Arnold, Matthew : (1822-88), English poet, critic who tackled literature, theology, history, art, science, & politics.
... Nights Entertainments, The, 129, 177 Archer, William, 490,49 1ff Archimedes, 416 Areopagitica, 200 Argov, Daniel, 228fn Arjava (J. A. Chadwick), 514, 575ff, 594, 639 Arnold, Matthew, 164, 177, 615 Arya, 398ff, 402ff, 436, 455, 459, 463,464, 470, 496, 514, 521, 525, 534ff, 573, 610 Ashram, Sri Aurobindo, concept of ashram, 571ff; ashrams old and new, 571-2; gurukulavasa ...
... 110 Ahura Mazda, 46 Alexander, 56-7 Allies, the, 66 America, 133,214,421 Aniruddha, 44, 207-8 Apollo, 47 Ardhanarishwara, 84 Arjuna,9, 14,76-8,93, 112n., 116, 161 Arnold, Matthew, 92, 119 Aryaman, 208 Asia, 272 Asura, 19,45-6,80,98, 162,208-9,226, 253, 334, 349, 379 Axis Powers, the, 66 BABYLON, 199 Bach, 393,424,427 Ba1arama, 44, 207-8 Bankim (Chandra ...
... Angst, 377 Anselm, 150 Apollo, 177,220 Aquinas, Thomas, 150 Aristotle, 128, 182,219,322 Arjuna, 60, 188-9,384-5, 391 Arminius, 88 Arnold, Matthew, 68, 192, 240, 272 Artemis, 195 Asia, 16, 48, 70, 101, 148, 152-3, 240, 245 Asoka,93,195 Asura, 18, 69-74, 186, 201, 234, 267, 272, 291, 376, 382-3, 386 ...
... 267 53,318,319,458 Aiyangar, Narayan 279 Alexander, Samuel 436 Anouilh, Jean 267 Ariosto31,383 Arnold, Sir Edwin 335 Arnold, Matthew 292,311,312,412 Arya 14 , 15,31,328,359,416 Atkinson,WilliamC.382 Aurobindo, Sri Tagore on, 3-5; Paul Richard on, 5; life-sketch, 6-16; Sri Aurobindo's ...
... America, 198,284 Ananda, 133 Andamans, 103 Ansars, 267 Antigone, 187, 273 -Aphrodite, 182 Apollo, 180, 182 Aragon, 88 Aristotle, 89, 248 Arjuna, 254 Arnold, Matthew, 71, 189,234 -Essays in Criticism, 234n Arya, the, 131,227-8 Asia, 284 Asuras, 159 Aswins, 45 Atri, 162 Auden,88 Aurelius, 70 BACCHUS, 182 Bacon, 108 ...
... pathos, the fine felicity of rhythm in these lines had stirred my young heart too a great deal. That was my first introduction to Matthew Arnold. The greatness of the poet-laureate Tennyson had already reached the ears of even the ordinary student at college, but Matthew Arnold and Browning were still unknown. All this is however quite beside the point. Let me come back to the story. The bomb was... However, we did not confine our studies to religious books alone; we had with us some secular literature as well. Page 350 It was precisely at this period that a collection of Matthew Arnold's poems came to my hands. The book belonged to Sri Aurobindo and must have been brought along by Barin. That Sri Aurobindo had studied it minutely was evident from the book itself, for he had marked ...
... rhythm in these lines had stirred my young heart too a great Page 29 deal. That was my first introduction to Matthew Arnold. The greatness of the poet-laureate Tennyson had already reached the ears of even the ordinary student at college, but Matthew Arnold and Browning were still unknown. , All this is however quite beside the point. Let me come back to the story. The... what came to pass. However, we did not confine our studies to religious books alone, we had with us some secular literature as well. It was precisely at this period that a collection of Matthew Arnold's poems came to my hands. The book belonged to Sri Aurobindo and must have been brought along by Barin. That Sri Aurobindo had studied it minutely was evident from the book itself, for he had ...
