Eliot : Thomas Steams (1888-1965), American-English poet, playwright, critic, leader of the modernist movement in poetry.
... Talks on Poetry TALK TWENTY-THREE We have brought Shakespeare and Eliot together apropos of the latter's lines on evening as an etherized patient. But Eliot and Sarojini Naidu would indeed be strange associates, the one a sophisticated modernist, the other a romantic traditionalist, the one intellectually inspired, the other emotionally beauty-swept. Yet... Yet there are some tracks in my mind along which I must bring them together: perhaps the very ingeniousness of Shakespeare and Eliot drives me in this matter. The lines we have quoted from Eliot I have considered the surgeon's delight. Well, the husband of the Indian poetess was a doctor and it is by marrying him that Sarojini Chattopadhyaya became Sarojini Naidu. Once an Indian admirer of hers... escape from all intention the poet himself may have had. Eliot has almost a moment of such poetry in his Gerontion at the end of a passage which is a series of forceful poetic thinkings in which remorse is expressed at the waste of knowledge about the presence of Christ: These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. Expositors of Eliot have tracked a clever connection between this line and ...
... people you mention were extra-literary. Show the works of the Indians to people like Eliot and see." God knows what he means. I don't think God knows. What the blazes does all this nonsense mean? The latter people like Binyon and De la Mare have no literary merit or literary perception and Eliot has? Eliot is a theorist, a man who builds his poetry according to rule. God save us from such fellows... whole estimate of Eliot is naturally not summed up in a remark made in 1936. Although this remark touches on a point which he evidently thought important in relation to Eliot, he could say about some passages read out to him at a later date: "This is poetry." About some others he said, "The substance is good but there's no poetry." He also appreciated certain pieces of criticism by Eliot, apropos of which... is not success or Shelleyan heights, but only to give voice to our spiritual experiences in a tongue so widely spoken, nothing remains to be said. Shelleyan heights are regarded, I believe, by Eliot as very low things or at least a very bad eminence. But even for expressing spirituality or whatever may be the object, we must try to make the vehicle as perfect as possible. Who said not except ...
... betrayer already hinted at in "flowering judas", a rank growth symbolically mentioned by Eliot in the company of "dogwood" and 23. King Henry the Fifth, Act III, Scene 1. 24. Selected Poems - T. S. Eliot (Penguin Poets, Harmondsworth), 1948, p. 29. 25.P. 641. 26. A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (London), 1955, p. 109. Page 41 "chestnut" as a product of "depraved... their comment on Gerontion in the very same book, Exploring Poetry, 25 and give their interpretation of Eliot: "Then Christ came with the power and beauty of a tiger, with the godlike energy and glory that Blake's tiger symbolizes." George Williamson, in A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot, 26 designates "Christ the tiger" as "an image of terror - or a springing form of terror and beauty" and... In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger.. . 23 Eliot goes directly to Christ. Contracting the accepted English derivative - "juvenescence" - of the Latin juvenescere which means "to reach the age of youth", and using it to denote the spring-time or ...
... reveal its beauty. Because the noted actress Rachel discovered this, she has become renowned in the world of French drama. The intention of the moderns is somewhat like this. Take, for example, Eliot; but Eliot may be considered afterwards. Let us first take the echo of a Bengali poet: From the point of view of technique, it has been said to be flawless. One likes to characterise these... incantation is Page 141 the quintessence of prose itself. Perhaps it may have measure but no tune. Yet, in Bengal, we have not been able to rise to the standard of Eliot. The reason is that Eliot is highly serious and has depth of feeling. However whimsical and arbitrary may be his brains, he has behind all that an intensity of emotion, although we may not call it the joy of poetry... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 Modern Poetry ELIOT was perhaps the first to lay down the principle that the style of poetry should be like that of prose. By prose he means the current way of talk. According to him the language should be current, if not colloquial. Common words and sentences and the order of prose will satisfy this principle ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 T. S. Eliot: “Four Quartets" IN these latest poems of his, Eliot has become outright a poet of the Dark Night of the Soul. The beginnings of the new avatar were already there certainly at the very beginning. The Waste Land is a good preparation and passage into the Night. Only, the negative element... swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty.... low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome ...
... that Eliot, no matter how curiously, has succeeded in making poetry of the kind we have designated as piquant. Ex-tremely piquant phanopoeia is created in the modernist mode which does not put a cordon sanitaire around usually prosaic departments of life but intrudes everywhere with a semi-satiric semi-morbid acuteness of sensation-seeking intellect. Shakespeare would have congratulated Eliot here... difference may be briefly shown to the best effect by a few passages. A. H. Cruickshank has juxtaposed some lines from Massinger with those from Shake-speare to which they have an affinity, and T. S. Eliot has made comments. Here is Massinger speaking — Page 185 Can I call back yesterday with all their aids Who bow unto my sceptre? or restore My mind to that tranquillity and... mandragora Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday. ("Owe" in Elizabethan English connotes "possess", "own".) Eliot remarks: "Massinger'S is a general rhetorical question, the lan-guage just and pure but colourless. Shakespeare's has particular significance; and the adjective 'drowsy' and the verb 'medicine' infuse ...
... the circumference, and seize it by direct vision." 9 ' On the other hand, T.S. Eliot bluntly says that, "nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else; and if you find that you must do without something, such as religious faith or philosophical belief, then you must just do without it." The point Eliot is trying to make is that, while it may be possible to appreciate the Commedia... mystic has to express in words experiences that are beyond verbal expression. As Gilbert Highet perceptively says (he is thinking of poets like St John of the Cross, Holderlin, Valery, Donne and T.S. Eliot): These people had a certain experience of life which they found so complex, so dangerous and alarming, so much profounder than normal thought and living, that they could not ... "there is a distinct pleasure in enjoying poetry as poetry when one does not share the beliefs"; whether one shares the beliefs or no, their presence must act either as a stimulant or an irritant. Eliot therefore concludes, in his characteristically guarded manner, that, "both in creation and enjoyment much always enters which is, from the point of view of 'Art', irrelevant." 95 It is when vision ...
... Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo. like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom à la Eliot of The Waste Page 56 Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like A body like a parable of dawn, That seemed a niche... one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct-factors which if not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M. whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more sensitively, more ... unsympathetic to poetry of a spiritual order. "I can read", he says, "the Divine Comedy with pleasure , St. John of the Cross is a marvellous poet, poems of Kabir and Chandidas are exquisite, T. S. Eliot 's Ash- Wednesday 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 ...
