindo: That is a kind of combination difﬁcult enough to execute, but capable of a great and beautiful effect in a master hand. But the Elizabethan intellectual direction runs always towards conceit and curious complication; it is unable to follow an idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories: seizing on all manner of disparates, it tends to throw them together without any real fusion. Spenser in his idea and its execution fell a victim to all these defects of the intelligence. He has taken his intellectual scheme from his Hellenism, the virtues to be ﬁgured in typical human beings; but he has dressed it up with the obvious and trivial mediaeval ingenuity of the allegory.  Nor is he satisﬁed with a simple form of this combination; he has an ambition of all-including representativeness which far exceeds his or perhaps any possible power of fusing creation.


Sri Aurobindo: The turn of the allegory must be at once ethical, ecclesiastical and political in one fell complexity; his witch of Faery-land embodies Falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church and Mary Queen of Scots in an irritating and impossible jumble. The subject of a poem of this kind has to be the struggle of the powers of good and evil, but the human ﬁgures through whom it works out to its issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or vice; they should stand for them as their expressive opportunity of life, not merely as their allegorical body. Spenser, a great poet, is not blind to this elementary condition; but his tangled skein of allegory continually hampers the sounder conception, and the interpretative narration works itself out through the confused maze of its distracting elements which we are obliged to accept, not for their own interest or living force and appeal, but for the beauty of the poetic expression and description to which they give occasion.  Besides this fault of the initial conception, there are defects in the execution. After a time at least the virtues and vices altogether lose their way in faery-land or they become mistily vague and negligible; and this, considering the idea of the poem, ought not to be, but certainly is a great relief to the reader.


Sri Aurobindo: We are well contented to read the poem or, still better, each canto apart as a romance and leave the ulterior meaning to take care of itself; what was intended as a great ethical interpretative poem of the human soul, lives only as a beautiful series of romantic descriptions and incidents. We can see where the defect is if we make a comparison with the two greater poems of Greece and India which had an intention not altogether unsimilar, the Ramayana fusing something like a vast faery-tale with the story of an immense struggle between world-powers of good and evil, the Odyssey with its magic of romance and its story of the assertion of right and of domestic and personal virtue against unbridled licence and wrong in an epic encounter between these opposite forces. The Odyssey is a battle of human will and character supported by divine power against evil men and wrathful gods and adverse circumstance and the deaf opposition of the elements, and its scenes move with an easy inevitability between the lands of romance and the romance of actual human life; but nowhere does the poet lose in the wealth of incident and description either the harmonising aesthetic colour or the simple central idea. The Ramayana too is made up of ﬁrst materials which belong to the world of faery romance; but, lifted into an epic greatness, they support easily a grandiose picture of the struggle of incarnate God and Titan, of a human culture expressing the highest order and range of ethical values with a giant empire of embattled anarchic force, egoistic violence and domination and lawless self-assertion. The whole is of a piece, and even in its enormous length and protracted detail there is a victorious simplicity, largeness and unity.


Sri Aurobindo: The English poet loses himself in the outward, in romantic incident and description pursued by his imagination for their own sake.  His idea is often too much and too visibly expressed, yet in the end ﬁnds no successful expression. Instead of relying upon the force of his deeper poetic idea to sustain him, he depends on intellectual device and parades his machinery. The thread of connection is wandering and confused. He achieves a diffuse and richly confused perplexity, not the unity of a living whole.


Sri Aurobindo: These are the natural limitations of the Elizabethan age, and we have to note them with what may seem at ﬁrst a disproportionate emphasis, because they are the key to the immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a complete and disastrous loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had not passed through any training of the poetic and artistic intelligence; it had abounding energy and power, but no self-discipline of the idea. Except in Shakespeare it fails to construct; it at once loses and ﬁnds itself in a luxurious indulgence of its force, follows with a loose sweetness or a vehement buoyancy all its impulses good, bad or indifferent.  Still what it does achieve, is unique and often superlative in its kind. It achieves an unsurpassed splendour of imaginative vitality and eager vision of the life spirit, and an unsurpassed intensity of poetical expression; life vents itself in speech, pours its lyric emotion, lavishes its intimate and intuitive description of itself in passionate detail, thinks aloud in a native utterance of poetry packed with expressive image or felicitous in directness.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no other poetry which has in at all the same degree this achievement.  This poetry is then great in achievement within the limits of its method and substance. That substance and method belong to the second step of the psychological gradations by which poetry becomes a more and more profound and subtle instrument of the self-expression of the human spirit. English poetry, I have remarked, follows the grades of this ascension with a singular ﬁdelity of sequence. At ﬁrst it was satisﬁed with only a primary superﬁcial response to the most external appearances of life, its visible ﬁgures and incidents, its primary feelings and characteristics.