... the only serious essays in the hexameter in English literature. Many have dallied with the problem, from the strange experiments of Spenser to the insufficient but carefully reasoned attempts of Matthew Arnold. But it is only by a long and sustained effort like Evangeline or the Bothie that the solution can really come. Longfellow in this connexion can be safely neglected, Page 743 but ...
... but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. But a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself... farthest Hebrides, ¹ Prelude, III. II. 62-63. ² "Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power."-Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism. Page 234 or else, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry. Sri Aurobindo has said that ...
... memory of submerging very often with its mightiness the small happinesses of human beings. In a line of Matthew Arnold's, we have three adjectives each of Page 112 which may be considered as bringing in one of the three qualities, though not in the order given by Patmore. Arnold refers to his separation, real or imaginary, from a French girl named Margue-rite, a separation brought... quality of tears. It suggests, in addition, the "sterile" and "frustrating", as in the line from Sri Aurobindo's early verse: And salt as the unharvestable sea. The piquancy, therefore, of Arnold's epithet lies in that epithet's signifying not at all what it obviously, superficially, literally con-notes. The poet here saturates the sea with a power of frustrating sorrow which, as the first adjective... with him dwells Ocean, old historian, tells All the dreadful heart of tears Hidden in the pleasant years. Summer's children, what do ye By the stern and cheerless sea? Arnold's third adjective — "estranging" — becomes, with the combined meaning of the first two colouring it, extraordinarily felicitous: it has a piercingness beautifully presented. "Estran-ging" connotes ...
... significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to have received and understood. The passage may be taken as one more illustration of Page 114 Matthew Arnold's characterisation of Wordsworth's genius at its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet. The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey ...
... he does not stay locked up in them. On the other hand, he uses them as symbols to drive home to our souls his sense of that reality. Many great critics including Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis at times committed ridiculous blunders in their estimates of poets and poems just because they failed to realise that there can be an endless variety of poems. ... short passages scattered throughout the work. What is striking about his study of Wordsworth's poetry is that he nowhere slavishly echoes the views expressed by such great Wordsworth critics as Matthew Arnold, A.C. Bradley, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks. To Sethna, Wordsworth is undoubtedly the central figure in the Romantic Movement in England, Even Coleridge's claim... learnt habits, methods and ruling ideas, Arnold mentions Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte Beuve and Newman. In his essay on Wordsworth Arnold gives a leading place to the latter's moral interpretation but is unable to explain the salient features of his style and its characteristic defects. Failing to judge properly Wordsworth's mastery of blank verse, Arnold praises him for the healing power of the ...
... M Macbeth 19 Madhuchchanda 8 Madhyama 13 Mahabharata 103, 104 Mamata 9 Manmohan Ghose, Prof. 92,102 Mantra 25 Manu 5 Marcellus 23, 24 Matthew Arnold 102 Medhatithi Kanwa 8 Michael Angelo 19 Milton 9, 16 Mitra 1, 4, 5, 31 Montevideo 55 Modern Review, the 93 Mount Kailas 17 Muse 61, 88 Page... Index A Agni 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 31, 72 Aldous Huxley 33 Antigone 40 Aphrodite 34 Apollo 34 Aristotelian 49 Arnold 43 Arya 90, 92 Ashram 92 Asuras 5 Athens 47 Atri 8 Atul Gupta 102 Auchathya 8 Avatara 27 B Bacchus 34 Balaka 92 Bamardo 23, 24 ...
... however, be asked, what then is meant by being in the world? If it means merely sitting quiet, suffering and observing nonchalantly the impacts of the world – something in the manner described by Matthew Arnold in his famous lines on the East –, well, that stoic way, the way of indifference is a way of being in the world which is not very much unlike not being in the world; for it means simply erecting ...
... that were put into his mouth carry a significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to have received and understood. The passage may be taken as one more illustration of Matthew Arnold's characterisation of Wordsworth's genius at its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet. The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of ...
