Dante : (Alighieri) (1265-1321), Italian poet famous for his Divina Commedia.
... presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work and to its overwhelming influence on him. It is true that Sri Aurobindo gave Dante a very high rank: Dante figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a... of being". An energetic constructiveness on a grand scale rather than a formative force as of a demiurge distinguishes Dante, even as it marks out Kalidasa who, like him, would otherwise be in the company of those topmost four. So Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Dante could never have been of the extreme order. Though, among the world's epics, he put the Divine Comedy alongside of the... that Dante has nothing to do with Savitri. Interesting and even illuminating comparisons may be made, on the whole as well as in some details, between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. Many parallels drawn by the thesis can hold, but its point de depart has to be changed. And here the most important thing to be borne in mind is the real source of the Aurobindonian epic. Dante differs ...
... from you in connection with the Dante-piece I sent you several weeks back. Yours sincerely, K. D. SETHNA December 3rd 1983 Dear Mr. Sethna, Thank you for your card. I received the poem but was waiting for your letter which has not yet arrived. When did Page 149 you send it? I think that your translation of Dante is most remarkable or rather truly... while you have a profound Aurobindonian strain within the general Christian creed to which you are pledged. As you must have gathered from The Secret Splendour, Dante attracts me immensely. Sri Aurobindo once noted that Dante always inspired me to my best. Indeed I seem to live with the great Rorentine if not even in him and share his devotion to and transformation by that Smile he visions... deeply you have penetrated the meaning. With best wishes, BEDE GRIFFITHS 6.12.83 My dear Father Griffiths, I was delighted to get your card expressing your delight in my Dante-adaptation. Yours is indeed a response from what I can only call the "soul". Both heart and mind merge in that inmost element and, from the single truth of them, speak the word of truth, at once ...
... Vision of Dante DANTE is known as a great poet and also as a great seer: Sri Aurobindo mentions him as one of the very greatest. He names three as the supreme poets of Europe, of the very first rank: Homer of ancient Greece, Dante in the Middle Ages, and nearer to us, Shakespeare. Along with these Sri Aurobindo mentions also Valmiki of India. However I shall speak of Dante not so much as... as possible. Virgil now looked at Dante and said: "Dante, my task is done. I am not allowed to go beyond this region of Purgatory and have to turn back. You see the river beyond, that marks the beginning of Heaven. You have to cross it. Another person will now come and take Page 52 charge of you, do not grieve. Beatrice herself will come." Dante was elated hearing the name of Beatrice... there pass their days, their life in purifying themselves till the doomsday decide finally their destiny. Virgil now asked leave of Dante. Dante was very sad to part from his friend but then Virgil waved his hand and slowly retired. While Virgil was retiring, Dante noticed that Virgil did not cast a shadow and was surprised to see that he himself had a shadow. He now remembered that he had come all ...
... section, written last, got the comment: "It is exceedingly good—one might say, perfect. Dante seems always to inspire you to your best." Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy about this section: "Amal in his translation of Dante has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he has used also a mystical turn of phrase which is not... Overhead Poetry THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA" ("PARADISO", Canto 33) St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son! Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity, Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility— Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind, Unto... immense Unseen! Deny him not perfection—lo, in prayer A myriad saints with Beatrice upraise Sinless love-splendoured hands that he may share The vision of inviolable Grace!" Dante Approaches the Beatific Vision The Eyes that make all heaven their worshipper Glowed on the suppliant's mouth and in their rays Streamed the mute blessing deep prayers draw from ...
... presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work and to its overwhelming influence on him. It is true that Sri Aurobindo gave Dante a very high rank: Dante figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly... constructiveness Page 262 on a grand scale rather than a formative force as of a demiurge distinguishes Dante, even as it marks out Kalidasa who, like him, would otherwise be in the company of those topmost four. So Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Dante could never have been of the extreme order. Though, among the world's epics, he put the Divine Comedy alongside of the Odyssey... They may be summed up: originality of imagination, power of expression, creative genius, range of subject-matter. The last criterion implies also scale of work or what we may call quantity of quality. Dante just misses the utter Everest-point and sits crowned on a Kanchanjanga because his work does not have an equal genius with Vyasa's, Valmiki's, Shakespeare's and Homer's for creating a teeming world ...
... Our life's repose is in the Infinite — is one of the greatest — quite fit to rank beside the phrase we have culled from Dante. In fact, it is the articulation of an idea affined to the one in Dante. Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in... European poets the most successful in chiselled Logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante. The Italians are not particularly distinguished for control over their emotions. Just as the Frenchman talks with his hands and his shoulders, the Italian carries on his conversation with a lot of gesticulation. But Dante was a severe nature and his style has a clear-cut restrained force: he is one of the... the few who have been sovereignly logopoeic in poetry. The natural medium for Logopoeia is prose, and therefore poets should not attempt it unless, like Dante, they can command a great intensity of expression with an intuitive drive behind their thought-movement or else a deep emotion charging the reflective attitude. There is a line of Dante's which Eliot has transposed to his own verse, a line with ...
... 'interiorised' exploration of the inner countries of the mind, heart and soul. But here we must pause a little. Dante and Milton are great figures in poetry, and it would of course be wrong to include them as mere steps in an argument in any cavalier fashion. Both Dante and Milton had an exalted view of their poetic function and responsibilities. They tried, in fact, to "assert Eternal Providence... processes, the powers—and to use the "magic of the divine Logos" to describe what they had seen. Did Dante succeed? Did Milton succeed? To quote Sri Krishnaprem, Page 458 Perhaps the last great Western poet to have made any real attempt to grasp the inner unity was Dante, and even he made use of merely traditional myth—and somewhat degenerated myth at that—for... cosmic poems. Ultimately the intellect rules both Dante and Milton, and the intellect alone is not enough. Neither can the modern man dispense with the intellect. It is because Sri Aurobindo has been able to reach and function from the overhead—the above-mind—planes and write in terms of an overhead aesthesis that what was not possible even for Dante and Milton has been largely possible for him. He ...
... Sri Aurobindo 'used' a philosophy which he had himself evolved, partly no doubt in consonance with India's philosophia perennis but partly also in the light of his own Yogic realisations, whereas Dante had been content to 'use' the Thomist philosophy that was ready to hand doesn't essentially affect the parallelism between Savitri and the Commedia, for in one as in the other the philosophy is... sometimes mislead more than instruct us. Dante's Florence was a very small world compared with the Indian political stage on which Sri Aurobindo played so notable a part during 1906-10. Besides, while Dante was a religious man, Sri Aurobindo was a Yogi, a pilgrim of Eternity', a vassal of the Spirit. As philosophers, again, there can be no effective comparison between the Florentine and the Indian poet... Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine is an independent philosophical work mounting an impressive dialectic and charged with a high creative purpose. Page 414 Further, Dante left a completed epic behind him while Sri Aurobindo left Savitri apparently incomplete. Two of the projected cantos in Book VIII (The Book of Death) are missing. He evidently knew he had not long ...
... vision deep into the soul. (30.12.1994) The topic of Dante is very welcome to me. I have only a smattering of Italian but my keen interest in all things Dantesque Has made me feel conversant with his many-sided nature and art. Sri Aurobindo's greater knowledge has helped me considerably. There is no doubt that Dante belongs to the top class of poets, but here we have to mark gradations... greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the first row except that they do not have enough of "a kind of elemental demiurgic power". Each of the... it is not the simplicity of an adequate style." Discussing poetic austerity and exuberance, Sri Aurobindo sets Dante between the two extremes of stringent bareness and colourful sumptuosity - extremes that also are capable of yielding first-rate poetry. Poised midway, Dante combines "the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fullness in the language which gives the sense ...
... interesting to note that certain circumstances in the lives of Dante and Sri Aurobindo seem to strike a somewhat similar note. Dante, like Sri Aurobindo, was involved in active politics for a time; Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta in 1910, first for Chandernagore, and finally for Pondicherry, where he remained for the rest of his life, even as Dante left Florence in 1302, to spend the remaining nineteen years... the ordinary speech—not even in ordinary poetic speech...only in poetry which was deliberately fragmentary and inadequate and symbolic; but he makes an exception about Dante: That is why Dante is such a superb writer. He was one of the very few men in the world's history who have had such a vision and have been able to communicate it as a coherent whole... Most... poet, but he would be writing only poetry! But Middleton Murry himself makes an exception in the case of Dante (even as Highet did): "The essential condition of philosophical poetry is that the poet should believe that there is a faculty of mind superior to the poetic; that was possible for Dante; but since Shakespeare lived and wrote it is not possible." 91 What is Murry driving at? Does he not mean ...
... comparison of poets like Blake and Shakespeare or Dante and Shakespeare by critics like Housman and Eliot? It seems to me that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not reach; but... too much when you expect this intuition to work with a mechanical instantaneousness and universality so that all shall have the same opinion and give the same values. The greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the same rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recognition of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first ...
... Classicism has a later phase which continues the Graeco-Roman spirit of poetic utterance, but in its two great names it is the philosophical intellect ruled by theology: Dante brings mediaeval Roman Catholic thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were... anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, also the story-element which plays through La Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost is absent. Dante is distin-guished by a severe and concise and clear-cut force of intellect with a strong intuitive drive which affects us as much by what is left suggestively... Darkness; Turning our feet and escaping back to the shining spaces - There lies the task and that is the labour. (K.D.S.) Dante is at once tense and tender in his profundity: Me la bonta infinita ha si gran braccia Che prende cio, che si rivolge a lei - ...
... is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Dante's triple worlds, although superficially geographical, are actually psychological states. Where Dante is religious, theological and mediaeval, Sri Aurobindo is spiritual, scientific and modem; what Dante did with such superb psychological and clinical precision for his time, Sri Aurobindo has done for all time. For Aswapati himself, the... was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few — and more and more as the months and years passed — came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper: 8 We know we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible... die, we reason but to err, and we are daunted at every turn. Thus the first verse of The Divine Comedy: In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, and lost my way. Dante is afraid, and fear is the precursor of death. He has to traverse the three worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror — he finds the answer in ...
... I don't know whether that would stand at all times— especially when each style reaches its inevitable power." We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it"—while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply... appreciably, when I am able to look at things in a more leisurely way and fix the misty lines which often tend to fade away, being an indefinable border." (3.5.1937) * THE TRIUMPH OF DANTE These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have brought her Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears, Out of a sky whose each... " Three, out of the four possible inevitabilities other than the fifth and final and unclassifiable one, may be explicitly illustrated from a sonnet by the very author of The Triumph of Dante: Page 101 MYSTIC MOTHER Seeing You walk our little ways, they wonder That I who scorn the common loves of life Should kneel to You in absolute surrender, ...
... (the poet's own beloved)— accost him, promising that he could lead him there. Dante follows. The journey takes them through hideous and vast Hell (described in Inferno, the first part of the poem comprising 33 Cantos) to the Hill of Purgatory (described in Purgatorio, also comprising 33 cantos) at the top of which Dante sees "the mystical procession representing the triumphant march of the Church... the psychic strata both in the Mind and the Cosmos. What for Dante are sin and vice, accepted as coetemal with the Devil, irredeemable and permanent, are for Sri Aurobindo ignorance and concomitants of the lower conscious-ness, which must disappear at the emergence of higher Page 472 consciousness. Redemption for Dante, even though he may have achieved "an actual insight into the... sometimes he sees Venus (Empedocles's Love; Nature's creative enlivening activity) prevailing over Mars (Empedocles's Strife, Nature's disintegrating disheartening movement). From Lucretius to Dante the transition is from naturalism to supematuralism which finds its sublimest expression in his Divina Commedia. A great poem, it strangely unifies romance, epic, drama, lyric; it grows on a scale ...
... Creative Calm 441 Creators 40 Crownless King 380 Crucial Quintet 566 Dante Approaches the Beatific Vision 193 Dante at the Tomb of Beatrice 703 Dante meets Beatrice in Purgatory 384 Dante on the Eve of the 'Divina Commedia' 34 Dawn 51 Day nor Night 24 Daybreak 611 ... of Sri Aurobindo 561 August 15—Sri Aurobindo's Birthday 52 Avatar 453 Bard 411 Beatitude 476 Beatrice Missions Virgil to Guide Dante 502 Beau Geste 542 Beauty's Parting 246 Beggar-palms 714 Beginning of an Autobiography 519 Behind Man's Form 303 Belisarius... Aurobindo 87 Sri Aurobindo 607 Sri Aurobindo the Poet 609 Sri Aurobindo's Vision 583 Sri Krishna 412 St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante 192 Star-break 393 Still Water 621 Storm-Light 161 Strange Enemy 237 Strange Tunes 474 Suns 305 Sun-Spell 48 ...