Sri Aurobindo: To mirror these things clearly, justly, with a certain harmony of selection and a just sufﬁcient transmutation in the personality and aesthetic temperament is enough for this earlier type of poetry, all the more easily satisﬁed because everything seen by the eye is fresh, interesting, stimulating, and the liveliness of the poetic impression replaces the necessity of subtlety or depth. Great poetry can be written in early times with this as its substantial method, but not afterwards when the race mind has begun to make an intenser and more inward response to life.  It then becomes the resort of a secondary inspiration which is unable to rise to the full heights of poetic possibility. Or else, if this external method still persists as part of the outward manner of a more subjective creation, it is with a demand for more heightened effects and a more penetrating expression. The last was the demand and method of the Elizabethan age.


Sri Aurobindo: In Elizabethan poetry the physical and external tendency still persists, but it is no longer sufﬁcient to satisfy either the perceiving spirit or its creative force. Where it is most preserved, it still demands a more vehement response, strong colours, violent passions, exaggerated ﬁgures, out-of-the-way or crowding events. Life is still the Muse of this poetry, but it is a Life which demands to feel itself more and is already knocking or trying to knock at the gates of the deeper subjective being. And in all the best work of the time it has already got there, not very deep, but still enough to be initially subjective. Whatever Shakespeare may suggest, — a poet’s critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration, — there is not here any true or exact holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but instead a moved and excited reception and evocation.


Sri Aurobindo: Life throws its impressions, but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power in the poet which is not satisﬁed with mirroring or just beautifully responding to what is cast upon it, but begins to throw up at once around them its own rich matter of receptive being and shaping force and so creates something new, something more personal, intimate, fuller of a ﬁrst inner vision, emotion, passion of selfexpression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare. At another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets much farther away from the actuality of life; it takes the impressions of the surrounding physical world as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which seems to be truly drawn not from the life of earth, but from a more beautiful and harmonious life-scene that exists either within our own unplumbed depths or on other subtler vital or physical planes. This creation has an aim in it at things symbolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself, and it tries to shadow them out through the magic of romance, since it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and image and sheer beauty of sound.


Sri Aurobindo: Imagination, thought, vision work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather work in it as a medium, accepted as the very form of their being and the very force of their nature.  Great poetry is the result, but there are other powers of the human consciousness which have not yet been mastered, and to get at these is the next immediate step of English poetry. The way it follows is to bring forward the intellect as its chief instrument; the thought-mind is no longer carried along in the wave of life, but detaches itself from it to observe and reﬂect upon it. At ﬁrst there is an intermediate manner, that of Milton’s early work and of the Carolean poets, in which something of the Elizabethan impulse, something of its intense imaginative sight or its charm of emotion, prolongs itself for a while, but is fast fading away under the stress of an increasing intellectuality, a strong dryness of the light of the reason and a growing hardness of form and concentrated narrowness of the observing eye. This movement rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton, and falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in Dryden and Pope.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XII  N THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, an extraordinary force for achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns in the actual execution to half-success or a splendid failure. A big streak of rawness somewhere, a wrong turn of the hand or an imperfect balance of the faculties wastes the power spent and makes the total result much inferior to what it should have been with so much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius to raise it into the highest empyrean heights. The mind of this age went for its sustaining inﬂuence and its suggestive models to Greece, Rome and France. That was inevitable; for these have been the three typically intellectual nations of Europe.


Sri Aurobindo: It is these three literatures that have achieved, each following its own different way and peculiar spirit, the best in form and substance that that kind of inspiration can produce. The English mind, not natively possessed of any inborn intellectual depth and subtlety, not trained to a ﬁne classical lucidity and sure aesthetic taste, had to turn to these sources, if the attempt was to be made at all.  Steeping itself in these sources, it might hope to blend with the classical clarity and form its own masculine force and strenuousness, its strong imagination, its deeper colour and profounder intuitive suggestiveness and so arrive at something new and great to which the world could turn as another supreme element of its aesthetic culture. But the effect actually obtained did not answer to the possibility offered. To arrive at this perfection, this new turn of poetry ought to have kept, transmuted but not diminished, all that was best in the Elizabethan spirit and to have coloured, enriched and sweetened with its magic touch the classical form and the intellectual motive.


Sri Aurobindo: There was instead a revolutionary departure, a breaking away, decisive rejection, and entirely new attempt with no roots in the past. In the end not only was the preceding structure of poetry abolished, but all its strong and brilliant Muses were expelled from their seats. A stucco imitation classical temple, very elegant, very cold and very empty, was erected in the vacant place, and the gods of satire and didactic commonplace set up in a shrine which was built more like a coffee-house than a sanctuary. A sterile brilliance, a set polished rhetoric was the poor ﬁnal outcome.  The age set out with a promise of better things; for a time it seemed almost on the right path.


