... y in a minor key, Sethna's. I argued that English poetry is of two orders - one steeped in the English atmosphere, the other carrying a universal air, taking up any subject from any place or age and becoming its native speech. I suppose this is common sense and it could apply to any poetic literature. But it should apply all the more to English poetry by the very nature of the language concerned... Indian Poets and English Poetry From Kathleen Raine What a surprise and a pleasure to hear from you again after all these years, and I certainly thought the publication of our correspondence had been long forgotten. I look forward to re-reading your own letters but did quickly run through my side of the correspondence to see whether what I had... and Yeats in both his poetic phases, his earlier and later orientations, had more power, more richness of expressive art. But I think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes to fulfil more consciously, more directly the particular mystic strain in it which gleams out in Coleridge and Shelley and most in Wordsworth and which is best designated as a secret ...
... only comes from the true source but is able to mould for itself the true transcription in rhythm and language, can continue. 6 June 1932 Suggestions for Indians Writing English Poetry If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you to observe: 1) Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things... intention to impose any strict rule of bare simplicity and directness as a general law of poetic style. I was speaking of "twentieth century" English poetry and of what was necessary for an Indian writing in the English tongue. 2 Page 568 English poetry in former times used inversions freely and had a law of its own—at that time natural and right, but the same thing nowadays sounds artificial... It is in English poetry that I give my opinions or correct or make suggestions. 22 November 1933 Criticism of Bengali Poetry I do not know that I can suggest any detailed criticisms of Bengali poetry, as I have to rely more on what I feel than on any expert knowledge of language and metre. Sri Aurobindo's Force and the Writing of Poetry You give me Force for English poetry—some lines ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter IX The Course of English Poetry - I Chaucer and the Poetry of External Life The spirit and temper that have stood behind the creative force and come to the front in a literature are the one essential thing that we must discern, for it is these that predestine the course the poetry of a people will take and the turn it gives... nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative quality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its work. The genius of English poetry was evidently predestined by the complexity of its spirit and its union of opposite powers to an adventurous consecutive seeking over the whole field, and this is in fact the first character of... Mallarmé driven to break the mould of French speech in his desperate effort to force it to utter what is to its natural clear lucidity almost unutterable. No such difficulty presents itself in English poetry; the depths, the vistas of suggestion, the power to open the doors of the infinite are already there, ready to hand for the mind rightly gifted to evoke them, waiting and almost asking to be used ...
... and suddenly creative changes that have at once afflicted and quickened the life of other peoples. The revolutions of the spirit of English poetry are extreme and violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can mark off first the early English poetry which found its solitary greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an absolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and... The Future Poetry Chapter VIII The Character of English Poetry - II What kind or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind so constituted? The Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circumstance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations have in this... rhythm would be absent; but there would be a boldly forcible or a well-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more ...
... Aurobindo and the Hexameter 1 Blank verse, ever since Shakespeare and Milton gave it the shape of their genius, has been the mould par excellence of English poetry. Its unrhymed lines of five feet, variously modulating on the iambic base of a light unstressed syllable followed by a heavy stressed one (x/), have proved capable of equalling the epic effects... experience being partly couched in other vowel-values — say, Page 30 Through the great stillness that was now his spirit. It is clear that quantity is no negligible part of English poetry; but Sri Aurobindo in his masterly essay On Quantitative Metre affirms that until it is explicitly and avowedly the base the quality of the ancient hexameter cannot be reproduced. No doubt, that... of the voice over unstressed syllables except where the vowel possesses intrinsic length. If consonant-weight is given a carte blanche to lengthen quantity, the sound-effect of many lines of English poetry would suffer. Such lines are expressive in their vowels because they ignore the classical canon. Take one instance: Sri Aurobindo's Baji Prabhou begins with the description of an extremely hot ...
... and seen as physical movements and interrelations. In English the outstanding example is Geoffrey Chaucer, the so-called Father of English Poetry. The adjective "outstanding" is very apt, for his mind stands out rather than in. The designation "Father of English Poetry" is perhaps less apt. Not because there is any poet of considerable stature preceding him, but some critics Page 366 ... protest that by using this phrase we make Chaucer look as if he were responsible for the birth of something named English Poetry without himself being English Poetry personified. Suppose we speak of the father of Shakespeare: we only make the old man responsible for a birth that is quite different in essential quality from himself. The father of Shakespeare could be a man like any of his son's... that Shakespeare's father was like Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry he may be thought to be anything except English Poetry itself. This is declared to be an erroneous suggestion. If the usual designation has to be applied, then Chaucer was a part of what he made: the first child he had was ...
... most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius". 9 After two chapters on the "character" of English poetry - chapters that are very perceptive and bring out both the cardinal virtues and the still thwarted purposings of English poetry - Sri Aurobindo starts assessing, with the same sustained insight and weight of authority, the work of some of the greater or more... its own greatness and light and beauty. 15 English poetry has had its vicissitudes, a supreme crest of achievement in Shakespeare, then a decline and an undulating flow; but Sri Aurobindo sees in "more recent verse" an attempt at the recovery of a commanding power of speech. Shakespeare yet remains the out-topping name in English poetry, but there is still no reason why the next wave shouldn't... 400-page book. The Future Poetry? Literary history, aesthetic criticism, appreciations of individual English poets classical and modern, speculations on the future of poetry in general and of English poetry in particular, discussions on themes like "The Essence of Poetry", "Rhythm and Movement", "Style and Substance", "Poetic Vision and the Mantra", "The Ideal Spirit of Poetry", "The Sun of Poetic ...
... Evolving India Can Indians write English poetry? The Indian Mind and the English Language W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express... praiseworthy knowledge of English poetical technique and a notable command over the English language at the disposal of Indian inspiration could fail to produce good English poetry? "There ain't no sich person" as English poetry with one simple and uniform body and soul! The only genuine criticism possible about a foreign poet handling English is that his knowledge of the verse-technique... has a great compatriot in A. E. and a fine one in James Cousins, not to mention Seumas O'Sullivan and Dorothy Wellesley. Ireland whose native language was Gaelic has triumphantly "arrived" in English poetry. No Page 17 doubt, Yeats and his fellow-singers heard English at their mothers' knee, even though they may not have imbibed it with their mothers' milk. Most Indians cannot ...
... Our Studentship Being a medical man I had little chance of reading English poetry and afterwards, though I had composed English poems under Sri Aurobindo's inspiration, I had no time to study poetry. I have now a very faint memory of our classes in English poetry which we studied (an euphemism rather) with Amal over many Page 303 ... poets like Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt, Manmohan Ghose. He tried to inculcate in us the beauty of form, structure, rhythm. But alas the rhythmic beauty of English poetry was alien to my Bengali ears in spite of my composing lots of English poetry. I am afraid our Indian ears are not accustomed to it. Since I had a genuine love of poetry except for the rhythm, I could enjoy a bit of its rasa. ... only concern. I was also fortunate to meet his mother, a cultured lady, and his sister, a lovely girl. After Amal's recovery our meetings became less frequent until I started writing English poetry under Sri Aurobindo's guidance. Meanwhile, Amal had come to know my niece Jyotirmoyee, who had also started writing poetry in Bengali. Now Amal started dropping in at the Dispensary ...
... know which poems they were. I have been too dreadfully busy to get together the new version of my random and violent remarks (it was not a letter but scattered comments) on the subject of English poetry by Indians. [?] wrote Thompson has pronounced I didn't know English. Perhaps Cromnur Byng doesn't know English ______________________ 1. Heddy Miller, Dilip's friend from Vienna, a famous... if the mastery is there. As for rules—rules are necessary but they are not absolute; one of the chief tendencies of genius is to break old rules and make departures which create new ones. English poetry of today luxuriates in movements which to the mind of yesterday would have been anarchic license, chhanda bhanga, yet it is evident that has led to discoveries of new rhythmic beauty with a very... around what one has to say. Most Indian poetry in the Sanskritic languages—there are exceptions of course—was more restrained and classic in taste or else more impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don't see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XII The Course of English Poetry - IV In the work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, an extraordinary force for achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns in the actual execution to half-success or a splendid failure. A... many-toned and perfect. As things happened, it is by Paradise Lost that he occupies his high rank among the poets. That too imperfect grandiose epic is the one supreme fruit left by the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, achieve beauty of poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and forge a complete balance and measured perfection of architectonic form and structure... instances, the true classical gift, the power of structure is absent. There is an almost complete void of the larger genuine thought-power which is necessary for structure. This intellectual age of English poetry did its work, but, as was inevitable with so pronounced a departure from the true or at least the higher line, that work gives the impression, if not of a resonant failure, at least of a fall or ...
... The Reason of Past Failures A definitive verdict seems to have been pronounced by the critical mind on the long-continued attempt to introduce quantitative metres into English poetry. It is evident that the attempt has failed, and it can even be affirmed that it was predestined to failure; quantitative metre is something alien to the rhythm of the language. Pure quantity, dependent... incidence, compared with stress and accent, and uncertain in its rules; at any rate, even in the most capable hands it has failed to form a practicable basis of metre. Accentual metre is normal in English poetry, stress metres are possible, but quantitative metres can only be constructed by a tour de force ; artificial and incapable of normality or of naturalisation, they cannot get a certified right... associated together which are in their nature distinct, although they can be brought Page 317 into close relation. There was, first, the problem of the naturalisation of classical metres in English poetry, and there was, mixed up with it, the problem of the free creation of quantitative English verse in its own right, on its own basis, with its own natural laws, not necessarily identical with those ...