... October 9, 1932 I said that Aeschylus like Milton was austere au fond [at bottom]—there is as in Dante a high serious restrained power behind all they write; but the outward form in Milton is grandiose, copious, lavish of strength and sweep, in Aeschylus bold, high-imaged, strong in colour, in Dante full of concise, packed and significantly forceful turn and phrase. These external riches might seem... austere. I did not mean that Dante reached the summit of austerity in this sense; in fact I said he stood between the two extremes of bare austerity and sumptuosity of language. But even in his language there is a sense of tapasyā, of concentrated restraint in his expressive force. Amal in his translation of Dante1 has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for... sackcloth. If that is admitted, then Milton can keep his claim to austeity in spite of his epic fullness and Aeschylus in spite of the exultant daring of his images and the rich colour of his language. Dante is, I think, the perfect type of austerity in poetry, standing between the two extremes and combining the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fullness in the language which ...
... I did not mean that Dante reached the summit of austerity in this sense; in fact I said he stood between the two extremes of bare austerity and sumptuosity of language. But even in his language there is a sense of tapasyā , of concentrated restraint in his expressive force. Amal in his translation [ from Dante ] has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for... finish— 8 October 1932 I said that Aeschylus like Milton was austere au fond —there is as in Dante a high serious restrained power behind all they write; but the outward form in Milton is grandiose, copious, lavish of strength and sweep, in Aeschylus bold, high-imaged, strong in colour, in Dante full of concise, packed and significantly forceful turn and phrase. These external riches might seem... say; with only this difference that Dante would have put it into fewer words than you do. It is the Dantesque stretching itself out a little—more large-limbed, permitting itself more space. Aeschylus' manner cannot be described as ucchvāsa , at least in the sense given to it in my letter. He is not carefully restrained and succinct in his language like Dante, but there is a certain royal measure ...
... opening section, written last, got the comment: "It is exceedingly good—one might say, perfect. Dante seems always to inspire you to your best." Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy about this section: "Amal in his translation of Dante has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he has used also a mystical turn of phrase which is not... The Secret Splendour THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA" ("PARADINO", Canto 33) St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son! Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity, Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility— Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind, Unto... immense Unseen! Deny him not perfection--lo, in prayer Unnumbered saints with Beatrice upraise Sinless love-splendoured hands that he may share The vision of inviolable Grace!" Dante Approaches The Beatific Vision The Eyes that make all heaven their worshipper Glowed on the suppliant's mouth and in their rays Streamed the mute blessing deep prayers draw from ...
... out one of his wishes — that you should try a comparative study of Dante and Sri Aurobindo. Here I may note that in Savitri we have not only deliberate echoes of several great lines of English poetry, lines passed through the typical Aurobindonian spirituality, but also reverberations from the poetic literature of other countries. Dante too has contributed some strains. One may be mentioned at once. Do... of earth's high change, to you it is given To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul... And the whole passage has an affinity in a general manner to the grand finale of Tennyson's Dante-inspired little piece — perhaps the noblest blank verse the Victorian poet penned: I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled... Ulysses is an exception and not the rule. Neither can it, for all its masterful semi-mystic romanticism, match the deeper tones that sweep through Savitri again and again. Perhaps the passage with the Dante-correspondence does not quite bring those tones home to the inner ear as markedly as others, such as: Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness; The toiling thinker widened and grew still ...
... I don't know whether that would stand at all times—especially when each style reaches its inevitable power." We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it" — while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might... Overhead Poetry The Triumph of Dante These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have brought her Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears, Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence. Ineffable the secrecies supreme Pass and elude my gaze—an... " Three, out of the four possible inevitabilities other than the fifth and final and unclassifiable one, may be explicitly illustrated from a sonnet by the very author of The Triumph of Dante: Page 36 ...
... one of his wishes - that you should try a comparative study of Dante and Sri Aurobindo. Here I may note that in Savitri we have not only deliberate echoes of several great lines of English poetry, lines passed through the typical Aurobindonian spirituality, but also reverberations from the poetic literature of other countries. Dante too has contributed some strains. One may be mentioned at once... Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul... And the whole passage has an affinity in a general manner to the grand finale of Tennyson's Dante-inspired little piece -perhaps the noblest blank verse the Victorian poet penned: Page 224 I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough ... is an exception and not the rule. Neither can it, for all its masterful semi-mystic romanticism, match the deeper tones that sweep through Savitri again and again. Perhaps the passage with the Dante-correspondence does not quite bring those tones home to the inner ear as markedly as others, such as: Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness; The toiling thinker widened and grew still ...
... Virgilian epics. Already in the Mediaeval Dante we see the Virgilian epic inspiring the vision of the ancient world. When Dante presents the great figures of that world he gives them a gravity and nobility which strike a new note in Mediaeval literature. This note is absent in the rest of Europe even after Dante. Chaucer, for instance, was versed not only in Dante and Petrarch but also in Virgil. Yet ...
... go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest Heaven where Dante meets Beatrice may be considered as the psychic world and Beatrice herself the Divine... each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony ...
... most part satisfied with a first primitive power of poetic speech, a subdued and well-tempered even adequacy. Only once or twice does he by accident strike out a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters. 1O Of the Elizabethans, Sri Aurobindo writes with total understanding, and no more than a few sentences are enough to fix Shakespeare and his lesser ... have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity.... His aim too is high, his subject loftier than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante.... To justify the ways of God to man intellectually is not the province of poetry; what it can do, is to reveal them. Yet just here is the point of failure. Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin... cumulatively ushering in the new heaven and the new earth of our inspired imaginings. The same honoured place that the Poetics holds among the works of Aristotle - "the Master of those who know", as Dante describes him - The Future Poetry holds in the total Aurobindonian canon. The Arya sequences all hang together like the many continents comprising our global habitation; and these treatises are ...
... is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Dante's triple worlds, although superficially geographical, are actually psychological states. Where Dante is religious, theological and medieval, Sri Aurobindo is spiritual, scientific and modem; what Dante did with such superb psychological and clinical precision for his time, Sri Aurobindo has done for our time. For Aswapathy himself, the... was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few - and more and more as the months and years passed - came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper: We know we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible... reason but to err, and we are daunted at every turn. Thus the first verse of The Divine Comedy: Page 663 In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, and lost my way.... Dante is afraid, and fear is the precursor of death. He has to traverse the three worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror - he finds the answer in ...
... see how his conception of her gives him his excellence—it was only one element in a very powerful and complex nature. 10 July 1932 Dante and Milton Would it be correct to call Dante a mystic poet? And how would you compare the inspiration-sources of Dante and Milton? Both the poets have a metaphysical background and a strong religious fervour. I don't think either can be called mystic... mean his rhythm, his surge of word music, that does no doubt come from somewhere else, much more than the thoughts or the words that are carried on the surge. 31 March 1932 Page 373 Dante Somehow Dante's verse as well as his life-story move me so much: it is I think mainly because of Beatrice—his conception of her gives him that excellence and that appeal. Will you please write also... mystic poets—Milton not at all. A religious fervour or metaphysical background belongs to the mind and vital, not to a mystic consciousness. Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive force behind it. 18 October 1936 Marlowe To me he seems an experiment wherein the occult voices were conceiving an epic drama with the central conception bodied forth a little loosely in se ...
... Our life's repose is in the Infinite— is one of the greatest—quite fit to rank beside the verse we have drawn from Dante. In fact, it is the articulation of an idea affined to the one in Dante. Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in... his quoque finem. Sri Aurobindo has essentially caught its charmed anguish and wisdom in his English version: Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Dante also is no mean master of the same art; and Milton of Paradise Lost can match the poets of both the Aeneid and La Divina Commedia. Indeed Milton demonstrates most Page 244 impressively... comparisons which are complete pictures in their own right—small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: 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 ...
... greatness to Dante, Dilip replied "That may be, but surely there is a vast difference between their greatnesses." SRI AUROBINDO: Still, both are great. NIRODBARAN: The Difference is that Dante has reached a very great height which Petrarch hasn't. SRI AUROBINDO: Petrarch is a great poet all the same. There are people who hold that Petrarch has a greater perfection of form than Dante. NIRODBARAN:... heavy baggage that weighs poetry down. NIRODBARAN: Dilip says he does not know how to define greatness but one can say that Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley are great and one should reserve the epithet for such men only. SRI AUROBINDO: Shakespeare and Dante are among the greatest. A poet like Browning has plenty of mass, volume, "girth" as you say, but he is a different case. Once he used to ...
... Sons, New York, 1956). Three Philosophical Poets : Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1935). Sarma, D.S. Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the 19 th and 20 th centuries (Benares Hindu University, Benares, 1944). Sayers, Dorothy L. Further Papers on Dante (Methuen, London, 1957). Sen, Kshitimohan. Medieval Mysticism... General Linguistic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie (Macmillan, London, 1929). Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus, and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford University Press, London, 1959). Dante, Alighieri. The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary (Oxford University Press, London, 1923). The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles... CM. Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: Lyric, Epic, and allied forms of Poetry (New York, 1919). The Principles of Poetry (New York, 1904). Gilson, Etienne. Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore (Sheed & Ward, London, 1952). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, (Bonn's Series, Bell, London, 1919). Gore, Charles. 'Be Philosophy ...
... heroes, he created a type of epic in which the characters represent something outside themselves, and the events displayed have other interests than their immediate excitement in the context." 11 Dante himself has explained that he wrote the Commedia in four senses: the literal, the allegorical, the analogical and the ethical. When viewed from the outside, it is the description of a journey; it... invisible, from the material to the spiritual. As Stambler says, "Just as God uses the physical, temporal universe to convey to man, by analogy, the existence and the meaning of His universe, so does Dante the poet use narrative-in-time and detailed sense-experience to communicate to the reader his universe, a universe which the poet alone could comprehend simultaneously (in all its purposes) as well... words, "a rather complete integration of several great cultures with all their disparate and conflicting possibilities." 14 A point is reached when poetry must race beyond reason, as it does when Dante the mystic pilgrim feels as if he has "entered a still uncleft pearl", thereby as it were impearling himself. On this Page 377 Williams comments as follows: " How body enters ...
... world's absolutely supreme singers. Who are these, then? Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa? And what about Aeschylus, Virgil and Milton? I suppose all the names you mention except Goethe can be included; or if you like you can put them all including Goethe in three rows—e.g.: 1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki 2nd row Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton 3rd row Goethe and... sublimity, it strikes me that the former has a more natural turn of imagination—that is to say, it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what he lacks perhaps is the epic élan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result ...
... is an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet, not a spiritual or mystic one; he was well-versed in theology, perfecdy conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and powerfully... In a long epic narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either... training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry. You actually try to prove that you are quite competent to pass judgment on spiritual poetry: you list your qualifications by commenting favourably on Dante, Eliot, St. John of the Cross, Kabir and Chandidas. The suggestion is unmistakable: Sri Aurobindo is a poetic failure and not merely a poet to whom you are allergic. It is this suggestion that drew ...
... only value of life; there are other values too, such as love, sacrifice, attainment of perfection, etc. So the epic purpose, as noted in the case of Dante, does not, of necessity, entail a story. It is, in reality, allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between the two senses in a poem, literal and allegorical. Even in Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. According... nt and epic-form. But the creative spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. Another such surprise in modem times was sprung by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri. Sri Aurobindo held in high esteem the two Indian epics, the Page 485 Mahabharata and ...
... 16 It is a sort of inner tavasyā or discipline, an ā tmasaṁyama or self-possession that renders Milton, like Aeschylus and Dante, austere although outwardly he is lavish of splendour and strength and sweep, even as Aeschylus is audacious in colour and image, Dante burdened with beauty and significance in the midst of his forcefully cut conciseness. We may add, with Sri Aurobindo - especially... sack-cloth. If that is admitted, then Milton can keep his claim to austerity in spite of his epic fulness and Aeschylus in spite of the exultant daring of his images and the rich colour of his language. Dante is, I think, the perfect type of austerity in poetry, standing between the two extremes and combining the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fulness in the language which ...
... embrace but there is a delight of sheer love, pure unshared love, an exquisite experience that remains indelibly puissant in the memory. The love of Dante for Beatrice is made of pure concentrated consciousness, has nothing physical in it, but it carried Dante in his peregrinations through all the worlds even to the very presence of God in heaven, to the presence Page 24 of his divinised... solution and resolution of all problems, the attainment of divine perfection. It is for you to enter and find for yourself the final consolation. Even so I am reminded of the great poet and seer Dante who was led by Virgil to the formidable door on which was inscribed in flaming letters the terrible heart-rending line: "Give up all hope, you who enter here." It is the door to eternal hell ...