... about the Tiger; but one is the creation of the vital or mental aesthesis, the other is a torrent of suggestion or an onrush of power from a higher plane. Another example: here is Matthew Arnold on the prospect of death: The air of heaven is soft, And warm, and pleasant; but the grave is cold. Heaven's air is better than the cold dead grave. 11 ... nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. 52 It is true Arnold is devising a dignified speech suitable for the Page 308 legendary hero, Rustum, while Shakespeare has to write a speech appropriate to the mentality of an errant youth like Claudio; yet, while Arnold is almost flat, Shakespeare has given a glow even to Claudio's frenzied fear of death... It is not only Claudio speaking but all frightened humanity recoiling helplessly at the very thought of the approach of the grim Spectre; it is limited life retreating tremblingly before Death. Arnold might have cited the passage as an example of the 'Grand Style' in Shakespeare; but its essential character is better suggested when we see it as an expression of the overhead aesthesis. To return ...
... however be asked, what then is meant by being in the world ? If it means merely sitting quiet, suffering and observing nonchalantly the impacts of the world—something in the manner described by Matthew Arnold in his famous lines on the East—, well, that stoic way, the way of indifference is a way of being in the world which is not very much unlike not being in the world; for it means simply erecting ...
... all the others, and the more so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as the novelist's, which proceeds principally from criticism. Goethe in Germany, Shakespeare, Fielding and Matthew Arnold in England are notable instances. Even where practical abilities seem wanting, a close study will often reveal their existence rusting in a lumber-room of the man's mind. The poet and the thinker ...
... stronghold by its gates and ramps... 129 Page 332 Jesus too is likewise tempted in the wilderness after his forty days of fasting; the story of the temptation is detailed both by Matthew and Luke, 130 and elaborated into epic proportions by Milton in Paradise Regained. Following in the main Luke's version, Milton gives each temptation its particular stress, and it is not surprising... various ways, including the offer of a world-wide Kingdom; failing in these attempts, Mara tries force, and fails again and flees with his hosts in disorder. There is a vivid description in Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia, culminating in a nobly articulate passage: Stars shot from heaven, The solid earth shuddered as if one laid Flame to her gaping wounds; ...
... was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high seriousness" as well as the "grand style". Only in a few phrases here and there did Matthew Arnold see these properties of what he considered, supreme poetic expression come into the Chaucerian speech — a line, for instance, like: O martyr souded in virginitie which, by the way, Arnold with his flair for m... tragic accent. Those two "never" 's should never have been there. He seeks to pack the very essence of the joie de vivre in the sensation of sunlight, but the thought has no depth of feeling in it. Arnold has done in a positive way what Dryden fails to do in a negative: Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun? Dryden, however, fails not simply because his way is negative: he fails because ...
... nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using "divinité", "infinité" "éternité", as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose Hyperion compelled even... Spenser's melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spenser's art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded his ...
... chooses to invest it. But when Mr. Banerji's words no longer reverberate in your ears, you may have leisure to listen to a quieter, more serious voice, now unhappily hushed in the grave,—the voice of Matthew Arnold, himself an Englishman and genuine lover of his country, but for all that a man who thought deeply and spoke sanely. And where according to this sane and powerful intellect shall we come across... outline the duplicate aspect of modern England: for now that we have admitted Mr. Banerji's phrase as symbolic of the healthy outcome creditable to English effort, we can hardly be shy of admitting Matthew Arnold's phrase as symbolic of the morbid outcome discreditable to it. But it is still open to us to evince a reasonable doubt whether there is any way of reconciling two items so mutually destructive: ...
... the name of poetry to it altogether. Matthew Arnold calls Pope and Dryden classics not of poetry, but of prose, he says that they are great in the regions of half poetry; other critics while hesitating to go so far, say in substance much the same thing; Gosse, for instance, calls their poetry the poetry of English rhetoric, which exactly amounts to Matthew Arnold's description of it as Page 125 ...