... in the field of English poetry. It is very difficult for us to enter into the subtleties of English language; and our oriental nature is also unappealing to the Westerners. What you say is no doubt correct, but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance... written regarding the learning of metre, Nishikanta approached Ramchandra for learning it; because it was he who had given him the push to write in English. But Ramchandra wants to read with him English poetry, so that he may plunge into the spirit before learning metre. To develop the English poetic style, I suppose, it would be the best plan. It is not English yet. But they can do like that if... he sometimes gave 3 ft. for 2 ft. lines and vice-versa. Having made a scheme he should keep to it. He wants to know how to get the right rhythm and the right poetic style. I said by reading English poetry. Yes, reading and listening with the inner ear to the modulation of the lines. About myself—as I go on writing, the lines, expressions, images seem so commonplace that I distrust the value ...
... 1 October 1943 Indo-English Poetry I suppose our oriental way of expression, which is as luxuriant as oriental nature itself, is unappealing to Westerners. What you say may be correct, but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance. If... Indian Poetry in English Writing in a Learned Language I was surprised last night how les mots justes sprang ready to the pen's call. Alas I can't say the same thing for my English poetry, where I always fumble so. One cannot expect to seize in poetry the finer and more elusive tones, which are so important, in a learned language, however well-learnt, as in one's native or natural... enter the subtleties of a foreign tongue. Who is this we? Many Indians write better English than many educated Englishmen. Is there any chance of our being able to express spirituality in English poetry? I put forward four reasons why the experiment could be made. (1) The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter VII The Character of English Poetry - I Of all the modern European tongues the English language—I think this may be said without any serious doubt,—has produced, not always the greatest or most perfect, but at least the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius. The unfettered play... play of poetic energy and power has been here the most abundant and brought forth the most constantly brilliant fruits. And yet it is curious to note that English poetry and literature have been a far less effective force in the shaping of European culture than the poetry and literature of other tongues inferior actually in natural poetic and creative energy. At least they have had to wait till quite a... sensual pessimism Page 48 which is even now one of the strongest shades in the literary tone of modern Europe,—to the present day Shakespeare and Byron are the only two great names of English poetry which are generally familiar on the continent and have had a real vogue,—we find the literature of the English tongue and especially its poetry flowing in a large side-stream, always receiving ...
... unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the "nature will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will lave a chance. "If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry, the English tongue is the most wide-spread... admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying." And then in another letter: "The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid.... At present many are turning to India for its sources of spirituality, but the eye has been directed only towards... apologise for giving such a long quotation from Sethna's book, the less because I cannot help a deep regret that we, Indians, who have already flowered, at our loveliest, into no mean creators in English poetry should have elected to cling to a cautious if not timid silence about Sri Aurobindo's epic achievement in poetry (an achievement which has been making history while we remain standing in a non ...
... may not be able to gauge the nature and sweep of the miracle that was achieved by Gurudev not only in me but in quite a few others including Chadwick. But to come now to how he initiated me into English poetry where, naturally, he could help me even more with his Yogic Force. After I had mastered the Bengali metres in which I was by now regarded as one of the authorities (I wrote a book*... and with what meticulous pains. But I am sure that a few instances of the poems he composed for my education will not only interest the general reader but be enjoyable as well to many a lover of English poetry, not to mention the young aspirants. The first poem he composed for me, in five-foot iambics, he wrote as having "improvised for the occasion" (on 25-5-1934) in the note-book I used to send... English people have not favoured Indian poets writing verse in English. But the mind of the future will be more international than it is today. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance." Next, when a highbrow friend of mine wrote to me advising me to start writing verse only in Bengali, my mother-tongue, pat came Gurudev's rejoinder: "My view of your poetry ...
... it is an inspiration which tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflating the voice of the poetic intelligence. 1 November 1936 Early Twentieth-Century English Poetry About modern English poetry of the early part of this century Livingston Lowes, writing in 1918, remarks in his Convention and Revolt in Poetry: "That which does allure it in the East is an amazing tininess... these autocrats; the other is precisely the "mystic" tendency—and I don't think it will be so easily snuffed out as that. 23 June 1932 Page 421 It is probably modern (contemporary) English poetry of which your friend is thinking. Here I am no expert; but I understand that the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, vivid, expressive... the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets. It does not look as if all contemporary English poetry were like that, it is only one strong trend; but such as it is, it has not as yet produced anything very decisive, great or successful. Much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity or, what is ...
... meagre and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but at least as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does not stop with Byron and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of some of the contemporary poets; their... be too much influenced by my own settled idiosyncrasies of an aesthetic temperament and being impregnated with an early cult for the work of the great builders in Sanskrit and Greek, Italian and English poetry. At any rate, this is true that whatever relation we may keep with the great Page 8 masters of the past, our present business is to go beyond and not to repeat them, and it must always... I have referred to these points which are only side issues or occasional touches in Mr. Cousins' book, because they are germane to the question which it most strongly raises, the future of English poetry and of the world's poetry. It is still uncertain how that future will deal with the old quarrel between idealism and realism, for the two tendencies these names roughly represent are still present ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XXII Recent English Poetry - III The rhythmic change which distinguishes the new poetry, may not be easy to seize at the first hearing, for it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body, commencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there is a change... life-burden of the thought, the emotion, the act or the thing seen in Nature. The movement that immediately followed, abandoned this power which Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had brought into English poetry; it sought after a language cut into the precision or full with the suggestions of the poetical intellect, and it gained something by its sacrifice; it purified the language, got rid of Elizabethan... the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, give the force and pitch and measure of this often clear, strong, large and luminous, but less intensely surprising and uplifting manner. English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry From Kathleen Raine Although I might postpone this letter for weeks until I had read or re-read all Sri Aurobindo's works, I don't suppose I could answer it better than by sitting down now - the first of the dark evenings of our winter when the extra hour of evening daylight is curtailed and I have the evening hours... reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter." Read alludes to an extensive stretch of genuine English poetry here: he does not make the least reservation in his praise and considers the work an "achievement" of a most noteworthy order. You refrain from any direct reference to poetic quality and in place... developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant development had preceded him in ...
... the key to the immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a complete and disastrous loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had not passed through any training... The Future Poetry Chapter XI The Course of English Poetry - III The Elizabethan drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it has a great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The rest of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion... substance and method belong to the second step of the psychological gradations by which poetry becomes a more and more profound and subtle instrument of the self-expression of the human spirit. English poetry, I have remarked, follows the grades of this ascension with a singular fidelity of sequence. At first it was satisfied with only a primary superficial response to the most external appearances ...
... from my intention to impose any strict rule of bare simplicity and directness as a general law of poetic style. I was speaking of "Twentieth-century English poetry" and of what was necessary for Amal, an Indian writing in the English tongue. English poetry in former times used inversions freely and had a law of its own —at that time natural and right, but the same thing nowadays sounds artificial and... let the language be more abundant than the sense. Don't indulge in mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them. (To Amal Kiran) 14 May 1935 Theme 3. If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you: (1) Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things at will because he has... An Indian using them kills his poetry and produces a scholastic exercise. (2) Write modem English. Avoid frequent inversions or turns of language that belong to the past poetic styles. Modern English poetry uses a straightforward order and a natural style, not different in vocabulary, syntax, etc., from that of prose. An inversion can be used sometimes, but it must be done deliberately and for a distinct ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XIII The Course of English Poetry - V When a power of poetry in a highly evolved language describes so low a downward curve as to reach this dry and brazen intellectualism, it is in danger of losing much of its vitality and flexibilities of expression and it may even, if it has lived too long, enter into a stage of decadence... knowledge or an execution of the thing seen equal to its true significance. All these familiar phenomena are visible in the new swift and far-reaching upward curve, which carries Page 100 English poetry from the hard, glittering, well-turned and well-rhymed intellectual superficialities of a thin pseudo-classicism to its second luminous outbreak of sight and beauty and an inspired creative impulse... poetic vision and utterance. This other and greater realm still remains open for a last transcendence. For the first time in occidental literature, we get in this fourth turn of the evolution of English poetry some faint initial falling of this higher light upon the poetic intelligence. Some ancient poets may have received something of it through myth and symbol; a religious mystic here and there may ...
... in the second Romanticism We may hazard the guess that the promise given by modern English Romanticism will be fulfilled most perfectly if certain recent glowings of the mystical in English poetry blend with influences of a spiritually resurgent India to seize most intimately on the soul of that Movement and carry it beyond the Spirit's dawn-flush known to it in the old days. The mind... poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. To that eventually, following the main stream of European thought and culture, English poetry turned for a time in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century; that too was more indistinctly the half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement which intervenes between Pope... purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, -not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era .... Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect ...
... champion of Indian writing in English and had himself authored innumerable poems and critical studies on a variety of subjects, was editing a highly admired journal, Mother India and teaching English poetry to Indian students. He came in contact with Miss Raine because of his studies in William Blake and his Christological interpretation of Blake's Tyger. Kathleen Raine was already a big name in English... press-mongers who want a world-language, and the advertisers of industrial products, and the power-seekers, and in a word the destroyers. Well, there it is. I see very little hope for the future of English poetry in any country, truth to say; and how much longer will the world itself last? 13 Those were the days of the Cold War. The Atomic Clock was ticking away fast and the United Nations had already... attitudes - not plastic enough to the diversity of fact or possibility." Getting back to her state 13. Ibid ., p. 30. 14. Ibid ., p. 32. Page 180 ment about English poetry is best written by Englishmen, Amal Kiran assures her that "much of the Englishness you speak of is merely a matter of certain national interests, historical habits, popular stock-responses, subtle ...