... Kumbhodara by name, Nikumbha's comrade. 1 One can go on ad infinitum, for in a sense poetry is nothing but images. Still I am tempted to give a last citation from Dante, the superb Dante, in his grand style simple: 1 Kailāsagauram vṛṣamārurukṣoḥ Page 17 Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aer bruno Toglieva gli animai, che sono in terra ... Yes, Shakespearean syllables are indeed the glorious members cut out of the body as it were of a beautiful vital being transmuted into heavenly luminaries. In the world of poetry Dante is a veritable avatar. His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive energy, Tapas. In Kalidasa the quantum is that of the energy of the-light ...
... activities, that is not affected at all by the outer nature; it remains as it is, pure, unsullied. Some of you were present at my talk on Dante. I spoke of Dante's vision; it is a wonderful vision—the vision of the mission of the Divine Mother. Dante saw a globe of light in front of him. As he was standing before the Divine Trinity in the Empyrean, suddenly he saw revealed to him a luminous... the Divine Mother in Her creative mood. And within that, "I was there as Her child, in my true reality, not as I see myself but as She sees me; in that image I saw myself." Page 74 Dante says that it was an experience as if he was looking into an Eye, a big ball of Eye; and in that Eye he saw reflected his image as the Divine sees him, not "as I see myself, but my true self". I say ...
... I am his slave, Kumbhodara by name, Nikumbha's comrade.³ One can go on ad infinitum, for in a sense poetry is nothing but images. Still I am tempted to give a last citation from Dante, the superb Dante, in his grand style simple: Lo giorno se n' andava, e l' aer bruno Toglieva gli animai, ehe sono in terra Dalle fatiehe loro.'4 Characteristically of the poet these... life-energy. Yes, Shakespearean syllables are indeed the glorious members cut out of the body as it were of a beautiful vital being transmuted into heavenly luminaries. In the world of poetry Dante is a veritable avatar. His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive energy, Tapas. In Kalidasa the quantum is that of the energy of the light ...
... in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso. I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in more thought-power) that marks... My mind within grew holy, calm and still Like the snow. ¹ "Reminiscence." ² "A Child's Imagination." ³ Inferno, xxxiii. 39. Page 60 However spiritual a soul, Dante is yet bound to the earth, he has dominated perhaps but not conquered. The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded ...
... for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude of which he has said nothing. He never sought to form relationships, while Manmohan, the second brother, roamed through London in the company of his friend... latent possibility, to the fully awakened being. Without reincarnation, it would be hard to account for the dramatic difference of degrees among souls – for example, between that of a pimp and that of Dante or Francis of Assisi, or simply between that of a man who searches and an economic philistine , as Sri Aurobindo put it – unless one believes that spiritual development is merely a matter of education... whole meaning of evolution. On the other hand, if we accept that the proper evolutionary course is that of the peak figures of earthly consciousness – Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Alexander the Great, Dante – we are still forced to acknowledge that none of these great men has been able to transform life. Thus, the summits of the mind or the heart do not give us, any more than the cosmic summits, the key ...
... mythological nor a historical story. It is in fact allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between two senses in a poem, — a literal and an allegorical sense. "The literal sense of The Divine Comedy is the fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice." Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's... appropriate form. But the creative spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. For the modem lover of the muse another such pleasant surprise is offered by Savitri. European critics have not taken any serious notice of the epics of India, both authentic and literary... while Savitri is the creation of a single genius. This vast subject, compared with those of other epics that are extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno, — hell, — through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude is far in the ...
... at comparison by critics like Housman and Eliot? It seems to me that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not "each; but in essence they stand as mighty equals. As for Blake and... are asking too much when you expect this intuition to w with a mechanical instantaneousness and universality so all shall have the same opinion and give the same values. greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recogn1 of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first rank ...
... But I made an astonishing discovery. I came upon a portrait of Christina done by her brother Dante Gabriel, which bore an extraordinary resemblance in facial feature, mood-expression and head-posture as well as hair-do to a photograph of Minnie at the time this poem had been written. I made a copy of Dante Gabriel's sketch and sent it along with that photograph of Minnie to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother... Europa. But nothing has moved me so much as the Fall of Florence a few weeks before, initiating God-knows-what new era of inner history and soul-development. It needs a never-forgetting Florentine like Dante to plumb with the triple rhymes of his Divina Commedia the profound cadence of this unexpected movement from vertical through Page 25 slanting to horizontal. Corresponding to his... at some length on this fast-disappearing little group of a bare 100,000 members in the whole world, but I shan't let myself go at the moment. Let me touch on some matters you have alluded to. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti" - I was delighted to see that name blaze out of your letter. Like his greater Florentine namesake, he and his work have attracted me ever since my late school-days. I have conned his ...
... go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest Heaven where Dante meets Beatrice may be considered as the psychic world and Beatrice herself the Divine... in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their Page 79 movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheswari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony ...
... neither a mythological nor a historical story. It is in fact allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between two senses in a poem,—a literal and an allegorical sense. The literal sense of the Divine Comedy is the fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice". Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise... appropriate form. But the creative-spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past/when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. For the modern lover of the muse another such pleasant surprise is offered by Sāvitrī. * * * European critics have not taken any serious notice of the epics of India, both... while Sāvitrī is the creation of a single genius. This vast subject, compared with those of other epics that are extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno,—hell,—through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all Page 36 its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude ...
... final chapter on Savitri as a 'Cosmic Epic' took me to other epics, ancient and modern, and I had an enchanting time exploring these 'realms of gold'. Dante, among the poets of the past, comes closest to Sri Aurobindo, and I found the essays on Dante by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate the most illuminating, though Charles Williams is very good too. Of the moderns, Ezra Pound and Nikos Kazantzakis challenge... is based on Sri Aurobindo's own yogic experiences and realisations. The appreciation of a poem like Savitri must accordingly involve special difficulties. In the 'Preface' to his thoughtful work, Dante the Philosopher, M. Etienne Gilson writes: When a philosopher discusses literature he often reveals a want of taste, but when a man of letter discusses ideas he sometimes ... possible that my argument lacks 'precision and 'taste' both; but at least I have not failed to hanker after 'that state of grace' to which M. Gilson refers. Again and again, amidst others, two names—Dante and Sri Aurobindo — are brought into juxtaposition in my thesis, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident, as it were; and re-reading the whole thesis, I ask myself whether the crest of the ...
... an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet, not a spiritual or mystic one; he was well-versed in theology, perfectly conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and ... a long epic-narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they... training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry. You actually try to prove that you are quite competent to pass judgment on spiritual poetry: you list your qualifications by commencing favourably on Dante, Eliot, St. John of the Cross, Kabir and Chandidas. The suggestion is unmistakable: Sri Aurobindo is a poetic failure and not merely a poet to whom you are allergic. It is this suggestion that drew ...
... believe that a poet like Dante who lived when Christianity was at its peak of power in men's lives could not have intended anything else. Yet Dante did not consciously lend his line the precise shade we see in it. Medieval theology a la St. Thomas Aquinas was coloured by Aristotle's philosophical outlook. Steeped in that theology and giving it glorious poetic form, Dante has here a hint about Aristotle's ...
... an art, great artist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural sound of its motion. His aim is high, his subject loftier than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante. There is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell; nowhere has there been a more powerful portraiture of the living spirit of egoistic... richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval Catholicism, but intellectually for so deep and vast a purpose it was not any more satisfying or durable. Still through his primitive symbols Dante has seen and has revealed things which make his work throughout poetically and creatively great and sufficient up to a certain high, if narrow level. It is here that Milton failed altogether. Nor is... they have not been seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measures and free lines of inspired perfection. The difference will become evident if we make a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong ...
... the feminity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not, are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine.... Yet Goethe, Dante and Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in feminity as Vyasa, none dominates so much... about to go - and this induces sadness. But there is a pleasure in realising that you once had moments of deep happiness. The general idea in such matters is the one voiced by Francesca of Rimini to Dante: ...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"... 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 also tried to echo Dante directly, though in a different style in the second line of that couplet from "Locksley Hail": Page 193 Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! This is truth the poet sings, That ...
... centuries after The Fairie Queene - or Shelley's resort to it at the same distance of time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller... of a new inner life does not make an immediate appeal to us. Still, we should answer to it aesthetically Page 105 enough to grant that a future humanity is sure to appreciate it. Dante, in the last Canto of his "Paradiso", invoked the Supreme Light, high above our imagining, to lend his memory and his tongue the power to leave but one sparkle of its "magnificence to future men". Because... the Perfect Master may not exclude being a poet. But you immediately contradict yourself if you accept as I am certain you do that poetry comes from a world of the Gods to which Homer and Virgil and Dante and Milton appealed for their inspiration. The furor poeticus is also the enthousiasmos, the "God-entry", To reach the world of the Gods is to be more directly capable of great verse. I do not mean ...
... There is a line in Dante which says that even eternal hell is a creation of the Divine Love. I wonder what Lajpat Rai would say to that. And what does Dante mean by it? I don't understand it myself. One can understand being thrown into hell in order that one may rise up to heaven from it; but how can the Divine Love create eternal hell?9 PURANI: Your reference to Dante reminds me of Lascellers ...
... activities, that is not affected at all by the outer nature; it remains as it is, pure, unsullied. Some of you were present at my talk on Dante....... I spoke of Dante's vision, it is a wonderful vision, – the vision of the mission of the Divine Mother. Dante saw a globe of light in front of him. As he was standing before the Divine Trinity in the Empyrean, suddenly he saw revealed to him a luminous... the Creative Power, the Divine Mother in Her creative mood. And, within that, I was there as Her child, in my true reality, not as I see myself but as She sees me; in that image I saw myself. Dante says that it was an experience as if he was looking into an Eye, a big ball of Eye; and in that Eye he saw reflected his image as the Divine sees him, not 'as I see myself,' – but 'my true self'… I ...
... embrace but there is a delight of sheer love, pure unshared love, an exquisite experience that remains indelibly puissant in the memory. The love of Dante for Beatrice is made of pure concentrated consciousness and has nothing physical in it, but it carried Dante in his peregrinations through all the worlds even to the very presence of God in heaven, to the presence of his divinised Beloved (in and with... solution and resolution of all problems, the attainment of divine perfection. It is for you to enter and find for yourselves the final consolation. Even so I am reminded of the great poet and seer Dante who was led by Virgil to the formidable door on which was inscribed in flaming letters the terrible heartrending line: Give up all hope, you who enter here. It is the door to eternal hell ...
... Savitri References Preface to the First Edition 1. The Hudson Review, Winter 1959-1960, p. 507. 2. Dante the Philosopher, tr. By David Moore, pp. ix-x 3. Quoted by J.B. Leishman in his Introduction to Poems 1906 to 1926 4. The Dawn Eternal, pp. 37-8 5. 18 April 1958 6. Quoted... the structure as well as the thought-content of St Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica.. ."(Sri Aurobindo, p. 258). 108. Nirodbaran, Mother India, 19 May 1951. 109. T.S. Eliot, 'Dante' (Selected Essays, p. 272). 110. Collected Essays, p. 421. 111. Savitri, pp. 822-3. 112. ibid., p. 823. 113. Sri Aurobindo, p. 64. 114. Collected... creation was to create, that is, a joy that could rejoice in its own being, each creature after its own manner, and reflect back to God the joy and gifts that He bestowed upon it." Further Papers on Dante, p. 91). 154. ibid., p.12 . 155. ibid., p.7 . 156. ibid., p.9 . 157. Essays, p.96 . 158. 17 January 1942. 159. 14 September ...
... substance and no form? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare, others say Euripides is greater. There are others, again, who say Euripides is nowhere near Sophocles. How can you say whether Dante is greater than Shakespeare? Disciple : It is better to ask what is the criterion of great poetry. Sri Aurobindo : Is there any criterion? Disciple : Then how to judge? ... Aurobindo : Satan is the only character he has created. His first four books are full of creative force. But Christ? – well – I object to the claim that he ever created Christ. Disciple : About Dante Abercrombie says that he created Beatrice and her memory was always with him. Sri Aurobindo : What about Dante's political life? I am sure he was not thinking of Beatrice when he was doing... poet, but if you take his work in a mass you can't justify his greatness. Petrarch has written only sonnets and that on one subject, and yet he is considered a great poet and given a place next to Dante. Simonides has not a single poem complete, he is known by fragments and yet he is regarded as second Page 249 to Pindar who is called the greatest lyricist. The Hound of Heaven ...
