Classical and Romantic

3

Romanticism and Classicism - the two phases of Roman-ticism - the psychological plane of the first phase: the Life-force of the Renaissance

When we turn to Romanticism we need to make two capital distinctions. We have not only to mark Romanticism off from Classicism. We have also to mark off two Romanticisms one from the other - and in a sense in which we do not mark off the various phases of the Classical. Differentiating Romanticism from Classicism, R. A. Scott-James¹ labels as Classical the virtues and defects which go with the notions of fitness, propriety, measure, restraint, conservatism, authority, calm, experience, comeliness and in contrast he labels as Romantic those which are suggested by excitement, energy, restlessness, spirituality, curiosity, troublousness, progress, liberty, experi-ment, provocativeness. If Scott-James is accepted superficially, Classicism would seem to be a pretty tame affair and Romanticism rather hectic, even the spirituality attributed to it appearing dubious by being sandwiched between restlessness and curiosity. No doubt, the qualities mentioned are there, but in isolation from several others they look somewhat hap-hazard.

Thus it is a mistake to confine energy to Romanticism. If Homer and Aeschylus, Lucretius and Milton are not energetic, then one does not know what energy can mean. Only, theirs is an energy more contained, more organised than in the Roman-tics. Again, to give spirituality to Romanticism without grant-ing anything analogous to Classicism is to forget what a living sense of powers beyond the human is at work in the Greek poets as well as in Dante and Milton: Classicism is hardly a secular poetry in the ordinary sense of secularity. Also, we must guard against the misconception that a poet writing with restraint and calm and comeliness is debarred from being spiritual. Spirituality is possible to all temperaments and in all

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manners. Further, Romanticism cannot be spiritual by simply cultivating the excitement and liberty which are supposed to be absent from Classicism. If it becomes spiritual it is precisely by ceasing to be nerve-ridden or merely defiant of authority and by drawing upon possibilities of a subtle inner force and a subtle inner freedom. All we can say is that Classicism, as we historically know it, has been religious rather than spiritual because of the particular plane of consciousness within which it has functioned.

Historically, Classicism may be fully defined by three categories together. In manner of articulation, it is unorna-mented, measured, finished, attentive to the total effect. In turn of mind, it is systematic, lucid, beautifully general, broadly keen - its spirit is, as Sri Aurobindo² says, "to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty". In range of vision, it is mostly restricted to the intellect's power of seeing and comprehend- ing: what is beyond the intellect it does not intimately or directly touch: it goes by a religious thought and feeling rather than a spiritual perception close to the supra-intellectual reality. In that sense it is not "visionary". But, because it is not thus "visionary", it does not work by a process of the intellect: as Sri Aurobindo³ reminds us, it works just as much as Romanticism by "a large vision and inspiration", else it could be no more than pseudo-Classical, mere aestheticised intellec- tuality and not creative and interpretative art. On the other hand, all Romanticism is not visionary in the spiritual connotation. What can be called visionary in it is its soaring off easily into fantasy and wonder: its attraction towards the fantastic and the wondrous, however, keeps it more free than Classicism to exceed the limits of outer reality and develop an acuter inner sight and tend towards spiritual visionariness. Its power to do . this comes from its source's lying not in the creative Intel- ligence that is Classicism's plane or at least not in that part of this Intelligence where Classicism sees and comprehends. And the range of vision it enjoys is articulated in a manner that is coloured, expansive, wilful, enamoured of parts and particu-

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lars. Its turn of mind is saltatory and insatiate, strangely sug-gestive, passionately gripping, breaking onward from point after intensely seized point - its spirit is, as Sri Aurobindo⁴ declares, "to bring out what is striking and individual, and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms".

Apropos of setting forth the universal or throwing into relief the striking and individual, Sri Aurobindo,⁵ with his wonted integrality of outlook, continues: "In truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well as a realistic element, - understanding realism in the sense of the prominent bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted romanticism of the 'real' which brings into exaggerated prominence the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life. The type of art to which a great creative work belongs is determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the others into subordination to its reigning spirit." The promi-nence, we may add, is itself determined by the plane of consciousness from which a poet habitually writes, and the plane keeps him Classical or Romantic in essence despite the opposite strain which to some degree is always there because of every human being's multi-planed existence.