... for the work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet and litterateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native spirit and essential substance... intentional and part of the technique. The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously... welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry: I can give not what men call love; But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not, — The desire of the moth for the star ...
... over all move mighty presences of gods & spirits who are still real to the consciousness of the people.) The life & surroundings in which Indian poetry moves cannot be rendered in the terms of English poetry. Yet to give up Page 251 the problem and content oneself with tumbling out the warm, throbbing Indian word to shiver & starve in the inclement atmosphere of the English language seems... these words have colour & meaning & beauty to them, they must also convey the same associations to their reader. This is a natural but deplorable mistake; this jargon is merely a disfigurement in English poetry. The cultured may read their work in spite of the jargon out of the unlimited intellectual curiosity natural to culture; the half-cultured may read it because of the jargon out of the ingrained... indicated: It is an unfortunate tendency of the English mind to seize on what seems to it grotesque or ungainly in an unfamiliar object; thus the elephant & peacock have become almost impossible in English poetry, because the one is associated with lumbering heaviness & the other with absurd strutting. The tendency of the Hindu mind on the other hand is to seize on what is pleasing & beautiful in all things ...
... charged, if not exactly with spiritual presences, at least with strange emanations of them. To receive the full melopoeia of such verse we must read the lines in a special manner. I know that English poetry is not to be sung but spoken, yet a subtle chanting is not the same thing as sing-song and unless we indulge in it a little we do injustice to the special inspiration here. Most Englishmen would... of tone answering to the inner idea-turn and theme-suggestion. Yeats himself always read his own verse with something of a chant. I am sure he avoided the sing-song mono-tony which goes ill with English poetry; but, aware of the pro-fundities whose echoes he was attempting to catch in his word-music, he sought to carry it as near as possible to the effect that sheer music of the wordless variety, has... possibilities of language, more responsive to the turns of rhythm as enrichers of substance, more varied in his musical moods to em-body the diversity of dream-silences. He stands supreme in mo-dern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia. In poetry written in English, though not necessarily in England, he is surpassed in this genre by Sri Aurobindo alone. ...
... association". 2. The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986. Also see, Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994. 3 . A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Correspondence between Bede Griffiths... a Professor of English at St. Xavier's College. Then there were R.K. Karanjia (later the editor of Blitz ) and Nissim Ezekiel, who would carve out a place for himself in the do-main of Indian English poetry. Bombay greatly excited Sethna and fascinated his intellectual-artistic imagination. There was, however, another self in him that was to take him away radically to a new path, an unknown... understanding of the intimate relationship between the English language and the Indian mind will have lasting value. His books The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry containing correspondence between him and Kathleen Raine are. a critic's delight, full of insights and illumination. • Fifth, Sethna's considerable body of writing in the field of Indian ...
... phrase: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose. For, Milton is the first English poet to fashion the language of poetic thought: he is the Adam of the creative intelligence in English poetry, and poetic thinking really finds in him all repose - no strain, no gesticulation, an intellectual utterance achieved with sovereign ease on a gigantic scale: the thought-power in us can see its... intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..." Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not press all the rest of man's parts into the service of a quivering... Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form". 5 But when ...
... unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance. "If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds of poetry, the English tongue is the... used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying." And then in another letter: Page 191 " The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid.... At present many are turning to India for its sources of spirituality, but the eye has been directed only towards... apologise for giving such a long quotation from Sethna's book, the less because I cannot help a deep regret that we, Indians, who have already flowered, at our loveliest, into no mean creators in English poetry should have elected to cling to a cautious if not timid silence about Sri Aurobindo's epic achievement in poetry (an achievement which has been making history while we remain standing in a ...
... traditional belief, its successful way of dealing with its material, its formal ethicism and its absence of passion. But to all these things he brings an artistic decorative quality which is new in English poetry. He has left his stamp on the language and has given starting-points and forms for poets of a rarer force to turn to greater uses and pass beyond them to a new construction. Tennyson is the... magnificence. Atalanta in Calydon, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and numerous other poems with the same perfect workmanship will always stand among the consummate achievements of English poetry. He is at his best one of the great lyrical singers; he writes in a flood and sweep and passion of melody: he is unique as a voice of all-round revolt, political, moral and of every kind, and in... craftsmen,—who are concerned to give beauty and finish to the material of poetry rather than original poets with a large power of inspiration. Their range is small, but they have brought into English poetry a turn for fine execution which is likely to be a long-abiding influence. Among the Victorians Browning stands next to Tennyson in the importance of his poetic work and station as a representative ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter X The Course of English Poetry - II Elizabethan Drama Shakespeare and the Poetry of the Life-Spirit The Elizabethan age, perhaps the era of most opulent output in the long history of English poetic genius, is abundant, untrammelled and unbridled in its power, but not satisfying in its performance. Beautiful as are many of... had many vices, flaws and serious limitations which their work exaggerates wilfully rather than avoids, so that it is only exceptionally free from glaring flaws. The gold of this golden age of English poetry is often very beautifully and richly wrought, but it is seldom worked into a perfect artistic whole; it disappears continually in masses of alloy, and there is on the whole more of a surface gold-dust... Unhappily, Marlowe had the conception, but not any real power of dramatic execution. He is unable to give the last awakening breath of life to his figures; in the external manner so common in English poetry and fiction he rather constructs than evolves, portrays than throws out into life, paints up or sculptures from outside than creates from within,—and yet it is this other inward way that is the ...
... shake everywhere. Bengali people say that they like my English verses better than my Bengali ones, for they find there something new. Isn't that because "people" are less accustomed to English poetry than to Bengali? You have written two good poems in English, and certainly it is early to have done that. But the circumstances are exceptional. This brings me to Nishikanta's poem. I wonder... Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets, because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? After what you have seen of my English poetry, is there any chance for me? Certainly I have looked at the Ox. Dictionary here and I find it clearly puts the accent on the 2nd syllable, with none on the first, thus [Image 7], the ˚ marking... the devil do I bother my head with poetry? Poetry, poetry, poetry! Have I come here for blessed poetry? You haven't. But the poetry has come for you. So why shout? I know that success in English poetry is as far away as the stars in heaven in spite of your remark to the contrary, though I must confess to having some contentment in writing. Rubbish! the stars in heaven don't stroll in and ...
... enchantment his verse lays upon our sensibilities. Without such an opening it would also be impossible to explain the poet’s success in writing English poetry with extremely meagre external technical equipment. Nishikanto’s success in the field of English poetry would appear to suggest that it is not impossible for an exceptionally gifted and powerful poet to surmount altogether the need of knowing the... vital if not the spiritual influence and then a divine call.” [43] Six years after the publication of Nishikanto’s Alakananda , his first book of poems in Bengali, his first and only book of English poetry Dream Cadences saw the light of the day in April 1946. The collection consisted of his original poems as well as translation of his poems made by Dilip Kumar Roy. It also included the following ...
... shall be neither astonished nor discomfited. I know the limitations of the poem and its qualities and I know that the part about the descent into Hell can stand comparison with some of the best English poetry; but I don't expect any contemporaries to see it. If they do, it will be good luck or divine grace, that is all." It redounds to the great credit of K.D.S. that he took up in right earnest... research in Mallarme’s Symbolist Poetry; 7. The English Language and the Indian Spirit; 8. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo; 9. Blake’s Tyger: A Christological Interpretation; 10. Indian Poets and English Poetry; 11. The Beginning of History for Israel; 12. “Overhead Poetry”; 13. KarpasaIt in Prehistoric India; and a host of others. It becomes a little difficult to believe that books as disparate... advised to refer to any of his following pieces: (1) “Two Critics Criticised” in Sri Aurobindo - the Poet (ii) “A Cross Critic Cross-Examined” (Ibid); (iii) the entire book Indian Poets and English Poetry (a correspondence with Kathleen Raine); (iv) “November 17, 1974 - A Look Backward and Forward” in Page 14 Mother India, November ’74; (v) “A Gross Misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo” ...
... Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo On Poetry 22-5-1925 The talk turned on the subject of Indians writing English poetry. Sri Aurobindo remarked that when he was conducting the Arya he received heaps of poems. Sri Aurobindo asked about Hindi literature, inquiring whether it carried the modern spirit in its works. Disciple : It contains the element... as for the rest there is not much that can be called modern. The form at present is mainly lyrical. Sri Aurobindo : But the lyric is quite old in Hindi. Disciple : What about X’s English poetry. Sri Aurobindo : Has he written anything new recently except his inexhaustible dramas that are no dramas? Disciple : Y tells me that X has even begun to write in Hindi. Sri Aurobindo... if he could have kept to the height and finished the poem. But in the second draft there is already a drop – a decline from the epic height. Disciple : There have been Indian writers of English poetry. What do you think of them? Sri Aurobindo : They do write poetry in English and it may even be successful, but it is not the real man who is speaking. Very few can do it in another language ...