... human interest and contemporary urgency. We have seen earlier that although mysticism and philosophy seldom prove tractable to poetic treatment at some length, yet Dante has somehow performed the miracle; if Dante, why not Sri Aurobindo? Dante, with great power of flight, describes the journey of the "two high creatures" through the nine heavens to the Empyrean, and we see that they "move in space and ...
... I happened to ask X whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Good Heavens... Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like X about the Bard (and moneylender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent Page 55 evidence, I am ready to take upon my back the offences of ...
... be, Ocean self enraptured and alone! Can't say. Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer. Illumined passing into the inspired. 24 September 1934 I feel my poem The Triumph of Dante has now been sufficiently quintessenced. If it satisfies you, will you make whatever analysis is possible of its inspirational qualities? These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have brought... less felt than the magnificence of its dress. All kinds are legitimate in poetry. I only wanted to point out that poetry can be great or perfect even if it uses simple or ordinary expressions, e.g. Dante simply says "In His will is our peace" and in writing that in Italian produces one of the greatest lines in all poetic literature. 1 April 1938 Page 195 ...
... unspoken and even unacknowledged love they read together the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Their eyes exchanged glances and their cheeks flushed. The book proved a tempter. And Francesca says to Dante no more than the words: Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante. (Upon that day no further did we read.) Quite a contrast on the one hand to Early Yeats as well as to Keats of the... hardly to do him justice. Pound had a many-sided mind and your bringing him in apropos of the art of translation is not quite appropriate. We may remember that he had praise for Binyon's renderings of Dante which were far from being always tied down to your notion of the "permissible". Not only is Binyon "mannered" at times in a pseudo Old-English vein: he is also over-free occasionally. Thus Dante's most ...
... literary history we have Homer, a poor blind beggar wandering with his harp and dying without a home. After his death, seven cities disputed with one another to be considered his birthplace! Then there is Dante, exiled from his beloved Florence, homeless for nearly fifteen years, depending on the fickle favours of moody and even boorish patrons. Poignantly he has quintessenced the feeling of his humiliation... awak-ened in the middle of the night by a knock at the door. When he opened the door, he saw a gaunt old man with weary eyes, who, on being asked what he wanted, said just one word: "Peace." This man was Dante, the greatest poet of Mediaeval Europe. Not until he died did Florence wake up to his worth. And when he was gone it urged its claim for his body upon the city of Ravenna where he had been buried. Byron ...
... reverse order, in "touch" and "is". So much for the art of the two lines. What about the heart? I suggest that the same heart is in both, approached and traversed from two opposite sides. In the Dante line we may read a profound faith in the r ightness of God no less than in His almightiness - against which nothing can prevail. Only God's- Will is the ultimate determinant, and whatever He wills... God's Will manifest already and a mass of difficulties and darknesses in which this Will has to manifest progressively and create bliss and light. A single truth with two faces is before us and the Dante-line shows one face which has to be seen if we are to achieve spiritual peace and the line of Sri Aurobindo shows the other face which must be seen if we are to transform earth-existence into the Life ...
... doctrine that God is the Love by which things in the world are set moving to their proper goal. Dante does not deny that God is Love, though his equation could permit certain things that would shock us out of our skins, as when he makes everlasting Hell declare: I too was created by Eternal Love. But what Dante in that terminal line of his masterpiece meant was the love inspired in all created things ...
... 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... Sri Aurobindo 15 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 ...
... reverse order, in "touch" and "is". So much for the art of the two lines. What about the heart? I suggest that the same heart is in both, approached and traversed from two opposite sides. In the Dante line we may read a profound faith in the rightness of God no less than in His almightiness—almightiness against which nothing can prevail. Only God's Will is the ultimate determinant, and whatever... God's Will already manifest and a mass of difficulties and darknesses in which this Will has to manifest progressively and create bliss and light. A single truth with two faces is before us and the Dante-line shows one face and the line of Sri Aurobindo shows the other face which must be seen if we are to transform earth-existence into the Life Divine. Even Death, in Sri Aurobindo's view, need ...
... greatest poetic achievement - Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol - over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of... dumbly, immensely the Unknown, [p. 522] The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances: None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell... [p. 227] All can be done if the God-touch is there. [p. 3] His failure is not failure whom God leads ...
... happened to ask Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Sri Aurobindo:... Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon my back the offences of all the famous ...
... investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goethe is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics ...
... Tagore the Unique IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these stars of the first magnitude is a king... place on its coming into contact with Europe; under its influence our language and literature have taken a turn that is almost an about-turn. But this revolution was not caused by a single person. Dante and Homer are the creators, originators or the peerless presiding deities of Italian and Greek respectively. Properly speaking Tagore may not be classed Page 177 with them. But just ...
... giving a beautifully phrased reply redolent of wisdom and learning and wit and humour. What a diversity of themes, and what a variety of approaches! The twelve great masters of style: Aeschylus and Dante: Dante and Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Blake: the poetry of the school of Dryden and Pope: Shelley's Skylark: Baudelaire's "vulgarity": Anatole France's "ironising": Walter de la Mare's Listeners: ...
... came within the limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton. Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there have been Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second Dante or Boccaccio. Such men come rarely in the lapse of centuries. Greece alone has presented the world an unbroken succession of supreme geniuses ...
... of frenzy without its loss of self-control; and within this even is the spirit, that unanalysable thing behind metre, style & diction which makes us feel "This is Homer, this is Shakespeare, this is Dante." [All these are essential before really great verse can be produced; everyone knows that verse may scan well enough & yet be very poor verse; there may beyond this be skilful placings of pause &... naturalised in English. If it has not yet been done, we must attribute it to some initial error of conception. Byron & Shelley failed because they wanted to create the same effect with this instrument as Dante had done; but terza rima in English can never have the same effect as in Italian. In the one it is a metre of woven harmonies suitable to noble & intellectual narrative; in the other it can only be ...
... poetic achievement — Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol — over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years... dumbly, immensely the Unknown. 15 The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances: None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. 16 All can be done if the God-touch is there. 17 His failure is not failure whom God leads. 18 ...
... equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid . Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri . And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of... essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" does not preclude all richness or colour, nor does it prevent the exercise of energy. Dante, for instance, combines great richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" — except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough ...
... without committing ourselves literally to its classification of the three artists concerned or to its ascription to them of the qualities defined. The Classicism of the Graeco-Roman poets as well as of Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe Page 183 and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both... it created did not sustain itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo, of ...
... equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid. Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of... "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" does not preclude all richness or colour, nor does it prevent the exercise of energy. Dante, for instance, combines great richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" - except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough ...
... verse does this poem fall? Has it any epic quality? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante? I should think epic poetry has a more natural turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.) Page... course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what be lacks is the epic elan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result of ...
... personal cry, a glorious passage all Latinists have by heart: "Fortunati ambo!..." 5 Dante is more felt in his work and that is because the Divina Commedia is in the first person, a kind of autobiography: it tells of the poet's own journey through Page 44 Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. But Dante fills his poem with so much of human interest outside himself, the stories of all ...
... Milton. Writers on Milton have justifiably found certain sides of his personality unsympathetic, even as they have done in the case of another poet who too dealt with a cosmic theme - the Italian Dante. But only sheer wrong-headedness, as in the modern poet-critic Robert Graves, can deny the spaciousness of soul which Milton's expressive rhythm indicates. When Wordsworth spoke of Milton he could... multiform world-activity in which the ultimately real manifests itself. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of such an attitude and we rightly designate his genius as protean or myriad-minded. Dante exemplifies an attitude oriented in the main towards human life set in a wider complex scheme Page 6 of an inhuman or superhuman Hereafter, created with a clear-cut diversity by a ...
... Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those forces that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander... Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon my back the offences of all the famous ...
... way, and it works in each according to his nature and the material and capacities, actual or latent, it finds there. 8 September 1931 Please send me some inspiration to complete my Triumph of Dante. What is the best way of receiving it? I'll be thankful if you'll teach me how to be able to fill up those gaps. Good Lord! it is not a thing that can be taught. As for the best way—well, silence... is not dramatic. Kalidas, narrative epic, drama, one elegiac poem, one poem of nature description—not an inexhaustible variation of metres. Valmiki, Vyasa epic only— anuṣṭubh and triṣṭubh metres. Dante, terza rima metre—little variation of kind in his poetic writing. I am rejecting the impulse to do other literary work—stories, novels etc.—simply for the sake of producing maturer work in poetry ...
... he wanted to have omitted, was tacked on rather awkwardly as a closing parenthesis. In a typescript of the text that was submitted to him, Sri Aurobindo emended "to study Goethe and Dante" to "to read Goethe and Dante". Incomplete Life Sketches. These pieces are from Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts of the 1920s. The circumstances of their writing are not known. Incomplete Life Sketch in ...
... does this poem fall ? Has it any epic quality ? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power ? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante ? I should think epic poetry has a more natural Page 69 turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays... course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what he lacks is the epic élan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result ...
... greatest poetic achievement— Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol —over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of... dumbly, immensely the Unknown. The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances: None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell... All can be done if the God-touch is there... His failure is not failure whom God leads... Our life's ...
... the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative originality and expressive power and creative genius, the widest scope and the largest amount of work. Those in the second are a little wllnting in cine or other of the required qualifications. Dante and · Kalidasa. would ...
... can one wholly summon Aeschylus and Dante to prop up by their work this modernist thesis. Aeschylus may show us Athenian patriotism, the struggle against tyranny and the place of the individual in society in some parts of his plays, but he expresses many other things too—supernatural presences, superhuman fates, individual aspirations, personal passions. Dante did write a notable political treatise ...
... an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet , not a spiritual or mystic one : he was well-versed in theology, perfectly conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and... In a long epic narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either ...
... one's nature: the two other Gunas are Rajas (dynamism) and Sattwa (refinement and poise). 9 Sri Aurobindo's reference is to the sentence in Canto III of Inferno , occurring among the words seen by Dante written on the gate of hell. Dorothy Sayers renders the sentence: Justice moved my Great Maker; God Eternal Wrought me: the Power, and the unsearchably High Wisdom, and the Primal Love Supernal.... " But Sri Aurobindo's point about the eternity of hell is not answered. That in the divine dispensation hell should be possible or actual is one thing: but it is quite another that the hell-gate in Dante should read: Through me the road to everlasting woe, and Abandon hope, all ye that enter here. How can the Supreme Power, Wisdom and Love condemn a soul to ever lasting woe and an utter abandonment ...
... standard? SRI AUROBINDO: What standard? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare. Others favour Euripides. Still others say Euripides is nowhere near Sophocles. How can one decide whether Dante is greater or Shakespeare? PURANI: It is better to ask what the criterion of great poetry is. NIRODBARAN: All right. What is the criterion? SRI AUROBINDO: Is there any criterion? NIRODBARAN:... the only character he has created. The first four books of Paradise Lost are full of creative force. But Christ? I disagree with Abercrombie there. Milton has not created Christ. PURANI: About Dante he says he has created Beatrice and her memory was always with the poet. SRI AUROBINDO: What about Dante's political life in Florence? I am sure he was not thinking of Beatrice at that time. PURANI: ...
... lacking. It is believed that his home was in Ionia in Asia. Among the front ranking poets of the world we could include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than... then these two epics have been translated into various European languages and have become the most important poems of the classic European tradition, being valued even above the works of Virgil and Dante. Homer has come to be seen as a staple of Greek education, the repository of Greek myth, the source of a thousand dramas, the foundation of moral training and even the scripture of orthodox theology ...
... vision, before the eyes of the world. The city of Rome and the goddess Juno and the hero Aeneas are mere symbols and excuses to express a great universal truth. In a parallel manner, the epics of Dante and Milton have specifically dealt with the Christian ideas. To us, modern intellectuals and adorers of materia1 science most of the ideas of these two poets may seem not only grotesque but also su... this ground dare to say that the literature of the ancient peoples was unrefined or insignificant? A Turgeniev, an Amiel, a Leconte de Lisle or a Pierre Loti can take birth only. in the present age. Dante, Homer, Valmiki or the most ancient Vedic sages – none of them, like Turgeniev, Amiel, Leconte de Lisle or Pierre Loti, sought for the tales of various other ages and countries, and yet have these modern ...
... the remote past and unwittingly managed to usher in the epoch of inspiration. Dante was the harbinger of the spirit of this new age, while Shakespeare of the English and Ronsard of the French developed and exampled it in the comity of cultures. Again the glimpses of intuition that we come across in the inspiration of Dante, Shakespeare and Ronsard have further diminished in Shelley, Byron and Hugo. ...