So much for marking off Classicism and Romanticism from each other. What of the two Romanticisms we have mentioned? No doubt, they are bound to have more themes and moods in common than Classicism shares with either. How- ever, we must not be careless of a basic dissimilarity between the two manifestations of the Romantic - basic because, while the several manifestations of the Classical differ within the same plane, the early Romanticism belongs to a plane quite different from that of the later.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the historical mainspring of the early Romanticism is, paradoxically, the event known as "the Classical Renaissance": This phrase has led astray many a

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literary generalisation. It got coined because the event to which it applies occurred when the scholars of Classicism whose centre was Constantinople were scattered all over Europe with their precious manuscripts after the fall of that city to the Turks in 1453 and, by giving the right direction, completed a movement which had already started sporadically and on a small scale before them. These scholars and their books are said to have brought about a rebirth of the Graeco-Roman spirit: hence the noun "Renaissance" and the adjective "Classical". There is truth in both adjective and noun, but we should beware of taking them too naively. Lucas appears not to see them in the correct light. And he is partly misguided because, after defining Romanticism as fantasies and feelings that arise from dream-levels of the subconscious and break through the control of the reason, either healthily or morbidly, he applies even this somewhat narrow definition in a rather restricted way.

He⁶ looks upon the Middle Ages as the Golden Age of Romanticism and there the goldenest height is for him the romance-cum-fantasy of Aucassin and Nicolette with its dei- fication of love at once intensely, tenderly, unsophisticatedly. A testament of Romanticism to Lucas is also Malory's Morte d'Arthur where the essence of the tradition of Chivalry is distilled, though with less lovely art. The Renaissance he cannot consider Romantic because it "tended to look scorn on the rags of medieval romance". He sees in it merely a few attempts here and there to make a compromise between the "old Romance" and the "new Classics".⁷ But, he⁸ remarks, "these Renaissance attempts show the self-consciousness thatbesets all literary revivals" and "any self-conscious bookish- ness proves particularly deadly" when the half-conscious dream-levels have to find utterance. "In Tasso, or Spenser, or . Sidney's Arcadia there is a sickly taint of the factitious, of pastiche.... Even Ariosto, who shields himself behind a mocker's grin, with his interminable necromancers and magic steeds gives too much the impression of a grown man in a green garden playing at bears. And even in Shakespeare's

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Tempest Prospero's wand, I feel, has already cracked a little before he flings it from him; his magic volume grown a little dog-eared before he closes it for ever. Prospero is too close a cousin to Polonius, without being aware of the relationship; and his daughter remains a pretty poppet, beginning to fade into a Spenserian decline."⁹

We need not deny Romanticism to the Middle Ages. As Lucas¹⁰ period. It is in the eighth century that there grew up, beside official Latin which was called lingua Latina, a vernacular known as lingua Romanica. From its adverb Romanice comes the noun "Romance", applied first to old French (romanz), then to Provencal (romanco) and Spanish (romance), later still to the other Latin tongues. The word, from meaning the French vernacular, came to denote also the fictitious stories in verse or, afterwards, in prose that used to get composed in that vernacular. From denoting "fiction" it came to signify anyfantastic statement. In the seventeenth century it developed the further suggestion of "strange and dreamlike". In the eighteenth it attached itself, as Lucas remarks, "to Gothic ruins, wild landscapes, and other delightful mixtures of terror and sublimity, such as banditti". Its literary sense, as opposed to "Classical", first appeared in T. Wharton (1781-82), still attached to the Gothic but, as Lucas does not seem to remem-ber, also related to notions like "rough", "giant", "yore", "sombrous imagery", "magic", "visionary rapture".* In 1801 the German philosopher of art, Schlegel, argued that it could apropriately be applied to work of mediaeval inspiration .by contrast to what is "Classical", in the same way as "Romance", the language evolved by the barbarian invaders, was opposed to the Classical Latin of the Empire. But if we take the group of poets at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, who belong to what is called "the Romantic Revival", not only is simple mediaevalism exceeded but a host of new associations typical of modernism arose, and there

* See T. Wharton's poem on his conversion to "the classic page" caused by Reynolds' Window for New College Chapel.