... reason was by Personification. We therefore find a tendency to create a sort of makeshift mythology by personifying the qualities of the mind. Otherwise the supernatural practically disappears from English poetry for a whole century. 2d The exclusion of rural life and restriction to the life of the Page 127 town and of good society. The aristocracy of the time took no interest in anything... all or only describe it in a surface manner recalling just so much as maybe perceived by a casual glance. Of sympathy with Nature or close observation of it, there is hardly a single instance in English poetry between Dryden and Thomson. 4ṭḥ The exclusion of human emotion, i.e. to say poetry was not only limited to the workings of the human mind and human nature but to cultured society and to the... men purely; the deeper feelings of the heart are not touched or only touched in an inadequate manner; and it is a characteristic fact that the passion of love which is the most common subject of English poetry, is generally left alone by these poets or if handled, handled in a most unreal and rhetorical manner. It followed from the exclusion of so much subject-matter that the forms of poetry which ...
... rigidity and monotone. English poetry has always a fundamental metrical basis, a fixed normality of the feet constituting a line; but it relieves the fixity by the use of modulations substituting, with sometimes a less, sometimes a greater freedom, other feet for the normal. This rule of variation, very occasionally admitted in the classical tongues but natural in English poetry, must be applied or at... replacing altogether the normal accentual mould of English verse by a quantitative structure; the object can only be to introduce new rhythms which would extend and vary the established achievement of English poetry, to create new moulds, to add a rich and possibly a very spacious modern wing to an old edifice. Even if the new forms are only an improvement on stress metre, a rhythm starting from the same swing ...
... The Problem of the Hexameter It is now possible to transfer our attention to the minor problem of the naturalisation of classical quantitative metres in English poetry; for in the light of this more natural theory of quantity we can hope to find an easier solution. Among these metres the hexameter stands as the central knot of the problem; if that is loosened... a born English rhythm, not a naturalised alien. It would be a mistake to cling to rigid scholarly Page 363 correctness in the process; these metres must submit to the natural law of English poetry, to movements and liberties which the classical rhythms do not admit, to modulation, to slight facilitating changes of form, to the creation of different models of itself, as there are different... lyrical forms and the Page 364 freedom of the use of quantitative verse for the creation of new original rhythms would be enough to add a wide field to the large and opulent estate of English poetry. Page 365 × Note the detestable combination of two flat trochees with a falsified tribrach in the middle ...
... quantity has been left to do what it can for itself under their rule. The basis commonly adopted in most English poetry since Chaucer is the accentual rhythm, the flow of accentual pitch and inflexion which is so all-important an element in the intonation of English speech. In any common form of English poetry we find all based on pitch and inflexion; the feet are accentual feet, the metrical "length" or ... it similarly leave the other two Page 330 elements, stress and accent, to influence and vary the rhythm but not allow them to interfere in the building of the metre? Can there be in English poetry a quantitative as well as an accentual or a stress building of verse, natural to the turn of the language, recognised and successful? and must stress or accentual lengths in such a metrical system ...
... work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet Page 346 and littérateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native spirit and essential... intentional and part of the technique. The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambement or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry From K. D. Sethna I see that you want to cry halt to our discussion of Sri Aurobindo as poet. Very well. But some points about your general attitude to poetry and certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo seem to call for some comment from me. First, the mixing up of the romantic with the sentimental. Surely, sentimentalism... Travels where galley on swanlike galley shines Somnolent over perfumed purple seas Rocking the rich fawn shimmer of ship-lines, Huge nonchalance surcharged with memories!) English poetry is chockful of both economical and lavish wonders. Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land may be rated economical but can anybody apply the same epithet to his Hound of Heaven? I don't know... urge to give us a whipping on any pretext. Whatever appears to come to hand serves you to run down Sri Aurobindo in particular and his school of Indian poets in general and by implication all Indo-English poetry. A sweeping obsession rather than any clear and patient perception is at play, as if it made no odds whether the occasion were truly pertinent or not. Just the belief that something is written ...
... Sethna's Wordsworth-criticism in his assertion that the characteristic Wordsworthian speech that brought a new note into English poetry is essentially Indian and Page 282 fundamentally Vedantic. He claims that there are two kinds of English poetry - one that is charged with the sense of England and the other that is independent of the country and that the second... into even the classics that have been exhaustively probed: "Milton has not only song-music, he has also symphony- music." (p. 133) "He (Yeats) stands supreme in modern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia." (p-144) "Phanopoeia rather than logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry." (p. 277) "Among European ...
... phrase: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose. For, Milton is the first English poet to fashion the language of poetic thought: he is the Adam of the creative intelligence in English poetry, and poetic thinking really finds in him all repose - no strain, no gesticulation, an intellectual utterance achieved with sovereign ease on a gigantic scale: the thought-power in us can see... intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..." Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not press all the rest of man's parts into the service of a... career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form". 2 _____________ ...
... Aurobindo welcomed such remarks from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he lived, could have talked with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature." 43 We should indeed be quite thankful to Amal Kiran for these... poetry, it just means that Sri Aurobindo might have been a poet but he was a bad poet in English because, unfortunately, he chose a medium 87 Ibid., p. 46. 88 Indian Poets and English Poetry, Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1994), pp. 29-30. See also Mother India, pp. 753-58, September 1996. 89 Ibid., p. 131. 90 Sri Aurobindo - Seer and Poet... brings out. That is the power of spiritual poetry. It is also a fine example of intuitive thought reaching an absolute of the Truth. One wonders whether such descriptions exist anywhere else in English poetry. In this context we may also recall what Sri Aurobindo wrote to Amal Kiran regarding his blank verse style in Savitri. "... when I attempted the single line blank verse on a large ...
... not find creative force there. He is a literary man, a Ph.D. from Oxford. SRI AUROBINDO: In philosophy? PURANI: No, in literature; he did research in ancient English poetry. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, that is the skeleton of English poetry. NIRODBARAN: Sahana says some of Tagore's dramas have creative force. SRI AUROBINDO: Which? NIRODBARAN: She doesn't remember which. But don't you think ... Yeats has no appeal! It is strange. He likes Arjava's poems and yet Arjava told him that he was greatly indebted to Yeats, and so also is Amal. SRI AUROBINDO: Perhaps X doesn't understand English poetry sufficiently. NIRODBARAN: But he said that Chesterton has variety in metre and he appreciates it. SRI AUROBINDO: Chesterton? NIRODBARAN: Yes, I think that if he doesn't understand a poem ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study III Trends in Modern English Poetry S o far as poetical creation is concerned, the present is a period of transition, that is to say, there are many widely separate attempts, some fine and powerful beginnings but no large consummation, no representative work, no dominating figure. But it is a period full... deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way what is aimed at be done". Analysing further the largest trends in English poetry, he says, "the latest craze in England is either for intellectual quintessence or sensations of life, while any emotional or ideal element in poetry is considered as a deadly sin. But beautiful... all the world besides: Each part may call the farthest, brother: For head with foot hath private amity, And both with moons and tides" Among young Indian poets who are writing English poetry, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Armando Menazes, K. D. Sethna may be considered representative. J. A. Chadwick alias Arjava may be included among them, though an Englishman, on account of his affinity ...
... comprehension and the same variety of rhythmical articulation. In his version, Songs of the Sea, Sri Aurobindo tried his best "to give his [Das's] beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage".29 Reasonably close to the original, the song-sequence in English has its own character and is suffused with a poetic iridescence of its own. Here are a few passages picked... paragraphs proves a tractable enough medium for the expression of the whole range of emotion covered in the speeches of Kausalya, Rama and Sita. It is possible to enjoy these passages simply as English poetry, forgetting for the nonce that they are but translations from Valmiki. And, after all, this is the real test of a good translation. VI Sri Aurobindo may have loved the Ramayana... sunlight. 80 Page 97 At Sri Aurobindo's magic touch, Kalidasa's superb figures are rekindled into a flame of beauty and his immortal play has won a sure habitation in the realms of English poetry.* *When an Indian critic charged Sri Aurobindo "with modem nineteenth-century romanticism and a false imitation of Elizabethan drama" in his rendering of Vikramorvasie as The Hero and ...
... for they have [been] nourished partly on the curious and elaborate art of Kalidasa and his gorgeous pomps of vision and colour, partly on the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry. Like Englishmen they are taught to profess a sort of official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are... virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers and Page 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general ...
... the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." Yeats, in the Oxford Book of English Poetry edited by him, touched up the Tagorean sentences: "Where thine infinite sky spreadeth for the soul to take her flight, a stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor... Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 11.The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12.Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation ...
... absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low placc either. I consider they can rank—these eight lines— with the very best in English poetry." To Dilip Kumar Roy: "Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both... when Madonna Mia and the subsequent poems had been commented upon, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English poetry or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order. ' In 1946 several lines in the world's poetry which he had once hesitated about were adjudged by him ...
... English accent. There was no rise or fall or any other dramatic quality in the intonation; it was in the manner of simple prose dictation with end stops of course. My initiation by him into English poetry rendered the scribe's work congenial as well as convenient. If I missed some words, I Page 79 would ask again, but sometimes I was so cocksure that I put down what I heard... Aurobindo welcomed such remarks from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he lived, could have talked with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead Page 80 poetry, etc., which is now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations ...
... my intention to lay down any strict rule of bare simplicity and directness as a general law of poetic style. I was speaking of "twentieth century" English poetry and of what was necessary for Amal, an Indian writing in the English tongue. English poetry in former times used inversions freely and had a law of its own, at that time natural and right ________________ 1. Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) ...