... senses without considerable self-culture. "He ranked Valmiki above Vyas. He regarded the former as the greatest epic poet in the world. He once said: 'I was captivated by the poetic genius of Dante, and immensely enjoyed Homer's Iliad - they are incomparable in European literature. But in the quality of his poetry, Valmiki stands supreme. There is no epic in the world that can compare with the... Swinburne were also there. Countless English novels were stacked in his book-cases, littered in the comers of his rooms, and stuffed in his steel trunks. The Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy of Dante, our Ramayana, Mahabharata, Kalidasa were also among those books. He was very fond of Russian literature... "After learning Bengali fairly well, Aurobindo began to study Bengali classics, Swarnalata ...
... conception of Savitri's personality,368-371; Sri Aurobindo on epic poetry, 378-379; Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Whitman, 387; Sri Aurobindo compared to Kazantzakis, 404-405; Sri Aurobindo compared to Dante,414-415, 417-420; Sri Aurobindo's early narrative poems, 420-424; Sri Aurobindo on Goethe,425; Sri Aurobindo's views compared with Goethe's, 425-427; Sri Aurobindo's visionary certainty, 436; Sri... Collins, Douglas C. 455 Cotton, James S. 8 Coulton, G.G. 412 Cousins, James H. 17 Coxe, Louis O. 398,408 Crane, Hart 390 Dante 33,102, 111, 330,333,334,371,372, 380,381,383-385,394,410-415,417- 419, 422,426,432,448,450,461,462 Das, C.R. 12,17,45 De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 35-37 De Ruggiero ...
... secular; he made it theological, and the change of approach meant a great change of temper and of atmosphere." 20 It would, perhaps, be truer to say that Milton tried to fuse Virgil and Dante, the epic manner of the former and the theological insights of the latter. This meant creating a new style, which is best summed up by the word 'sublime'. Analysing it, Gilbert Highet writes: "It... harmony. Highet's pointed emphasis on Milton's style in Paradise Lost is by no means misplaced. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the anustup of Vyasa and Valmiki, the terza rima of Dante, the symphonic blank verse of Milton, the crystalline iambic pentameter of Savitri, all play no mean part in charging these great epics with life and movement and a rounded significance. Ezra Pound ...
... the Infinite." 125 It is the Hound of Heaven, and Love is another name of this celestial Hound, that runs the quarry to its ultimate cave of awakening and acceptance. It was this Hound that drove Dante on and on till he came to the immediate presence of God. Such spiritual yearning, such Love, says C. G. Osgood, "is a reciprocal attraction, mutual between Infinite and Finite.. .As a sense of that... the occult worlds and Savitri's exploration of the countries of the soul, and the latter is as important as the former. Aswapati's occult and spiritual itinerary is at least remotely paralleled by Dante s, but Savitri's voyage of self discovery is almost unique. Of course, 'upward' and inward' are but physical terms to convey experiences that are supra-physical; 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within ...
... their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante. It has been said, truly, that the Ramayana represents an ideal society and assumed, illogically, that it must therefore represent an altogether imaginary one. The argument ignores the alternative ...
... and of modern Europe. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself German and Italian sufficiently to read Goethe and Dante in the original tongues. (He passed the Tripos in Cambridge in the first division and obtained record marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service.) [ Sri Aurobindo's note; ...
... mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity. 475—Dante, when he said that God's perfect love created eternal Hell, wrote perhaps wiselier than he knew; for from stray glimpses I have sometimes thought there is a Hell where our souls suffer aeons of intolerable ...
... among the wonders of remote and magic isles with his heart always turned to his lost and far-off human hearth, Shakespeare riding in his surge of the manifold colour and music and passion of life, or Dante errant mid his terrible or beatific visions of Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, or Valmiki singing of the ideal man embodying God and egoistic giant Rakshasa embodying only fierce self-will approaching ...
... make the caesura either at the middle of the third or the middle of the fourth foot, e.g. (you need not bother about the Latin words but follow the scansion only): Page 133 (1) Quadrupe|dante pu|trem || cur|su quatit | ungula | campum. (Virgil) Horse-hooves | trampled the | crumbling | plain || with a | four-footed | gallop. (2) O pass|i gravi|ora, || dab|it deus | his quoque | finem ...
... harmonising construction, characteristic of the Elizabethan, almost of the English mind. Spenser's intention seems to have been to combine in his own way the success of Ariosto with the success of Dante. His work was to have been in its form a rich and beautiful romance; but it must be too at the same time a great interpretation by image and symbol, not here of the religious or spiritual, but of the ...
... Europe's modern languages, he has been intimately acquainted Page 73 with French from his early Manchester years. Nor are Italian and German any strangers: he rubs shoulders with Dante and Goethe in the original. The speech of Calderon too is on more than nodding terms with him: I am told that once inspiration seized him with force enough to pour through him a couple of hundred ...
... action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence). The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer levels ...
... leave out of his poetry. Men with intellects can be intense poets if they know how to put into their poems not their intellectuality but the passion of thought that often goes with it. Lucretius and Dante were such men, Milton also in his own manner. Shelley was another. Wordsworth too. In them thought was passionate, in Shakespeare passion was thinking. He seems time and gain to set up fireworks of ...
... long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: 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 ...
... poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Romans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly ...
... the famous dramas . While we are about Bacon we may quote what Sri Aurobindo says in another context - the discussion of "Sight" as "the essential poetic gift" which renders Homer, Shake-speare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa supreme poets. "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; ...
... of the Bible, Shankara's theories as familiar as the speculations of Teutonic thinkers and Kalidasa, Valmekie & Vyasa as near and common to the subject matter of the European critical intellect as Dante or Homer. It is the difficulties of presentation that prevent a more rapid and complete commingling. Page 393 ...
... carried the soul of past music mingled with a spirit that makes all things new. In fact, he had the avowed ambition to gather up in his Paradise Lost Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius and Dante into a mature mastery of style animated by his own genius and character. A consummate scholar in various literatures, deeply saturated with the great traditions of poetry, Sri Aurobindo too exhibit ...
... faultless as possible. That magic and power has a large variety of heights and depths, and I dare say if I had to choose between Spenser's perfection and Dante's I would not hesitate a minute, because Dante gives a far more intimate touch of the Page 8 absolute beauty which great verse must draw close to us by its patterned inspiration, its unimpeachably expressed and rhythmed mood ...
... Dionysiac temples as in fanes of Apollonian calm, to lust on Sappho's lips and deny the gods with Lucretius just as excellently as to weave Tagore's song-garlands for an immortal Beloved and, through Dante, hear even the mouth of hell declare God's mercy. Else it would be curious that the largest poetic splendour the modern ages have witnessed should have burst from the one gigantic genius who cared ...
... fact that as a poet of the future. Amal Kiran's sweep embraces a wide spectrum: from the Kingfisher to a close companion like Minnie; from Seascape, Daybreak to literary figures like Helena, Dante, Carlyle and Arnold. But naturally, given his primary interests and preoccupations, it is not surprising that most of the poems that find place in the entire corpus are of a spiritual or- mystical ...
... To skies like some vast super-rose of ruth, Seer suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain. The Divine Comedy gets invoked quite often in crystalline poems. Some passages from Dante and Prudhomme have also been transcreated. Page 345 Sethna's is a lyric genius. Even the Sehra group is but a bouquet of lyrics. It is surprising that inspite of ...
... Page 21 shall grow gradually into the feeling that a Power beyond our own takes up all our works and directly acts through us. When this experience begins, we are on the way to the state Dante attributes to the blessed at every level of Paradise — the state in which there is no ambition, no discontent, no lack of self-completion but a constant acceptance and reception of God's Will that is ...
... 366 Sweep down, keen dweller on the eyrie height 425 Sweet Calm! forgive the many times I hurled 486 Take all my shining hours from me. 42 Tell. Dante when he shows 715 Tell not your joy to even your own heart. 711 Thank God for all this wretchedness of love— 184 That blow upon his face 522 The Alps ...
... "Phanopoeia rather than logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry." (p. 277) "Among European poets the most successful in chiselled logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante." (p. 277) "Shakespeare... is a king of phanopoeia, his very mind moves phanopoeiacally." (p. 282) Page 284 In Sethna's view, Wordsworth achieves phanopoeia ...
... lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable ...
... poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Ro- mans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly ...
... Paul’s secondary school in London. Along with the normal curriculum, by following which he made rapid progress in Latin, Greek and French, he also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish to read Dante, Goethe and Cervantes in the original. As to English literature, he showed much interest in the Elizabethan theatre and for the great romantic poetry, particularly that of Keats, Shelley and Byron. ...
... read especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, medieval and modern Europe. ‘He also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish in order to read Dante, Goethe and Calderon in the original tongues. A boy with so ambitious a programme could not rightly be accused of laziness.’ 11 The Foundation Scholarship awarded him by his headmaster must have ...
... again the heart-cleansing mind-numbing handing over of your situation to the All-knower, the All-lover, whose glance can pierce through every knot and work out the Will in which alone is our peace, as Dante knew long ago. 1 am telling you this method not merely out of any wise book but out of my own life which has realised on its pulses that All can be done if the God-touch is there. Page ...
... to those who are not of the common run, people who carry in their bones the drive of some great mission. Milton, for instance, who knew he had been born for a worthwhile poetic creation. 1 believe Dante too had to wait for the Divine Comedy to emerge. After this poem's music had come to rest with I'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (The love that moves the sun and the other stars) ...
... established? "Towers may soar up but they Will topple if the ground is not steady. And there is a further reason for serenity. Let me come to it by way of a voice of wisdom from the past . Dante wrote in Italian one of the most inspired lines in all poetry, the English of which would simply be: "In His Will is our peace." It means that our hearts can rest only by putting themselves in tune ...
... pure Mantra, still there is not such a succession of long vowels mostly driven home by strong stresses as in Sri Aurobindo's picture _______________ 1[Amal Kiran, The Secret Splendour, 'Dante on the Eve of the Divina Commedia', p. 34.] 2 [Ibid., 'No Mortal Breath', p. 162.] Page 262 -a picture supported grandly, after a one-line interval, by the vision of the ...
... transformation of 77,248 word of supreme 177 creative intelligence 347 C.R.M. 122,140 Page 374 D Dadhikravan (the white horse) 305,310 Dante 22,57,126,188,223,258 186, 205 Dawn-Goddess. See Savitri (2) De Quincey's division of literature 162 death 5 desire 29,160 dharma 145,174 Diekhoff,John 244 Divine Presence ...
... indirectly, that he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of a torrent for him and, as for Caesar, he said: ...
... Supemature, The Supreme, All-Truth, Sun-word, are no more poetic than words like pole, centre, diurnal, etc. are poetic in Milton. Like the astronomical terms of Milton and the theological terms of Dante, they yield to us their meaning only when we set out to study them. The impression of what P. Lai calls the vague "luminosity" of form is therefore a nebulous charge. There is remarkable ...
... living Infinite. 21 It would be out of place to deal in detail here with Savitri. But the publication of Savitri raises the question: Can yogic experience form the subject-matter of poetry? Dante took the Christian mystical experience and made an attempt to grasp the inner unity through a traditional myth. The result was an epic of wonderous pictorial beauty full of living unforgettable touches ...
... analytical insight: he marks a difference between the early epic of Homer, Valmiki or Vyasa, where a vast and complex outward action is the subject; and the departure towards subjectivism introduced by Dante and strengthened in Milton. Savitri could be seen as a modern efflorescence of this trend, an inner epic of spiritual integrality and vastness. Romen's comparative study of Savitri and Milton's ...
... also the strengthening and safety provided by the very power of the verse that protectively spreads over the suffering soul the peace which nothing can mutilate. We have, extending sublimity beyond Dante, a soothing and redeeming certitude that not only did God create Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice, but also took particular care that out of such a possibility shall emerge in striking ...
... without stir and light each soul to peace!" Itihasic tales; Vedic-Upanishadic stories (the two birds on a tree, for instance); translation from French and Italian poets (including Dante): swings of mystic ardour; metaphysical conceits ("a fourscore sun focussing eternity"); psychological probings; aspirations. All of them linked, however tenuously, to the central idea that ...
... and never thinks or that Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt or sensed; but what separates him from Shakespeare and puts him with poets like Lucretius and Dante and Wordsworth and even Shelley whose style differs so much from his own is that the mind of thought works directly in him. He is a poet who puts into his poetry the passion of thought. He is an in ...
... such ideal praise? Was ever woman pure enough to bear A mirrored paradise Within the changeful glory of her eyes? Poor sage! whose bloodless kin denied Lips to the smile that Dante sighed Through hollow years to see again— Will you with your unpassioned abstract brain Make clear how the august philosophy Which I was song-allured to speak By symbol of a white ...