Sri Aurobindo: Milton’s early poetry is the fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with a glow and beauty which has been left by a fast receding tide of romantic colour, spontaneous warmth of emotion and passion and vital intuition, gifts of a greater depth and force of life. Many softer inﬂuences wove themselves together into his high language and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power had been nourished by great classical inﬂuences. A touch of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise of Lucretian grandeur, a note of Aeschylean sublimity, the ﬁnest gifts of the ancients coloured or mellowed by richer romantic elements and subtly toned into each other, entered in and helped to prepare the early Miltonic manner. Magniﬁed and exalted by the stress of an original personality, noble and austere, their result was the blending of a peculiar kind of greatness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse.


Sri Aurobindo: The substance is often slight, for it is as yet Milton’s imagination rather than his soul or his whole mind that is using the poetic form; but the form itself is of a faultless beauty. Already, in spite of this slenderness of substance, we can see the coming change; the retreat of the ﬁrst exuberant life-force and a strong turning of the intelligence upon life to view it sedately from its own intellectual centre of vision are now ﬁrmly in evidence. Some of the Elizabethans had tried their hand at this turn, but with no great poetical success; when they wrote their best, even though they tried to think closely and strongly, life took possession of the thought or itself quivered out into thought-expression. Here on the contrary, even in the two poems that are avowedly expressions of vital moods, it is the intellect and its imaginations that are making the mood a material for reﬂective brooding; there is no longer here the free and spontaneous life mood chanting its own sight and emotion to its own moved delight.


Sri Aurobindo: In the minor Carolean poets we have some lingering of the colours of the Elizabethan sunset; something of the life-sense and quick emotional value are still there but too thinned and diluted to support any intensity or greatness of speech or manner, and ﬁnally they die away into trivialities of the intelligence playing insincerely with the movements of the emotional nature. For the reﬂective idea already predominates over sight and intimate emotion; the mind is looking at the thing felt and is no longer taken up and carried away in the wave of feeling. Some of this work is mystic in its subject or motive; but that too, except in some luminous lines or passages, suffers from the same desiccating inﬂuence. The opening of an age of intellect was not the time when a great mystical poetry could leap into existence.  This ebb is rapid and the change is soon complete.


Sri Aurobindo: The colour has faded, the sweetness has vanished, song has fallen into a dead hush. For a whole long dry metallic century the lyrical faculty disappeared from the English tongue. The grandiose epic chant of Milton breaks what would be otherwise a complete silence of all higher or profounder poetic power; but it is a Milton who has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all Pagan delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness to express only in ﬁt greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had built out of his beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul. One is moved to speculate on what we might have had from him if, instead of writing after the long silence of his poetic genius during which he remained absorbed in barren political controversy until public and private calamities compelled him to go back to himself and his true power, he had written his master work in a ripened continuity and deepened strength of his earlier style and vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent, many-toned and perfect.


Sri Aurobindo: As things happened, it is by that he occupies his high rank among the poets. That too imperfect grandiose epic is the one supreme fruit left by the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, achieve beauty of poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and forge a complete balance and measured perfection of architectonic form and structure.   is one of the few great epic poems in the world’s literature; certain qualities in it reach heights which no other of them had climbed, even though as a whole it has defects and elements of failure which are absent in the other great world epics. Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement; seldom has there been an equal sublimity of ﬂight. And to a great extent Milton has done in this respect what he had set out to do; he has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which succeeds by its own intrinsic force and is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain inspired intellectual thought-utterance.


Sri Aurobindo: This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulﬁlled it. At the same time he has raised this achievement to a highest possible pitch by that peculiar grandeur in the soul and manner of the utterance and that magniﬁcence of sound-tones and amplitude of gait in the rhythm which belong to him alone of poets. These qualities are easily sustained throughout this long work, because with him they are less an art, great artist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural sound of its motion. His aim is high, his subject loftier than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante. There is nowhere any more magniﬁcently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell; nowhere has there been a more powerful portraiture of the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain and yet still sustained by the greatness of the divine principle from which it was born, even when it has lost oneness with it and faces it with dissonance and deﬁance.


Sri Aurobindo: If the rest of the epic had been equal to its opening books, there would have been no greater poem, few as great in literature.  But here too the total performance failed and fell below the promise. compels our admiration throughout by its greatness of style and rhythm, but as a whole, in spite of its mighty opening, its whole substance as distinct from its more magniﬁcent or striking parts has failed to enter victoriously either into the mind or into the heart of the world; much of it has not lodged itself deeply in its imagination or enriched sovereignly the acquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the poem that does neither of these things, however noble its powers of language and rhythm, has missed its destiny. The reason is not to be found in the disparity between Milton’s professed aim, which was to justify the ways of God to man, and the intellectual means available to him for fulﬁlling his purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: The theology of the Puritan religion was a poor enough aid for so ambitious a purpose; but the Scriptural legend treated was poetically sufﬁcient if only it had received throughout a deeper interpretation. Dante’s theology had the advantage of the richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval Catholicism, but intellectually for so deep and vast a purpose it was not any more satisfying or durable. Still through his primitive symbols Dante has seen and has revealed things which make his work throughout poetically and creatively great and sufﬁcient up to a certain high, if narrow level. It is here that Milton failed altogether. Nor is the failure mainly intellectual; it is of a more radical kind.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true that he had not an original intellect; his mind was scholastic and traditional to a point that discouraged any free thinking power; but he had an original soul and personality and the vision of a poet. It is not the province of poetry to justify intellectually the ways of God to man; what it can do, is to reveal them: but just here is the point of failure.  Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin and Hell and Chaos; there is a scriptural greatness in his account of these things. But he has not seen God and heaven and man or the soul embodied in humanity, at once divine and fallen, enslaved to suffering and evil, striving for redemption, yearning for a forfeited bliss and perfection. On this side there is no inner greatness in the poetic interpretation of his materials.