... Marlowe Page 183 and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare - practise what he sees as Salvini's art. The peak-point of the later Romanticism, the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth, carries the art that he conceives to be Cha-liapin's. For it passes beyond the cadre not only of Classicism but also of Elizabethan poetry. And this it does not merely... References 1.The Future Poetry, p. 1 92. 2. Ibid., pp. 90-9 1. 3. Ibid., p. 2 7 9. 4. Lucas, op. cit., pp. 174-175 (fn. 1). 5. T. Earle Welby, A Popular History of English Poetry (London), p. 183. 6.SABCL, Vol. 22, Letters on Yoga, p. 185. 7. Lucas, op. cit., p. 236. 8. Savitri (Centenary Edition), pp. 802-03. Page 198 ...
... the tongue chosen by the poet. Not even the ghost of any awkwardness can be slipped in as a suggestion into Dr. Gokak's elaborately considered and expounded opinion of Savitri's achievement in English poetry. If Dr. Gokak here is to be believed, gaucherie in the ordinary accepted sense should strike us as the last thing to be hinted at - no matter how moderately - for Sri Aurobindo's epic... Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him - and yet the passage is one of the peaks of grandeur in English poetry: Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition there to dwell In adamantine chains ...
... got the opinion that a number of pieces "spoke" to her but she picked out only one from nearly a hundred as being almost "English poetry". This was the short poem "Each Night". I dare say others may not be so doctrinaire as she. You should be a good judge of the English poetry-loving public, I have always in mind your plan of "Collected Poems of K. D. Sethna." Just yesterday I looked again at the various ...
... h between the long vowels and the short, or to pronounce correctly the combinations of vowels and consonants, or to know where exactly words are accented is to miss the musical significance of English poetry. I say "significance" on purpose, for sounds and beats have not just a quality of fineness and crudeness, concord and discord. More than through anything else, the thrill of the poetic afflatus... that cannot wholly be caught in idea or vision. To hold and communicate all these thrills with all their deep and far-reaching suggestions, sounds and beats are prime factors in poetry. (I mean English poetry, where beats are concerned; other languages have other metrical determinants.) Poetry, and to a lesser degree all imaginative writing, are wholly appreciated, wholly absorbed, wholly lived with ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry. Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language... If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal of Indian inspiration, I see no reason Page 10 why memorable English poetry should fail to be ...
... Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic A New Landmark in English Poetry* A Review-Article SOME years ago, in a series of illuminating essays, published in the journal Arya under the title "The Future Poetry", Sri Aurobindo discussed the nature and evolution of future poetry. As the most significant poetic trend in recent times in this... light and vision, not in the inadequate speech of the surface mind but in the inspired and revelatory accent of Spirit itself. This attempt has not always been successful. In continental and English poetry it has not gone beyond a search for some inner meaning of the sensational and emotional experience and its formulation in a new kind of intuitivised expression. A few Irish and Indian poets ...
... Pindar and Euripides - we have in the last line, which looks simple enough, so exquisite a combination of vowels and consonants that a critic like Grierson considers it the most musical in all English poetry. At least we may deem it as beautiful as any waft on the ear in Paradise Lost. An effect Page 61 comparable to any there in rhythmic strength is also in a Sonnet of 1652: ... 18 . Ibid., 383-5. 19 .Bk. IV, 75-8. 20 . Comus, 208. 21 . Ibid, 730. 22 . On the Lord General Fairfax, at the Siege of Colchester, 4. 23 . English Poetry (1952), p. 73. 24 .Lines 9-14. 25 .Bk. II, 7-8. 26 .Bk. IX, 142. 27 . Ibid., 170-1. 28 .Bk. IV, 323-4. 29 . Peloponnesian War, I. i. 30 ...
... perfect. If you could always write like that, yon would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank - these eight lines - with the very best in English poetry." No mean praise, coming from so high a source! One more of Amal's poems, this time on Sri Aurobindo, titled The Master: Bard rhyming earth to paradise, T... his talks was appearing in the monthly Ashram magazine Mother India of which he was, and is, the editor. As an Englishman, I was at once struck by his detailed familiarity not only with English poetry - especially that of Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics - but also with that of Europe. And he appeared familiar not only with the literature but with the best of Western criticism, too ...
... the curve of this great impulse. Continental literature displays the mass of this movement with a much more central completeness and in a stronger and more consistent body and outline than English poetry. In the Teutonic countries the intellectual and romantic literature of the Germans at the beginning with its background of transcendental philosophy, at the end the work of the Scandinavian and... influences by the Parnassians, the like later turn towards the poetry of Mallarmé, Verlaine, D'Annunzio, stigmatised by some as the beginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of the curve. In English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on the whole a less clear and definite inspiration and there is in spite of the greatness of individual poets an inferior total effectivity; but at the ...
... it once possessed; or Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee Like the sun from a wintry sky. In this manner English poetry is especially opulent and gets from it much of its energy and power; but yet we feel that this is not the highest degree of which poetic speech is capable. There is a more intimate vision, a more... spirit's sense of itself, as it were, externalised and made vital and physical and some illumination of the inner meaning of this externality, that motives a new kind of utterance. Much of present-day English poetry drives in the same direction but with less subtlety and a more forceful outwardness of sight and tone. The Irish poets and in a different way the few Indians, Tagore and Chattopadhyay and Mrs. ...
... if the mastery is there. As for rules,—rules are necessary but they are not absolute; one of the chief tendencies of genius is to break old rules and make departures, which create new ones. English poetry of today luxuriates in movements which to the mind of yesterday would have been insanity or chaotic licence, yet it is evident that this freedom of experimentation has led to discoveries of new... has to say. Indian poetry in the Sanskritic languages—there are exceptions of course—was for the most part more restrained and classic in taste or else more impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don't see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament ...
... rigidity and monotone. English poetry has always a fundamental metrical basis, a fixed normality of the feet constituting a line; but it relieves the fixity by the use of modulations substituting, with sometimes a less, sometimes a greater freedom, other feet for the normal. This rule of variation, very occasionally admitted in the classical tongues but natural in English poetry, must be applied or at ...
... their functions are according to the nature of the language they derive from. Polysyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Latin and Greek which have resonance and weight. The work they do, therefore, is to vivify things in their aspect of stability and wideness and splendour. Monosyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Anglo-Saxon which has an intimate ring and a lightness about it. The work ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry From Kathleen Raine We live in a very mysterious world, in which thoughts are realities that communicate in ways other than print. Of course any dream contains many elements but I have no doubt that there was indeed some meeting between us in yours. I enclose the book review in last week's TLS which as you see is extremely... the seer of the Lake District knew when he spoke of the secret universal Being Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Do you know that Tennyson regarded this line as the grandest in English poetry? He may well be nearly right, for to my mind both the art and the heart of it are superb. Take the vowellation to start with. A softly penetrating sound Page 169 meets us the first ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry Introduction The Collection of letters - The English Language and the Indian Spirit - preceding the present one was appreciated by "an audience fit though few" interested in the adventure of India's contribution to the varied world of English poetry. This audience is expected to welcome the cut and thrust of two idealistic ...
... trisyllabic skip. It is best to take the first foot as a semi-spondee, anticipating the full spondee with which the verse concludes: "fair face." There are several prepositions or adjectives in English poetry which allow a change of accent as here. To mention a few: "among", "upon", "beyond", "between", "occult", "divine", "extreme", "supreme". Consider for an example the fifth line at the beginning... syllables making up the line are intrinsically long vowels and bear massed stresses, four consecutive ones in the first two feet and three such in the last two. I do not know of any other line in English poetry that has so much weight of music as well as of meaning and yet possesses a spontaneous mobility. No completer example can be offered of what these talks have sought to disclose: the heart and the ...
... the tongue chosen by the poet. Not even the ghost of any awkwardness can be slipped in as a suggestion into Dr. Gokak's elaborately considered and expounded opinion of Savitri's achievement in English poetry. If Dr. Gokak here is to be believed, gaucherie in the ordinary accepted sense should strike us as the last thing to be hinted at — no matter how moderately — for Sri Aurobindo's epic. Could... Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him — and yet the passage is one of the peaks of grandeur in English poetry: Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition there to dwell In adamantine chains and ...
... : Have you seen Amal's recent article "Can Indians Write English Poetry"? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. He has paid a compliment to the Ashram. He has said that there is a growing band of gifted poets here. Perhaps he is paying a compliment to himself! (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: He says one must know English prose in order to write English poetry. SRI AUROBINDO: The English language rather. ...
... person blindly follows. For instance, you give me Force for English poetry—some lines come all right, others are jumbled, wrong, etc., and these things you correct by outer guidance, i.e. by correcting, changing, etc. till I become sufficiently receptive and then only a few changes will be necessary. I do so in your English poetry because I am an select I nowadays avoid poetry. In Bengali poetry ...
... Aurobindo was loved and highly revered by his students 13 at Baroda College, not only for his profound knowledge of English literature and his brilliant and often original interpretations of English poetry, but for his saintly character and gentle and gracious manners. There was a magnetism in his personality, and an impalpable aura of a lofty ideal and a mighty purpose about him, which left a... seen anybody with such a passionate love of reading. Because of his habit of keeping late hours for reading and writing poetry, Aurobindo used to rise slightly late in the morning. He wrote English poetry in various metres. He had an extraordinary command of the English language. His English poems were sweet and simple, his descriptions lucid and devoid of over-colouring. He possessed an uncommon ...
