Sri Aurobindo: Passing beyond this ﬁrst limit, this just or strong, but always restrained measure, it may admit a more emphatic rhythm, more directly and powerfully stimulate the emotion, appeal to a more vivid aesthetic sense. It may even make such a free or rich use of images as to suggest an outward approximation to the manner of poetry; but it employs them decoratively, as ornaments,, or for their effective value in giving a stronger intellectual vision of the thing or the thought it describes or deﬁnes; it does not use the image for that profounder and more living vision for which the poet is always seeking. And always it has its eye on its chief hearer and judge, the intelligence, and calls in other powers only as important aids to capture his suffrage. Reason and taste, two powers of the intelligence, are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist, while to the poet they are only minor deities.  If it goes beyond these limits, approaches in its measures a more striking rhythmic balance, uses images for sheer vision, opens itself to a mightier breath of speech, prose style passes beyond its normal province and approaches or even enters the conﬁnes of poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: It becomes poetical prose or even poetry itself using the apparent forms of prose as a disguise or a loose apparel. A high or a ﬁne adequacy, effectivity, intellectual illuminativeness and a carefully tempered aesthetic satisfaction are the natural and proper powers of its speech. But the privilege of the poet is to go beyond and discover that more intense illumination of speech, that inspired word and supreme inevitable utterance, in which there meets the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of inﬁnite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain-heads of the spirit within us. He may not always or often ﬁnd it, but to seek for it is the law or at least the highest trend of his utterance, and when he can not only ﬁnd it, but cast into it some deeply revealed truth of the spirit itself , he utters the.


Sri Aurobindo: But always, whether in the search or the ﬁnding, the whole style and rhythm of poetry are the expression and movement which come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself. The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things; it may be a vision of force and action, or of sensible beauty, or of truth of thought, or of emotion and pleasure and pain, of this life or the life beyond. It is sufﬁcient that it is the soul which sees and the eye, sense, heart and thought-mind become the passive instruments of the soul.  Then we get the real, the high poetry. But if what acts is too much an excitement of the intellect, the imagination, the emotions, the vital activities seeking rhythmical and forceful expression, without that greater spiritual excitement embracing them, or if all these are not sufﬁciently sunk into the soul, steeped in it, fused in it, and the expression does not come out puriﬁed and uplifted by a sort of spiritual transmutation, then we fall to lower levels of poetry and get work of a much more doubtful immortality.


Sri Aurobindo: And when the appeal is altogether to the lower things in us, to the mere mind, we arrive outside the true domain of poetry; we approach the conﬁnes of prose or get prose itself masking in the apparent forms of poetry, and the work is distinguished from prose style only or mainly by its mechanical elements, a good verse form and perhaps a more compact, catching or energetic expression than the prose writer will ordinarily permit to the easier and looser balance of his speech. It will not have at all or not sufﬁciently the true essence of poetry.  For in all things that speech can express there are two elements, the outward or instrumental and the real or spiritual. In thought, for instance, there is the intellectual idea, that which the intelligence makes precise and deﬁnite to us, and the soul-idea, that which exceeds the intellectual and brings us into nearness or identity with the whole reality of the thing expressed. Equally in emotion, it is not the mere emotion itself the poet seeks, but the soul of emotion, that in it for the delight of which the soul in us and the world desires or accepts emotional experience.


Sri Aurobindo: So too with the poetical sense of objects, the poet’s attempt to embody in his speech truth of life or truth of Nature. It is this greater truth and its delight and beauty for which he is seeking, beauty which is truth and truth beauty and therefore a joy for ever, because it brings us the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities. This greater element the more timid and temperate speech of prose can sometimes shadow out to us, but the heightened and fearless style of poetry makes it close and living and the higher cadences of poetry carry in on their wings what the style by itself could not bring. This is the source of that intensity which is the stamp of poetical speech and of the poetical movement. It comes from the stress of the soul-vision behind the word; it is the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter III HE MANTRA, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’s vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufﬁciency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets, and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work, the spots in the sun. But it is only at a certain highest level of the fused intensities that the Mantra becomes possible.  It is from a certain point of view the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the ﬁrst fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of poetry. A perfect rhythm will often even give immortality to work which is slight in vision and very far from the higher intensities of style.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is not merely metrical rhythm, even in a perfect technical excellence, which we mean when we speak of poetic movement; that perfection is only a ﬁrst step, a physical basis. There must be a deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul-movement entering into the metrical form and often overﬂooding it before the real poetic achievement begins.  A mere metrical excellence, however subtle, rich or varied, however perfectly it satisﬁes the outer ear, does not meet the deeper aims of the creative spirit; for there is an inner hearing which makes its greater claim, and to reach and satisfy it is the true aim of the creator of melody and harmony.  Nevertheless metre, by which we mean a ﬁxed and balanced system of the measures of sound,, is not only the traditional, but also surely the right physical basis for the poetic movement. A recent modern tendency — that which has given us the poetry of Whitman and Carpenter and the experimentalists in in France and Italy, — denies this tradition and sets aside metre as a limiting bondage, perhaps even a frivolous artiﬁciality or a falsiﬁcation of true, free and natural poetic rhythm.


Sri Aurobindo: That is, it seems to me, a point of view which cannot eventually prevail, because it does not deserve to prevail. It certainly cannot triumph, unless it justiﬁes itself by supreme rhythmical achievements beside which the highest work of the great masters of poetic harmony in the past shall sink into a clear inferiority.  That has not yet been done. On the contrary, has done its best when it has either limited its aim in rhythm to a kind of chanting poetical prose or else based itself on a sort of irregular and complex metrical movement which in its inner law, though not in its form, recalls the idea of Greek choric poetry.  Milton disparaging rhyme, which he had himself used with so much skill in his earlier, less sublime, but more beautiful poetry, forgot or ignored the spiritual value of rhyme, its power to enforce and clinch the appeal of melodic or harmonic recurrence which is a principal element in the measured movement of poetry, its habit of opening sealed doors to the inspiration, its capacity to suggest and reveal beauty to that supra-intellectual something in us which music is missioned to awake.


Sri Aurobindo: The Whitmanic technique falls into a similar, but wider error. When mankind found out the power of thought and feeling thrown into ﬁxed and recurring measures of sound to move and take possession of the mind and soul, they were not discovering a mere artistic device, but a subtle truth of psychology, of which the conscious theory is preserved in the Vedic tradition. And when the ancient Indians chose more often than not to throw whatever they wished to endure, even philosophy, science and law, into metrical form, it was not merely to aid the memory, — they were able to memorise huge prose Brahmanas quite as accurately as the Vedic hymnal or the metrical Upanishads, — but because they perceived that metrical speech has in itself not only an easier durability, but a greater natural power than unmetrical, not only an intenser value of sound, but a force to compel language and sense to heighten themselves in order to fall ﬁtly into this stricter mould. There is perhaps a truth in the Vedic idea that the Spirit of creation framed all the movements of the world by, in certain ﬁxed rhythms of the formative Word, and it is because they are faithful to the cosmic metres that the basic world-movements unchangingly endure. A balanced harmony maintained by a system of subtle recurrences is the foundation of immortality in created things, and metrical movement is nothing else than creative sound grown conscious of this secret of its own powers.


Sri Aurobindo: Still there are all sorts of heights and gradations in the use of this power. General consent seems indeed to have sanctioned the name of poetry for any kind of effective language set in a vigorous or catching metrical form, and although the wideness of this deﬁnition is such that it has enabled even the Macaulays and Kiplings to mount their queer poetic thrones, I will not object: catholicity is always a virtue. Nevertheless, mere force of language tacked on to the trick of the metrical beat does not answer the higher description of poetry; it may have the form or its shadow, it has not the essence. There is a whole mass of poetry, — the French metrical romances and most of the mediaeval ballad poetry may be taken as examples, — which relies simply on the metrical beat for its rhythm and on an even level of just tolerable expression for its style; there is hardly a line whose rhythm ﬂoats home or where the expression strikes deep.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in later European poetry, though the art of verse and language has been better learned, essentially the same method persists, and poets who use it have earned not only the popular suffrage, but the praise of the critical mind. Still the deﬁnitive verdict on their verse is that it is nothing more than an effective jog-trot of Pegasus, a pleasing canter or a showy gallop. It has great staying-power, — indeed there seems no reason why, once begun, it should not go on for ever, — it carries the poet easily over his ground, but it does nothing more. Certainly, no real soul-movement can get easily into this mould. It has its merits and its powers; it is good for metrical romances of a sort, for war poetry and popular patriotic poetry, or perhaps any poetry which wants to be an “echo of life”; it may stir, not the soul, but the vital being in us like a trumpet or excite it like a drum.