Sri Aurobindo: In other words, he has ended by stumbling over the rock of offence that always awaits poetry in which the intellectual element is too predominant, the fatal danger of a failure of vision: he has tried to poetise the stock ideas of his religion and not reached through sight to a living ﬁgure of Truth and its great expressive thoughts or revelatory symbols.  This failure extends itself to all the elements of his later work; it is deﬁnitive and he never, except in passages, recovered from it. His language and rhythm remain unfalteringly great to the end, but they are only a splendid robe and the body they clothe is a nobly carved but lifeless image. His architectural structure is always greatly and classically proportioned; but structure has two elements or two methods, — there is the schematic form that is thought out and there is the incarnating organic body which grows from an inward artistic and poetic vision. Milton’s structures are thought out; they have not been seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measures and free lines of inspired perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: The difference will become evident if we make a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than theirs, but always ﬁnely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong intellectual strain in it and of putting forward as its aim the play of imaginative thought in the service of the poetical intelligence; but that must be supported very strongly by the quickening emotion or by the imaginative vision to which the idea opens. Milton’s earlier work is suffused by his power of imaginative vision; the opening books of are upborne by the greatness of the soul that ﬁnds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and by the greatness of its sight. But in the later books and still more in the and the this ﬂame sinks; the thought becomes intellectually externalised, the sight is obvious and on the surface. Milton writing poetry could never fail in greatness and power, nor could he descend, as did Wordsworth and others, in style, turn and rhythm below his well-attained high poetical level; but the supreme vitalising ﬁre has sunk.


Sri Aurobindo: The method and idea retain sublimity, but the deeper spirit has departed.  Much greater, initial and essential was the defect in the poetry that followed this strong beginning. Here all is unredeemed intellectuality and even the very ﬁrst elements of the genuine poetic inspiration are for the most part, one might almost say, entirely absent. Pope and Dryden and their school, except now and then and as if by accident, — Dryden especially has lines sometimes in which he suddenly rises above his method, — are busy only with one aim, with thinking in verse, thinking with a clear force, energy and point or with a certain rhetorical pomp and effectiveness, in a well-turned and well-polished metrical system. That seems to have been their sole idea of “numbers”, of poetry, and it is an idea of unexampled poverty and falsity.


Sri Aurobindo: No doubt this was a necessary phase, and perhaps, the English creative mind being what it then was, rich and strong but confused and lawless and always addicted in its poetry to quite the reverse of a clear intellectual method, it had to go to an opposite extreme. It had to sacriﬁce for a time many of its native powers in order to learn as best it could how to arrive at a ﬁrm and straightforward expression of thought in a just, wellharmonised, precise and lucid speech; an inborn gift in all the Latin tongues, in a half-Teutonic speech attacked by the Celtic richness of imagination this power had to be acquired even at a cost. But the sacriﬁce made was immense and entailed much effort of recovery in the later development of the language. The writers of this rationalising age got rid of the Elizabethan language with its opulent confusion, its often involved expression, its lapses into trailing and awkward syntax, its perplexed turn in which ideas and images jostle and stumble together, fall into each other’s arms and strain and burden the expression in a way which is sometimes stimulating and exhilarating, but sometimes merely embarrassing and awkward; they got rid of the crudeness and extravagance but lost all the rich imagination and vision, the sweetness, lyrism, grace and colour, and replaced it with acute point and emphatic glitter. They got rid too of Milton’s Latinisms and poetic inversions, substituting smaller rhetorical artiﬁces of their own device, — dismissed his great and packed turns of speech, ﬁlling in the void left by the departure of this grandeur with what claimed to be a noble style, but was no more than a spurious rhetorical pomp.