... the quotations are from "Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on The Mother”, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Page 5 spent most of his spare time in general reading, especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe. He spent some time also over learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish. He spent ... of the culture of the West. He had travelled in the wide realms of classical thought, and delighted in the epic grandeur of its poetry. He had enjoyed and admired the splendour and beauty of English poetry, the grace and charm of French literature, the sublimity of Dante's creation, and the giant sweep of Goethe's mind. He had studied the historical development of Western religion, thought and ...
... study of classics, but even at St. Paul's in the last three years he simply went through his school course without labouring over it and spent most of his time in general reading, especially of English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of mediaeval and modem Europe. He also spent some time learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish. This he could do as he was... Even while he was at Manchester he wrote a poem for the Fox's Weekly , "an awful imitation" as he used to call it. At St. Paul's, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, he began to write more English poetry. This activity continued when he went to Cambridge, and indeed throughout his life. His brother Manmohan was a classmate of Laurence Binyon and a friend of Oscar Wilde. He was also very intimate ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XX Recent English Poetry - I The movement away from the Victorian type in recent and contemporary English poetry cannot be said to have yet determined its final orientation. But we may distinguish in its uncertain fluctuations, its attempts in this or that direction certain notes, certain strong tones, certain original indications ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XXIII Recent English Poetry - IV The inspiring spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness and presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning... to some fullest power of its intelligence and speech-force, and the thought and writing of those who follow Whitman, like the French "unanimist" poets, bear the same character. At the centre of English poetry, in England itself, we have found another turn of intuitive speech which is more native to that closer actuality of experience for which we seek, a turn and power brought about perhaps by the greater ...
... of phrase and image which has some intellectual finish but not either force or magic, or a fluidity of movement which fails to hold the ear. But there are three poems of his which are unique in English poetry, written in moments when the too active intellect was in abeyance, an occult eye of dream and vision opened to supraphysical worlds and by a singular felicity the other senses harmonised, the speech... purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry,—not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era. His astonishing early performance leaves us wondering what might have been the ...
... Sri Aurobindo - The Poet The Longest Sentence in English Poetry The longest sentence in English poetry—143 words and, if a compound is counted as two, 144—is in Savitri, Book IV, Conto III, P.426. We must understand, of course, that true sentence-length does not really depend on putting a full-stop as late as possible and substituting commas and ...
... the poet to whom these singers looked back sometimes in the manner and movement of their verse and who was mainly responsible for the establishment of an authentically intellectualised speech in English poetry: Milton. Particularly in the early Milton of the Nativity Hymn, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and Lycidas we have a richness and Page 88 flexibility and supple penetrativeness... colourful swell. Not that the inspired reason and the enlightened Page 89 aesthetic sense are absent in the new Romantics. In relation to their work Sri Aurobindo 6 has written: "English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping ...
... and Page 50 finer effects, sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies". 16 The Teuton element makes for that "con-stant tendency of the spirit of English poetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, of feeling and passion, to give that its full force and to make it the basis and the source and, not only the... within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of poetical sight". 24 When in English poetry the Celtic genius emerges from under the weight of its Teutonic companion and acts with it from the plane of the Life-force it casts into Teutonic Romanticism its own Romanticism of the delicate ...
... suspends the over-rigid censorship exerted by our sense of what is fact and our sense of what is fitting", 6 he is too far out in tracing to the Freudian Subconscious or Unconscious the Movement in English poetry which began in 1789 with Blake's Songs of Innocence and ended in its typical characteristics with the deaths of Keats and Shelley. Doubtless, the Freudian "impulses and drives" had a say... and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing". 19 In the new Romantic Age of English poetry, which is founded not on the Life-force but on the creative Intelligence, we have three Page 152 elements at work. One is the Teutonic - "much poetical thinking or even poetical ...
... Then there is the perspicacity of his note: "there are two points which struck Page 255 me emphatically. (1) The frequent echoes — quite deliberate — of well-known lines in English poetry in Savitri. They are all over the place. (2) Sri Aurobindo says somewhere in the prose notes that he has discussed and examined in the poem every important philosophical theory... You have touched... to carry 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 ...
... of saying 'I will pay off with tears', Rum says: 'I will pay off tears' as the price of the absolution. This Latini-sation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry—of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some other... shall be neither astonished nor discomfited. I know the limitations of the poem and its qualities and I know that the part about the descent into Hell can stand comparison with some of the best English poetry; but I don't expect any contemporaries to see it. If they do, it will be good luck or divine grace, that is all. Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary ...
... Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry. 2 Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language...If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal of Indian inspiration, I see no reason why memorable English poetry should fail to be produced ...
... and professional command over it. All the shades and nuances of English poetry Amal knows with absolute thoroughness even as they become an aspect of his creative personality. Everything from Page 131 Canterbury Tales to Savitri flows in his blood-stream. Once I told Amal that he would be carrying English poetry along with him to the next life, which he with a confirming smile ...
... English people have not favoured Indian poets writing verse in English; but the mind of the future will be more international than it is today. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance. * (In reply to a highbrow critic friend. A.)... It is not true in all cases that one can't write first-class things in a learned language. Both in French... regard it as a sort of psychic calamity, if you stopped in the good way at anybody's suggestion. If for nothing else they would be worth doing as an expression of bhakti (the Indian kind) which in English poetry has had till now no place. Page 189 (Author's note: The last two paragraphs Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in a letter dated October i, 1943. Thereafter I have made bold to use two Sanskrit ...
... a truly remarkable poem." Then there is the perspicacity of his note: "there are two points which struck me emphatically. (1)The frequent echoes - quite deliberate - of well-known lines in English poetry in Savitri. They are all over the place. (2)Sri Aurobindo says somewhere in the prose notes that he has discussed and examined in the poem every important philosophical theory... You have... carry 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 ...
... 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 lines of 223,282,322 longest sentence 118 ... Poet and Critic 5.Aspects of Sri Aurobindo 6.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 7.Classical and Romantic : An Approach through Sri Aurobindo 8.. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and KD. Sethna 9.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 10.Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of ...
... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri THE LONGEST SENTENCE IN ENGLISH POETRY 1 The longest sentence in English poetry - 143 words and, if a compound is counted as two, 144 - is in Savitri, Book IV, Canto 3, p. 426 [p. 375]. We must understand, of course, that true sentence-length does not really depend on putting a full-stop as late as possible ...
... imitation, and influence to the original work of art." 17 In every case of influence all these steps are not necessarily 13 Herbert Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, Harmondsworth, 1960 (Repr.), p. 437. 14 Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, pp. 150-51. 15 Ibid ., p. 149. 16 Ibid ., p. 150. 17 Ulrich Weisstein, op. Cit ., p. 32. Page 444 ... 25 Besides the linguistic difficulty there was also the cultural difference. "The life and surroundings," says Sri Aurobindo, "in which Indian poetry moves cannot be rendered in the terms of English poetry." 26 While translating Sanskrit poetry he had to tackle this problem thoroughly. In his notes he points out, as he says, "rather sketchily", how he thinks it best to meet the difficulty. His ...
... Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, - not gran- Page 72 diose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry." 9 Rossetti stands next in subtle pictorial directness. Yeats is as... amount of accomplished work as Milton, and nobody rivals him in the long drawn-out structure of modulated harmony. But our fourth paradox lies in the queer conjunction that the greatest artist in English poetry is also the greatest Puritan in England's literature. We have already said that he was Cromwell's Foreign Secretary; like Cromwell, he belonged to the sect of those who wanted to make religion ...
... oil or enema, to clear out the bowels. More purgatives? after the triumph of the soda sulph. and A's own pathetic question? May 15, 1937 Please give a few examples of conceit in English poetry Not very clear about it.... Conceit means a too obviously ingenious or far-fetched or extravagant idea or image which is evidently an invention of a clever brain, not a true and convincing... If pay is given they don't care. Cart service seems hardly suitable for that illness. There is however a hammerman in the smithy who goes on with a leg like that. I am afraid my source of English poetry is exhausted before it has begun. The Guru is supposed to take up the shishya's troubles! It seems to me to be rather J's trouble. She writes fine epic verse and says she is unable to do anything ...
... Bengali poetry. Thereby, I thought, I would get Sri Aurobindo's direct contact and guidance. This was the predominant factor that inspired me to take up the hazardous journey through the seas of English Poetry. I am today almost where I began, for I started very late; but the sudden brain-wave has been amply rewarded in more ways than one, and had it not been for the unfortunate circumstance of his accident... you don't mind. You may say that you could write better than this and certainly you would. But as I say, I was a novice; I knew nothing about poetry and I was taking a leap into the unknown of English poetry, like a daring explorer. Considering all this, it is not a bad example. Too romantic perhaps. Here it is: Like a flame of flowers on yonder tree, Like the rippling waves of the ...
... 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 poetry. Passages from The Hollow Men are scanned in Sri Aurobindo's essay on quantitative metre as examples of the new 'ametric poetry', and once, in 1946, in defence of his use of the French word... Nevertheless, 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 ...