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is too some affinity of interests and seekings with the Elizabethans, reminding us of J. Warten's reference to the Romantic as far back as 1753 in The Adventurer (No. 93): "Shakespeare has carried the romantic, the wonderful, the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance."*

In all this we are pretty distant from Aucassin et Nicolette and other fictions of the Middle Ages. But, of course, they can be granted Romanticism. There is the play in them of the fabulous, the fantastic, the dreamily amorous that Lucas considers the "whole of Romanticism and that is no doubt Romantic though surely not all that the Romantic may connote. How- ever, even where it or anything else we deem Romanticism does occur we may say it becomes characteristically Romantic not unless it is projected from another plane than the creative Intelligence of Classicism or at least another region of the planeon which Classicism functions. That is why the Romantic elements we may discern in the poetry of ancient Greece and Italy are always faint and elusive. That is also why the fictions of the Middle Ages are Romantic. But these fictions are hardly typical of that period: they are a side-product and there is a certain childlike prattle in them showing that the Romantic has not yet come into its own. Because they are such, Lucas is led to put them more or less on a par with the Romanticism he traces in Graeco-Roman literature: what he labels as an affinity between the two manifestations of the Romantic - "the healthy

* For the reader's interest the origin of the word "Classical" may be mentioned. Lucas tells us: "In Latin classis (perhaps from the same root as 'call') meant originally a 'host', military as well as naval. Good King Tullius divided his citizens into five grades, according to the arms they could afford. The richest, providing the cavalry and the heavy-armed phalanx (classis), were called classici ; the rest were infra classem . But classicus is not transferred metaphorically to writers until, seven centuries later, under the Empire, Aulus Gellius contrasts classicus scriptor with proletarius - 'a first-class, standard writer' with 'one of the rabble'. At the Renaissance the fact that the 'standard' writers of Greece and Rome were read ^. in class at school seems to have helped by confusion to produce that other sense of 'classic', as applied to any Greek or Roman writer, whether first-class or not. Thus 'classical', meaning 'standard', dates in the Oxford Dictionary, from 1599 (' Classicall and Canonicall'); meaning 'Greek or Latin', from 1607 ('Classical Authors'). Thence the epithet adapted itself to anything supposed to conform to the standards of classical antiquity." (Op. cit., p. 19)

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day-dreaming of a young imagination"^11- with health or disease but simply with the absence, in two different ways, of the full force of Romanticism. The full force can arise only when a plane, or a portion of a plane, that is not the Classical creative Intelligence asserts itself as the basic determinant of existence and expression. To judge whether the Renaissance can be called Romantic and, if it can, what the total content of its Romanticism is, we must ask whether it was governed by the Classical mind and, if not, what did govern it.

"Self-conscious bookishness" there certainly is in this period, but is it really the dominant feature? Again, is the bookishness such that it would inevitably interfere with the true nature of fantasy and feeling and of whatever else may be Romantic? The talk about scholars from the capital of the Greek Empire and about the study of the ancient Classics is apt to incline one to think of intellectuality and pedantry inhibiting the play of the spontaneous being. But the truth is thatthe Renaissance in full flush, though its creative enthusiasm was fired by Antiquity with example on glowing example of great literature such as the Middle Ages rarely provided, was not notable for its intellectuality - at least for a revival of the Graeco-Roman intellect.

What the return of Classical literature fundamentally did is stated with accuracy by Sri Aurobindo.¹² different countries, but one thing above all everywhere, the discovery of beauty and joy in every energy of life. The Middle Ages had lived strongly and with a sort of deep and sombre force, but, as it were, always under the shadow of death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire through suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the cross and on the other by the sword. and loves it in excess; it is carried away by the beauty of the body and the senses and the intellect, the beauty of sensation and action and speech and thought, - of thought hardly at all

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for its own sake, but thought as a power of life. It is Hellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and things human, nihil humani a me alienum puto ,* but at first a barbarised Hellenism, unbridled and extravagant, riotous in its vitalistic energy, too much overjoyed for restraint and measure."