... when he creates, as he cannot but create himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we are allowed the liberty of comparing... form an ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture – the æsthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree, in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as part and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra... but the modern style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement. Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be supposed to illustrate: At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, ...
... Ibid., pp. 99-100 16. S. K. Mitra, Resurgent India (1963), p. 31 17. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 14, p. 399 18. Ibid., p. 407 19. lbid.,p.408 20. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, II, 11. 395-98 21. Quoted in Arabinda Poddar's Renaissance in Bengal: Quests and Confrontations (WO), p. 17 22. Ibid. 23. Quoted in... 21. Ibid., p. 36 22. Ibid., p. 42 23. Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, No. 27, P. 140 24. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 2, p. 3 25. Ibid. 26. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1944), p. 20 27. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 2, p. 3 28. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 13, pp. 563-64 29. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 2, p. 4 30. Ibid., p. 5 31... 64. Ibid., p. 344 65. Ibid., p. 351 66. Ibid., pp. 360-61 67. Ibid., p. 352 68. Ibid., p. 370 69. Ibid., p. 371 70. T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, pp. 170-74 71. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 16, p. 371 72. Quoted in D. K. Roy's Sri Aurobindo Came to Me (Jaico edn.), p. 107 73. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 18, p. ...
... either in this respect or in respect of brevity. So a modified conception of "pure poetry" grew out of the Imagist extremism. To this conception Pound's admirer and ultimately surpasser as poet, T. S. Eliot, gave critical formulation. Here a premium was put on the contemplation of doctrine or of ideas without setting at a discount the cult of imaged moods: the comtemplation was to be done exclusively... against the intrusion of it in the poem. The ideas have to be squeezed out of the finished poetic product and the reader must supply them after receiving the sheer image-impact. Poetry resides, as Eliot said, in the "objective correlative". Here, as in Imagism, the emotion is not to be told us as this or that subjective condition of experience but must be communicated through "a set of objects, a situation... all that belongs to the conventional structure of a poem is removed: no connections, no transitions, nothing explicitly directing and explaining the heightened consciousness. The reason advanced by Eliot of such abbreviation of method is that "the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression". Naturally, this method conduces to an elliptical style with a lot of obscurity ...
... Waldock) was trying 'to accomplish two incompatible things', namely, to depict a hell which was a place of perpetual torment, and one which was a base for military operation... It may be, as Mr. Eliot suggests, that we should 'not attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts'; the world to which he has introduced us does not require this kind of consistency. 'It should be accepted... nightmare quality completes the Kubla-Khan affinity of Milton's work in many places. Where the quality is not nightmarish, it is often still suffused with a strange species of vivid vagueness. Eliot 13 Page 25 considers Milton lacking in sufficient visual power and he attributes in some measure the increase of the defect to his blindness. But the absence of fully realised... according to his account, was frequently heard by him. Take his Eden. It has a certain indefiniteness, its flora and fauna do not display the details which would assimilate it to earth's landscapes. As Eliot 14 has noted, the impression of Eden which we retain is that of light - "a daylight and a starlight, a light of dawn and of dusk". In Eliot's view, it is "the light which, remembered by a man ...
... of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom a la Eliot of The Waste Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes, A figure in the ineffable Witness'... experience of the Saints who figure in his Paradiso. By the way, apart from certain portions, the Divine Comedy is not even directly religious poetry: only its setting is in terms of religion. T. S. Eliot also is in part an effective poet of religious feeling and idea: the tension, confusion and resolution in Ash-Wednesday are not spiritual in the true sense and they are more misty than mystic.... 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 my fire ...
... PURANI: Thompson asked me to read the poems of Eliot. He was in ecstasy over them. I read them. I couldn't find anything there. Neither in Ezra Pound. I asked Amal's opinion. SRI AUROBINDO: What did he say? PURANI: He is of the same view. He cut a fine joke on Ezra Pound: "His name is Pound but he is not worth a penny." (laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: Eliot is the pioneer of modem poetry. I have not... not read much of him. Do you know the definition of a modern poet?: "A modern poet is one who understands his own poems and is understood by a few of his admirers." NIRODBARAN: Eliot has written a poem "Hippopotamus," which is supposed to be very fine. PURANI: Hippopotamus the animal? SRI AUROBINDO: I thought he had written about himself. (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: The modem young poets of ...
... amusing reminiscence of Baroda life: "When Mr. Eliot, the Maharaja's tutor, came to Baroda from England, Mr. Parvi, a Parsi officer, could not understand anything he said because of the strangeness of his pronunciation, so Mr. Parvi went on saying Yes to everything. Then Mr. Eliot put him a question to which he should have said No but he said as usual Yes. Eliot got annoyed and said, 'Shall I take you for ...
... itself is essentially eternal. It is a manifestation in space and time of the eternal Reality. The resurrection itself is not an event in time. It is the passage from time to eternity or, as T. S. Eliot put it, 'the point of intersection of eternity with time'. This is why the 'time' of the Resurrection and the 'time' of the final manifestation are not strictly determined. The body of Jesus in the... eternity of the Christian mystery to argue that the "time" of the Second Coming is not strictly determined. But surely "the point of intersection of eternity with time", which you press on me with Eliot must still have some chronological locus? The birth of Jesus for those like us who regard him as a divine manifestation is a point where eternity and time intersect, yet on that account we" do not... time Page 251 which is not there. The Resurrection of Christ has always been considered as an 'echatological' event. It does not belong to ordinary time. It is what T.S. Eliot called the 'point of intersection of the timeless with time'. In one sense the end of the world came with the resurrection. It marked the passage of the temporal and spatial world into the eternal ...