... the eighth class at the Jagatbandhu Institute. We had a teacher who used to teach us grammar and translation - I cannot recall his name. There was another teacher named Bihari-babu who taught us English poetry. This other teacher was teaching us some translation. One of the sentences was "Shey ratrey bahirey bhishan andhakar" from Shrikantd. The teacher translated: "On that night there was... see this new translation. "Who has taught you this kind of English?" "Sir, Bihari-babu." "Bihari? What does he know about translating grammatical English? He is supposed to teach English poetry. That's fine. But teach grammar? Translation? It isn't as easy as he thinks!" This sort of one-upmanship was common between the *A Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee ...
... English accent. There was no rise or fall or any other dramatic quality in the intonation; it was in the manner of simple prose dictation with end stops, of course. My initiation by him into English poetry rendered the scribe's work congenial as well as convenient. If I missed some words, I would ask again, but sometimes I put down what I thought I heard correct. Later on, after his passing away... welcomed such discussion from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he been alive, could have discussed with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate expositions on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare ...
... "The Feast of Youth" This is the first published book of a young poet whose name has recently and suddenly emerged under unusually favourable auspices. English poetry written by an Indian writer who uses the foreign medium as if it were his mother-tongue, with a spontaneous ease, power and beauty, the author a brother of the famous poetess Sarojini Naidu, one ...
... Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 11. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14. Blake's Tyger: ...
... Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 11.The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12.Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation ...
... ical Interpretation, Pondicherry: K.D. Sethna. 29. 1993 The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 30. 1994 Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 31. 1994 Life-Poetry-Yoga: Personal Letters , Vol. I, Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral ...
... have understood the poetic potential inherent in gold and gems. Sri Aurobindo elevates this poetic technique to a high level of symbolism. It can be said that what is just a poetic method in English poetry is transmuted into an exquisite poetic tradition by Sri Aurobindo,—because he demonstrates how the material, the poetic and the spiritual can be fused together. The Poet-Jeweller thus becomes ...
... lly, gets connected with the great Event which took place one year after its composition, the event of 29 February 1956. For a time Amal was in the Centre of Education, our Professor of English Poetry. Once he asked all the students to write a poem as homework. Nobody wrote. He was still very patient and said: "Do you think it is so difficult to compose a poem? In our ordinary parlance also ...
... a different kind of melody but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly aksaravrtta.19 (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali ...
... With vibrant songs of victory...." This can be sung in the same tune as Bengali. Edmund Spencer (1552-1599): English poet. The Faerie Queene is his major contribution to English Poetry. It is a long dense allegory in the epic form of Christian virtues, tied into England's mythology of King Arthur. Anacreon (563-478 BCE): Greek poet, noted for his lyrics on love and ...
... the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." Yeats, in the Oxford Book of English Poetry edited by him, touched up the Tagorean sentences: "Where thine infinite Page 35 sky spreadeth for the soul to take her flight, a stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is ...
... verse and violent excess of word-vision several contemporary poets are practising — rather poetasters, for Yeats and AE and, at their best, Abercrombie and Masefield are in the great tradition of English poetry. But the lines are spoiled none the less by their too patent intellectuality and striving after flamboyant effect. In modern poetry, much that is neither frigid nor hectic, that avoids ...
... Inspiration and Effort SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI, THE NATURE OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY A LETTER The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are analytic, cla ...
... flowers and landscapes and there is an unforgettable prolonged revelling in the memory of the English countryside in an essay by him on translating Kalidasa. Throughout his life English literature - English poetry in particular - was a living presence, and a speech in Baroda evinces an appreciative recollection of the temper of "liberal education" at the great English universities. But, according to his ...
... Testament for our Poets". He has some pointed and pertinent things to say, but he spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a recent broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: ...
... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI, THE NATURE OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY A LETTER The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are ...
... majestically thinking mind, the deep or colourful cry of the idealistic imagination as in Wordsworth and Shelley and, recently, Yeats and A.E. Savitri, while taking into itself the whole past of English poetry, adds not only the Indian spirit: it adds also in ample measure the typical intonation, at once intense and immense in its rhythmic significance, which the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita ...
... otherwise perfect." 1 What exactly the ripe result would have been like may be gauged from other remarks of Sri Aurobindo's in the same context. He speaks of the intellectual age dawning on English poetry after the Elizabethan outburst of the Life-Force. But, according to him, "we have at first an intermediate manner, that of Milton's early work and of the Carolean poets, in which the Elizabethan ...
... and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets 12. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13 . Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 14. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 15. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation ...
... of saying "I will pay off with tears" Ruru says 'I will pay off tears' as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licenses in English poetry, — of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some ...
... absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they rank - these eight lines - with the very best in English poetry." Such height of praise from Sri Aurobindo only shows Amal's Himalayan poetic consciousness and it goes to prove that he is truly a clear ray of Sri Aurobindo's poetic dimension. It seems ...
... lived in as no poet before or after him has done, with a spiritual closeness and identity which is of the nature of a revelation, the first spiritual revelation of this high near kind to which English poetry had given voice. Some soul of man, too, he sees, not in revolt,—he has written unforgettable lines about liberty, but a calm and ordered liberty,—in harmony with this tranquil soul in Nature, finding ...
... rapid and remarkable kind which have dominated the literature of Europe, now more than ever before growing into a single though varied whole. We have to see how they have worked themselves out in English poetry during this period. We shall then be able to form a clearer idea of the dominant possibilities of the future: for though it has been a side stream and not the central current, yet in the end the ...
... passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me. Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that when it is the only possible answer—at least so far as I can remember. Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present conscious ness I might find more intimations like the line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come—the "future poetry" perhaps ...
... are vast and many. 13 July 1937 Old Forms into New Shapes Jyoti doesn't want to rest content with the forms. The yugadharma must be satisfied. I don't follow the যুগধর্ম্ম myself in English poetry. There I have done the opposite, tried to develop old forms into new shapes instead of being gloriously irregular. In my blank verse, I have minimised or exiled pauses and overflows. 20 March ...
... shimmer of the second, the rapid drift of the third and then the deliberate subtlety of the last line. Is there in recent poetry an unconscious push towards a new metrical basis altogether for English poetry—shown by the outbreak of free verse, which fails because it is most often not verse at all—and the seeking sometimes for irregularity, sometimes for greater plasticity of verse-movement? Originally ...
... shall be neither astonished nor discomfited. I know the limitations of the poem and its qualities and I know that the part about the descent into Hell can stand comparison with some of the best English poetry; but I don't expect my contemporaries to see it. If they do, it will be good luck or divine grace, that is all. 2 February 1932 I am afraid you are under an illusion as to the success of ...
... and (2) a few loose sheets containing longer additions. Only fragments remain of the manuscript used for printing the Arya . Sri Aurobindo quoted almost a hundred lines or passages of English poetry as illustrations. The sources of these quotations are given in a table in the reference volume. He seems to have quoted from the works of older poets largely from memory; for contemporary writers ...
... higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton's early poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ordinarily in this mould. But this too is not that highest intensity of the revelatory poetic word from which the Mantra starts. It has a certain power of revelation in it, but the ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XXIV New Birth or Decadence? At this point we stand in the evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a common evolution, and I have singled it out to follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve of the human ...
... is a different kind of melody, but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly akṣaravṛtta . (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali rhythm ...
... Several annotators have approached this idea in a brief generalized manner. F.F. Monk 9 may be chosen to represent 8. William Blake (Chatto & Windus), p. 31, fn. 9. Representative English Poetry (London), 1927, p. 51. Page 23 them: "The stars are here thought of as armed angels, throwing down their weapons and breaking into tears at the sight of the terrible new thing ...
... he was Page 71 most unMarlovian by his kind of tone, a mental and deliberate rhythm helped out by his inversions, his linked syntax, his length of poetic phrase. Still, in English poetry there can be found nothing outside Marlowe to measure its power: he alone catches again and again its vast dynamic, though he employs it in successive passionate outbursts where Milton marshals ...
... of all thought, And rolls through all things. I may remark, en passant, that Tennyson considered the phrase, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, the grandest line in English poetry. It is, at least, one of the grandest and as long as Wordsworth was alive to the feeling it expressed he kept in touch with his own genius and the genius of Romanticism. His decline started when ...
... the poetic nature of all these lines, however unmarked they may be in musical rhythm, let me throw at you two lines by two famous poets. One is by Meredith: Arthur Symons thinks it the ugliest in English poetry: Page 100 Or is't the widowed's dream for her new mate? The rhythm here is harsh and halting without serving any purpose, and the expressions "is't" and "widowed's" are acmes ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry From Kathleen Raine I have received and read your Blake's Tyger with delight. I must, I think, concede you the victory - your laying out of the whole map of Blake's inner world and its dynamics in the context of Milton's poem does convince. Whether when Blake wrote The Tyger he himself as yet saw that whole universe ...
... issued "A Testament for our Poets". He has some pointed and pertinent things to say, but he spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: ...
... inherited the world-enlightening mission of Ramakrishna in a mind avid of immurement in the illimitable Formless where no questions arise, this lyric which we may well regard as one of the treasures of English poetry makes the Divine Being utter to him the Wisdom beyond thought: Page 166 THE CUP This is your cup - the cup assigned to you From the beginning. Nay, My ...
... not at all convey the same association to a person not familiar with Sanskrit. As Sri Aurobindo remarks, "The life and surroundings in which Indian poetry moves cannot be rendered in the terms of English poetry". A literal translation would be abstruse and bad poetry. And Page 46 Sri Aurobindo adds, "the business of poetical translation is to reproduce not the exact words, but the exact ...