The Renaissance is a revolt against the Middle Ages by way of explosion of the Life-force, an explosion effected by a revival of certain qualities prevalent in Classical Antiquity. The free-dom of thought and feeling, the aesthetic response to the loveliness of the natural world and to the human body's vibrant vigour, the large interest in individual self-expression and in earthly concerns - it is these features of ancient Greek culture that proved potent to release the suppressed sensuous vitality of Europe. The mind of the time was stirred also in its own proper nature by the mind of Hellas, but the Renaissance was so drunk with life, with the glory of the senses and emotions and passions expanding themselves in an opulent freedom, that it could not easily recover the lucid orderly intellect of the Classics. No doubt, the awakening of the mind of the time showed itself in the development of physical science with its stress on the study of Earth as against the stress on the contemplation of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory that had characterised the mind of the Middle Ages. But the new science itself was at the beginning borne along on a gust of the Life-force more than on a zest of the pure intellect. It was part of the same overbrimming and wide-faring vitalistic energy that inaugurated the sailing of the seas and the sweeping over unknown lands. Copernicus who charted the skies in a novel way was but another avatar of the same exploratory vitality that drove Columbus across the Atlantic and Magellan around the globe. The Life-force bursting out in all directions, towards the "Crystalline Sphere" above as over the orbis terrarum, .impelled the scientific mind. This mind as a power on its own, together with other intellectual powers that are sometimes associated with it but often separated from it, had already had

* Nothing human is alien to me.

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its initiation in Europe in the figure of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was not only an artist but a supreme intellectual and he stands at the head of the Renaissance for the rebirth of the Graeco-Roman civilisation in its intellectual aspects: he sum-marised the seeds of a new European intellectuality taking up the work of that civilisation in new life-moulds. But the vitalistic energy set free from the grip of the Middle Ages assumed the lead in the Renaissance and brought it to its full flush, and it was some time before the new intellectuality that had found its initial growth in Leonardo started to emerge. It was fostered by Francis Bacon, yet it may be said to have emerged in a recognisable form only with the advent of Galileo and to have reached a world stature, so to speak, not prior to Newton. Hand in hand with its development went the rise of a new Classicism - the Miltonic, the French and the pseudo-Augustan. And by the time this happened the tide of the Renaissance had started ebbing.

As part of the Renaissance's elan of the Life-force we have the literature of the first Romanticism and this literature is at its most expressive in Elizabethan poetry, both more powerful and more disorderly than the corresponding poetry in other countries. Sri Aurobindo¹³ speaks of the poetry of the life-spirit as "the pure and genuine romanticism". The poetry of the subtle-physical plane or of the creative Intelligence may contain a Romantic strain and, of course, all poetry of the life-motive (to quote another term of Sri Aurobindo's) is not necessarily Romantic any more than all poetic production from the plane of the Intelligence is bound to be Classical: still the real Romanticism springs from vital passion and power, the joy and pain, wonder and terror and beauty of the life-soul feeling, thinking, imagining, and turning everything into the values proper to its own drive of desire. The poetic work done in the beginning of the nineteenth century and usually called Romantic is entitled to that name because of complex factors at play which are lacking in the creations of the subtle-physical or of the Classically mental plane and Sri Aurobindo does refer to it as "Romanticism of the modern type";¹⁴ yet for him the speci-

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fically Romantic remains a certain sight and sensibility and speech of the vital energy such as we find amongst the Elizabethans.

Even Tasso and Ariosto whom Lucas criticises are not really Classical: they are Romantic but quasi-Romantic and open to criticism because something in the Italian spirit mingling with the Graeco-Roman cannot altogether express the soul of Romanticism as it can the soul of Classicism. Sri Aurobindo¹⁵ has well said: " An Italy with the Graeco-Roman past in its blood could seize intellectually on the motives of Catholic Christianity and give them a clear and supreme expression in Dante, while all Germanised Europe had only been stam- mering 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 sensuous-ness 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."