... 167 Divine Vision, The, 53 fn. 2,146 fn. 36, 244 Druidism, 83 Duraiswamy, M.S., i, iv fn. 2 Dyne,Sonia,48fn. 17 Earth's Answer, 54,174,232 Eden,157,162 Eliot, T.S., 40,41,42,43,256 Elohim, 220 "Elohim Creating Adam, The", 226 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, The, 50 fn. 25 Energy, 70,140 English Blake, 53 fn. 1 ... 59 Raine, Kathleen, i, ii, vii, 4,25-29, 50 fn. 23, 134,144 fn. 18, 146,167-97, 222,231,237,258,261, 262,263-65 Rajan, B., 45,101 Ratio, Reason, 70,71 Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot, A, 41 Representative English Poetry, 24 fn. 9 Revelation of St. John the Divine, The, 44, 45,46,59 fn. 20 Rintrah, 205-06,231 Romantic Imagination, The, 137 fn. 1 Rossetti... Father", 54 "Satan exulting over Eve", 54 "seize", "sieze", 17,26, 111, 112,113, 177-80,262,264,266 Selected Poems of William Blake, 5 fn. 12 Selected Poems - T.S. Eliot, 41 fn. 24 Self, 4,146 Seraphim, 48,95 Sethna, K.D. iii, v Seturaman, V.S., i, iv fn. 1 Seurat, Denis, 246 Sewanee Review, The, 25 fn. 11,168 fn. 109 Shabda Brahman ...
... Damon, Foster S. "Blake and Milton" in The Divine Vision, Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto (Gollancz, London), 1957. Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems - T. S. Eliot (Penguin Poets, Harmondsworth), 1948. Ezekiel Frye, Northrop "Blake After Two Centuries" in English Romantic Poets, Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by M. H. Abrams... Blake (Chatto & Windus). Wickstead, Joseph H. Blake's Innocence and Experience, A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts (London), 1928. Williamson, George A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (London), 1955. Witcutt, W. P. Blake: A Psychological Study (London), 1946. "William Blake and Modern Psychology" in John O'London's Weekly, April 4, 1947. Page 269 ...
... "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct—factors which if one is not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M., whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more sensitively, more... experience of the Saints who figure in his Paradiso. By the way, apart from certain portions, the Divine Comedy is not even directly religious poetry: only its setting is in terms of religion. T.S. Eliot also is in part an effective poet of religious feeling and idea: the tension, confusion and resolution in Ash-Wednesday are not spiritual in the true sense and they are more misty than mystic. Not... 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 my fire ...
... time. It is felt to be too big, too judicial a word to be lavished on what is contemporary. "A critic in a review will hesitate before describing a writer of the eminence of, say, Mr. T. S. Eliot, as a 'great poet' although he may be acknowledged to be one of the best writing in English. This is so much a characteristic of the English as to be a fact of usage, in spite of the cry from other... it is a matter of 'taste in ties' — or there is no other go than to leave one to one's own certitude." Two-thirds of the above pronouncement — the reference to the word "great" and to T. S. Eliot — echoes almost the words of Bernard Blackstone in his Advanced English for Foreign Students (page 264). And there is some sound advice in the pronouncement. But one is afraid Blackstone himself is... 1958) of the Times Literary Supplement is at hand. On glancing through its advertisement columns one finds short quotations made from reviews of several books by writers of less eminence than T. S. Eliot. Still, what does one observe? On page 619 The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt is advertised and underneath we have the opinion of Philip Toynbee as expressed in the Observer : "A great work of ...
... from Whitman, whom Sri Aurobindo obviously admired, though with the necessary qualifications, he was doubtless also influenced as a practitioner of verse by the work of contemporaries like Yeats, Eliot and Ezra Pound. While the extent of the influence might not have been very appreciable, there can be no question about the reality of Sri Aurobindo's intelligent interest in contemporary English... quantitative metre as examples of the new 'ametric poetry', and once, in 1946, in defence of his use of the French word 'flasque' in Savitri, he said that he had done it "somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound".' 3 Whether Sri Aurobindo had any close acquaintance with the Cantos it is difficult to say; but he certainly knew about this unique 'work in progress' in a general way, and any... the Cantos remain, on a first or second or even third reading, a maddening work. It is an important and immense poetic creation, a nodal point in contemporary English poetry. Crane and MacLeish, Eliot and Yeats, themselves considerable poets, have been influenced by the Cantos and the Poundian poetics and aesthetics. But there must be a clue to this labyrinth, however tenuous, however almost ...
... Seer Poets George Seferis Poet and essayist in modem Greek. Translated poems of the English poet, George Eliot, into modern Greek; was in diplomatic service, now retired and settled in Athens. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963. An Elder, ma î tre, now in the literary world of modem Greece. References: "Poetry" (Chicago); Greek Number... that now took on colour. (P. 120) Yet was he a Christian in mood or feeling or faith in the wake of his friend and comrade, kindred in spirit and in manner, the English poet T. S. Eliot ? There was a difference between the two and Seferis himself gave expression to it. The English poet after all was an escapist: he escaped, that is to say, in his consciousness, into the monastery... little higher. Nor was he, we may now observe, a pagan, a secular aesthete. He has himself risen enough to glimpse and name his soul. It was not perhaps as clear a sight as that of Eliot that had a touch of the Upanishadic assurance. Still the sense of an immortal thing unrepressed by mortalities came to him, in an authentic manner. For such is his final vision: And ...
... unique cultural heritage. II William Archer was on the whole a sound dramatic critic, although some of his animadversions on the lesser Elizabethans were too harsh and needed a T.S. Eliot to put the record straight. But when Archer ventured, with more valour than discretion, to indict the culture of a sub-continent like India, he was really asking for trouble. 1 The provocation he gave... up and down is one and the same. These two aphorisms, by a curious coincidence, serve also as epigraphs to T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, published twenty years later. Like Sri Aurobindo and Eliot, Heraclitus too had wrestled with seeming opposites only to forge a firm reconciliation at last. Commenting on the first of the above, Sri Aurobindo writes: ...day and night, good and evil... "touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is a divine child." 69 As Eliot flashes forth the revelation - Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Page 513 Of children in the foliage ...
... of Rosalind, Lear or Perdita. In both one can't miss the wonder and the magic and the power of the Word, in one the word of the Vital and in the other the word of Light. The modems, Eliot-Pound group, might deprecate Milton for his Latinisms, his inflated, ritualistic or incantatory style lacking intimacy and even for the unmodemistic characters of his two epics; but they would fail... "uselessly uttering existence." Hardy at close of the play has the word that "deliverance" will be offered, "consciousness the will informing;" but it is lost in the tragic immensity of the whole. Eliot, despite the saving grace of his vision of Marina and the experience of the still moment of interaction between Time and Eternity, would still, like a true Catholic, doubt if man could transcend the ...