Sri Aurobindo: Still the work they had to do they did effectively, with talent, energy, even an undeniable genius.  If the substance of this poetry had been of a higher worth, it would have been less open to depreciation and need not have excited so vehement a reaction or fallen so low from its exaggerated pride of place. But the substance was too often on a par with the method and often below it. It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted a certain perfection of polish and brilliance and often an element of superﬁciality and triviality for the strength and weight of the Latin manner. It followed more sincerely the contemporary French models; but it missed their best normal qualities, their culture, taste, tact of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: For, though that poetry may often fall short of the intensest poetic delight by its excessive cult of reason and taste, though it may run often in too thin a stream, though it may indulge the rhetorical turn too consistently to achieve utterly the highest heights of speech, yet it has ideas and a strong or delicate power, a true nobility of character in Corneille, a ﬁne grace of poetic sentiment and a supreme delicacy and ﬁne passion in Racine. But the verse of these pseudo-Augustan writers does not call in these greater gifts: it is occupied with expressing thought, but its thought has most often little or none of the greater values.  This Muse is all brain of facile reasoning, but has no heart, no depth or sweetness of character, no high nobility of will, no ﬁne appeal or charm of the joy and sorrow of life. In this ﬂood of brilliant and forcefully phrased commonplace, even ideas which have depths behind them tend to become shallow and external by the way of their expression.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind of these writers has no great seeing eye on life. Its satire is the part of their work which is still most alive; for here the Anglo-Saxon spirit gets back to itself, leaves the attempt at a Gallicised reﬁnement, ﬁnds its own robust vigour and arrives at a brutal, but still a genuine and sometimes really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy and driving force, the English virtues, are, indeed, a general merit of the verse of Pope and Dryden and in this respect they excel their French exemplars. Their expression is striking in its precision; each couplet rings out with a remarkable force of ﬁnality and much coin of their minting has passed into common speech and citation. If there is not much gold of poetry here, there is at least much wellgilt copper coin of a good currency, useful for small purchases and petty trafﬁc.


Sri Aurobindo: But in the end one is tired of a monotonous brilliance of language, wearied out by the always repeated trick of decisiveness and point of rhythm. This verse has to be read by couplets and passages; for each poem is only a long string of them and, except in one or two instances, the true classical gift, the power of structure is absent. There is an almost complete void of the larger genuine thought-power which is necessary for structure. This intellectual age of English poetry did its work, but, as was inevitable with so pronounced a departure from the true or at least the higher line, that work gives the impression, if not of a resonant failure, at least of a fall or a considerable descent to lower levels. This Augustan age not only falls inﬁnitely far below the Roman from which it drew so much of its inspiration, but gives an impression of great inferiority when compared with the work of the Victorians and one is tempted to say that a little of the work of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley has immeasurably more poetic value than all this silver and tin and copper and the less precious metals of these workers whose superﬁciality of workmanship was a pride of this age.


Sri Aurobindo: But although this much has to be said, it would be by itself too one-sided and depreciative a view of the work of what is after all a period of the most brilliant and energetic writing and a verse which in its own way and its own technique is most carefully wrought and might even claim a title to a supreme craftsmanship: nor can we ignore the fact that in certain types such as satire, the mock heroic, the set didactic poem these writers achieved the highest height of a consummate and often impeccable excellence. Moreover some work was done especially by Dryden which even on the higher levels of poetry can challenge comparison with the work of the Elizabethans and the greater poets of later times. Even the satire of Pope and Dryden rises sometimes into a high poetic value beyond the level they normally reached and they have some great outbursts which have the power not only to please or delight by their force and incisiveness or their weight of thought or their powerful presentation of life, but to move to emotion, as great poetry moves us.  It is not necessary here to say more in vindication of the excelling work of these writers; their fame abides and no belittling can successfully depreciate their work or discount its excellence. We are concerned here only with their place in the development, and mainly, the psychological development of English poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: Its place there, its value is mostly in the direction of a sheer intellectuality concerned with the more superﬁcial aspects of thought and life deliberately barren of emotion except the more superﬁcial; lyricism has run dry, beauty has become artiﬁcial where at all it survives, passion is replaced by rhetoric, the heart is silent, life has civilised, urbanised, socialised and stylised itself too much to have any more a very living contact with Nature. As the literature of an age of this kind this poetry or this powerful verse has an enormous merit of its own and could hardly be better for its purpose. Much more perhaps than any other age of intellectual writing it has restricted itself to its task; in doing so it has restricted its claims to poetic greatness of the highest kind, but it has admirably done its work. That work is not faultless; it has too much of the baser lead of rhetoric, too frequent a pomposity and artiﬁce, too little of Roman nobility and too little of English sincerity to be of the ﬁrst value. But it stands out well enough on its own lower summit and surveys well enough from that inferior eminence a reach of country that has, if not any beauty, its own interest, order and value.


Sri Aurobindo: There we may leave it and turn to the next striking and always revolutionary outburst of this great stream of English poetic literature.   Chapter XIII  HEN a power of poetry in a highly evolved language describes so low a downward curve as to reach this dry and brazen intellectualism, it is in danger of losing much of its vitality and ﬂexibilities of expression and it may even, if it has lived too long, enter into a stage of decadence and perish by a dull slow decay of its creative force. That has happened more than once in literary history; but there can always be a saving revulsion, a return of life by a shock from without or a liberating impulse from within.