... The Secret Splendour Dante meets Beatrice in Purgatory (From Purgatorio , Canto XXX) A woman, white-veiled, crowned with olive, came— Under the shade of her green mantle, all Her body clothed in colour of living flame. Long years had passed since the first trembling fall My spirit knew, love-broken in youth's hour ...
... lapis-lazulis of, rare value were the reward extracted from his supramental quarry, though at the cost of being dubbed a "wooden head" and many other complimentary epithets. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Napoleon, Virgil, Shaw, Joyce, Hitler, Mussolini, Negus, Spanish Civil War, General Miaja, romping in, oh, the world-theatre seen at a glance exhibiting many-coloured movements for the eye's, the ear's ...
... development. That is why, when I took up Greek, I began straightaway with Euripides' Medea, and my second book was Sophocles' Antigone.... I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante.... I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience. One feels as if one took a plunge into the inmost core of the language, into that secret heart where ...
... out the spark and lustre of inner knowledge, there is in him a swift natural movement of a primal concentrated consciousness. He is therefore allotted a seat in the very first rank, with Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. Sophocles reminds one of the French dramatists with their restraint and measure, their skill in delineating subtle feeling. There is here nothing in excess, but there is a sense of subdued ...
... the spirit's absolute. 105 Fust to meet Aswapati is "a triple realm of ordered thought", which is reached by "a triple flight", itself but "a small beginning of immense ascent". Even as Dante speaks of the descending circles of Hell and the ascending slopes of Purgatory, here in Savitri Sri Aurobindo views the cosmos symbolically as a descending and an ascending stair of worlds, the ...
... he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the State. Whether I did complete the translation I cannot now recollect. I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante. I have already told you about my French, there I started with Moliere. I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience. One feels as if one took ...
... several dimensions and many voices", 50 an evolving epic of a cosmos still in a process of becoming. "It is as though", writes Roy Harvey Pearce, "Odysseus, or Aeneas, or Beowulf, or Mio Cid, or even Dante, under the persona of Adam (in whose fall/we sinned all) had been compelled, out of some dark necessity, to write his own history, and in writing it, to make it." 51 The Cantos may thus be almost ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Cosmos, on the other hand, takes a modern rather than a mediaeval view; the picture presented by science is not denied, and the insights of psychology are fully pressed into service. Dante himself is now seen to be more modern than he appeared to be during the last five or six centuries, but Sri Aurobindo is modern, and his picture of the cosmos has a poetical and philosophical as well ...
... particle, with its own charge and spin and vibrations. Shakespeare's, I said, is a particle of Life-energy, a packet of living blood-vibration, pulsating as it were, with real heart-beat. Likewise in Dante one feels it to be a packet of Tapas—of ascetic energy, a bare clear concentrated flame-wave of consciousness, of thought-force. In the Prayers and Meditations the fundamental unit of expression seems ...
... of consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the scientists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does not ...
... 98 Brummagem 98 Buddhist Period 82 C Caryatides 35 Chandidasa 82, 84 Chinese Puzzle 71 Coleridge 103 Cyclopian 48 D Dane 23 Dante 17, 27, 79 Denmark 25 Dionysus 34, 35 Dirghatama 8, 10, 11, 13, 14 Discabolo 18 Douve 77 Dr. Zhivago 38, 40, 42 Dryad 32 Duncan 19 Durga 31 Dyaus 34 ...
... excelled in depicting the beauties of form. Shakespeare sought not beauty but the wide surge of vital truths. Petrarch abounds in the beauty of form. He created more and yet more beauty of form. But Dante is to be appreciated rather through the poetic truths that stood out as unmoving rocks, the tremendous energy petrified as it were in the form. Our Indian poet Vidyapati was mad after the beauty of ...
... consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (cf. the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the scientists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does ...
... accord It unveils itself: Page 161 Yamevai ṣ a v ṛṇ ute tena labhya ḥ (Katha: 2.23) The actual function or role of personal effort is that of a guide, like Virgil taking Dante through Hell and Purgatory and then arriving at the frontier of Paradise and there entrusting him into the hands of Beatrice. It is to give the preliminary experiences, initiate into the basic mysteries ...
... Parimal, 169 Chatila, 258 Chattopadhyaya, Ramakrishnaprasad, 170 Chinmoy, 193 Christ, 7 Collyrium, 188 Corneille, 1I4 DAMANAKA, 77 Dante, 114 Darika, 279 Das, Jagadish Chandra, 182-3 Dasharatha, 56 Devi, Aruna, 194-5 Devi, Sahana, 185-7 Devi, Vma, 181 Dhama, 286 Dhanapala, 239 ...
... III. 85) What could be easier or more natural, more common and colloquial than such expression? Milton's line may be taken as an exception to his usual style, but the entire composition of Dante borders on popular speech. Yet the fact of the matter is not that. Even though the ancients speak in popular terms, they choose the zenith in poetry, they swim on the crest of its waves, never in its ...
... of consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the scientists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does not ...
... name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic ...
... you take his work in a mass you can't justify his greatness. Petrarch has written only sonnets and these too on merely one subject. And yet he is considered a great poet and given a place next to Dante. Simonides has not a single surviving complete poem; he is known only by his fragments. But he is ranked as a great poet, second only to Pindar who is the greatest Greek lyricist. Nor has Pindar himself ...
... highest is visible only when of its own accord It unveils itself: Yamevaisa_ vrnute tena labhyah ² The actual function or role of personal effort is that of a guide, like Virgil taking Dante through Hell and Purgatory and then arriving at the frontier of Paradise and there entrusting him into the hands of Beatrice. It is to give the preliminary ¹ The Gita: II, 59 ² Katha UPanishad: ...
... 385 Britain, 338 Buddha, 52-3, 104-6,182-3,196,221, 225,309,311, 344,349,400 CHINA, 54 Christ, 349, 379, 400 Churchill, 346 Commonwealth, 362 Confucius, 196 Czardom, 338 DANTE, 228,284,287, 388 – The Divine Comedy, 388 Darshanas, 297 David-Neele, Alexandra, 142, 173 Diti, 287 Durga, 249 Duryodhana, 206 EINSTEIN, 222, 344, 374, 376 Elizabeth, ...
... t, 308 Crew, Lord, 369-70 Cripps, Arthur, 32 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 706ff, 710, 754,782 Curzon, Lord, 202ff, 204ff, 224, 268, 294, 304 Daly, Dr., 317, 321 Dante, 92, 619, 636 Das, C. R., 64, 68, 77, 79, 282, 326ff, 343, 411, 528, 529, 531ff, 727 Das, Hemachandra, 62, 64 Dass, Poushpa, 774 Datta, Aswini Kumar, 184, 269, 343 ...
... his speeches on Sri Aurobindo and Savitri. The audience with the Mother after my thesis had brought me the doctoral degree, the publication of the book, my post-doctoral work on Sri Aurobindo and Dante Alighieri growing out of one section in this book, my days spent in reading Sri Aurobindo and writing about him guided gently by my father are all entwined in its pages. It is all due to Mother's grace ...
... seek suitable comparisons. D.S. Sarma calls it "a vast philosophical prose epic...on the spiritual evolution of the universe" and describes Sri Aurobindo as "a self-exiled and self-imprisoned Dante" and The Life Divine as, "a philosophical Divina Commedia having its Inferno in the Spirit's descent into the ignorance of mind, life and matter, its Purgatorio in the ascent to the true knowledge ...
... it was as the Mother of Love that she manifested a power of 'the The Divine Shakti not hitherto witnessed - or witnessed to an equal degree - in the world. The symphonic Divina Commedia of Dante concludes with a peal in of praise of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars". Love is indeed the heart-beat that sustains and gives rapture to the phenomenal world. "Love," says the Mother ...
... physical reality of the universe. It is reality only for the cage. As for "other worlds," there is no lack of psychics, sages and saints in every age and clime, from Egypt to India, to Eleusis and Dante, who have seen and described them; any person at all conscious and developed has seen his "dead" friends after their death (in sleep, generally, precisely when the web of the physical Mind gives way) ...
... n, a preface where, he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the State." Nolini never completed the translation. "I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante." I do not know with what books he began his Spanish and German lessons! Nolini knew well those two languages also. And Sri Aurobindo taught him Sanskrit. He learnt it so well that he translated many ...
... can't be Bengali!'" One of Sri Aurobindo's interests was in "learning languages" for which he had a natural aptitude. He learnt German and Italian so well by himself that he could study Goethe and Dante in the original. In Baroda he picked up Gujarati "as I had to read the Maharaja's files." It was also in Baroda that Sri Aurobindo for the most part learnt Bengali for himself; before engaging a teacher ...
... perfectly sane and strong in all its parts. So much did these elements form the basis of Coleridge's own temperament that he could not perhaps imagine a genius in which they were wanting. Yet Goethe, Dante & Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in femineity as Vyasa, none dominates so much ...
... be classed with the genus irritabile vatum; nor does he square any better with the popular idea that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity—except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality & strong character are in themselves madness. But to arrive ...
... atavists of this European evolution. For more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern ...
... insane hacking of stone and an effeminate daubing of canvas; Vauban, Pestalozzi, Dr. Parr, Vatel and Beau Brummell are then the true heroes of artistic creation and not Da Vinci, Angelo, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Rodin. Whether Mr. Archer's epithets and his accusations against Indian spirituality stand in the comparison, let the judicious determine. But meanwhile we see the opposition of the ...
... The Secret Splendour Rosa Mystica—A Colloquy The Cynic Tell Dante when he shows High heaven—-where earth-lust falls away— In the image of a rose: "Not by forgetting all Earth-hunger does that bloom display Carmines so magical" Do mystics ever ken What tumult bees and butterflies Make in the rose-core ...
... him as his representative to the ceremony. Francesca and Paolo fell in love. Once the husband came suddenly and surprised them in bed. In his rage he severed the necks of both of them with his sword. Dante, guided by Virgil, meets their souls in the second circle of Hell, and Francesca tells him their story.) "My land of birth is seated on the shore Whither in quest of peace the Po descends ...
... without toiling and moiling. Poetry is often supposed to be born perfect at one stroke, a flawless uninterrupted outburst. The result of striving and straining is declared to be no poetry. But what does Dante say about his Divina Commedia? "Si che m'ha fatto per piu anni macro" -which means that his poem made him "lean through many a Page 1 year." If even a master-singer found that climbing ...
... masterpiece at the sacrifice of his own mother's life though not necessarily as a deliberate act of callousness towards her — the point is also that the masterpiece saved is the Divina Commedia of Dante. If you enter imaginatively into the importance felt of this poem by Page 182 all who read poetry with their deepest soul as well as with their living entrails and if you share their ...
... unconscious naturalness and inevitability with nothing cheap and vulgar and theatrical about it, though this does not preclude the grand pride or godlike confidence that inspiration has in itself through a Dante or a Milton or a Shakespeare sonneteering about his "powerful rhyme" and its ability to outlast monuments of brass and marble. Sometimes the sterling artist and the gaudy actor co-exist: but we must ...
... Abysm is the belly of the prostitute. Grandeurs are dumb and misery has no muse; Homeric laughters crack through the hyena's teeth, Virgil drops tears of things through a crocodile And Dante climbs from the pit to pap and mouth! Only some glances parted by lids that quiver Catch the Soul pinking through the world-vast sleep, The Spirit golding the streaks a-dream in the haze ...
... The Secret Splendour Dante on the Eve of the 'Divina Commedia' Gloom-bird they call me—for I brood apart. One with night's incommunicable mind, All human frenzy quenched within my heart By the haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity. Drunk with the Unknown, I wander mute and blind; ...
... is to surrender oneself completely to Her and drown one's whole life in Her vastnesses. Amal Kiran ends the poem uttering the mantra of self-surrender. "Your will alone my peace", in the manner of Dante - "E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace." A gem of a lyric is "Purblind". The metaphor of the candle runs all through the four stanzas, at times revealing, at times concealing the beautiful beloved ...
... Savitri as the great fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius. Indeed, that should immediately dispel the doubt that a Yogi's experiences can at all form the subject-matter of poetry. Had not Dante taken the Christian mystical experience and made an attempt to grasp the inner unity through a traditional myth? The result is a wondrous pictorial beauty. Much more than that is Savitri. In Sri Aurobindo ...
... delight which flows from its spiritual inspiration and spiritual word. We should not look at it as the Page 145 work of a poet like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats, even like that of Dante or Kalidas. It must be seen as the work of Valmiki or Vyasa though not on that level of aesthetic-spiritual creativity. Textbook or academic criteria are certainly not applicable to it nor should we ...