... and you will immediately perceive a difference in the degree of poetic inwardness, in the intensity of the imaginative word and of its power to bring out the imponderables by the sound-suggestion. Eliot achieves a poetically pointed statement with an original image, but it is an effect that is a little self-conscious, the "Thibet" which introduces the most telling associations has also slightly the... enthousiasmos. The terror and horror raised up by Shakespeare of the strange half-physical half-supraphysical states and places have a fascinating and compelling intimacy of vision and voice which Eliot as a whole falls short of. Throughout the nine verses Shakespeare has a revelatory music of the plane on which he functions. Eliot's two lines do not hold in each part of them the intensest possible ...
... well to note that Jung who is our most comprehensive typically modern mind-explorer has attempted to co-ordinate the psycho-analytic integration of personality with the Yogic process and that T. S. Eliot who is said to be the chief shaper of the modern poetic impulse has not fought shy of the mystic's Dark Night of the Soul: I said to my soul be still and let the dark come upon you Which... externals into harmony by some power from within, his concern about the poor unfulfilled trivialities that are divorced from the deep springs of our consciousness, he outdoes also the modernism of Eliot no less than Jung. His main poetic work lies along this line of potent synthesis of the outermost and the innermost: so he can scarcely be put by as an anaemic denizen of dreamland fashioning clever ...
... night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress, or Eliot subtly symbolises the supreme religious consummation of love in which all intensities come together and are uplifted and opposites get reconciled When the tongues of fire are in-folded ... necessarily to be overhead with the revelatory rhythm with which the Indian Rishis often uttered their realisations. As a rule, the world's Bibles ring the note of Donne or Crashaw or Herbert, Hopkins or Eliot or other fine English poets turned mystics. Most of the existing religious and spiritual literature is wanting in the accent which leads up to what the Rishis considered the culminating speech of mysticism ...
... Perhaps they will swim across with swimming belts and allow themselves to be arrested. SRI AUROBINDO: Swimming parties can't be arrested. This man Leavis is less partial to Ezra Pound than to Eliot. He says Pound's earlier poems are a preparation for later ones which have rhythm, form, etc., but have no substance. Have you found. wonderful rhythm? PURANI: None. Isn't that poem "O Apollo.. ... idiotic it is. And he says it is a great pun; not a pun but most idiotic. PURANI: I told you Amal's joke that Pound is not worth the penny! (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: Among all these people only Eliot has done something. PURANI: Yes, though he has no form, he has substance. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, and rhythm and energy. No wonder that old English people can't enjoy their poetry and they call it ...
... Humour with initials and acronyms: Example 1: This is from the poet-critic K.D. Sethna lecturing to the students of his class on Poetry: "Here is a surprising image evoked by the poet Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table ... "It almost sounds like one surgeon egging another on to take advantage... Fellows of the Royal Page 42 College of Surgeons - could hope to do, unless the sky falls and overwhelms them with grace. "But leaving aside acknowledged F.R.C.S.'s we may ask whether Eliot has produced here a true poetic image that could please this unconventional F.R.C.S. before you - this Fellow Researching in Comparisons and .Symbols or if you want to generalise, this Fellow Roaring ...
... Alighieri. The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary (Oxford University Press, London, 1923). The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles Eliot Norton (Great Books of the Western World, William Benton, Chicago, 1952). Das, Abinas Chandra. Rig-Vedic India, Vol. I (The University of Calcutta, 1921). Deshmukh, P.S. The Origin... Eastman. Max. The Literary Mind (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1932). Eaton, Gai. The Richest Vein: Eastern Tradition and Modern Thought (Faber 8c Faber, London, 1949). Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays (Faber Faber, London, 1944). The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Faber 8c Faber, London, 1955). Fausset, Hugh I'Anson. A Modern Prelude (Jonathan ...
... my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God; 62 —T.S. Eliot Yet man's life is thought And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging and uprooting, that he may... —Stevens It is easy to dismiss some of the above lines at least as no more than verbal legerdemain; Tate, Robinson and Eliot, all three seem to make play with 'night' or 'dark; Yeats seems to charge 'ravening' and 'desolation' with a certain violence; 'quartz' and 'stone' in Emily Dickinson and 'holy hush' in Wallace Stevens ...
... often of 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... 771-77. 168. Humanity and Deity, p. 464. 169. Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, p. 195. 170. Existentialism, Ti. by E.M. Cocks,pp. 49-50. 171. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. 172. Savitri, p. 835 . 173. See A Heifer of the Dawn, pp. 19-21. 174. P. Lai, Introduction to Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry, pp. ii-iii. ...
... American television channels raining down their pollution from the skies themselves? It saddens me to see that it has already arrived. I brought with me the first vol. of the letters of T.S. Eliot, recently published, which I am reviewing for Temenos. I knew him, though slightly and only in his later years. His childhood, youth, and ill-advised marriage make sad reading, yet doesn't a poet choose... asked me to write for one of the last Temenoses has had the effect of making me dig up the already written sheets from my archives of oblivion and try to get in tune with them. Your reference to Eliot and Yeats has prompted several thoughts but I must stop now and express them later lest I should miss reaching you in Delhi with this letter. (18.3.1989) Page 268 ...
... that dimension is as if non-existent for the academic critics as a whole, and there are remarkably few others around; Herbert Read was one of the last, and of course the poets themselves - Yeats and Eliot and Edwin Muir - were most perceptive critics. Materialism in the West has reached, one might hope, its nadir; but often I think -Shakespeare's words again - 'there is no worst'. You feel very strongly... Waley's Chinese poems, all of which have had a deep impact on the English language. Many excellent translations have done less than this but have brought something of the original - Leishman's Rilke, Eliot and others who have translated St. John Perse in such a way as to make a shining contribution to the art of translation." Surely Chapman or Pope or Dryden, in their remarkably successful compositions ...
... with all his passion poured into the meaning that I could hardly recognise the words. I have also listened to taped Page 115 readings by eminent English poets - T.S. Eliot, for instance. Although Eliot made each word clear-cut one was sent to sleep after a time by the utterly neutral tone. This was the other extreme. To get the right mean, one must realise a few facts. I know that in ...
... for and a deep sense of kinship with another poet. It changes one's whole poetic personality. 8 Many great authors have 3 Poets— Horace, Rajasekhara, Du Belley, Boileau, Pope, Wordsworth, Eliot, etc.—who have developed an ars poetica, have themselves, in the first place, applied their precepts. 4 Kuntaka, Vakroktijivita, UI.2. 5 Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and... ", in, Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, (eds.), Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective. University of South Illinois Press, 2nd ed. 1971. 7 Ibid, p. 21. 8 See, T. S. Eliot, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry", The Egoist, July 1919. Page 442 openly admitted that they have been influenced by others. Sri Aurobindo too has acknowledged his debt to ...