Wherever this spirit would be at work in the Renaissance literature of England we should have in Romanticism what Lucas terms "the taint of the factitious, of pastiche". But the English spirit is a mixture of racial strains opening it to possibilities of a plenary Romanticism and the censure di- rected against Tasso or Ariosto would hardly apply to Spen-ser's poetry on the whole or to Shakespeare's Tempest or any other play. The Teuton and the Celt whose meeting-place, according to Sri Aurobindo, is Romanticism are part and parcel of the rich composite English spirit in which, we may add with Sri Aurobindo, French and Latinistic influences have also had a say, reshaping a Teutonic Anglo-Saxon tongue and giving it " clearer and more flowing forms" and turning it " into a fine though difficult linguistic material sufficiently malle-able, sufficiently plastic for Poetry to produce her larger and

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finer effects, sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies".¹⁶ The Teuton element makes for that "con-stant tendency of the spirit of English poetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, of feeling and passion, to give that its full force and to make it the basis and the source and, not only the point of reference, but the utility of all else" .¹⁷ This element can, of course, find articulation on various planes, colouring each with its own genius. On the subtle-physical, it would create a poetry teeming with an externality of observation, like Chau-cer's. On the mental, its creation, unlike what was done through Milton in the main, would not be "a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life, things and ideas"¹⁸ and a replacing of the external presentation of life by "an interpreta-tion, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge". From the Teutonic mind we would have "poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly power-ful".¹⁹ Examples can be drawn from the work of Dryden and Pope, Cowper and Scott and Browning. On the vital plane the Teutonic element would be far more at home poetically than the Latin, for nervous vehemence and energy of character and rush of incident are natural to its objective and dynamic bent; but the Romanticism it would achieve would be of an external kind, "sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses".²⁰ Such Romanticism is "the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama".²¹ What prepares that drama for supreme poetic moments is the opposite element, submerged, half-insistent, in the English spirit: the Celtic.

The pure Celtic genius "seems to care little for the earth-life for its own sake, has little hold on it or only a light and ethereal hold, accepts it as a starting-point for the expression of other-life, is attracted by all that is hidden and secret".²² While the Teutonic genius goes by a strong vital instinct rather than by clear intellectual thought or force of imagination or intellectual intuition, the Celtic has a quick and luminous intelligence, a

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rapid and brilliant imagination, and also a "natural love of the things of the mind... left to it from an old forgotten culture in its blood which contained an ancient mystical tradition".²³Here is "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 poetical sight".²⁴ When in English poetry the Celtic genius emerges from under the weight of its Teutonic companion and acts with it from the plane of the Life-force it casts into Teutonic Romanticism its own Romanticism of the delicate and beautiful, the imagina-tive and spiritual. "It awakens... 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 sensuous-ness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception" and, throwing its force and fire and greater depth of passion across the drama, "makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing".²⁵ The nature of the plane through which it acts limits its inherent mysticism - and especially the Teutonic drive with which it coalesces in the Elizabethan drama makes it function with a somewhat embarrassed power, but the authen-tic Romanticism which springs to birth from that plane is by its help rendered again and again a plenary blaze.

No other critic has been so acute as Sri Aurobindo in analyses and distinctions. But several have recognised Eliza-bethan poetry as Romantic. Thus Scott-James²⁶ speaks of Ben Jonson resisting the "unruly Romanticism of his time" be-cause, though he appreciated the fire that burned in his contemporaries, he saw that the very greatness of what Scott-James calls the "romantic splendour" of the age had its grave dangers. It is surprising that Lucas should fail to note that, whatever the tinge of "bookishness" in certain sections of Renaissance literature, the release of those parts of human psychology which, according to him, the Classical writer mostly keeps under control or at least prevents with the help of

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the "super-ego" and the "reality-principle" from wholly rushing out in their own rights is never so expressive as in Elizabethan poetry which not only gives English speech a new extraordinary intensity but is also full of the disorder and excess of new formation. Sri Aurobindo²⁷ aptly describes it: "It springs up in a chaos of power and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by a stress within it for which there is no clear guiding knowledge except such as the instinctive genius of the age and the individual can give. It is constantly shot through with brilliant threads of intellectual energy, but is not at all intellectual in its innate spirit and dominant character. It is too vital for that, too much moved and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose of rein; its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehe-ment and inordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its notes, revelling in image and phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent colours, of many-hued fire, of threads of golden and silver light."