Sri Aurobindo: But after all the drum and the trumpet do not carry us far in the way of music.  But even high above this level we still do not get at once the greater sound-movement of which we are speaking. Poets of considerable power, sometimes even the greatest in their less exalted moments, are satisﬁed ordinarily with a set harmony or a set melody, which is very satisfying to the outward ear and carries the aesthetic sense along with it in a sort of even, indistinctive pleasure, and into this mould of easy melody or harmony they throw their teeming or ﬂowing imaginations without difﬁculty or check, without any need of an intenser heightening, a deeper appeal. It is beautiful poetry; it satisﬁes the aesthetic sense, the imagination and the ear; but there the charm ends. Once we have heard its rhythm, we have nothing new to expect, no surprise for the inner ear, no danger of the soul being suddenly seized and carried away into unknown depths.


Sri Aurobindo: It is sure of being ﬂoated along evenly as if upon a ﬂowing stream. Or sometimes it is not so much a ﬂowing stream as a steady march or other even movement: this comes oftenest in poets who appeal more to the thought than to the ear; they are concerned chieﬂy with the thing they have to say and satisﬁed to have found an adequate rhythmic mould into which they can throw it without any farther preoccupation.  But even a great attention and skill in the use of metrical possibilities, in the invention of rhythmical turns, devices, modulations, variations, strong to satisfy the intelligence, to seize the ear, to maintain its vigilant interest, will not bring us yet to the higher point we have in view. There are periods of literature in which this kind of skill is carried very far. The rhythms of Victorian poetry seem to me to be of this kind; they show sometimes the skill of the artist, sometimes of the classical or romantic technician, of the prestigious melodist or harmonist, sometimes the power of the vigorous craftsman or even the performer of robust metrical feats.


Sri Aurobindo: All kinds of instrumental faculties have been active; but the one thing that is lacking, except in moments or brief periods of inspiration, is the soul behind creating and listening to its own greater movements.  Poetic rhythm begins to reach its highest levels, the greater poetic movements become possible when, using any of these powers but rising beyond them, the soul begins to make its direct demand and yearn for a profounder satisfaction: they awake when the inner ear begins to listen. Technically, we may say that this comes in when the poet becomes, in Keats’ phrase, a miser of sound and syllable, economical of his means, not in the sense of a niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its possibilities of sound. It is then that poetry gets farthest away from the method of prose-rhythm. Proserhythm aims characteristically at a general harmony in which the parts are subdued to get the tone of a total effect; even the sounds which give the support or the relief, yet to a great extent seem to be trying to efface themselves in order not to disturb by a too striking particular effect the general harmony which is the whole aim.


Sri Aurobindo: Poetry on the contrary makes much of its beats and measures; it seeks for a very deﬁnite and insistent rhythm. But still, where the greater rhythmical intensities are not pursued, it is only some total effect that predominates and the rest is subdued to it. But in these highest, intensest rhythms every sound is made the most of, whether in its suppression or in its swelling expansion, its narrowness or its open wideness, in order to get in the combined effect something which the ordinary harmonic ﬂow of poetry cannot give us.  But this is only the technical side, the physical means by which the effect is produced. It is not the artistic intelligence or the listening physical ear that is most at work, but something within that is trying to bring out the echo of a hidden harmony, to discover a secret of rhythmic inﬁnities within us.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not a labour of the devising intellect or the aesthetic sense which the poet has achieved, but a labour of the spirit within itself to cast something out of the surge of the eternal depths. The other faculties are there in their place, but the conductor of the orchestral movement is the soul suddenly and potently coming forward to get its own work done by its own higher and unanalysable methods. The result is something as near to wordless music as word-music can get, and with the same power of soullife, of soul-emotion, of profound supra-intellectual signiﬁcance.  In these higher harmonies and melodies the metrical rhythm is taken up by the spiritual; it is ﬁlled with or sometimes it seems rolled away and lost in a music that has really another unseizable and spiritual secret of movement.  This is the intensity of poetic movement out of which the greatest possibility of poetic expression arises.


Sri Aurobindo: It is where the metrical movement remains as a base, but either enshrines and contains or is itself contained and ﬂoats in an element of greater music which exceeds it and yet brings out all its possibilities, that the music ﬁt for the Mantra makes itself audible. It is the triumph of the embodied spirit over the difﬁculties and limitations of the physical instrument. And the listener seems to be that other vaster and yet identical eternal spirit whom the Upanishad speaks of as the ear of the ear, he who listens to all hearings;  “behind the instabilities of word and speech” it is the profound inevitable harmonies of his own thought and vision for which he is listening.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter IV  HYTHM is the premier necessity of poetical expression because it is the sound-movement which carries on its wave the thought-movement in the word; and it is the musical sound-image which most helps to ﬁll in, to extend, subtilise and deepen the thought impression or the emotional or vital impression and to carry the sense beyond itself into an expression of the intellectually inexpressible, — always the peculiar power of music. This truth was better understood on the whole or at least more consistently felt by the ancients than by the modern mind and ear, perhaps because they were more in the habit of singing, chanting or intoning their poetry while we are content to read ours, a habit which brings out the intellectual and emotional element, but unduly depresses the rhythmic value. On the other hand modern poetry has achieved a far greater subtlety, minute ﬁneness and curious depth of suggestion in style and thought than was possible to the ancients, — at the price perhaps of some loss in power, height and simple largeness.  The ancients would not so easily as the moderns have admitted into the rank of great poets writers of poor rhythmic faculty or condoned, ignored or praised in really great poets rhythmic lapses, roughnesses and crudities for the sake of their power of style and substance.


Sri Aurobindo: In regard to poetic style we have to make, for the purpose of the idea we have in view, the starting-point of the Mantra, precisely the same distinctions as in regard to poetic rhythm, — since here too we ﬁnd actually everything admitted as poetry which has some power of style and is cast into some kind of rhythmical form. But the question is, what kind of power and in that kind what intensity of achievement? There is plenty of poetry signed by poets of present reputation or lasting fame which one is obliged to consign to a border region of half-poetry, because its principle of expression has not got far enough away from the principle of prose expression. It seems to forget that while the ﬁrst aim of prose style is to deﬁne and ﬁx an object, fact, feeling, thought before the appreciating intelligence with whatever clearness, power, richness or other beauty of presentation may be added to that essential aim, the ﬁrst aim of poetic style is to make the thing presented living to the imaginative vision, the responsive inner emotion, the spiritual sense, the soul-feeling and soul-sight. Where the failure is to express at all with any sufﬁcient power, to get home in any way, the distinction becomes palpable enough, and we readily say of such writings that this is verse but not poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: But where there is some thought-power or other worth of substance attended with some power of expression, false values more easily become current and even a whole literary age may dwell on this borderland or be misled into an undue exaltation and cult for this halfpoetry.  Poetry, like the kindred arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, appeals to the spirit of man through signiﬁcant images, and it makes no essential difference that in this case the image is mental and verbal and not material. The essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and feeling must arise out of the sight or be included in it, but sight is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech. For the poet has to make us live in the soul and in the inner mind and heart what is ordinarily lived in the outer mind and the senses, and for that he must ﬁrst make us see by the soul, in its light and with its deeper vision, what we ordinarily see in a more limited and halting fashion by the senses and the intelligence.  He is, as the ancients knew, a seer and not merely a maker of rhymes, not merely a jongleur, rhapsodist or troubadour, and not merely a thinker in lines and stanzas.


Sri Aurobindo: He sees beyond the sight of the surface mind and ﬁnds the revealing word, not merely the adequate and effective, but the illumined and illuminating, the inspired and inevitable word, which compels us to see also. To arrive at that word is the whole endeavour of poetic style.  The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental ﬁctions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the ﬁrst instruments in the creation of poetic style.


Sri Aurobindo: The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the ﬁctitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, — of this truth too there are many gradations, — which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.  This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the ﬁrst of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufﬁcient language of no very high quality.


Sri Aurobindo: But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisﬁes our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other “problems”, or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.  The style of such poetry corresponds usually to its substance; for between the word and the vision there tends to be, though there is not by any means perfectly or invariably, a certain equation.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a force of vital style, a force of emotional style, a force of intellectual style which we meet constantly in poetry and which it is essential to distinguish from the language of the higher spiritual imagination. The forceful expression of thought and sentiment is not enough for this higher language. To take some examples, it is not enough for it to express its sense of world-sorrow in a line of cheap sentimental force like Byron’s or to voice an opposite truth in the sprightly-forcible manner of Browning’s or to strike the balance in a sense of equality with the pointed and ever quotable intellectuality of Pope’s  This may be the poetical or half-poetical language of thought and sentiment; it is not the language of real poetic vision. Note that all three brush the skirts of ideas whose deeper expression from the vision of a great poet might touch the very heights of poetic revelation.