... edge of the hills that now took on colour.¹ Yet was he a Christian in mood or feeling or faith in the wake of his friend and comrade, kindred in spirit and in manner, the English poet T. S. Eliot? There was a difference between the two and Seferis himself gave expression to it. The English poet after all was an escapist: he escaped, that is to say, in, his consciousness, into the monastery,... just a little higher.³ Nor was he, we may now observe, a pagan, a secular aesthete. He has himself risen enough to glimpse and name his soul. It was not perhaps as clear a sight as that of Eliot that had a ¹ "Engomi". ² This is what exactly Seferis says about this "old man" of Greece. "He has no inclination to reform. On the contrary, he has an obvious loathing for any reformer ...
... (using the term in its positive sense and divesting it of the superfoetation of dust that has gathered upon it, mostly Page 318 pejorative in implication) matter. It is, as T.S. Eliot knew, a whole way of life of a people. Thus the manner in which way Ugadi Pacchadi is made and served, the items of costume one must possess for various social gatherings, the festivals we celebrate ...
... from the days that are In this life it's not difficult to die To make life is more difficult by far. And to this humanity aimlessly pursuing a daily humdrum existence which T.S. Eliot describes in his poem The Waste Land — Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many ...
... depreciation could take that away from them. This proves my contention that there is an abiding intuition of poetic and artistic greatness. The attempts 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 ...
... is a French word meaning 'slack', 'loose', 'flaccid', etc. I have more than once tried to thrust in a French word like this, for instance,'A harlot empress in a bouge'—somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound. Now that Savitri has been mentioned we may dip into it with the very passage to which Sri Aurobindo here refers. It is about an occult dimension explored by Savitri's father ...
... structuring and ordering of the intellect into the mystical consciousness. There is also the lyric style rising into a great height of intensity and passion. Lastly, there is the allusive style. As T. S. Eliot uses literary quotation to enrich his own meaning, Sri Aurobindo uses literary allusions to throw a bridge of understanding before the reader and to communicate to him effectively the thrill and the ...
... idiotic mood and this very frame of mind eggs me on to hair-split between being idiotically ingenious and being ingeniously idiotic! Perhaps I may best illustrate the former by the "famous" lines of Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.... Here the stress falls upon ingenuity and the idiot-element grins ...
... path to the vapid and the passionless or else the feverish and the disjointed. There is an affinity in certain quarters to the style of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals - a complexity of what Eliot calls sensuous thought: the poet feels his curious thought instead of lumping it upon feeling, his idea and his image are one vital intricacy, as in Hume's The old star-eaten blanket of the sky ...
... ? - the Rose of God. Sethna repeatedly quotes Sri Aurobindo, especially on Mallarmé's poetry, and the spinal column of the argument is that past Mallarmé, past Valery, past Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens, there shines Sri Aurobindo the pole star, the laureate of Overhead Poetry and Savitri . In the second part, Sethna remarks that Mallarmé "is likely to suffer least ...
... slowing-down of the movement in its direction would be the Mother's secret blessing to her disciples. Our journey may seem long, our passage may at times even be as though in the words of T. S. Eliot— Across a whole Thibet of broken stones That lie, fang-up. But if the difficulty is increased, it must be understood as a challenge to us to double our aspiration, our effort ...
... belonged to the wealthy circles to which Eckart had access in his personal name and in the name of Ernst Hanfstängl, an admirer and supporter of Hitler who had studied at Harvard, was acquainted with T.S. Eliot, Walter Lippman and President Franklin Roosevelt, and ran an international arts business. It was at the house of Hanfstängl’s sister Erna that the historian K.A. von Müller saw Hitler arrive one ...
... is a French word meaning "slack", "loose", "flaccid" etc. I have more than once tried to thrust in a French word like this, for instance, "A harlot empress in a bouge"—somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound. 1946 Page 305 To unify their task, excluding life Which cannot bear the nakedness of the Vast, [ p. 273 ] I suppose the intransitive use of "unify" is not i ...
... are needed, but a limited and ignorant way of living is not likely to produce them. There may indeed be a lucky accident even in the worst circumstances—but one cannot count on accidents. A George Eliot, a George Sand, a Virginia Woolf, a Sappho, or even a Comtesse de Noailles grew up in other circumstances. 30 April 1933 What a stupidly rigid principle! 4 Can Buddhadev really write nothing ...
... Tyger which is at once contrary and complementary to a supernatural Lamb-shape - all these details are supported with elements of Christian religious tradition. After picking out some lines from T. S. Eliot and Christopher Smart, the former of whom has actually the phrase "Christ the tiger", we looked mainly at the Old and the New Testaments, cast a glance at some early theologians and referred in passing ...
... evoke a superhuman humanity without that human paradox as old as the epic of Gilgamesh by which man is part mortal, part immortal. You take issue (second point) about Milton's abstractions; Eliot, you will remember, criticized Milton himself for this. In the fine passage you cite I would suggest that the abstracts and negatives serve precisely the purpose of evoking 'chaos and old night' and ...
... although I have lived it all too much. Yes, the England of the Imagination is eternal and no poetry is greater than ours has been. It all seemed to end with the last war - before that war there were Eliot and Yeats and David Jones and Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and de la Mare and many fine poets of lesser stature. Now there is no-one; David Gascoyne stands alone. I do my best which ...
... "we two", etc. Who are these "we"? PURANI: Perhaps you will find some more good poets as you go on. SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know, because these are the poets they speak of. (To Nirodbaran) Eliot is undoubtedly a poet. Why the devil does he go in for modernism, when he can write such fine stuff as "La Figlia che Piange"? When he plunges into irregularity he makes a mess by lack of rhythm. ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: Space is also Swayambhu then? DR. MANILAL: Yes, Sir, the creation is infinite; it has no beginning, no end, like a tennis ball! (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: And self-existent with Eliot and his hippopotamus existing from eternity? (Laughter) SATYENDRA (to Dr. Manilal) : If you don't believe God has created this world then God can't help you to get liberation. You have to rely ...