Sri Aurobindo: And this saving revulsion, when it comes, is likely, if bold enough, to compensate for the past prone descent by an equally steep ascension to an undreamedof novelty of revealing vision and illumined motive. This is the economy of Nature’s lapses in the things of the mind no less than in the movements of life. For when the needed energy is within, these falls are an obscure condition for an unprecedented elevation, these emptyings a preface to large inrushes of plenty. In the recoil, in the rush or upwinging to the opposite extreme, some discovery is made which would otherwise have been long postponed or not have arrived at all; doors are burst open which might have been passed by unseen or would have resisted any less vehement or rapidly illumined effort to unlock them. On the other hand it is a frequent disadvantage of these revolutions or these forced rapidities of evolution, that they carry in them a premature light and an element of quick unripeness and a subsequent reaction and return to lower levels becomes inevitable.


Sri Aurobindo: For the contemporary mind is not really ready for the complete implanting of this new seed or stock; and what is accomplished is itself rather an intuitive anticipation than a ﬁrmly based knowledge or an execution of the thing seen equal to its true signiﬁcance. All these familiar phenomena are visible in the new swift and far-reaching upward curve, which carries English poetry from the hard, glittering, well-turned and wellrhymed intellectual superﬁcialities of a thin pseudo-classicism to its second luminous outbreak of sight and beauty and an inspired creative impulse.  Intellect, reason, a ﬁrm clarity of the understanding and arranging intelligence are not the highest powers of our nature.  If this were our summit, many things which have now a great or a supreme importance for human culture, religion, art, poetry, would either be no more than a lure or a graceful play of the imagination and emotions, or, though admissible and useful for certain human ends, would still be deprived of the truth of their own highest indications. Poetry, even when it is dominated by intellectual tendency and motive, cannot really live and work by intellect alone.


Sri Aurobindo: Its impetus is not created and its functioning and results are not shaped either wholly or predominantly by reason and judgment; an intuitive seeing and an inspired hearing are its natural means or its native sources. But intuition and inspiration are not only spiritual in their essence, they are the characteristic means of all spiritual vision and utterance; they are rays from a greater and intenser Light than the tempered clarity of our intellectual understanding. Ordinarily these powers are turned in human action and creation to a use which is not spiritual and not perhaps their last or most intrinsic purpose. Their common use in poetry is to give a deeper and more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to sublimate the more inward but still untransformed and comparatively surface movements of human emotion and passion or to empower thought to perceive and utter certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man. But every power in the end ﬁnds itself drawn towards its own proper home and own highest capacity and ﬁeld of expression and one day or another the spiritual faculties of intuitive hearing and seeing must climb at last to the expression of things spiritual and eternal and their power and working in temporal things


Sri Aurobindo: . Poetry will yet ﬁnd in that supreme interpretation its own richest account, its largest and most satisﬁed possible action, its purest zenith of native force.  An ideal and spiritual poetry revealing the spirit in itself and in things, showing to us the unseen present in the seen, unveiling ranges of existence which the physical mind ignores, pointing man himself to undreamed capacities of godhead, future heights of being, truth, beauty, power, joy which are beyond the highest of his common or his now realised values of existence, — this will surely appear as the last potentiality of this high and beautiful creative power. When the eye of the poet has seen the life of man and the world externally or penetrated into its more vital inwardness or has risen to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which observantly perceives or intimately understands it, and when his word has caught some revealing speech and rhythm of what he has seen, much has been done, but not all that is possible to poetic vision and utterance. This other and greater realm still remains open for a last transcendence.


Sri Aurobindo: For the ﬁrst time in occidental literature, we get in this fourth turn of the evolution of English poetry some faint initial falling of this higher light upon the poetic intelligence. Some ancient poets may have received something of it through myth and symbol; a religious mystic here and there may have attempted to give his experience rhythmic and imaginative form. But here is the ﬁrst poetic attempt of the intellectual faculty striving at a high height of its own development to look beyond its own level directly into the unseen and the unknown and to unveil some ideal truth of its own highest universal conceptions hidden behind the veil of the ordinary mind and supporting them in their return to their eternal source. This high departure was not an inevitable outcome of the age that preceded Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley. The intellectual endeavour had been in Milton inadequate in range, subtlety and depth, in those who followed paltry, narrow and elegantly null, in both supported by an insufﬁcient knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: A new and larger endeavour in the same ﬁeld might rather have been expected which would have set before it the aim of a richer, deeper, wider, more curious intellectual humanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. That was the line followed by the main stream of European thought and culture, and to that too English poetry had eventually to turn in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century. It was already the indistinct and half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement which intervenes between Pope and Wordsworth; but as yet this movement was obscure, faltering and poor in its achievement. When a greater force came streaming in, the inﬂuences that were abroad were those which elsewhere found expression in the revolutionary idealism of the French Revolution and in German transcendentalism and romanticism. Intellectual in their idea and substance, they were in the mind of ﬁve or six English poets, each of them a remarkable individuality, carried beyond themselves by the sudden emergence of some half-mystical Celtic turn of the national mind into supraintellectual sources of inspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: Insufﬁciently supported by any adequate spiritual knowledge, unable to ﬁnd except rarely the right and native word of their own meaning, these greater tendencies faded away or were lost by the premature end of the poets who might, had they lived, have given them a supreme utterance. But still theirs was the dawn of whose light we shall ﬁnd the noon in the age now opening before us if it fulﬁls all its intimations. Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth were ﬁrst explorers of a new world of poetry other than that of the ancients or of the intermediate poets, which may be the familiar realm of the aesthetic faculty in the future, must be in fact if we are not continually to describe the circle of efﬂorescence, culmination and decay within the old hardly changing circle.