... record marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service.] He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself Italian and German sufficiently to read Dante and Goethe in the original tongue." I have left the detail about the Tripos and the record Page 36 marks, though I do not find these trifles in place here; the note would read ...
... make the caesura either at the middle of the third or the middle of the fourth foot: e.g. (you need not bother about the Latin words but follow the scansion only): (1) Quadrupe¦dante pu¦tream¦cur¦su quatit¦ungula¦campum. (Virgil) Horse-hooves¦trampled the¦cmmbling¦plain¦with a¦four-footed gallop Page 119 (2) O pass¦i gravi¦ora,¦¦dab¦it ...
... Bible), French and mathematics. His reports show that these subjects provided him with no difficulty, and he found time to study on the side Italian, German and Spanish in order to be able to read Dante, Goethe and Calderón in the original. At that time he led a life of poverty because his father, for unknown reasons, practically stopped sending money for him and his second brother, while most of their ...
... them were Nolini and Moni, who had had to stop their college studies because of their revolutionary activities. He taught them French, Greek, Latin and Italian, L’Avare, Medea, Antigone, Vergil and Dante. Both Nolini and Moni would gain fame as writers in Bengali. They had to eat too. ‘We did the cooking ourselves and each of us developed a specialty,’ narrates Nolini. ‘I did the rice, perhaps because ...
... neglecting the high enchantment their bete noire seldom lacked. Of course, Swinburne's style is not the sole possible medium for such enchantment: no poet could be more concise, more clear-cut than Dante, but there is also a richness in his restraint, he is a fire on the leash. Whether controlled or expansive, it is a rhythmic intensity of vision that constitutes great verse, a thrilled mating of sense ...
... any other is recommended because some needed corrections have been made in it. One of the stories is called "The Hero" and is based upon an anecdote told me by the Mother. The other, which concerns Dante, is titled: "A Mere Manuscript." Strange things have been happening of late to me. I have written of them to two or three friends and at least one letter will appear in a future Mother India ...
... those who had an intimate relationship with her. She often made them feel wonderfully unique. Something of this Krishna-like Grace is sought to be pictured in the last lines of my poem. The Triumph of Dante: For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?- Page 250 A love that misers not its golden store But gives itself and yearns to ...
... scattered through its maze. I can only think of a "volume" like The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga which in terms of earthly literature could reflect the state of Divine Consciousness Dante hints at, a state wherein the multiplicity and diversity of the phenomenal world interweave and blend to discover their all-hansforming unity or, rather, meet in a warm and glowing union which discloses ...
... broad even river-flow of Virgil ran in his veins, the concentrated titanism of Aeschylus made his bone and marrow, the grandiose passion of Lucretius tensed his tissues, the sweetly intense severity of Dante thrilled and toned his nerves - and, in addition to these formative forces, Page 57 there were the diverse poetic qualities brought by Tasso and Ariosto and Camoes and all other c ...
... Extremist"). 8. Stephen Crane, Prose- and Poetry. The Library of America, 1984. 9. Amal Kiran, Altar and Flame, p. 40 ("Pranam to the Divine Mother") 10. Ibid., p. 26 ("Dante Meets Beatrice in Purgatory"). Page 219 ...
... intellectual and that he will touch on the diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part ...
... 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 ...
... primitive power of poetic speech; a subdued and well-tempered even adequacy is its constant gift. Only once or twice does Chaucer, as if by accident, strike out a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters. No other great poetical literature has had quite such a beginning. Others also started with a poetry of external life, Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with ...
... the 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 ...
... between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea; (3) a life Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys,, (4) gasping in the impossible air (this is quite Dante; (3) also) (5) these intelligible dangerous marvels; (6) Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future, (and the two lines that follow) (7) the years of the ...
... mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity. 474) Dante, when he said that God's perfect love created eternal Hell, wrote perhaps wiselier than he knew; for from stray glimpses I have sometimes thought there is a Hell where our souls suffer aeons of intolerable ...
... record marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service |. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself Italian and German sufficiently to read Dante and Goethe in the original tongue." 2 I have left the detail about the Tripos and the record marks, though I do not find these trifles in place here; the note would read much better with the ...
... with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley the tone is as if he were dealing with an essential part of himself. The connection is basic because in Shelley's mind Plato of the Symposium and Dante of the Paradiso interfused: he burned with a spiritual idealism of thought, the lips of his love carried a flame-kiss from the fragmentary human heart to the Absolute Sun of Eternity. What, however ...
... the serene lift by which Homer's elemental enthusiasm expressed itself, the godlike elegance in which Virgil's dignified pensiveness found voice, the soaring yet mountain-secure intensity to which Dante shaped his compulsive vision, the smiling certainty of vast wing-stroke which upbears Milton through all the revelatory detours of his mind. Chapman at his best rushes, dazzles, distracts: he has ...
... hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable." The inspired style reaching inevitability may be exemplified by the two lines apropos of which Sri Aurobindo in his pronouncement on Dante, quoted above, referred to "the inspired style" in his writing: Page 37 Si come quando Marsia traesti Delia vagina delle membra sue. These lines to Apollo may be tentatively ...
... and authorship breaks through an exclusive utility. This Master of the Via Mystica is at the same time, in a super-Aristotelian sense, "the Master of those who know" (to quote a phrase from Dante) and, we may add, the Master of all who love literature. Philosopher and stylist at every instant, Sri Aurobindo ¹. Printed at the Jupiter Press Private Ltd., Madras-18. ². P. ...
... long poems are attempted but most of them come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets is such that we can count them on the fingers of one hand. Similarly, even writers of short ...
... abundant. But sometimes even in Shakespeare you come across very bare lines which are just as effective as his wealth-burdened move- Page 421 merits. Milton too has such effects. In Dante you have, according to Sri Aurobindo, a perfect example of poetry where richness and restraint are fused. There are poets who are restrained rather than rich yet they achieve supreme effects. So it ...
... Sophocles may resemble the mad Lear of Shakespeare, but they are caught in poetry of two distinct orders and neither theme nor mood can make Sophocles Romantic or Shakespeare Classical. Similarly, Dante rests Classical for all his poignancy and sensitivity. Lucas 23 himself feels that though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus ...
... mirror their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, Homer, Shakespeare and Dante..." * * * "Many centuries after these poets [Valmiki and Vyasa], perhaps a thousand years or even more, came the third great embodiment of the national consciousness, Kalidasa. There is ...
... atmosphere of the earth as no other engine has done. It has shaken the moral atmosphere too not in a lesser degree. Reason and moral sense could not move man, so Fear has been sent by the Divine Grace. Dante said that God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice-that seems to be the inevitable gate through which one has to pass to arrive at the Divine. We are indeed in hell today upon earth ...
... Communism, 25, 27-8, 125-6 Confucius, 222 Copernicus, 308 Cordelia, 185n Corneille, 197 Crete, 214 Cyrus, 240 Czechoslovakia, 100 DANTE, 39, 79, 197 . - Divina Commedia, 39 Darshallas, the, 344 Das, Prof. A. C., 336-9 Dasarathi, 91 De Broglie, Louis, 319 -La Physique Nouvelle ...
... less felt than the magnificence of its dress. All kinds are legitimate in poetry. I only wanted to point out that poetry can be great or perfect even if it uses simple or ordinary expressions—e.g. Dante simply says "In His will is our peace" 191 and in writing that in Italian produces one of the greatest lines in all poetic literature. "And thy magic vastness wraps my secret hours With its ...
... her with her permission. To be so close to the Divine’s physical Presence and watch at the same time the significantly changing expressions on her face was a delight to be envied even by the gods. Dante says of Beatrice: What she appears when she smiles a little, Cannot be spoken of, neither can the mind lay hold on it, It is so sweet and strange and sublime a miracle. 7 Page 79 ...
... particle, with its own charge and spin and vibrations. Shakespeare's, I said, is a particle of Life-energy, a packet of living blood-vibration, pulsating as it were, with real heart-beat. Likewise in Dante one feels it to be a packet of Tapas—of ascetic energy, a bare clear concentrated flame-wave of 1 And the hours pass like dreams unlived. 2 O serene and immobile Consciousness, Thou ...
... 235 -Kubla Khan, 84 Commonwealth, 284, 290 Communism (Sovietic), 253 Confucius, 281 Cousins, James H., 52n -New Ways in English Literature, 52n DANDAKARANYA,276 Dante, 53, 60-1, 71, 85, 169, 176,219 -Inferno, 53, 60n., 149, 169n -Paradiso, 53, 71, 149 Danton, 103 Delille, 85 Denmark,175 Descartes, 286 Dhammapada, 279n Diocles ...
... 82, 93, 116, 118, 127, 130, 187, 189, 191,209, 243, 283, 317 Christianity, 192 Chronos, 226 Colbert, 209, 411 Congo, 323-4 Curie, 428 Cyclops, 99 DAITYA, 46 Danege1d, 117 Dante, l8ln., 203, 209 – Divina Commedia, 181n. – Irifemo, 181n. Danton, 94 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 210 Debussy, 427 Devas, 253 Dhammapada , the, 9n., 159 Dionysus, 47 Dirghatamas ...
... particle, with its own charge and spin and vibrations. Shakespeare's, I said, is a particle of Life-energy, a packet of living blood-vibration, pulsating as it were, with real heart.- beat. Likewise in Dante one feels it to be a packet of Tapas – of ascetic energy, a bare clear concentrated flame-wave of consciousness, of thought-force. In the Prayers and Meditations the fundamental unit of expression seems ...
... the distance between the highest and the lowest, he descended from the very highest into the very lowest, demanding nothing, asking for no condition whatsoever from the soul in Ignorance, from ¹ Dante: Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto III. 4 "Justice moved my great maker" Page 181 the earth under the grip of evil. Thus it was that Life lodged itself in the home of death, Light ...
... FRENCH AVE MATER Amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare . . . -Dante Et je devins poète en étant amoureux . . . -Corneille Page 114 Mater ...
... we pass through it gaining experience, growing in consciousness; and then when we have crossed the stage we enter into the domain beyond death and begin to learn, to partake of the life immortal. Dante, the great Christian poet speaks likewise of a life in Hell and a life in Paradise, first, the tragedy, the life of sorrows, transmuted in the end into the Divine Comedy, the life of happiness and bliss ...
... where, he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the state. Whether I did complete the translation I cannot now recollect. I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante. I have already told you about my French, there I started with Molière. I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience. One feels as if one took a ...
... of something beyond the grasp of the senses, something divine and infinite. The aspiration of every poet flies to an immaculate realm of Beauty and Truth, to a world beyond. Milton, Wordsworth and Dante need no introduction in this field, for they are undoubtedly spiritual. They seriously resorted to spirituality. But it is strange enough how Shakespeare, whose creation is replete with nature's scenes ...
... atmosphere of the earth as no other engine has done. It has shaken the moral atmosphere too not in a lesser degree. Reason and moral sense could not move man, so Fear has been sent by the Divine Grace. Dante said that God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice— that seems to be the inevitable gate through which one has to pass to arrive at the Divine. We are indeed in hell today upon earth ...
... time; he was already at ease in them and did not think it necessary to labour over them any longer." Sri Aurobindo mastered French and learnt enough of Italian and German to be able to read Dante and Goethe in the original. His studies in the Classics, English and French literatures, and the entire history of Europe was not only extensive, but extraordinarily deep, ample evidence of which ...
... terms and pronunciation of Bengali. In the year 1895 the first collection of Sri Aurobindo's poems, Songs to Myrtilla , was published "for private circulation". Sri Aurobindo used to read Homer, Dante, the Mahabharata, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti, during this period. He instructed the Bombay firms Messrs Radhabai Atmaram Sagun and Messrs Thacker Spink & Co. to send him catalogues of new publications ...
... one should work only for the Divine, the Divine, of course, including humanity also. Further, it is a striking parallelism between the Commedia and Faust that even as it is Beatrice who conducts Dante through Paradise, it is Gretchen who finally comes forward to guide Faust to the higher spheres: Page 423 To guide him, let-it be given to me; Still dazzles ...
... is what you call a religious myth. Even though it puts forth characters that are human characters, it doesn't Page 4 deal with a human event; nor does the Divine Comedy of Dante deal with any historical episode. It is not history. The Divine Comedy is something that deals with the conditions of the human soul, particularly after death, and the conditions of man. Even now ...
... to make the pupil plunge into the living waters of its great literature. Nolini began Greek with the Medea of Euripides and the Antigone of Sophocles. Latin with the Aeneid, and Italian with Dante.** This was also the period when they felt they might indulge a little in the luxury of buying books. With a lavish provision of Rs. 10 per month, they were able to get some of the best English literature ...