... all the best brains and few can survive this process of "evisceration, deprivation, destitution, desiccation and evacuation", to use the glowing and Page 114 graphic words of T. S. Eliot, although in another connection; few can maintain or express after passing through this grinding or sucking machine their inner reality, the truth and beauty personal to them. The poet* regrets: ...
... 260 Duryadhona, 80 EDDINGTON, 313-14, 317-19, 326, 332 Egypt, 106, 119, 127, 177n., 219, 223, 236, 238-41 Einstein, 139, 304, 308, 314-16, 325, 334, 401 Eliot, T. S., 115, 192-3, 195 -The Waste Land, 193n Encyclopaedists, the, 16 Engels, 128 England, 145,210,245 Equator, the, 304 Euclid, 81 Europe, 16,52,59 ...
... of Calcutta, 1947, Calcutta, Dasgupta, S,N,, A History of Indian Philosophy, Cambridge University , Press, Cambridge, 1932, Vols. I and II; 1940, Vol. Ill; 1949, Vols. IV and V Deutch Eliot, Advaita Vedanta; A philosophical reconstruction, East- West Centre Press, 1969, Honolulu, Diwanji, P. C., Bhagavad Gita and Astādhyāyī, Annuls of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1949 ...
... the Soule, 80n Douve,217 Dryden, 85 Duncan, 170 Durga,180 ECKHART, 131 Edgar, 171-3 Egypt, 298 Einstein, 300 Eiseley, Loren, 295n - The Immense Journey, 295n Eliot, T. S., 88, 140-4, 147-8, 196, 205 -"Burnt Norton", 142n., 144n., 146-7n -"East Coker", 14On., 145n -"Little Gidding", 141n., 145-6n -."The Dry Salvages", 145-6n., 148n ...
... Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the. very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like ...
... organization of our days sucks in all the best brains and few can survive this process of "evisceration, deprivation, destitution, desiccation and evacuation", to use the glowing and graphic words of T. S. Eliot, although in another connection; few can maintain or express after passing through this grinding or sucking machine their inner reality, the truth and beauty personal to them. The poet regrets ...
... externals into harmony by some power from within, his concern about the poor unfulfilled trivialities that are divorced from the deep springs of our consciousness, he outdoes also the modernism of Eliot no less than Page 115 Jung". We shall just show from a few quotations how this modem- ism has become an organic part of his creative faculty, so much so that; a reader of Sāvitrī if ...
... 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 comparison with Sri Aurobindo as epic poets. I have therefore ...
... Dharma 11 Dickinson, Emily 314 Dowsett, Norman 18 Drewett, William H.6 Dryden, John 310,341 Dutt, Tom 253 Eliot, T.S. 44,198,267,272,314,389,391, 397,408,411,413,414,453 Emerson, R.W. 332 Erie 47,50,51 Essays on the Gita 25,294,359 Euripides 243 Fausset ...
... be taken as proof that a long poem is no longer possible", but he also adds: "I cannot share any such notion. It proves only that the romantic approach to a long poem is not workable." 80 And T.S. Eliot says, though in an entirely different connection: "I by no means believe that the 'long poem' is a thing of the past; but at least there must be more in it for the length than our grandparents seemed ...
... Disciple : Perhaps the art in Bengal is not so bad as the poetry – except that of Tagore. Sri Aurobindo : Bad in what way? Disciple : They are trying to be Eliotian (imitators of T S Eliot). Page 222 Good poetry is not being read. X's book came out and was very well reviewed and yet the book is not selling. Sri Aurobindo : So they don't read poetry in India ...
... can thus resort to ā vrtti, repetition, "as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty." 178 Eliot uses repetition to almost hypnotic effect in the Choruses from the 'Rock', Four Quartets, and several other poems; in fact most poets of the first order are adepts at exploiting the 'uses' of repetition ...
... appearance in a serial form in the Arya synchronised with the First World War, was to achieve definitive book publication in 1939-40, the opening years of the Second World War, which also provoked T. S. Eliot to indite poems like "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942) - "as exciting to many of us," said John Lehmann, "as news of a great victory". Didn't the Gita itself ...
... Dostoevsky, Fyodor 481 Drouet, Mifaou 621 Duraiswami Iyer 226, 258, 287, 297, 319, 328-9, 426-7, 493, 691 Dyuman (Chunibhai Patel) 255, 325, 328-9, 418, 683, 816-8, 820 Edith Schnapper 782 Eliot, T.S. 120, 643 The Eternal Wisdom 108, 110, 119 Fanon, Franz 773 Rower Arrangement 195 (cf320ff, 419-20) Francis, Archduke Ferdinand 109 Francis, Saint 485 French Institute ...
... what was the scope for the epic as a literary form? Of Hopkins, Sri Aurobindo said that he "becomes a great poet in his sonnets. He is not a mystic poet, but a religious one". 6 Talking of T.S. Eliot, Sri Aurobindo said that he is "undoubtedly a poet", but added: "Why the devil does he go in for modernism when he can write such fine stuff as La Figlia che Piange?" 7 Again, on Nirod once remarking ...
... there is an abiding intuition of poetic and artistic greatness. Page 665 The attempts at 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 ...
... 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 a catch in Page 277 the breath and a tug at the heart without bringing in any extraordinary words, not even any glimmer of an image. The ...
... the latter. But there are effects in both that are brainy or ingenious in an inspired way: some of Donne's conceits, for instance, are not superimposed on the idea and emotion but organic to them and Eliot has at times an intricate cross-light imagery that is really penetrating. Here they are apparently sophisticated while being truly sincere. Where, however, there is in a poet complexity without any ...
... have struck at the root of the problem which modern poets have been attempting to solve by recourse to free verse forms. Both argument and example are convincing, and one wonders whether poets like Eliot, Auden and Spender have reached similar conclusions. At least, they should be made aware of this considerable contribution to English prosody by an Indian poet." 2 The Future Poetry, pp. ...
... artist/poet who experiences that bliss is most often than not left with the burning sense of an absence that desires more and more to be re-lived. "After such knowledge what forgiveness?", writes T.S. Eliot. Time could be seen in different aspects - the conventional and the biological. As we measure conventional time by the swinging of the pendulum or the lengthening of the shadows, or the movements ...
... rest, for if they have emerged out of a genuine culture, there is bound to be a bondage and harmony among them. There can be a negative harmony too - in their joint decadence. An observation by T.S. Eliot may be relevant here: "Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pur-sued for its own sake." ( Notes towards ...