Sri Aurobindo: Byron’s line is the starting-point in the emotional sensations for that high world-pessimism and its spiritual release which ﬁnds expression in the Gita’s  and one has only to compare the manner of the two in style and rhythm, even leaving the substance aside, to see the difference between the lesser and the greater poetry. Browning’s language rises from a robust cheerfulness of temperament, it does not touch the deeper fountain-heads of truth in us; an opposite temperament may well smile at it as vigorous optimistic fustian.  Pope’s actually falsiﬁes by its poetical inadequacy that great truth of the Gita’s teaching, the truth of the divine equality, because he has not seen and therefore cannot make us see; his signiﬁcant images of the truth are, like his perception of it, intellectual and rhetorical, not poetic ﬁgures.  There is a higher style of poetry than this which yet falls below the level to which we have to climb.


Sri Aurobindo: It is no longer poetical language of a merely intellectual, vital or emotional force, but instead or in addition a genuinely imaginative style, with a certain, often a great beauty of vision in it, whether objective or subjective, or with a certain, often a great but indeﬁnite soulpower bearing up its movement of word and rhythm. It varies in intensity: for the lower intensity we can get plenty of examples from Chaucer, when he is indulging his imagination rather than his observation, and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton’s early poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ordinarily in this mould. But this too is not that highest intensity of the revelatory poetic word from which the Mantra starts. It has a certain power of revelation in it, but the deeper vision is still coated up in something more external; sometimes the poetic intention of decorative beauty, sometimes some other deliberate intention of the poetic mind overlays with the more outward beauty, beauty of image, beauty of thought, beauty of emotion, the deeper intention of the spirit within, so that we have still to look for that beyond the image rather than are seized by it through the image.


Sri Aurobindo: A high pleasure is there, not unspiritual in its nature, but still it is not that point where pleasure passes into or is rather drowned in the pure spiritual Ananda, the ecstasy of the creative, poetic revelation.  That intensity comes where everything else may be present,  but all is powerfully carried on the surge of a spiritual vision which has found its inspired and inevitable speech. All or any of the other elements may be there, but they are at once subordinated and transﬁgured to their highest capacity for poetic light and rapture. This intensity belongs to no particular style, depends on no conceivable formula of diction.


Sri Aurobindo: It may be the height of the decorative imaged style as often we ﬁnd it in Kalidasa or Shakespeare; it may be that height of bare and direct expression where language seems to be used as a scarcely felt vaultingboard for a leap into the inﬁnite; it may be the packed intensity of language which uses either the bare or the imaged form at will, but ﬁlls every word with its utmost possible rhythmic and thought suggestion. But in itself it depends on none of these things; it is not a style, but poetic style itself, the Word; it creates and carries with it its elements rather than is created by them.  Whatever its outward forms, it is always the one ﬁt style for the Mantra.  Chapter V  HIS HIGHEST intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual elements of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justiﬁes itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion, the appeal of beauty in the thing discovered and in its expression — for all great poetic utterance is discovery, — rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration and pass into an ecstasy of sight.


Sri Aurobindo: In the lesser poets these moments are rare and come like brilliant accidents, angels’ visits; in the greater they are more frequent outbursts; but in the greatest they abound because they arise from a constant faculty of poetic vision and poetic speech which has its lesser and its greater moments, but never entirely fails these supreme masters of the expressive word.  Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth, and though we have wandered far enough from that ideal to demand from him only the pleasure of the ear and the amusement of the aesthetic faculty, still all great poetry instinctively preserves something of that higher turn of its own aim and signiﬁcance.  Poetry, in fact, being Art, must attempt to make us see, and since it is to the inner senses that it has to address itself, — for the ear is its only physical gate of entry and even there its real appeal is to an inner hearing, — and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens in us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore the greatest poets have been always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa, however much they may differ in everything else, are at one in having this as the fundamental character of their greatness. Their supremacy does not lie essentially in a greater thought-power or a more lavish imagery or a more penetrating force of passion and emotion; these things they may have had, one being more gifted in one direction, another in others, but these other powers were aids to their poetic expression rather than its essence or its source. There is often more thought in a short essay of Bacon’s than in a whole play of Shakespeare’s, but not even a hundred cryptograms can make him the author of the dramas; for, as he showed when he tried to write poetry, the very nature of his thought-power and the characteristic way of expression of the born philosophic thinker hampered him in poetic expression. It was the constant outstreaming of form and thought and image from an abundant inner vision of life which made Shakespeare, whatever his other deﬁciencies, the sovereign dramatic poet.


Sri Aurobindo: Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets ﬂowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and wordimages which become the expressive body of the vision. The great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation,, seers of the poetic truth and hearers of its word.  The tendency of the modern mind at the present day seems to be towards laying a predominant value on the thought in poetry. We live still in an age which is in a great intellectual trouble and ferment about life and the world and is developing enormously the human intelligence, — often at the expense of other powers which are no less necessary to self-knowledge, — in order to grapple with life and master it.


Sri Aurobindo: We are seeking always and in many directions to decipher the enigma of things, the cryptogram of the worlds which we are set to read, and to decipher it by the aid of the intellect; and for the most part we are much too busy living and thinking to have leisure to be silent and see. We expect the poet to use his great mastery of language to help us in this endeavour; we ask of him not so much perfect beauty of song or largeness of creative vision as a message to our perplexed and seeking intellects. Therefore we hear constantly today of the “philosophy” of a poet, even the most inveterate beautiﬁer of commonplaces being forcibly gifted by his admirers with a philosophy, or of his message, — the message of Tagore, the message of Whitman. We are asking then of the poet to be, not a supreme singer or an inspired seer of the worlds, but a philosopher, a prophet, a teacher, even something perhaps of a religious or ethical preacher. It is necessary therefore to say that when I claim for the poet the role of a seer of Truth and ﬁnd the source of great poetry in a great and revealing vision of life or God or the gods or man or Nature, I do not mean that it is necessary for him to have an intellectual philosophy of life or a message for humanity, which he chooses to express in verse because he has the metrical gift and the gift of imagery, or that he must give us a solution of the problems of the age, or come with a mission to improve mankind, or, as it is said, “to leave the world better than he found it.”


Sri Aurobindo: As a man, he may have these things, but the less he allows them to get the better of his poetic gift, the happier it will be for his poetry. Material for his poetry they may give, an inﬂuence in it they may be, provided they are transmuted into vision and life by the poetic spirit, but they can be neither its soul nor its aim, nor give the law to its creative activity and its expression.   The poet-seer sees differently, thinks in another way, voices himself in quite another manner than the philosopher or the prophet. The prophet announces the Truth as the Word, the Law or the command of the Eternal, he is the giver of the message; the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done that, his whole work is done; he need not be its explicit spokesman or its ofﬁcial messenger.


Sri Aurobindo: The philosopher’s business is to discriminate Truth and put its parts and aspects into intellectual relation with each other; the poet’s is to seize and embody aspects of Truth in their living relations, or rather — for that is too philosophical a language — to see her features and, excited by the vision, create in the beauty of her image.  No doubt, the prophet may have in him a poet who breaks out often into speech and surrounds with the vivid atmosphere of life the directness of his message; he may follow up his injunction “Take no thought for the morrow,” by a revealing image of the beauty of the truth he enounces, in the life of Nature, in the ﬁgure of the lily, or link it to human life by apologue and parable. The philosopher may bring in the aid of colour and image to give some relief and hue to his dry light of reason and water his arid path of abstractions with some healing dew of poetry. But these are ornaments and not the substance of his work; and if the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth.  Thus the more rigid metaphysicians are perhaps right in denying to Nietzsche the name of philosopher; for Nietzsche does not think, but always sees, turbidly or clearly, rightly or distortedly, but with the eye of the seer rather than with the brain of the thinker.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand we may get great poetry which is full of a prophetic enthusiasm of utterance or is largely or even wholly philosophic in its matter; but this prophetic poetry gives us no direct message, only a mass of sublime inspirations of thought and image, and this philosophic poetry is poetry and lives as poetry only in so far as it departs from the method, the expression, the way of seeing proper to the philosophic mind.  It must be vision pouring itself into thought-images and not thought trying to observe truth and distinguish its province and bounds and fences.  In earlier days this distinction was not at all clearly understood and therefore we ﬁnd even poets of great power attempting to set philosophic systems to music or even much more prosaic matter than a philosophic system, Hesiod and Virgil setting about even a manual of agriculture in verse! In Rome, always a little blunt of perception in the aesthetic mind, her two greatest poets fell a victim to this unhappy conception, with results which are a lesson and a warning to all posterity.