... speech: An equal greatness in her life was sown. Perhaps the next longest sentence—141 words and, if the three compounds count each for 2, 144 as in Sri Aurobindo's sentence—ends Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gypsy, again a unit composed of an elaborated simile. In this connection it may be of interest to mention that the longest sentence in English prose—659 words—is said to be in ...
... the vanguard of the world's greatest poets. He really deserves this place. Yet he is only a poet and does not seem to be a seer or creator of mantras like the poets of the Upanishads. What Matthew Arnold said of the poet Wordsworth we all know. In places where Wordsworth's poetry, he says, reaches the acme of perfection one feels as if the poet has Page 110 disappeared: ...
... omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. But a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Page 100 Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own ...
... stimulus which is attached to its own luminosity, limpidity and steadiness, and avoids richness, force or emotion of a poignant character even when these are needed and appropriate. The poetry of Matthew Arnold is often though not always of this character. But this is a limited inspiration. Sattwic as well as rajasic poetry may be written from the uninspired intellect, but the sensational mind never gives ...
... after Shakespeare and Milton. What about Shelley's Prometheus Unbound? SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say there is no successful blank verse. Plenty of people have written successfully, such as Byron, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustom and some others. But there are only three who have written great blank verse: Milton, Shakespeare and Keats. NIRODBARAN: What about Harin? SRI AUROBINDO: I don't think ...
... may therefore lead to far more serious misconceptions than to use the term "God" & the pronoun "He". When Matthew Arnold said that God was a stream of tendency making towards righteousness, men naturally scoffed because it seemed to turn God into an inanimate force; yet surely such was not Arnold's meaning. On the other side if the new ideas are presented with force and power, a reader of intelligence ...
... the unsounder aspects which we do not care to learn, or if we have learned, are in the habit of carefully forgetting. We may perhaps realize the nature of that unsounder aspect, if we amplify Matthew Arnold's phrase:—an aristocracy no longer possessed of the imposing nobility of mind, the proud sense of honour, the striking pre-eminence of faculty, which are the saving graces—nay, which are the very ...
... raises a special aspect, but that is a mere symptom or complexity of the disease. For the composition of all ancient poetry was neither artificial nor unnatural. Rather, the reverse is the truth. Matthew Arnold has given proof of the grand style in poetry. For example, Milton's Fall'n cherub! to be weak is miserable (Paradise Lost, Book I, 1. 157) Or Dante's E'n La sua volontade ...
... characterised by 'in-evitability'. Thus an individual modification and reapplication is made by both Sri Aurobindo and Sethna of the concepts of'architectonics', 'inevitability' and 'touchstones' of Matthew Arnold. Sethna appropriately stresses the Aurobindonian description of Shakespeare as a Hiranyagarbha in contradistinction to a Virat , in the sense that he was a creator of 'forms' with fully in... (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1965 and 1991) and "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets further sub-titled An Identification through a New Approach (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1984) [SAOS and TL & WP, here-after]. The ideas and material of both the books were, in germ, originally presented in the special Shakespeare quater-centenary lectures Sethna gave at Annamalai ...
... no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth 's Lyrical Ballads as sheer prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do". Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, Page 65 these were no small and narrow critics... the Tennysonian influence, especially from the Idylls of the King, is the strongest strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats , Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical and... directed not at one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct-factors which if not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M. whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more sensitively ...
... monosyllabic (except five) – how easy in manner! Absolutely unadorned and still most effective! The movement is that of an arrow, strong and firm and straight. There is an epic quality about it, what Matthew Arnold calls the "grand style simple." This piece fortunately has not been lost; it has found a place in one of Sri Aurobindo's works, in his The Doctrine of Passive Resistance, under the heading, "The ...
... hexametrical line, and that gave me the swing of the metre as it should be in English. English has no really successful poetry in hexametres and all the best critics have declared it to be impossible. Matthew Arnold's professor friend and others tried it but failed. NIRODBARAN: I thought Yeats also has written hexameters. SRI AUROBINDO: Where? I don't know about it. I think you mean alexandrines. ...