... locked up in them. On the other hand, he uses them as symbols to drive home to our souls his sense of that reality. Many great critics including Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis at times committed ridiculous blunders in their estimates of poets and poems just because they failed to realise that there can be an endless variety of poems. Each of them was ...
... internalisation and long possession of these over the decades. Moreover, he 'winds himself into his subject', in the process, as was said of Edmund Burke. The basic methods are those of what T.S. Eliot called 'comparison and analysis.' But remarkable is the deep engagement and at-homeness combined with a keen perception and discrimination of poetic qualities of diction, sense, rhythm and tone with ...
... routine as if nothing was the matter. He still wanted to write on modern poetry and a search was on to provide him with volumes of such poetry to read. (He appreciated Mallarmé, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot.) He also dictated, at the Mother’s request, the important series of articles published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth . In these articles he expounded the state of affairs ...
... as though paralysed by dread of nothingness. He finds himself to be in a state of giddiness and of a tragic feeling of a situation without issue. It is not without some profound import that T.S. Eliot, the 'dry poet', sings of the spiritual deserts of our time. Page 183 In this age of human predicament, in this epoch of spiritual malady, the Heideggerian Angst has taken possession ...
... dharma 145,174 Diekhoff,John 244 Divine Presence 303 divinisation 6 Donne 46,230 Durga'sLion 307 Dutt,Toru 144 dvārapālaka 299 E ego 298,310,313 Eliot, T.S. 126,335 emotional being 29 English poetry creative intelligence in 229 epic and mysticism in 185 Latinisation and inversion 283 Life-Force and Mind-Force 216,367 ...
... mood of a rightful reaction against Victorianism the modem mind has certainly brought mental profundity and penetration which were very desirable. It has won a new freedom also. When it touches Eliot-wise the Gita's core that "the time of death is every moment" and therefore one must remember Krishna always, we have here another possibility opened out for poetry, a possibility of the inner mental ...
... combinations of substantives and they are to be found in profusion in Savitri. Lastly, there is something to be said about the element of literary allusiveness in his poetic diction. T.S. Eliot has shown how quotations from other poets can be fitted into new contexts in a manner which endows them with the novelty that distinguishes original writing itself. Sri Aurobindo does not quote. But ...
... beautiful and at the same time apt figures in a poetry dealing with little known spiritual and mystic topics. And here lies also the difference between that group of modem English poets headed by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and others on one side and Sri Aurobindo on the other. Those English poets as well as Sri Aurobindo use 74 p. 37. 75 p. 259. 76 p. 242. 77 p. 204. Page 371 ...
... earth, and in whom all the three divisions of Time find refuge. Both are incantatory no doubt, but the deep calm one feels in Vyasa's almost Overmental stanza is missing in the inner mental lines of Eliot. Savitri's substratum is the divinely pervasive Shanta Rasa Open Savitri anywhere and what we witness is the unmistakable silence of the Word's powerful contents holding sight-sound-sense, silence ...
... These are needed, or one or other of them, but the purdah is not likely to produce them, though there may be a lucky accident in the worst circumstances, but one can't count on accidents. A George Eliot, a George Sand, a Virginia Woolf, a Sappho, or even a Comtesse de Noailles grew up in other circumstances. May 1933? It is true that the removal of the sex-impulse in all its forms ...
... University of Calcutta, 1947, Calcutta. Dasgupta, S.N., A History of Indian Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932, Vols. I and II; 1940, Vol. Ill; 1949, Vols. IV and V. Deutch Eliot, Advaita Vedanta: A philosophical reconstruction, East- West Centre Press, 1969, Honolulu. Page 77 Flengen, Owen, Consciousness Reconsidered, MIT Press, 1992, Cambridge: Massachusetts ...
... Sharma said that while we talk of values and virtues, which are very good words, what is important is the man who has embodied those values and virtues. Page 73 He referred to T.S. Eliot who had referred to the situation of life today where life is lost in living, wisdom is lost in knowledge and knowledge is lost in information. Dr. Sharma also referred to the impact of science ...
... century was indeed the age of satire. Voltaire was really a superb master in the field. Byron allied satire with sublimity in his work Vision of judgment. In the 19th century, Dickens, George Eliot and Balzac, although not satirists in the proper sense of the term, must be mentioned in this connection. Passing through Samuel Butler and G.B.Shaw, we come to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell of the ...
... in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth." 22 Modern writers like Joyce, Eliot, Gide and Camus have felt the need for myths appropriate to our times, and Herbert Read categorically observes: .. .the farther science penetrates into the mystery of life, the more it reverts ...
... can be symbolic. Bernard Stambler describes a symbol as, "a tool, a device for expressing a difficult, complex, or even ineffable concept in concrete and even pictorial terms." 35 For example, T.S. Eliot has made use of the symbol of the 'Waste Land' to convey with over-powering effect the sense of the bleakness, ugliness and sterility of contemporary urban civilisation. Likewise, Albert Camus has exploited ...
... a result, no matter what the topic is, whether it be the still-vexing problem of Hindu-Muslim unity in India, or the meaning of Indian culture, or Modernist poetry, or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot, or Sartrean Freedom, or the bypaths of the spiritual journey or the interpretation of the Veda or the Upanishads, I have never taken a dip into his writings without being able to come up with a dazzling ...
... 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 E Eliot, T.S. 47, 52, 53, 61 Elsinor 38 Elysium 35 Europe 56 F Fakirs 83, 84 France 48 Francisco 23 G Genoese 50 Page 103 ...
... spontaneous and easy and felicitous movement. In English the hiatus between the poetic speech and prose is considerable, in French it is not so great, still the two were kept separate. In England Eliot came to demolish the barrier, in France a whole company has come up and very significant among them is this foreigner from Spain who is so obliquely simple and whose Muse has a natural yet haunting ...
... 204 and easy and felicitous movement. In English the hiatus between the poetic speech and prose is considerable, in French it is not so great, still the two were kept separate. In England Eliot came to demolish the barrier, in France a whole company has come up and very significant among them is this foreigner from Spain who is so obliquely simple and whose Muse has a natural yet haunting ...
... Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like ...
... gift of Homer and Valmiki - and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine. 14 Sri Aurobindo wrote these articles before the work of Hopkins, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Auden and the later Yeats achieved publication, and even as regards the poetry of Meredith, Phillips, A.E. and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo had mainly to depend Page 615 ...