Sri Aurobindo: Lucretius’ work lives only, in spite of the majestic energy behind it, by its splendid digressions into pure poetry, Virgil’s by ﬁne passages and pictures of Nature and beauties of word and image; but in both the general substance is lifeless matter which has ﬂoated to us on the stream of Time, saved only by the beauty of its setting. India, and perhaps India alone, managed once or twice to turn this kind of philosophic attempt into a poetic success, in the Gita, in the Upanishads and some minor works modelled upon them. But the difference is great. The Gita owes its poetical success to its starting from a great and critical situation in life, its constant keeping of that in view and always returning upon it, and to its method which is to seize on a spiritual experience or moment or stage of the inner life and throw it into the form of thought; and this, though a delicate operation, can well abide within the limits of the poetic manner of speech. Only where it overburdens itself with metaphysical matter and deviates into sheer philosophic deﬁnition and discrimination, which happens especially in two or three of its closing chapters, does the poetic voice sink under the weight, even occasionally into ﬂattest versiﬁed prose.


Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishads too, and much more, are not at all philosophic thinking, but spiritual seeing; these ancient stanzas are a rush of spiritual intuitions, ﬂames of a burning ﬁre of mystic experience, waves of an inner sea of light and life, and they throw themselves into the language and cadence of poetry because that is their natural speech and a more intellectual utterance would have falsiﬁed their vision.  Nowadays we have clariﬁed our aesthetic perceptions sufﬁciently to avoid the mistake of the Roman poets; but in a subtler form the intellectual tendency still shows a dangerous spirit of encroachment. For the impulse to teach is upon us, the inclination to be an observer and critic of life, — there could be no more perilous deﬁnition than Arnold’s poetic “criticism of life”, in spite of the saving epithet, — to clothe, merely, in the forms of poetry a critical or philosophic idea of life to the detriment of our vision. Allegory with its intellectual ingenuities, its facile wedding of the abstract idea and the concrete image, shows a tendency to invade again the domain of poetry. And there are other signs of the intellectual malady of which we are almost all of us the victims.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore it is well to insist that the native power of poetry is in its sight, not in its intellectual thought-matter, and its safety is in adhering to this native principle of vision; its conception, its thought, its emotion, its presentation, its structure must rise out of that or else rise into it before it takes its ﬁnished form. The poetic vision of things is not a criticism of life, not an intellectual or philosophic view of it, but a soul-view, a seizing by the inner sense. The Mantra too is not in its substance or its form a poetic enunciation of philosophic verities, but a rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul’s sight of God and Nature and itself and of the world and of the inner truth — occult to the outward eye — of all that peoples it, the secrets of their life and being.  In the attempt to ﬁx the view of life which Art must take, distinctions are constantly laid down, such as the necessity of a subjective or an objective treatment or of a realistic or an idealistic view, which mislead more than they enlighten. Certainly, one poet may seem to excel in the concrete presentation of things and falter or be less sure in his grasp of the purely subjective, while another may move freely in the more subjective worlds and be less at home in the concrete; and both may be poets of a high order.


Sri Aurobindo: But when we look closer, we see that just as a certain objectivity is necessary to make poetry live and the thing seen stand out before our eyes, so on the other hand even the most objective presentation starts from an inner view and subjective process of creation or at least a personal interpretation and transmutation of the thing seen. The poet really creates out of himself and not out of what he sees outwardly: that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work. Otherwise his work would be a mechanical construction and putting together, not a living creation.  Sheer objectivity brings us down from art to photography; and the attempt to diminish the subjective view to the vanishingpoint so as to get an accurate presentation is proper to science, not to poetry. We are not thereby likely to get a greater truth or reality, but very much the reverse; for the scientiﬁc presentation of things, however valid in its own domain, that of the senses and the observing reason, is not true to the soul.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not the integral truth or the whole vision of things, for it gives only their process and machinery and mechanic law, but not their inner life and spirit. That is the error in realism, — in its theory, at least, for its practice is something other than what it intends or pretends to be. Realistic art does not and cannot give us a scientiﬁcally accurate presentation of life, because Art is not and cannot be Science. What it does do, is to make an arbitrary selection of motives, forms and hues, here of dull blues and greys and browns and dingy whites and sordid yellows, there of violent blacks and reds, and the result is sometimes a thing of power and sometimes a nightmare. Idealistic art makes a different selection and produces either a work of nobly-coloured power or soft-hued beauty or else a high-pitched and false travesty or a specious day-dream.


Sri Aurobindo: In these distinctions there is no safety; nor can any rule be laid down for the poet, since he must necessarily go by what he is and what he sees, except that he should work from the living poetic centre within him and not exile himself into artiﬁcial standpoints.  From our present point of view we may say that the poet may do as he pleases in all that is not the essential matter.  Thought-matter may be prominent in his work or life-substance predominate. He may proceed by sheer force of presentation or by direct power of interpretation. He may make this world his text, or wander into regions beyond, or soar straight into the pure empyrean of the inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: To arrive at the Mantra he may start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements.  The one thing needful is that he should be able to go beyond the word or image he uses or the form of the thing he sees, not be limited by them, but get into the light of that which they have the power to reveal and ﬂood them with it until they overﬂow with its suggestions or seem even to lose themselves and disappear into the revelation and the apocalypse. At the highest he himself disappears into sight; the personality of the seer is lost in the eternity of the vision, and the Spirit of all seems alone to be there speaking out sovereignly its own secrets.  But the poetic vision, like everything else, follows necessarily the evolution of the human mind and according to the age and environment, it has its ascents and descents, its high levels and its low returns. Ordinarily, it follows the sequence of an abrupt ascent pushing to a rapid decline.


Sri Aurobindo: The eye of early man is turned upon the physical world about him, the interest of the story of life and its primary ideas and emotions; he sees man and his world only, or he sees the other worlds and their gods and beings, but it is still his own physical world in a magniﬁed and heightened image. He asks little of poetry except a more forceful vision of familiar things, things real and things commonly imagined, which will help him to see them more largely and feel them more strongly and give him a certain inspiration to live them more powerfully. Next, — but this transition is sometimes brief or even quite overleaped, — there comes a period in which he feels the joy and curiosity and rich adventure of the expanding lifeforce within him, the passion and romance of existence and it is this in all its vivid colour that he expects art and poetry to express and satisfy him through the imagination and the emotions with its charm and power. Afterwards he begins to intellectualise, but still on the same subject-matter; he asks now from the poet a view of things enlightened by the inspired reason and beautifully shaped by the ﬁrst strong and clear joy of his developed aesthetic sense. A vital poetry appealing to the imagination through the sense-mind and the emotions and a poetry interpretative of life to the intelligence are the fruit of these ages.


Sri Aurobindo: A later poetry tends always to return on these forms with a more subtilised intellect and a richer life-experience. But, having got so far, it can go no farther and there is the beginning of a decadence.  Great things may be done by poetry within these limits and the limited lifetime it gives to a literature; but it is evident that the poet will have a certain difﬁculty in getting to a deeper vision, because he has to lean entirely on the external thought and form; he must be subservient to them because they are the only safe support he knows, and he gets at what truth he can that may be beyond them with their veil still thickly interposing between him and a greater light. A higher level can come, bringing with it the possibility of a renewed and prolonged course for the poetic impulse, if the mind of man begins to see more intimately the forces behind life, the powers concealed by our subjective existence. The poet can attempt to reveal these unsuspected ranges and motives and use the outward physical and vital and thought symbol only as a suggestion of greater things.


Sri Aurobindo: Yet a higher level can be attained, deeper depths, larger horizons when the soul in things comes nearer to man or when other worlds than the physical open themselves to him. And the entire liberation of the poetic vision to see most profoundly and the poetic power to do its highest work will arrive when the spiritual itself is the possession of the greatest minds and the age stands on the verge of its revelation.  Therefore it is not sufﬁcient for poetry to attain high intensities of word and rhythm; it must have, to ﬁll them, an answering intensity of vision and always new and more and more uplifted or inward ranges of experience. And this does not depend only on the individual power of vision of the poet, but on the mind of his age and country, its level of thought and experience, the adequacy of its symbols, the depth of its spiritual attainment. A lesser poet in a greater age may give us occasionally things which exceed in this kind the work of less favoured immortals.


Sri Aurobindo: The religious poetry of the later Indian tongues has for us fervours of poetic revelation which in the great classics are absent, even though no mediaeval poet can rank in power with Valmiki and Kalidasa. The modern literatures of Europe commonly fall short of the Greek perfection of harmony and form, but they give us what the greatest Greek poets had not and could not have. And in our own days a poet of secondary power in his moments of inspiration can get to a vision far more satisfying to the deepest soul within us than Shakespeare’s or Dante’s. Greatest of all is the promise of the age that is coming, if the race fulﬁls its highest and largest opening possibilities and does not founder in a vitalistic bog or remain tied in the materialistic paddock; for it will be an age in which all the worlds are beginning to withdraw their screens from man’s gaze and invite his experience, and he will be near to the revelation of the Spirit of which they are, as we choose, the obscuring veils, the signiﬁcant forms and symbols or else the transparent raiment. It is as yet uncertain to which of these consummations destiny is leading us.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter VI  HE WORK of the poet depends not only on himself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates for him. It is not that he is or need be entirely limited or conditioned by his environment or that he must regard himself as only a voice of the national mind or bound by some past national tradition and debarred from striking out a novel and original road of his own. In nations which are returning under difﬁculties to a strong selfconsciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present moment, this kind of conscious nationalism in literature may be for some time a living idea and a powerful motive.