... his idea and diction may be epic and yet his rhythm be found wanting. There is a certain strongly calm self-mastery in the true epic, which the jog-trot ballad-rhythm tends to disintegrate. As Matthew Arnold with his usual fine ear perceived, only a deep lyric impulse — that is, an impulse which introduces a poignant, wistful or delicate flow — can charm away the ballad-jerk, while the ample sweeping... Sri Aurobindo's. Occult or mystic it may be, yet its fundamental connotation is not thus limited: it can also be moral or philosophical, provided there is no dull morality or dry philosophy. Just as Arnold could not read Macaulay's To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late Page 52 without a cry of pain at its ring of false metal, one cannot refrain from ...
... definite basic psychology? When the Romantic Movement caught English poets, did not all the hoary-headed classicists find the result un-English in temper as well as style? How bewildered was even Matthew Arnold by the un-English ethereality that ran riot in Shelley's work! And what about that pre-Romantic Blake? Are his "embryo ideas" and "uninvolved images" and "vague mystic grandeurs" English? Is ...
... suppose an average matric student reads a poem and says, "It's beautiful." What would be the meaning of this statement? Will it put the stamp of merit on the poem? Now suppose a man like Coleridge or Matthew Arnold makes the same remark, "It's beautiful." The words will have come from an entirely different source: they will have sprung from a mind quick to the revelatory impact of poetic inspiration and the ...
... like Sanskrit is based on quantity i.e. the length of a syllable, so that it is extremely difficult to bring the swing of quantitative metre into English poetry successfully and it had eluded Matthew Arnold and other English poets of the past who had experimented with it. In later years Sri Aurobindo wrote some magnificent poems in quantitative metre. Here are the opening lines of the long poem "Ahana" ...
... of India, their teeming populations – much greater than any single nation or country – are sometimes adduced as reasons of the stability or longevity of these two Asiatic peoples. But I suppose Matthew Arnold's graphic vision of the situation – in his famous lines about the dreaming East and the legions thundering past – hits the mark closer, although his was a disparaging, Page 240 ...
... looks so mundane as this war. We refuse to own the nature and character so often ascribed to us by the West, which finds a graphic Page 3 description in the well-known lines of Matthew Arnold: The East bow'd low before the blast In patient deep disdain. She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again. In fact, however, there is ...
... say in a matter which looks so mundane as this war. We refuse to own the nature and character so often ascribed to us by the West, which finds a graphic description in the well-known lines of Matthew Arnold: The East bow'd low before the blast, In patient deep disdain. She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again. In fact, however, there is no insu ...
... momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth Page 272 of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as ...
... say in a matter which looks so mundane as this war. We refuse to own the nature and character so often ascribed to us by the "West, which finds a graphic description -in the well-known lines of Matthew Arnold: The East bow'd low before the blast In patient deep disdain. She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again. In fact, however, there ...
... the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam — and in those early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo. He is describing ...
... One example from Matthew Arnold: But the majestic river floated on Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon. This is Victorian blank verse at its best. There is felicity of description and a beauty belonging to the romantic order. Arnold too in not so austere... and lacking in self-restraint. Shelley and Keats are too romantic and purely lyrical; they never had the ambition to write an epic. Their approach and method were not suited for this purpose. Matthew Arnold has written admirable long poems but they are mere episodes and not concerned with any that changed fate or created history. Thus we come back to the two poets we started with. We brought... a form ? Let us try to analyse the situation. Blank verse prior to Sri Aurobindo had become perfect as far as it could go with the group of poets that came after Milton: Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, to name only some. Each gave something to it, some lucidity, grandeur, beauty, sweetness or flow. Sri Aurobindo's earlier attempts, like Love and Death, Urvasie and Baji Prabhou, ...