... Charu Chandra, 189ff, 193, 207,208, 285fn, 286, 322 Dutt, Kanailal, 324ff Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 25,49,50 Dutt, Romesh Chunder, 11, 81fn, 83, 662 Eknath, 9 Eliot, T. S., 209,294, 318,491, 513,535 Englishman, The, I'll, 340 Epictetus, 48 Eric, 119,141ff, 642,646; set in Norwegian Heroic Age, 141; gods active behind the scenes, 142; ...
... the fierce spirit of Bhawani Mandir and is vibrant with the electric fervour and faith generated during 1905-6. The "partition" was truly "a moment in time and of time", yet a moment when (as T.S. Eliot might put it) "time was made through that' moment". It was a time of unprecedented mass agitation against the ruling colonial power. "Swadeshi" became a clarion call, "boycott" resounded like ...
... III The opening verses in the second canto on "Vigilance" start the Mother on a discussion between the old spiritual percipience and wisdom and the new science and technology. The words of T.S. Eliot are pertinent here: Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries Have taken us farther ...
... dungeon, the admonition and the exhortation seemed to insinuate their meaning into his disturbed heart, and it was as though he was enacting the inner spiritual drama so disturbingly described by T.S. Eliot: To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy... In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of ...
... and spiritual frustration or writhing under the vulgarity of "civilisation" or maddened by the politics of selfishness and communalism - felt the invasion of cynicism and desperation, and found in Eliot the laureate of their moods and musings: This is the dead land This is the cactus land. Try as they might, the idea would not crystallise into reality but would vaporise instead; ...
... Anglo-Indian bureaucrats. Many letters and telegrams were sent back and forth from England to India, between Viscount John Morley, the then Secretary of State for India, and Fourth Earl of Minto, Gilbert Eliot, the then Viceroy of India. Why? A secret report of the Government, laying squarely the blame on Sri Aurobindo, says, "His is the master mind at the back of the whole extremist campaign in Bengal ...
... EVENING PURANI: Nolini was saying that he found this book of modern poetry very difficult to understand. How many people will read it? SRI AUROBINDO (smiling): Not worth reading. I have read Eliot's Hippopotamus; it is amusing. Nowadays one reads poetry not to enjoy oneself or for pleasure, but as a duty or a task. All that these Moderns are doing is to take the most commonplace ideas and try ...
... loftiness, misgivings dazzlingly Resolved in dazzling discovery. There is no map of Paradise. The great Omnium descends on us As a free race... Always the cry is, in Eliot's words, not Farewell, but Fare forward! Leave the broken images behind; leave the symbols behind; leave "the rumours or speech-full domes" behind. In the realm of untainted sovereign Truth at last ...
... is illustrated too in another manner by the best product of a poet whom the so-called "modernists" often set at the centre of their cult in opposition to the bulk of verse in the past—passages of Eliot's Four Quartets: a fact rather curious, for, if we may judge by it, the less typically modernist a poem the more genuinely poetic it would appear to become. The Page 57 finest utterances ...
... verse like much of Prelude — in the literal and most damnatory connotation of the term, blank verse. Similarly, just because we do not judge from personal temperament, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot's labyrinthine cross-lit fitfulness need not be accepted as a poetic paradise. In every department of art, what is required is not only "significant form" nor, as the modern temperament inclines to believe ...
... Talking of illnesses I am reminded of a piece of Logopoeia in Shakespeare which will give me a chance to complete the roll of medicos I started during my discussion of Phanopoeia. Apropos of Eliot's simile of the etherised evening and Shakespeare's passage beginning "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" I brought in a number of Ashram surgeons and physicians. The name of one doctor got ...
... Blake's Tyger 3 The Internal Pattern and Christian Tradition Now - in addition to the two passages already noted, Eliot's and Smart's - we may attempt a survey of Christian tradition and set forth correspondences to the "Minute Particulars" of The Tyger's symbolism as well as to the lyric's "Vision" as "a perfect Whole" into which they are "Organized" ...
... period may turn out to be far more successful than the later ones. But how does one determine the "success" of poetry of this kind in the first place, one may ask? "Elucidating" (T.S. Eliot's phrase) spiritual or mystical poetry is clearly not an easy task. True, all aesthetic judgment remains finally a matter of subjective experience. And trying to read future or futuristic poetry ...
... him strongest behind them. Or we may aver that if we look for him behind them we shall surely find him and he will help us to take a short-cut to our spiritual goal across what looks like - in T.S. Eliot's words - A whole Thibet of broken stones That lie, fang-up... The difficulty appalling us has to evoke in our hearts an intense cry to see the Beloved's face through the terrifying ...
... of this insight is to be judged by the world-wide community of Blake-enthusiasts. it may be of interest that his interpretation gives a semi-mythopoeic semi-Miltonic body to a phrase of T.S. Eliot's, flashed out in another context, in the poem Gerontion : "Christ the tiger." (2) "Two Love's" and "A Worthier Pen" The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets ...
... their might; The slain survive the slayer. But, perhaps, the most enjoyable of the shorter poems is Despair on the Staircase which seems to have unaccountably strayed from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats: Page 44 Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair, An image of magnificent despair; The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise ...
... e.g., Page 350 Or let us take a passage from Stephen Spender,— There is a rhythm there, but it is not sufficiently gathered up or vivid and it is much more subdued than Eliot's towards the atony and flatness of ordinary prose rhythm. The last lines of the quotation from The Hollow Men could be used to describe with a painful accuracy most of this ametric poetry. Some kind ...
... Tagore, that the stronger is the symbolism the less symbolic it is — because then it becomes real with the tangibility of a flaming rock and of a dense bright flame. In comparison, then, T.S. Eliot's criterion of "objective correlative" would also turn out to be somewhat pale and abstract, or else insipidly intellectual-algebraic. Spiritual Word, and spiritual Symbol, carries the Power and ...
... read them out, he said, "Mark that passage," or "These lines have a striking image" — (once the lines referred to were, I think, from C. Day Lewis' Magnetic Mountain ).He himself read out a poem of Eliot's to me — I don't remember exactly which, and remarked, "This is fine poetry." In this way we proceeded. Since we had to wait for the arrival of the books, he said, "Let us go back to Savitri ." His ...
... everything, and must take the blame for everything. IV April 1908 was a month reverberating with sinister foreboding. In retrospect, one feels like recalling the opening lines of T.S.. Eliot's The Waste Land: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Although the ...
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