Sri Aurobindo: In others which have had a vivid collective life that has exercised a common and intimate inﬂuence on all its individuals or in those which have cherished an acute sense of a great national culture and tradition, the more stable elements of that tradition may exert a very conscious inﬂuence on the mind of the poets. At once sustaining and limiting the weaker spirits, they give to genius an exceptional power for sustained beauty of form and a satisfying perfection. But this is no essential condition for the birth of great poetry. The poet, we must always remember, creates out of himself and has the indefeasible right to follow freely the breath of the spirit within him, provided he satisﬁes in his work the law of poetic beauty. The external forms of his age and his nation only give him his starting-point and some of his materials and determine to some extent, by education, by a subconscious and automatic environmental pressure, the room he ﬁnds for the free play of his poetic spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor is it necessary to subscribe to the theory of the man and his milieu or the dogma of the historical school of criticism which asks of us to study all the precedents, circumstances, inﬂuences, surroundings, all that “created” the man and his work, — as if there were not something in him apart from these which made all the difference, something that made him a man apart and not like others. It is supposed that out of this elaborate scientiﬁc study the right estimate of his poetry will arise. But even the right historical or psychological understanding of him need not inevitably arise out of this method; for we may very easily read into him and his work things which may perhaps have been there in front of him or around him, but never really got inside him.  And the right estimate of his work we certainly shall not form if we bring in so much that is accidental and unessential to cloud our free and direct impression. Rather the very opposite is the true method of appreciation; we have to go straight to the poet and his poem for all we need essentially to know about them, — we shall get there all that we really want for any true aesthetic or poetic purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: Afterwards we can go elsewhere, if we like, for any minor elucidations or rummage about laboriously to satisfy our scientiﬁc and historical curiosity. In this more natural order things accidental are much more likely to fall into their right place and the freshness and authenticity of our poetic appreciation have some chance of remaining unobscured and still vibrant. But quite apart from its external and therefore unreal method, there is a truth in the historical theory of criticism which is of real help towards grasping something that is important and even essential, if not for our poetic appreciation, yet for our intellectual judgment of a poet and his work.  In poetry, as in everything else that aims at perfection, there are always two elements, the eternal true substance and the limitations and accidents brought in by the time element. The ﬁrst alone really and always matters, and it is that which must determine our deﬁnitive appreciation, our absolute verdict, or rather our essential response to poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: A soul expressing the eternal spirit of Truth and Beauty through some of the inﬁnite variations of beauty, with the word for its instrument, that is, after all, what the poet is, and it is to a similar soul in us seeking the same spirit and responding to it that he makes his appeal.  It is when we can get this response at its purest and in its most direct and heightened awakening that our faculty of poetic appreciation becomes at once surest and most intense. It is, we may say, the impersonal enjoyer of creative beauty in us responding to the impersonal creator and interpreter of beauty in the poet.  For it is the impersonal spirit of Truth and Beauty that is seeking to express itself through his personality; and it is that and not his personal intelligence which ﬁnds its own word and seems itself to create through him in his highest moments of inspiration.  And this Impersonal is concerned only with the creative idea and the motive of beauty which is seeking expression; its sole purpose is to ﬁnd the perfect expression, the inevitable word and the rhythm that reveals.


Sri Aurobindo: All else is subordinate, accidental, the crude material and the conditioning medium of this essential endeavour.  Still there is also the personality of the poet and the personality of the hearer; the one gives the pitch and the form of the success arrived at, the other determines the characteristic intellectual and aesthetic judgment to which its appeal arrives.  The correspondence or the dissonance between the two decides the relation between the poet and his reader, and out of that arises whatever is personal in our appreciation and judgment of his poetry. In this personal or time element there is always much that is merely accidental and this rather limits and deﬂects our judgment than helps usefully to form it. How much it interferes can be seen when we try to value contemporary poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a matter of continual experience that even critics of considerable insight and sureness of taste are yet capable of the most extraordinarily wrong judgments, whether on the side of appreciation or of depreciation, when they have to pass a verdict on their contemporaries. And this is because a crowd of accidental inﬂuences belonging to the effect of the time and the mental environment upon our mentality exercise an exaggerated domination and distort or colour the view of our mental eye upon its object. But apart from this disabling intrusion there is always something essential to our present personality which is of more value and has a right to be heard. For we are all of us souls developing our unﬁnished nature in a constant endeavour to get into unity with the spirit in life through its many forms of manifestation and on many different lines. And as there is in Indian Yoga a principle of varying capacity,, something in the immediate power of a man’s nature that determines by its characteristics his right to this or that way of Yoga, of union with the Divine, which, whatever its merits or its limitations, is his right way because it is most helpful to him personally, so in all our activities of life and mind there is this principle of .


Sri Aurobindo: That which we can appreciate in poetry and still more the way in which we appreciate it, is that in it and us which is most helpful to us and therefore, for the time being at least, right for us in our attempt to get into union either with universal or transcendent Beauty through the revealing ideas and motives and suggestive forms of poetic creation.  This is the individual aspect of the personal or time element. But there is also a larger movement to which we belong, ourselves and the poet and his poetry; or rather it is the same movement of the general soul of mankind in the same endeavour as the individual’s and towards the same objective. In poetry this shows itself in a sort of evolution from the objective to the inward and from the inward to the inmost, the spiritual, — an evolution which has many curves and turns and cycles, many returns upon past motives and imperfect anticipations of future motives, but is on the whole and up to a certain point a growth and progress, a constant labour of self-enlargement and self-ﬁnding. It is a clear idea of this evolution which may most helpfully inform the historical element in our judgment and appreciation of poetry; it is a judgment of it from the viewpoint of the evolution of the human spirit and the subtler consciousness and larger experience which that progress brings.


Sri Aurobindo: We can see this general movement working itself out in different forms and on different lines through the souls of the nations and peoples, not so many after all, who have arrived at a strong self-expression through the things of the mind, through art and thought and poetry. These things of the mind do not indeed form or express the whole of the movement, even as they do not make up the whole of the life of the people; they represent its highest points, — or in the two or three peoples that have powerfully developed the spiritual force within, the highest with the exception of the spiritual summit. In these few we can best see the inner character and aim of any one line of the movement, — whether it be the line of poetry, the line of art or the line of religious and spiritual endeavour.  This general evolution has its own natural periods or ages;  but as with the stone, bronze and other ages discovered by the archaeologists, their time periods do not always correspond, are not the same for all the peoples which have evolved them.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover, they do not always follow each other in quite the same rigorous order; there are occasional reversals, extraordinary anticipations, violent returns; for in things psychological the Spirit in the world varies its movements more freely than in physical things. There, besides, the spirit of the race can anticipate the motives of a higher stratum of psychological development while yet it lives outwardly the general life of a lower stratum. So too when it has got well on to a higher level of development, it may go strongly back to a past and inferior motive and see how that works out when altered and uplifted or enlarged or even only subtilised by the motives and powers of the superior medium.  There is here, besides, a greater complexity of unseen or halfseen subconscient and superconscient tendencies and inﬂuences at work upon the comparatively small part of us which is conscious of what it is doing. And very often a nation in its labour of self-expression is both helped and limited by what has been left behind from the evolution of a past self which, being dead, yet lives.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus, the Indian spirit could seize powerfully the spiritual motive in an age in which the mass of the people lived a strenuous external life and was strongly outward-going and objective in its normal mentality. It succeeded in expressing the supreme spiritual experiences, so difﬁcult to put at all into speech, in forms and images proper to the simplest physical life and the most external customary mentality converting them into physical symbols of the supraphysical and then, by a rapid liberation, in its own proper voice, so producing the sacred poetry of the Veda and Upanishads. An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its blood could seize intellectually on the motives of catholic Christianity and give them a precise and supremely poetic expression in Dante, while all Germanised Europe was still stammering its primitive thoughts in the faltering infantile accents of romance verse or shadowing them out in Gothic stone, successful only in the most material form of the spiritual. In another direction, when it seized upon the romantic life-motive, the meeting-place of the Teuton and the Celt, we see it losing entirely the mystically sentimental Celtic element, Italianising it into the sensuousness of Tasso, and Italianising the rest into an intellectualised, a half imaginative, half satiric play with the superﬁcial motives of romance, — the inevitable turn of the Italianised Roman spirit.  On the other hand the English spirit, having got rid of the Latin culture and holding the Celtic mind for a long time at bay, exiled into the Welsh mountains or parked beyond the pale in Ireland, followed with remarkable ﬁdelity the natural curve and stages of the psychological evolution of poetry, taking several centuries to arrive at the intellectual motive and more to get at something like a spiritual turn still too intellectualised to ﬁnd any absolute intensity of the spirit, only the ﬁrst shimmerings of an outbreak of vision.