... the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives—particularly his Sohrab and Rustam —and in the early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death and Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo. He is describing... spins in shrillness on the bough... But surely Melopoeia cannot claim its true climax here. Page 243 Perhaps the greatest master of climactic Melopoeia is Virgil. According to Arnold Bennett, the most marvellously rhythmed line in all poetic literature is Aeneas's gesture of helplessness when Queen Dido of Carthage asks him for the story of Troy: Infandum, regina, jubes ...
... Divine's Victory in earthly evolution. Remember that the god of the psyche is Agni who in the Rigveda is named "Son of Force". Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the psychic being not only in terms of Matthew Arnold's well-known "sweetness and light": he has also Page 173 ascribed strength to it, the power to conquer, the power to bear, the power not only to stand four-square against mortality ...
... reputation who was the Reader of a big firm. He acknowledged some poetic merit, but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold and so had no sufficient reason for existence. But Lionel Johnson, I was told, like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere, and perhaps if I had persisted in sending it to other firms, some other Reader, not similarly obsessed, might... n influence of this kind in general is there in Songs to Myrtilla. Arnold had influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three "buts" as in No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru, But son of a great Rishi, or, But tranquil, but august, but making easy ... Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes... Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general ...
... an English publisher, it was referred to Lionel Johnson who "acknowledged some poetic merit but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold"; and Sri Aurobindo adds: "But Lionel Johnson, I was told like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere". 1 In the nineties of the last century, romanticism had not yet ceased to be fashionable, and Urvasie - whether Amoldian ...
... omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. However a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even. Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself ...
... , the manner of ordinary thinking, and has considerably succeeded too; still the presence of imperfection, the signs of a lower flight loom large there. We do not find there – in the words of Matthew Arnold – 'a humanity variously and fully developed' or a multifarious free scope of the universal life such as we have already mentioned. This very achievement of breaking down the limited movements ...
... distinctions and running different things into each other. 1st equation. Philosopher (artist kind) = a man with a constructive as well as a critical vision of life = Shaw. I may add = all poets, if Matthew Arnold's equation about poetry and criticism of life is correct. Hundreds of others also can at this rate be called philosophers. Page 538 2nd equation. Mystic = mystic philosopher = philosopher... literature, Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name others, especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages—there is no other to match it. Matthew Arnold once wrote a line something like this: France great in all great arts, in none supreme, to which someone very aptly replied, "And what then of the art of prose-writing? Is it not a great ...
... some reputation who was the Reader of a big firm. He acknowledged some poetic merit, but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold and so had no sufficient reason for existence. But Lionel Johnson, I was told, like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere, and perhaps if I had persisted in sending it to other firms, some other Reader, not similarly obsessed, might... Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere ...
... below civilisation or is soured civilisation, philistinism is civilisation grown hypocritical and soulless and lifeless, petrified before it could flower into culture. The Philistine, against whom Matthew Arnold raised his voice, "is not dead, - quite the contrary, he abounds, - but he no longer reigns". 18 And there is the recent emergent, the "sensational man", the Jack-of-all-ideas and new intellectual... the age of religion, and again from the age of religion to the present age of science. Oswald Spengler has elaborated with immense erudition his theory of the growth and decline of civilisations; and Arnold Toynbee has likewise seen the historical process as a succession of challenges and responses. A theory is but a theory, a formula is but a formula; and human nature comprises too many imponderables... "On the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge." 51 Still later, Arnold Toynbee ventured to see a "divine plan" behind the rise and fall of civilisation and discover a kind of progress in spiritual terms, resulting in "a cumulative increase in the means of Grace at man's ...
... and hisses with a mighty terror, the other rolls and rings with a profound beauty. Perhaps Milton's art is at its most beautiful in those lines, the appreciation of whose rhythmic quality Matthew Arnold initiated with an ear for technique - the lines about "Proserpin", occurring in the midst of the long passage on the Garden of Eden. In that passage Milton employs first a positive, then a negative ...