If Elizabethan poetry is not a voice strongly charged with -among other and greater things beyond it -what Lucas, following Freud, terms the "Id", the desire-soul in us, and considers the essence of the Romantic, it is difficult to say what else can be so regarded. Occasionally he lets himself refer to Elizabethan poetry as Romantic, as when he writes about Schiller adapting in Classical mood "the Romantic pages of Macbeth^"28 or when he tells us that the Romantic. pursues violent feelings and that, "like an Elizabethan dramatist, he may find them in the crudities of reality as well as in .the fantasies of dreams" and that "dreams themselves can be at times only too realistic" .²⁹ He has also described Aeschylus's imagination as Romantic because it "ranges like Marlowe's among the echoing names of far countries of the world".³⁰ Then he has remarked apropos of Euripides's Andromeda: "We who possess Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra cannot share the rage of Aristophanes at this first staging of romantic passion."³¹ Finally, he has the observation: "There is much, then, that is 'romantic' in classical Greek literature; yet it would

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be easy to exaggerate. Homer is never unreal as Spenser is; Aeschylus never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe."³² It is evident that Lucas is not unaware of Roman-ticism in Elizabethan poetry. Still, no whole-hearted and clear-eyed acknowledgment is forthcoming. Partial glows of the Romantic seem to be all he is prepared to grant, for his idea is that the Renaissance killed the Middle Ages and, in doing so, killed the truly Romantic until the latter was revived in a less healthy form several centuries after. Adventitious elements appear to have biased Lucas's judgment in relation to the poetry of the Elizabethans.

Even where he grants, as with Shakespeare, some play of the truly Romantic he yet makes reservations and talks of at most a successful compromise between Romanticism and Classicism. Shakespeare's allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, his adoption of Graeco-Roman themes in a few plays, his frequent laying of Plutarch's Lives under tax are only a thin veneer of Classicism over his utterly non-Classical verse: they are the tinges provided by the Renaissance's exultant interest in the literature of Greece and Rome, but the exultancy is predominantly Romantic at first and the Shakespearean poetry tinged by it is entirely so. We may deem Shakespearean Romanticism "self-conscious" if we like; it is not simple spontaneity; yet extreme spontaneity cannot be denied to it and the "self" of which it is "conscious" is basically the life-soul, the soul which is much more than the Freudian "Id" or "Libido" but which more than anything else in our psycho-logical being has to do with impulse and passion.

Indeed, Shakespeare is the greatest Romantic poet in the world or, to be more precise, the greatest poet of Romantic drama. The only figure that approaches him in the same genre in English literature is his own contemporary Marlowe. Amidst the extremely rich but often patchy and disorderly poetry of the Elizabethan period, Marlowe, though mostly wanting in power of creating characters or of building up their interaction into a convincing whole, stands out by "his highly coloured and strongly cut style and rhythm"³³ as well as by

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detached scenes and passages and culminating moments of dramatic force in which his true genius which is lyrical and epic breaks through the form of drama. His genius, however, for all its megalomania is a narrow intensity. Only in Shakespeare does the poetry of the age display a consummate versatility and attain its perfect rondure.

References

1.The Making of Literature (London), 1946, p. 167.

2.The Human Cycle (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry ), 1949, p. 171.

3.Ibid, p. 172.

4.Ibid., p. 171.

5.Ibid., pp. 171-172.

6.Lucas, op. cit., p. 135; pp. 73-84.

7.Ibid, p. 85.

8.Ibid.

9.Ibid., pp. 85-86.

10.Ibid, pp. 16-17.

11.Ibid, p. 134.

12.The Future Poetry, p. 63.

13.Ibid., p. 192.

14.Ibid., p. 92.

15.Ibid., p. 42.

16.Ibid., p. 49.

17.Ibid., p. 54.

18.Ibid., p. 59.

19.Ibid., p. 50.

20.Ibid.

21.Ibid., p. 51.

22.Ibid., p. 54.

23.Ibid., p. 48.

24.Ibid., p. 51.

25.Ibid.

26.Scott-James, op. cit., pp. 120, 121.

27.The Future Poetry, p. 64.

28.Lucas, op. cit., p. 13.

29.Ibid., p. 15.

30.Ibid., p. 60.

31.Ibid., p. 62.

32.Ibid., p. 65.

33.The Future Poetry, p. 70.

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