Sri Aurobindo: Generally, every nation or people has or develops a spirit in its being, a special soul-form of the human all-soul and a law of its nature which determines the lines and turns of its evolution. All that it takes from its environment it naturally attempts to assimilate to this spirit, transmute into stuff of this soul-form, make apt to and governable by this law of its nature.  All its self-expression is in conformity with them. And its poetry, art and thought are the expression of this self and of the greater possibilities of its self to which it moves. The individual poet and his poetry are part of its movement.


Sri Aurobindo: Not that they are limited by the present temperament and outward forms of the national mind; they may exceed them. The soul of the poet may be like a star and dwell apart; even, his work may seem not merely a variation from but a revolt against the limitations of the national mind. But still the roots of his personality are there in its spirit and even his variation and revolt are an attempt to bring out something that is latent and suppressed or at least something which is trying to surge up from the secret all-soul into the soul-form of the nation. Therefore to appreciate this national evolution of poetry and the relations of the poet and his work with it cannot but be fruitful, if we observe them from the point of view not so much of things external to poetry, but of its own spirit and characteristic forms and motives.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter VII  F ALL the modern European tongues the English language — I think this may be said without any serious doubt, — has produced, not always the greatest or most perfect, but at least the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius. The unfettered play of poetic energy and power has been here the most abundant and brought forth the most constantly brilliant fruits. And yet it is curious to note that English poetry and literature have been a far less effective force in the shaping of European culture than the poetry and literature of other tongues inferior actually in natural poetic and creative energy. At least they have had to wait till quite a recent date before they produced any potent effect and even then their direct inﬂuence was limited and not always durable.


Sri Aurobindo: A glance will show how considerable has been this limitation. The poetic mind of Greece and Rome has pervaded and largely shaped the whole artistic production of Europe; Italian poetry of the great age has thrown on some part of it at least a stamp only less profound; French prose and poetry — but the latter in a much less degree, — have helped more than any other literary inﬂuence to form the modern turn of the European mind and its mode of expression; the shortlived outbursts of creative power in the Spain of Calder´on and the Germany of Goethe exercised an immediate, a strong, though not an enduring inﬂuence; the newly created Russian literature has been, though more subtly, among the most intense of recent cultural forces. But if we leave aside Richardson and Scott and, recently, Dickens in ﬁction and in poetry the very considerable effects of the belated continental discovery of Shakespeare and the vehement and sudden wave of the Byronic inﬂuence, which did much to enforce the note of revolt and of a half sentimental, half sensual pessimism which is even now one of the strongest shades in the literary tone of modern Europe, — to the present day Shakespeare and Byron are the only two great names of English poetry which are generally familiar on the continent and have had a real vogue, — we ﬁnd the literature of the English tongue and especially its poetry ﬂowing in a large side-stream, always receiving much from the central body of European culture but returning upon it in comparison very little. This insularity, not of reception but of reaction, is a marked phenomenon and calls for explanation.  If we look for the causes, — for such a paucity of inﬂuence cannot, certainly, be put down to any perversity or obtuseness in the general mind of Europe, but must be due to some insufﬁciency or serious defect in the literature, — we shall ﬁnd, I think, if we look with other than English-trained eyes, that there is even in this rich and vigorous poetry abundant cause for the failure.


Sri Aurobindo: English poetry is powerful but it is imperfect, strong in spirit, but uncertain and tentative in form; it is extraordinarily stimulating, but not often quite satisfying. It aims high, but its success is not as great as its effort. Especially, its imaginative force exceeds its thought-power; it has indeed been hardly at all a really great instrument of poetic thought-vision; it has not dealt fruitfully with life. Its history has been more a succession of individual poetic achievements than a constant national tradition; in the mass it has been a series of poetical revolutions without any strong inner continuity. That is to say that it has had no great self-recognising idea or view of life expressive of the spiritual attitude of the nation or powerful to determine from an early time its own sufﬁcient artistic forms.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is precisely the possession of such a self-recognising spiritual attitude and the attainment of a satisfying artistic form for it which make the poetry of a nation a power in the world’s general culture. For that which recognises its self will most readily be recognised by others. And, again, that which attains the perfect form of its own innate character, will be most effective in forming others and leave its stamp in the building of the general mind of humanity.  One or two examples will be sufﬁcient to show the vast difference. No poetry has had so powerful an inﬂuence as Greek poetry; no poetry is, I think, within its own limits so perfect and satisfying.


Sri Aurobindo: The limits indeed are marked and even, judged by the undulating many-sidedness and wideness of the modern mind, narrow; but on its own lines this poetry works with a ﬂawless power and sufﬁciency. From beginning to end it dealt with life from one large view-point; it worked always from the inspired reason, used a luminous intellectual observation and harmonised all it did by the rule of an enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense; whatever changes overtook it, it never departed from this motive and method which are the very essence of the Greek spirit. And of this motive it was very conscious and by its clear recognition of it and ﬁdelity to it it was able to achieve an artistic beauty and sufﬁciency of expressive form which affect us like an easily accomplished miracle and which have been the admiration of after ages. Even the poetry of the Greek decadence preserved enough of this power to act as a shaping inﬂuence on Latin literature.  French poetry is much more limited than the Greek, much less powerful in inspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: For it deals with life from the standpoint not of the inspired reason, but of the clear-thinking intellect, not of the enlightened aesthetic sense, but of emotional sentiment. These are its two constant powers; the one gives it its brain-stuff, the other its poetical fervour and grace and charm and appeal. Throughout all the changes of the last century, in spite of apparent cultural revolutions, the French spirit has remained in its poetry faithful to these two motives which are of its very essence, and because of this ﬁdelity it has always or almost always found for its work a satisfying and characteristic form. To that combination of a clear and strong motive and a satisfying form it owes the immense inﬂuence it has exercised from time to time on other European literatures. The cultural power of the poetry of other tongues may be traced to similar causes.


Sri Aurobindo: But what has been the distinct spirit and distinguishing form of English poetry? Certainly, there is an English spirit which could not fail to be reﬂected in its poetry; but, not being clearly self-conscious, it is reﬂected obscurely and confusedly, and it has been at war within itself, followed a ﬂuctuation of different motives and never succeeded in bringing about between them a conciliation and fusion. Therefore its form has suffered; it has had indeed no native and characteristic principle of form which would be, through all changes, the outward reﬂection of a clear self-recognising spirit.  The poetry of a nation is only one side of its self-expression and its characteristics may be best understood if we look at it in relation to the whole mental and dynamic effort of the people.  If we so look at the general contribution of the English nation to human life and culture, the eye is arrested by some remarkable lacunae.


Sri Aurobindo: These are especially profound in the arts: English music is a zero, English sculpture an unﬁlled void, English architecture only a little better; English painting, illustrated by a few great names, has been neither a great artistic tradition nor a powerful cultural force and merits only a casual mention by the side of the rich achievement of Italy, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium.  When we come to the ﬁeld of thought we get a mixed impression like that of great mountain eminences towering out of a very low and ﬂat plain. We ﬁnd great individual philosophers, but no great philosophical tradition, two or three remarkable thinkers, but no high fame for thinking, a great multitude of the most famous names in science, but no national scientiﬁc culture. Still in these ﬁelds there has been remarkable accomplishment and the inﬂuence on European thought has been frequently considerable and sometimes capital. But when ﬁnally we turn to the business of practical life, there is an unqualiﬁed preeminence: in mechanical science and invention, in politics, in commerce and industry, in colonisation, travel, exploration, in the domination of earth and the exploitation of its riches England has been till late largely, sometimes entirely the world’s leader, the creator of its forms and the shaper of its motives.


Sri Aurobindo: This peculiar distribution of the national capacities ﬁnds its root in certain racial characteristics. We have ﬁrst the dominant Anglo-Saxon strain quickened, lightened and given force, power and initiative by the Scandinavian and Celtic elements. This mixture has made a national mind remarkably dynamic and practical, with all the Teutonic strength, patience, industry, but liberated from the Teutonic heaviness and crudity, yet retaining enough not to be too light of balance or too sensitive to the shocks of life; therefore, a nation easily ﬁrst in practical intelligence and practical dealing with the facts and difﬁculties of life. Not, be it noted, by any power of clear intellectual thought or by force of imagination or mental intuition, but rather by a strong vital instinct, a sort of tentative dynamic intuition. No spirituality, but a robust ethical turn; no innate power of the thought and the word, but a strong turn for action; no ﬁne play of emotion or quickness of sympathy, but an abundant energy and force of will.