Sri Aurobindo: Certain motives which led up to this new poetry are already visible in the work of the middle eighteenth century. There is, ﬁrst, a visible attempt to break quite away from the prison of the formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical cult. Poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by a return to Miltonic blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form, — an inﬂuence which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley, — to lyrical movements, but more prominently the classical ode form, or to freer and richer moulds of verse. Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth of language or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the pre-Restoration diction and to modify it to suit the intellectualised treatment of thought and life which was now an indispensable element; for the old rich vital utterance was no longer possible, an intellectualised speech had become a ﬁxed and a well-acquired need of a more developed mentality. Romanticism of the modern type now makes its ﬁrst appearance in the choice of the subjects of poetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite in the grain and the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these newer motives are only incipient and unable to get free expression because there is still a heavy weight of the past intellectual tradition. Rhetoric yet loads the style or, when it is avoided, still the purer intensity of poetic emotion is not altogether found. Verse form tends to be still rather hard and external or else ineffective in its movement; the native lyric note has not yet returned, but only the rhetorical stateliness of the ode, not lyricised as in Keats and Shelley, or else lyrical forms managed with only an outward technique but without any cry in them. Romanticism is still rather of the intellect than in the temperament, sentiment runs thinly and feebly and is weighted with heavy intellectual turns.


Sri Aurobindo: Nature and life and things are seen accurately as objects and forms, but not with any vision, emotion or penetration into the spirit behind them.  Many of the currents which go to make up the great stream of modern poetry are beginning to run in thin tricklings, but still in a hard and narrow bed. There is no sign of the swift uplifting that was to come as if upon the sudden wings of a splendid moment.  In Burns these new-born imprisoned spirits break out from their bounds and get into a free air of natural, direct and living reality, ﬁnd a straightforward speech and a varied running or bounding movement of freedom. This is the importance of this solitary voice from the north in the evolution, apart from the intrinsic merits of his poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: His work has its limitations; the language is often too intellectualised to give the lyrical emotion, though it comes from the frank, unartiﬁcial and sturdy intellect of a son of the soil; the view on life is close, almost too close to give the deeper poetic or artistic effect, but it deals much with outsides and surfaces and the commonnesses and realisms of action, sometimes only does it suggest to us the subtler something which gives lyrical poetry not only its form and lilt and its power to stir, — all these he has, — but its more moving inmost appeal. Nevertheless, Burns has in him the things which are most native to the poetry of our modern times; he brings in the new naturalness, the nearness of the fuller poetic mind, intellectualised, informed with the power of clear reﬂective thought awake to life and nature, the closely observing eye, the stirring force of great general ideas, the spirit of revolt and self-assertion, the power of personality and the free play of individuality, the poignant sentiment, sometimes even a touch of psychological subtlety. These things are in him fresh, strong, initial as in a forerunner impelled by the ﬁrst breath of the coming air, but not in that ﬁnished possession of the new motives which is to be the greatness of the future master-singers. That we begin to get ﬁrst in Wordsworth. His was the privilege of the earliest initiation.


Sri Aurobindo: This new poetry has six great voices who fall naturally in spite of their pronounced differences into pairs, Wordsworth and Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Byron sets out with a strangely transformed echo of the past intellectualism, is carried beyond it by the elemental force of his personality, has even one foot across the borders of the spiritual, but never quite enters into that kingdom. Wordsworth breaks away with deliberate purpose from the past, forces his way into this new realm, but ﬁnally sinks under the weight of the narrower intellectual tendencies which he carries with him into its amplitudes. Blake and Coleridge open magical gates, pass by ﬂowering sidelanes with hedges laden with supernatural blooms into a middle world whence their voices come to us ringing with an unearthly melody.  In Shelley the idealism and spiritual impulse rise to almost giddy heights in a luminous ether and are lost there, unintelligible to contemporary humanity, only now beginning to return to us with their message.