... happening, and we become almost participants in the action. It may, perhaps, be said that this 'descent' , into Hell is more Greek than Hindu, recalls vaguely Hades and Tartarus and the Circles in Dante than the legendary Patala of Indian mythology. Nevertheless, merely as a poetic projection of other worlds - or nether worlds - the passage must rank among the most unforgettably vivid in the entire ...
... and in an immensity of calm serenity it says: Just as Thou wilt, just as Thou wilt. 10 On 21 July, Mirra has a blissful unitive experience. Perhaps something of that kind is pictured by Dante in the Paradiso : As sudden lightning throws in disarray The visual spirits, so that the eye is reft Of power to grasp even things that strongest stay, The living light in ...
... great love that would be shared, free from all animal activity, something that could physically represent the great love which is at the origin of the worlds". Rather like the climactic vision in Dante: O Light eternal who only in thyself abidest, only thyself dost understand, and to thyself, self-understood and self-understanding, turnest love and smiling! ... To the high fantasy ...
... 416, 423, 425 Coleridge, S.T. 61 Counouma, P. 691, 816 Cripps, Sir Stafford 425ff, 447, 571 Page 900 Dahyabhai Patel 683 Daladier, Edouard 395ff, 403 Daniel, Samuel 38 Dante 111,315,471,633 Dara (Aga Syed Ibrahim) 328 Das, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan 216, 448 Datta (Dorothy Hodgeson) 183, 201, 209ff, 217, 235, 239, 255, 321, 325, 328-9, 674, 691 David-Neel, ...
... Aurobindo's culminating prose testament, The Supramental Manifestation. One way or another, the aim was to take the listeners to the inner countries of the Integral Yoga, rather like Virgil guiding Dante through the triple worlds in The Divine Comedy. It is seldom a sheerly sunlit path or the primrose path of easy success, for the invisible adverse forces are always around; but Grace too is near at ...
... body had ever spoken of the deliberate transformation of the species. Mother is the extraordinary story of this change of species. It is a story more incredible than Jules Verne, more profound than Dante, more mysterious than all the planets yet to be explored—perhaps another planet within this planet. A mystery that we must decipher together. For in truth, we do not know what the mystery is. If ...
... monsters and caricatures, or perhaps improved super-brains, that is, if they succeed, but these will be variations of the same thing and woven of the same substance. One can put the molecules of Napoleon, Dante and Shakespeare together—it would be amusing to behold—but it would still be of man all the same, perhaps even worse. What follows man will possibly (certainly) produce itself from man but with an element ...
... of life. I may add that, following this work and helped by a UGC postdoctoral Senior Fellowship for three years (1967-70) at Andhra University, I completed a comparative study of Dante's The Divine Comedy and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. It appeared first serially in Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual '(1972-78) and later in book form (1981). But Savitri remains inexhaustible ...
... ("She who was the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good, coming where 1 was, denied me her most sweet salutation, in which alone was my blessedness."—Dante's Vila Nuova) O Beatrice, one word's saluting grace Breathed from your mystery-haunted flower-sweet Visage would have becalmed the passion-heat Vexing my vague mind's melancholy ...
... poet—the dignity and humanity of his thought—-can be measured by nothing, perhaps, so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives; if he is supreme his vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars. George Santayana Page 369 ...
... and the Name, crosses the murky no-man's-land, though only to confront, "a greater darkness...a worse reign,/If worse can be where all is evil's extreme." 83 As in the circles in Dante's Inferno, beneath Horror's depths are lower circles of deepening Horror. Now Aswapati is in the land of the unashamedly vicious, the licentious and the lost—the "fell dun suburbs of the cities of ...
... 233 If Milton in his 'mighty-mouthed' moments is inspired by the Higher Mind, if Shakespeare in his great dazzling moments of supreme utterance is the poet with the Illumined Mind, if Dante's poetry is charged again and again with the marvellous revelatory power of the Intuitive Mind, then Sri Aurobindo's Savitri embodies the sovereignty of the Overmind and comes to us with the direct ...
... themselves through the mantras provided their fundamental truth is the truth of delight. Take the famous utterance of Shakespeare: And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, or Dante's: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate, (Abandon hope, all ye that enter here,) Page 109 or Valmiki' s : Apahrtya sacim bharyam sakyam Indrasya jivitum. Na ca ...
... it. It has been very much used, perhaps created, by Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer and I am certain that nobody would doubt that as a neologism it is a success. "Take another example: Dante's 'insemprare' in the line 'se non cola dove gioir s'insempra' ( Paradiso X, 148) - 'there where joy can be forever' - where the preposition 'in' and the temporal adverb 'sempre' ('always') undergo... have "ancillary" meaning "subservient", but I can easily imagine an English poet writing: Anciilar to God's will is the world's work. Very interesting indeed is what you say about Dante's verbal innovation. I wonder whether in an English rendering we can incorporate a suggestion of his feat. Laurence Binyon has a fine sensitive version: Save where joy tastes its own eternity ...
... Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms, Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues Coiling in a half darkness... 118 This is like the descent into Dante's Hell, and Ruru is aghast when he sees the shapes and hears the cries in Death's Kingdom. But Ruru's resolve is unshaken, and he makes the inexorable bargain with Death, and Ruru and Priyumvada are ...
... it were, the quality of water. It takes up the form of that very vessel in which it is put and assumes the colour thereof. Milton's inner Being represents height, density, weight and seriousness. Dante's inner Being represents intensity, virility and Tapasya (askesis). Kalidasa's inner Being represents beauty, while that of the Upanishadic seers represents luminosity. The truth of the inner Being ...
... s. The sense of something irreparable, a final doom, has before it the vision of an eternal hell, the Lord of hell and his hosts and his captives. Upon this basic picture of Hell has loomed out Dante's vision of Paradise. The Indian consciousness did not consider anything essentially evil, anything irrevocably and eternally condemned to perdition. Even the Asura, the anti-Divine is viewed ...
... ess. The sense of something irreparable, a final doom, has before it the vision of an eternal hell, the Lord of hell and his hosts and his captives. Upon this basic picture of Hell has loomed out Dante's vision of Paradise. The Indian consciousness did not consider anything essentially evil, anything irrevocably and eternally condemned to perdition. Even the Asura, the anti-Divine is viewed, in ...
... consciousness. The sense of something irreparable, a final doom has before it the vision of an eternal hell, the Lord of hell and his hosts and his captives. Upon this basic picture of Hell has loomed out Dante's vision of Paradise. The Indian consciousness did not consider anything essentially evil, anything irrevocably and eternally condemned to perdition. Even the Asura, the anti-Divine is viewed ...
... topic of the Mahabharata, mention G. Ram's interpretation of that poem as symbolic, Bhima symbolising military genius and Draupadi... SRI AUROBINDO: Nonsense! It is something like Byron's joke on Dante's Divine Comedy, that Beatrice was a mathematical figure. PURANI: Critics say that in the future the epic will be more and more subjective. SRI AUROBINDO: It looks like that. The idea has always ...
... by a sudden upheaval of the nether forces. The whole system feels, although not in a conscious manner, the tension of the repression and suffers from something that is unhealthy and ill-balanced. Dante's spiritualised passion is a supreme instance of control by Sublimation, but the Divina Comedia hardly bears the impress of a serene and tranquil soul, sovereignly above the turmoils of the tragedy ...
... described as "the final outburst of inexplicable joy" is one of the world's master-movements of it. Among European achievements 1 would incline to couple with it the whole last canto of "Paradiso" in Dante's Divina Commedia, closing on that unforgettable note which one may venture to English, a little freely, thus: Then vigour failed the towering fantasy; Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble ...
... the central truth and purpose of his existence : the union with and the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. But this truth and purpose are realised by love and by nothing else—love which is, in Dante's words, The increate perpetual thirst that draws Towards the realms of God's own form...¹ In some of the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother this psychic love finds an exquisitely ...
... something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose repre ...
... read European literature only in bad or ineffective Indian translations, were to pass it under a hostile and disparaging review, dismiss the Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and primitive epos, Dante's great work as the nightmare of a cruel and superstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken barbarian of considerable genius with an epileptic imagination, the whole drama of Greece and Spain ...
... Aurobindo, "Nirvana") The bareness and simplicity, the unemphatic but superbly efficient rhythm give to the line an inevitability that lies beyond the powers of the mind. A similar line is Dante's: E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace. (In His will is our peace.) Spiritual poetry can and often does free itself from the philosophical content and directly convey the significance ...
... long ago. I wrote "mud' mud, mud, mud of the subconscient. Can you not tell us a few words on this subconscient? By the grace of Freud and other psychologists, we have come to look upon it as Dante's Inferno or Michael's Hell. Your description seems to come close to it, but you've said somewhere that in this subconscient, there is formed and stored the impression, besides that of previous lives ...
... unit. C, Day Lewis represents them by: To tell of the war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier, Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores, To Italy... Dante's Divina Commedia runs its start into a trio of lines setting the terza rima moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself ...
... Well, your arguments are not so overwhelming that I would find it difficult to answer; it was the time to answer that I did not find. You may note that you quoted some time back [31.3.38] Dante's line: "In His will is our peace" and said that written in Italian it is one of the greatest lines in all poetic literature. Well, judging by the translation (not knowing Italian rhythm), I fear again ...
... that I did not know before, but it gave precision and point to my previous perception. But still I don't quite understand Tagore's objection. I myself do not take many things as true in poetry—e.g. Dante's Hell etc.—of which I yet feel the emotion. It is surely part of the power of poetry to open new worlds to us as well as to give a supreme voice to our own ideas, experiences and feelings. The Life ...
... creations of the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its representative significance for the human condition, and the tragic ...
... "The distinction of a poet—the dignity and humanity of his thought—can be measured by nothing, perhaps so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his vision, like Dante's, always stretches to the stars." 1 Two other poets whose vision, literally and metaphorically, stretches to the stars are Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo. In Book I of De Rerum Natura Lucretius ...
... which testifies to the immense labour of a god that has gone into the building of the magnificent epic. For a future research scholar, when Savitri earns as wide a recognition as, for instance, Dante's or Homer's epic, if not more, a very interesting work remains to be done; going into the minutest detail, he would show where new lines or passages have been added, or where one line slightly changed ...
... which testifies to the immense labour of a god that has gone into the building of the magnificent epic. For a future research scholar, when Savitri earns as wide a recognition as for instance Dante's or Homer's epic, if not more, a very interesting work remains to be done, going into the minutest detail, he would show where new lines or passages have been added, or where one line slightly changed ...
... him with open arms, and asked him to apply his mathematical ability to what was to them a far more important problem: the calculation of the exact location and dimensions of Hell, as described in Dante’s Inferno . Galileo took his assigned task seriously … Over the course of two lectures to the Florentine Academy he used mathematical arguments to demonstrate that Hell must have a shape like a cone ...
... English Paradise Lost and Keats' Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharat, Ramayan, Kalidasa's Kumar Sambhav, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment 138 ) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but ...
... you; Move in your music towards that mundane mark All moves to, but entranced... It is a fine commingling of the mood of "the Cloud of Unknowing" with something Shelleyan as well as Dantes-que. Miss Chadwick's glimpses of God as Nature itself super-natured are most enchantingly concrete: Sweeter to smell than sun-warmed cedar bark, Shaped with more grace than cats or willow ...
... intrusion of Overmind or Supermind could produce philosophies more perfect in themselves than the systems of Shankara or Plato or Plotinus or Spinoza or Hegel, poetry superior to Homer's, Shakespeare's, Dante's or Valmiki's, music more superb than the music of Beethoven or Bach, sculpture greater than the statues of Phidias and Michael Angelo, architecture more utterly beautiful than the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon ...
... into light, from ignorance of God to knowledge of Him is the work assigned by many poets to woman. There is the praise by Goethe of the Eternal Feminine calling us onward and upward. And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy of worship. Crashaw wrote a hymn in honour of St. Teresa, lauding her ...
... valuable because he cites in the course of it two or three stanzas from his own rendering of Page 91 the Meghaduta, the otherwise lost Cloud-Messenger in terza rima, the metre of Dante's Divina Commedia. We have now perforce to be satisfied with these significant samples of the translator's art: "Dark like the cloudy foot of highest God When starting from the dwarf-shape ...
... physically and philosophically of the Sun; 2. the fourfold pattern of a city that is a representation of the cosmos … The City as an archetype of an ideal heavenly and earthly society is fundamental to Dante’s Divine Comedy , and is also to be found biblically in the Book of Revelation, where the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem, descends from on high at the end of the world … The holy city of Jerusalem ...
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