Sri Aurobindo: This is one element of the national mind; the other is the submerged, half-insistent Celtic spirit, gifted with precisely the opposite qualities, inherent spirituality, the gift of the word, the rapid and brilliant imagination, the quick and luminous intelligence, the strong emotional force and sympathy, the natural love of the things of the mind and still more of those beyond the mind, left to it from an ancient mystic tradition and an old forgotten culture, forgotten in its mind, but still ﬂowing in its blood, still vibrant in its subtler nerve-channels. In life a subordinate element, modifying the cruder Anglo-Saxon characteristics, breaking across them or correcting their excess, sometimes reﬁning and toning, sometimes exaggerating the energy of the Norman and the Scandinavian strength and drive, we may perhaps see it emerging at its best, least hampered, least discouraged, in English poetry, coming there repeatedly to the surface and then working with a certain force and vehement but still embarrassed power, like an imprisoned spirit let out for a holiday but within not quite congenial bounds and with an unadaptable companion. From the ferment of these two elements, from the vigorous but chaotic motion created by their fusion and their clash, arise both the greatness and the limitations of English poetry.  Chapter VIII  HAT KIND or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind so constituted?


Sri Aurobindo: The Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circumstance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations have in this ﬁeld been conspicuous by their silence or the rarity of their speech. After the old rude epics, saga or Nibelungenlied, we have to wait till quite recent times for poetic utterance, nor, when it came, was it rich or abundant. In Germany, so rich in music, in philosophy, in science, the great poetic word has burst out rarely: one brief and strong morning time illumined by the calm, large and steady blaze of Goethe’s genius and the wandering ﬁre of Heine, afterwards a long unlighted stillness.  In the North here or there a solitary genius, Ibsen, Strindberg.


Sri Aurobindo: Holland, another Teutonic country which developed an art of a considerable but almost wholly objective power, is mute in poetry. It would almost seem that there is still something too thick and heavy in the strength and depth of the Teutonic composition for the ethereal light and ﬁre of the poetic word to make its way freely through the intellectual and vital envelope.  What has saved the English mind from a like taciturnity? It must have been the mixture of other racial strains, sublimating this strong but heavy material temperament with a quicker and more impetuous element; the submerged Celtic genius must have pushed the rest from behind, intervening as a decisive force to liberate and uplift the poetic spirit. And as a necessary aid we have the fortunate accident of the reshaping of a Teutonic tongue by French and Latinistic inﬂuences which gave it clearer and more ﬂowing forms and turned it into a ﬁne though difﬁcult linguistic material sufﬁciently malleable, sufﬁciently plastic for Poetry to produce in it both her larger and her subtler effects, but also sufﬁciently difﬁcult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies.


Sri Aurobindo: A stuff of speech which, without being harsh and inapt, does not tempt by too great a facility, but offers a certain resistance in the material, increases the strength of the artist by the measure of the difﬁculty conquered and can be thrown into shapes at once of beauty and of concentrated power. That is eminently the character of the English language.  At any rate we have this long continuity of poetic production. And once supposing a predominantly Anglo-Saxon or, more strictly an Anglo-Norman national mind moved to express itself in poetry, we should, ignoring for a moment the Celtic emergence, expect the groundwork to be a strong objective poetry, a powerful presentation of the forms of external life, a ready and energetic portrayal of action and character in action, the pleasant or the melancholy outsides of Nature, the robust play of the will and the passions, a vigorous ﬂow of a strenuous vital and physical verse creation. Even we might look for a good deal of deviation into themes and motives for which prose will always be the more adequate and characteristic instrument; we should not be surprised to meet here a self-styled Augustan age which makes these things the greater part of its realm and indulges with a self-satisﬁed contentment in a conﬁdent and obvious “criticism” of external life, preferring to more truly poetic forms and subjects the poetry of political and ecclesiastical controversy, didactic verse, satire.


Sri Aurobindo: There would be in this Anglo-Norman poetry a considerable power of narrative and a great energy in the drama of character and incident; but any profounder use of the narrative and dramatic forms we would not look for, — at most we might arrive in the end at some powerful dramatic analysis of character. The romantic element would be of an external Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses; there would be no touch of the delicate and beautiful imaginative, mystic and almost spiritual Celtic romanticism. We should have perhaps much poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate or vigorous, prompt and direct or robustly powerful, but not the ﬁner and subtler poetic thought which comes easily to the clear Latin intellect. Form too of a kind we might hope for, though we could not be quite sure of it, but at best bright and plain or strongly balanced and not those greater forms in which a high and deep creative thought presides or those more exquisite of which a delicate sense of beauty or a subtle poetic intuition is the magic builder. Both the greater and more profound depths and magnitudes and the subtler intensities of style and rhythm would be absent; but there would be a boldly forcible or a well-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic vigours of verse.


Sri Aurobindo: This side of the national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate ﬁnesse, the poetry of Browning. For this much we need not go outside the Anglo-Norman temperament.  That also would give, but subject to a potent alchemy of transformation, the basic form and substance of most English poetry. That alchemy we can fairly attribute to the submerged Celtic element which emerges, as time goes on, in bright upstreamings and sometimes in exceptional outbursts of power. It comes up in a blaze of colour, light, emotion and imaginative magic; in a passionate hungering for beauty in its more subtle and delicately sensuous forms, for the ideal which escapes deﬁnition and yet has to be seized and cast into interpretative lines; in a lyrical intoxication; in a charm of subtle romance.


Sri Aurobindo: It casts into the mould a higher urge of thought than the vital common sense of the Saxon can give, not the ﬁne, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of creative sight. It brings in a look upon Nature which pierces beyond her outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her which is most intimately spiritual. It awakens rare outbreaks of mysticism, a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos; it reﬁnes passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modiﬁes vital sensuousness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception. It carries with it a seeking for exquisite lyrical form, touches narrative poetry to ﬁner issues, throws its romantic beauty and force and ﬁre and its greater depth of passion across the drama and makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing. At one period it strives to rise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things.


Sri Aurobindo: In language and music it is always a quickening and reﬁning force; where it can do nothing more, it breathes a more intimate energy; where it gets its free characteristic movement, it creates that intensity of style and rhythm, that sheer force of imaginative vision and that peculiar unseizable beauty of turn which are the highest qualities of English poetry.  The varied commingling and separating of these two elements mark the whole later course of the literature and present as their effect a side of failure and defect and a side of achievement.  There are evidently two opposite powers at work in the same ﬁeld, often compelled to labour in the same mind at a common production; and when two such opposites can coalesce, seize each other’s motives and, fusing them, become one, the very greatest achievement becomes possible. For each ﬁlls in the other’s deﬁciencies; they light each other up with a new light and bring in a fresh revelation which neither by itself could have accomplished. The greatest things in English poetry have come where this fusion was effected in the creative mind and soul of the poet.


Sri Aurobindo: But that could not always be done and there results from the failure a frequent uncertainty of motive, a stumbling unsureness of touch, an oscillation, a habit of too often falling short of the mark. It does not prevent great triumphs of poetic power, but it does prevent a high equality and sustained perfection of self-expression and certainty of form. We must expect inequality in all human work, but not necessarily on this scale nor with so frequent and extensive a sinking below what should be the normal level.  To the same uncertainty may be attributed the rapid starts and turns of the course of English poetry, its want of conscious continuity, — for there is a secret, underground and inevitable continuity which we have to dig for and disengage. It takes a very different course from the external life of the nation which has always been faithful to its inner motive and spirit and escaped from the shattering and suddenly creative changes that have at once afﬂicted and quickened the life of other peoples.


Sri Aurobindo: The revolutions of the spirit of English poetry are extreme and violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can mark off ﬁrst the early English poetry which found its solitary greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an absolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and black Nirvana.  The magniﬁcent Elizabethan outburst has another motive, spirit and manner of expression which seem to have nothing to do with the past; it is a godhead self-born under the impulse of a new age and environment. As this fades away, we see standing high and apart the lonely ﬁgure of Milton with his strenuous effort at an intellectual poetry cast in the type of the ancients. The age which succeeds, hardly linked to it by a slender stream of Caroline lyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden.


Sri Aurobindo: Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the spirit. The Victorian period did not deny their inﬂuences; it felt them in the ﬁrst form of its work, and we might have expected it to have gone nobly forward and brought to some high or beautiful issue what had been only a great beginning that did not arrive at its full fruition. But it did nothing of the kind; it deviated into a new way which has nothing to do with the ﬁner spirit of the preceding poets. Descending it fell away into an intellectual, half-artistic, carefully but not ﬁnely or sovereignly wrought and mostly superﬁcial and external poetry. And afterwards we have this age which is still trying to ﬁnd itself, but in its most characteristic tendencies seems to start from a summary rejection of the Victorian forms and motives.