Sri Aurobindo: Keats, the youngest and in many directions the most gifted of these initiators, enters the secret temple of ideal Beauty, but has not time to ﬁnd his way into the deepest mystic sanctuary. In him the spiritual seeking stops abruptly short and prepares to fall away down a rich sensuous incline to a subsequent poetry which turns from it to seek poetic Truth or pleasure through the senses and an artistic or curiously observing or ﬁnely psychologising intellectualism. This dawn has no noon, hardly even a morning.  Chapter XIV ODERN poetry carrying in it the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised mind begins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Here are the free, impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider ﬂowings.


Sri Aurobindo: Here we see the initial tendencies which have undergone a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and seeking have reached in the early twentieth a quite unprecedented subtle intensity, reﬁnement and variety of motives and even a tense straining on many lines to ﬁnd in everything some last occult truth and hitherto unimagined utterance, to go beyond all that poetry has ever done. This is in its very nature an effort which must end either in a lingering, a hectic extravagant or dull exhausted decadence or in a luminous and satisﬁed self-exceeding. At the very beginning and still more and increasingly afterwards this modern movement, in literature as in thought and science, takes the form of an ever widening and deepening intellectual and imaginative curiosity, an insatiable passion for knowledge, an eager lust of ﬁnding, a seeking eye of intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of an endless new truth and discovery. The Renascence was an awakening of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reﬂection and the stirred discovery of all that is brilliant and curious in the things of the life and the mind on their surface; but the fullness of the modern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of the informed and clariﬁed intellect to a wider curiosity, a much more extensive adventure of discovery and an insistent need to penetrate deeper and know and possess the truth of Nature and man and the universe, — both their outer truth and process and whatever deeper mystery may lie hidden behind their ﬁrst appearances and suggestions. And now it is culminating in something that promises to go beyond it, to bring about a new futurist rather than modernist age in which the leader of the march shall be intuition rather than the reasoning and critical intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: The long intellectual search for truth that went probing always deeper into the physical, the vital and the subjective, into the action of body and life, into the yet ill-grasped motions of mind and emotion and sensation and thought, is now beginning to reach beyond these things or rather through their subtlest and strongest intensities of sight and feeling towards the truths of the Spirit. The soul of the Renascence was a lover of life and an amateur of knowledge; but the modern spirit has been drawn rather by the cult of a clear, broad and minute intellectual and practical Truth: the dominating necessity of its being is a straining after knowledge and a power of life founded on the power of knowledge. Poetry in the modern age has followed intellectually and imaginatively the curve of this great impulse.  Continental literature displays the mass of this movement with a much more central completeness and in a stronger and more consistent body and outline than English poetry. In the Teutonic countries the intellectual and romantic literature of the Germans at the beginning with its background of transcendental philosophy, at the end the work of the Scandinavian and Belgian writers with their only apparently opposite sides of an intellectual or a sensuous realism and a sentimental or a psychological mysticism, the two strands sometimes separate, sometimes mingled, among the Latins the like commencement in the work of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Ch´enier, Hugo, the intermediate artistic development of most of the main inﬂuences by the Parnassians, the like later turn towards the poetry of Mallarm´e, Verlaine, D’Annunzio, stigmatised by some as the beginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of the curve.


Sri Aurobindo: In English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on the whole a less clear and deﬁnite inspiration and there is in spite of the greatness of individual poets an inferior total effectivity; but at the beginning and the end it has one higher note, a lifting of sight beyond the stress of the intellect and the senses, which is reached either not at all or much less directly realised with a less pure vision in the more artistically sound and sufﬁcient poetry of the Continent. Still the principal identical elements are distinguishable, sometimes very strongly pronounced and helped to some fullest expression by the great individual energy of imagination and force of character which are the most distinct powers of the English poetic mind. Often they thus stand out all the more remarkable by the magniﬁcent narrowness of their self-concentrated isolation.  Earliest among these many new forces to emerge with distinctness is an awakening of the eye to a changed vision of Nature, of the imagination to a more perfect and intimate visualisation, of the soul to a closer spiritual communion. An imaginative, scrutinising, artistic or sympathetic dwelling on the details of Nature, her sights, sounds, objects, sensible impressions is a persistent characteristic of modern art and poetry; it is the poetic side of the same tendency which upon the intellectual has led to the immeasurable development of the observing and analysing eye of Science.


Sri Aurobindo: The poetry of older times directed an occasional objective eye on Nature, turning a side glance from life or thought to get some colouring or decorative effect or a natural border or background for life or something that illustrated, ministered to or enriched the human thought or mood of the moment, at most for a casual indulgence of the imagination and senses in natural beauty. But the intimate subjective treatment of Nature, the penetrated human response to her is mostly absent or comes only in rare and brief touches. On the larger scale her subjective life is realised not with an immediate communion, but through myth and the image of divine personalities that govern her powers. In all these directions modern poetry represents a great change of our mentality and a swift and vast extension of our imaginative experience. Nature now lives for the poet as an independent presence, a greater or equal power dwelling side by side with him or embracing and dominating his existence.