... from Hastings, Manmohan evidently refers to Aurobindo when he writes, "You have not been the only one to think some to my verses have a similarity to Matthew Arnold's. My brother once remarked to me that he thought I imitated Matthew Arnold in many of my poems. You may believe me when I say, if I have imitated him, it is perfectly unconsciously. ..." On 8 January 1890, he gives an account ...
... a city like Athens; it is world-wide. Sometimes the injustice, the unhappiness, the brutality of the world oppress us Page 387 and darken our minds, and we see no way out. With Matthew Arnold, we feel that there is no hope in the world and that all we can do is to be true to one another.. For the world which seems To lie before us, like a land of dreams, So various ...
... The sensation was something indescribable. Many people have tried to give an idea of what the soul or, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, the psychic being, is like. He has himself quoted Matthew Arnold's words — "sweetness and light" — to convey the characteristics of the psychic being. And indeed they are quite apt because that sort of thing you do feel — the sweetness in the experience is of ...
... of excellence which can hardly be reached by any other poet, for there is something superbly beautiful about his poetry that makes it unique for all times. I am reminded in this context of what Matthew Arnold had to say about Shakespeare, and I think, this would, mutatis-mutandis, apply to the writings of Kālidāsa too. Others abide our question — Thou art free! We ask and ask— thou smilest ...
... because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them Page 415 ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics... it the Tennysonian influence is the strongest—especially from the Idylls of the King— strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats, Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. 1 Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical... at one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct—factors which if one is not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M., whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more sensitively ...
... yesterday in my Bengali poem, because at times I can see their beauty only after you've marked them—as it happened yesterday. Strange! for they are full of poetic power and feeling and what Matthew Arnold would call "in the grand style". December 4, 1936 Nishikanta says that taking my poetry as a whole, some command over expression and harmony is there, but the বক্তব্য 53 is not ...
... clue to the hexameter verse in English. He read out a line from r which he thought was the best line and that gave me the swing of the meter. There is really no successful hexameter in English. Matthew Arnold and his friends have attempted it but they have failed. Disciple : I thought Yeats has written it. Sri Aurobindo : Where? I did not know. I think you mean the Alexandrine. Disciple ...
... because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics. If they could have ...
... the leading gift is a man's 'caste' surely, were he a carpenter or a musician or a yogi. It is really futile to go on arguing about Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether it be like Milton or like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson, for my point about 'nowness' is that a poet should work with language as it comes to his own time and place. I find his style full of linguistic clutter -'well-loved', 'overwhelming ...
... pp. 40-1. 128. Savitri, p. 623. Page 477 129. Book VI (Jaico Edition, 1949, p. 104). 130. St. Matthew, I, HI and St. Luke, IV, I. 13; also see, for a modern version, William Faulkner's A Fable (Random House, 1954), pp. 341-56. 131. Paradise Regained, Book IV, II. 368-72. ... pp. 822-3. 112. ibid., p. 823. 113. Sri Aurobindo, p. 64. 114. Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. I, p. 76. 115. ibid.,p. 82. 116. Sir Edwin Arnold gave this title, Love and Death, to his verse translation of the Mahabharata story of Savitri. It is an interesting coincidence that Sri Aurobindo should have followed up his Love and Death with ...
... the greatest of all woes Is to remember days of happiness In misery - as well your sage guide knows. The guide, of course, is Virgil with his "sense of tears in earthly things" as Matthew Arnold puts it, Tennyson, in a lovely poem of nine-foot lines attempting to echo the Latin hexameter, hails him: Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind! Tennyson has ...
... , Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name others, but especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages—there is no other to match it. Matthew Arnold once wrote a line that runs something like this: "France great in all great arts, in none supreme," to which someone very aptly replied, "And what then of the art of prose-writing? Is it ...
... fact of this great exploit there has been no attempt to preserve historical accuracy". We quote a few lines from the poem which reminds us in its concentrated force and graphic intensity of Matthew Arnold's Sohrub and Rustum, though the episode here is pitched in a higher key and the tone is nobler. "A noon of Deccan with its tyrant glare Oppressed the earth; the hills stood deep in ...
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