Sri Aurobindo: These reversals and revolutions of the spirit are not in themselves a defect or a disability; on the contrary, they open the door to large opportunities and unforeseen achievements. English poetical literature has been a series of bold experiments less shackled by the past than in countries which have a stronger sense of cultural tradition. Revolutions are distracting things, but they are often good for the human soul; for they bring a rapid unrolling of new horizons.  Here comes in the side of success and greatness in this poetry.  There is a force which overrides its defects and compensates richly for its limitations; its lapses and failures are the price it pays for its gains.


Sri Aurobindo: For nowhere else has individual genius found so free a ﬁeld; nowhere has it been able to work so directly out of itself and follow so boldly its own line of poetic adventure. Form is a great power, but sureness of form is not everything. A strong tradition of form gives a ﬁrm ground upon which genius can work in safety, protected from its own wanderings; but it limits and stands in the way of daring individual adventure. The spirit of adventure, if its path is strewn with accidents, stumblings or fatal casualties, brings, when it does succeed, new revelations which are worth all the price paid for them. English poetry is full of such new revelations.


Sri Aurobindo: Its richness, its constant freshness, its lavish expenditure of genius exulting in chainless freedom, delivered from all meticulous caution, its ﬁre and penetrating force of imagination, its lambent energy of poetic speech, its constant self-liberation into intensest beauty of self-expression are the rewards of its courage and its liberty. These things are of the greatest value in poetry. They lead besides to possibilities which are of the highest importance to the poetry of the future.  We may brieﬂy anticipate and indicate in what manner. We have to accept one constant tendency of the spirit of English poetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, feeling and passion and to give that its full force and make of it the basis and the source and, not only the point of reference, but the utility of all else.


Sri Aurobindo: A strong hold upon this life, the earth-life, is the characteristic of the English mind, and it is natural that it should take possession of its poetry.  The pure Celtic genius leans towards the opposite extreme: it seems to care little for the earth-life for its own sake and has little hold on it or only a light and ethereal hold; it accepts it as a starting-point for the expression of other-life, but is attracted by all that is hidden and secret. The Latin mind insists on the presentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which life is the visible expression, — not the remoter, the spiritual or soul-truths, but those which present themselves to the clarities of the intelligence.  But the English mind looks at life and loves it for its own sake, in all its externalities, its play of outer individualities, its immediate subjective idiosyncrasies. Even when it is strongly attracted by other motives, the intellectual, the aesthetic or the spiritual, it seldom follows these with a completely disinterested ﬁdelity, but comes back with them on the external life and tries to subject them to its mould and use them for its purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: This turn is not universal, — Blake escapes from it; nor is it the single dominant power, — Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have their hearts elsewhere: but it is a constant power; it attracts even the poets who have not a real genius for it and vitiates their work by the immixture of an alien motive.  This objective and external turn might be strong enough in some other arts, — ﬁction, for instance, or painting or sculpture, — to create a clear national tradition and principle of form, but not easily in poetry. For here the mere representation of life cannot be enough, however vivid or however strongly subjected to the law of poetic beauty it may be. Poetry must strive at least towards a presentation from within and not at simple artistic reproduction; and the principle of presentation must be something more than that of the eye on the visible object. It is by a process from within, a passing of all one meets, thinks or feels through some kind of intimately subjective vision that life is turned into poetry.


Sri Aurobindo: If this subjective medium is the inspired reason or the intuitive mind, the external presentation of life gives place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge. But in English poetry the attempt is to be or at least to appear true to the actual lines of life, to hold up a mirror to Nature. It is the mirror then which has to do the poetising of life; the vital, the imaginative, the emotional temperament of the poet is the reﬂecting medium and it has to supply unaided the creative and poetical element.  We have then a faithfully unfaithful reﬂection which always amounts to a transformation, because the temperament of the poet lends to life and Nature its own hues, its own lines, its own magnitudes. But the illusion of external reality, of an “imitation” of Nature is created, — the illusion which has been for so long a ﬁrst canon of Western artistic conceptions, — and


Sri Aurobindo: the English mind which carries this tendency to an extreme, feels then that it is building upon the safe foundation of the external and the real; it is satisﬁed of the earth even when it is singing in the heavens.  But this sole reliance on the temperament of the poet has certain strong results. It gives an immense importance to individuality, much greater than that which it must always have in poetical creation: the transformation of life and Nature in the individuality becomes almost the whole secret of this poetry.  Therefore English poetry is much more powerfully and consciously personal and individual than that of any other language; it aims much less directly at the impersonal and universal. This individual subjective element creates enormous differences between the work of poets of the same age; they cannot escape from the common tendencies, but give to them a quite independent turn and expression and subordinate them to the assertion of the individuality; in other literatures, until recently, the reverse has oftener happened.


Sri Aurobindo: Besides, the higher value given to the intensity of the imaginative, vital or emotional response favours and is perhaps a ﬁrst cause of that greater intensity of speech and immediate vision which is the strength of English poetry.  For since the heightening cannot come mainly from the power and elevation of the medium through which life is seen, as in Greek and ancient Indian poetry, it has to come almost entirely from the individual response in the poet, his force of personal utterance, his intensity of personal vision.  Three general characteristics emerge. The ﬁrst is a constant reference and return of the higher poetical motives to the forms of external life, as if the enriching of that life were its principal artistic aim. The second is a great force of subjective individuality and personal temperament as a leading power of poetic creation.


Sri Aurobindo: The third is a great intensity of speech and ordinarily of a certain kind of direct vision. But in the world’s literature generally these are the tendencies that have been on the increase and two of them at least are likely to be persistent. There is everywhere a considerable stressing of the individual subjective element, a drift towards making the most of the poet’s personality, an aim at a more vivid response and the lending of new powers of colour and line from within to the vision of life and Nature, a search for new intensities of word and rhythm which will translate into speech a deeper insight. In following out the possible lines of the future the defect of the English mind is its inability to follow the higher motives disinterestedly to their deepest and largest creative results, but this is being remedied by new inﬂuences. The entrance of the pure Celtic temperament into English poetry through the Irish revival is likely to do much; the contribution of the Indian mind in work like Tagore’s may act in the same direction.


Sri Aurobindo: If this change is effected, the natural powers of the English spirit will be of the highest value to the future poetry. For that poetry is likely to move to the impersonal and universal, not through the toning down of personality and individuality, but by their heightening to a point where they are liberated into the impersonal and universal expression. Subjectivity is likely to be its greater power, the growth to the universal subjective enriched by all the forces of the personal soul-experience. The high intensity of speech which English poetry has brought to bear upon all its material, its power of giving the fullest and richest value to the word and the image, is needed for the expression of the values of the spiritual, which will be one of the aims of a supreme intuitive utterance. If the pursuit of the higher godheads into their own sphere will be one of its endeavours, their return upon the earth-life to transform our vision of it will be its other side.


Sri Aurobindo: If certain initial movements we can even now see in English poetry outline and emphasise themselves in the future, this long stream of strong creation and utterance may arrive at a point where it will discover a supreme utility for all its past powers. It may go deeper within itself and ﬁnd and live in the greater spirit which has till now only occasionally broken into its full native utterance. Arriving at a more comprehensive spiritual motive it may successfully interweave into it the conﬂicting lines of its past forces. It may achieve clear and powerful forms of a new intuitive utterance in which the Anglo-Celtic spirit will ﬁnd its highest harmonised and perfect self-expression. The Elizabethan poet wrote in the spacious days of its ﬁrst birth into greatness, It has since brought in many powers, commanded many spirits; but it may be that the richest powers, the highest and greatest spirit yet remain to be found, brought in, commanded, put into the service of the greatest work and achievement of which our evolving humanity is capable.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter IX  HE SPIRIT and temper that have stood behind the creative force and come to the front in a literature are the one essential thing that we must discern, for it is these that predestine the course the poetry of a people will take and the turn it gives to its forms. For if the ﬁeld which poetry covers is common ground and its large general lines the same everywhere, yet each nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative quality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its work. The genius of English poetry was evidently predestined by the complexity of its spirit and its union of opposite powers to an adventurous consecutive seeking over the whole ﬁeld, and this is in fact the ﬁrst character of it that strikes the eye, a series of bold and powerful creative adventures, each quite different in spirit from its predecessor. But in its ﬁrst natural potentiality certain pronounced limitations point to a facile and vigorous success in a forcefully accurate or imaginative presentation of life and a more difﬁcult and incomplete success in the intellectual or spiritual interpretation of life; most difﬁcult for it would be a direct presentation of the things beyond, a concrete image of mystic realities, a poetic approach to the higher truths of the spirit.