... genius. যুগধর্ম্ম 110 must be satisfied. You can't pooh-pooh it, when you want things to be intelligible to people. Otherwise they will damn it. I don't follow the যুগধর্ম্ম myself in English poetry—There I have done the opposite; tried to develop old forms into new shapes instead of being gloriously irregular. In my blank verse, I have minimised or exiled pauses and overflows. Lord, sir ...
... name "John Turner", he would have a better chance. Even so, he got high appreciation from critics like Binyon. Secondly, his poetry can be appreciated by those who have not lost the thread of English poetry since the Victorian period. Poetry is not read in England nowadays, I hear. One can also gather this from what was said about my poetry. Some of my recent poems were sent to the editor of an ...
... it would be difficult to account for the immediate enchantment his verse lays upon our sensibilities. Without such an opening it would also be impossible to explain the poet's success in writing English poetry with extremely meagre external technical equipment." 9 We now come to our last example - last, yes, but not least. Dilip Kumar Roy, a scholar, musician and novelist, came to Sri Aurobindo ...
... Jesus Christ (a detailed story). 5. Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). 6. Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry. 7. Need to control and master the lower nature (topic for study and reflection). 8. Diet and health. II . Exercises to be recommended: 1. To makes in daily ...
... is the law and the rule Page 107 and the resson and rhyme of it and everything. 82 3.NB: I am thrown out of joint at two miracles, Sir: (i) R's treatment or yours; (ii) NK's English poetry, though Madam Doubt still peeps from behind. Anyhow, no chance for me! Kapal [Fate], Sir! What to do? Sri Aurobindo: Why out of joint? It ought to strengthen your joints for the journey ...
... lyrical forms and the freedom of Page 53 the use quantitative verse for the creation of new original rhythms would be enough to add a wide field to the large and opulent state of English poetry." 22 I n the successful experiment in which the ancient Homeric story is attempted to be told, Sri Aurobindo has bridged the old and the new, and opened a new chapter of the unfolding Future ...
... flow" "fountain music" "bright ethereal voices" "echoing notes" "far windblown lyre" "break upon my listening ear" etc. are perhaps new to you and full of colour, but to experienced readers of English poetry they sound as old as Johnny; one feels as if one had been reading hundreds of books of poetry with these phrases on each page and a hundred and first book seems a little superfluous. If they had ...
... 1937 Can there be fear and anger at the same time? Fear and anger very often go together. Evidently you have not studied cats fighting ... Do you think I have a lyrical hand in English poetry or does my gift seem to be more in grave things? You have acquired the latter better up to now because you have put more practice into it and found your way. June 9, 1937 I will ...
... you here and there—in pencil. Surely the Supramental is a greater decipherer than the inframental, what? Read—very interesting. March 8, 1938 You said that I have found myself in English poetry [13.9.37]. Now it seems I have lost myself, what? You are flopping about a bit, but not lost. March 9, 1938 "The rich sun-mirrored fuming blood Running through choked earth-laden ...
... poetry? Poetry, poetry, poetry! Have I come here for blessed poetry? SRI AUROBINDO: You haven't. But the poetry has come for you. So why shout? MYSELF: I know that success in English poetry is as far away as the stars in heaven in spite of your remark to the contrary, though I must confess to having some contentment in writing. SRI AUROBINDO: Rubbish! the stars in heaven don't ...
... of is the child. Then the period of his youth: I heard the passion breathed amid the honeysuckle scented glade, Honeysuckle is a European flower. All those who are reading English poetry will know about it. Honeysuckle - the name suggests 'honey' and 'suckle'. And saw the King pass lightly from the beauty that he had betrayed. I saw him pass from love to love; ...
... English literature, the day we heard him say about his dearest Italian poet Petrarch "Whose rethorike swete" Enlumynd all Ytaille of Poetrie, what a new life and novel tune has appeared in English poetry, what a unique resplendence has illumined its firmament! Chaucer elevated English literature as from a mundane to the spiritual level. He is the father of ‘Great Poetry’. He freed the language ...
... idea and practice of mantra and even of the discovery of a new poetic creation that would embody a new mantric poetry. He has also suggested that, that, considering the past evolution of English poetry and considering the trends that are visible in greater poets like Whitman, Meredith, Carpenter, A.E. and Tagore, that language, too, may turn to the discovery of mantric poetry and even the ...
... (50) Q uite some time back Vishwanath-da, who used to work with us, came to the office one day and said: "I heard an interesting thing today. Unlike our Bengali or English poetry where the rhyme comes at the end of the line, in Tamil poetry, the rhyme comes at the beginning." "Could you write such a poem in Bengali?" he asked me. I felt the task should not ...
... assumed that the symbol is a more appropriate form for poets of early times and that it is not in keeping with the modernist spirit. This belief goes against facts, for, even a bird's eye-view of English poetry reveals that not only poets like Blake and others in the past have resorted to the symbol but that many of the modem poets have used it effectively. Francis Thom- son's The Hound of Heaven is ...
... Creative Education (William Maclellan, Glasgow, 1958). Pearson, N. Sri Aurobindo and the Soul Quest of Man (Allen & Unwin, London, 1952). Pinto, Vivian de Sola. Crisis in English Poetry : 1880-1940 (Hutchinson, London, 1951). Pound, Ezra. The Canto 1-84 (New Directions, New York). Section : Rock-Drill, 85-95 (New Directions, New York). ...
... seized and carried him, and we can merely gaze wonderingly at the phenomenon. Isolated short passages or single lines of great beauty occur, of course, in modern American and English poetry, and it may not be far-fetched to recognise some kind of overhead inspiration in them. To cite a few almost at random: Page 310 Across my foundering deck shone ...
... together as if by magic. The detractors of Milton's verse notwithstanding, this verse by its blending of beauty and power to the point of sublimity has given us what is to be found nowhere else in English poetry. Hell yawns before us, and chaos presently envelops us; and Satan and Beelzebub and Mammon and Moloch and Belial are vivid, almost apocalyptic, projections. Page 381 ...
... among his very best. Here the rather novel rhythm and the distinct inspiration seem to fuse to high creative purpose and one feels almost that "a wide field to the large and opulent estate of English poetry" has been opened by Sri Aurobindo. Thus Ocean Oneness is in alcaics, Trance of Waiting is in elegiacs with rhyme in the pentameter, Soul in the Ignorance in dactylic tetrameter, and The ...
... earlier portion which had received careful revision at Sri Aurobindo's hands , is strikingly articulate , the steady dactylic flow giving it a volume and power of movement not often found in English poetry. 122 Page 55 ...
... looked back at the past fourteen years, — years of study and striving, of loneliness and privation, of aspiration and partial fulfilment. During this period he had developed an attachment to English poetry and European though and literature, though not to England as a country. While his brother Manomohan had for a time actually looked upon "gland as his adopted country, Sri Aurobindo had never ...
... He wrote back in his characteristic vein: "Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come - the 'future poetry' ...
... then the impression, if it is not silvery, can’t be golden. By silvery I have meant silver-white and when the white becomes shining, the silver tint is suggested. Am I right? SRI AUROBINDO: In English poetry moonlight is usually spoken of as golden, because of its effect on the ground or water, although moon-silvered is also used. The silvery element is there in the moonlight in the air, but it is ...
... " 1. David Rassendren. Some stories were found later, many of them incomplete, and have been published. Page 191 One of his main occupations at Cambridge was writing English poetry to' which he had devoted much of his time the last two years he was at St. Paul's School. Sri Aurobindo's lifelong poetical career, let us recollect, began in Manchester when he wrote for the ...
... when even their Indian pupils perverted from good taste and blinded to fine discrimination by a love of the striking & a habit of gross forms & pronounced colours due to the too exclusive study of English poetry, repeat & re-enforce their criticisms, the lover of Kalidasa & his peers need not be alarmed; he need not banish from his imagination the gracious company with which it is peopled as a gilded & ...
... On Poetry and Literature Early Cultural Writings Appendix: Test Questions The Mediaevalists 1) Describe the nature & influence on English poetry of Percy's Reliques. 2) Sketch the career of Chatterton. 3) Describe the character of Chatterton's forgeries and estimate their effects on the value of his poetry. 4) Discuss the conflicting ...
... classics at Manchester and at Saint Paul's; but even at St Paul's in the last three years he simply went through his school course and spent most of his spare time in general reading, especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe. He spent some time also over learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish. He spent much ...
... interests of life for the pleasure of the intellect and imagination and failed too much to create life from within by a deeper delight in the power of vision of the soul and spirit. The high energy of English poetry has done great and interesting things; it has portrayed life with charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in Shakespeare ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XXI Recent English Poetry - II The effective stream of poetry in the English tongue has followed no such strong distinctive turn as would be able to sweep the effort of rhythmic expression along with it in one mastering direction. The poets of this age pursue much more even than their predecessors the bent of their personality ...
... founts and the kindlier sources of vision are not there. 27 April 1931 The Ode A successful ode must be a perfect architectural design and Keats' Odes are among the best, if not the best in English poetry, as I think they are, at any rate from the point of view of artistic creation, because of the perfect way in which the central thought is developed and each part related to the whole like the design ...
... left out—can he? Voltaire adored him, Voltaire who called Shakespeare a drunken barbarian. Finally, what of Wordsworth, whose Immortality Ode was hailed by Mark Pattison as the ne plus ultra of English poetry since the days of Lycidas? Kindly shed the light of infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling opinions. I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe—it was the front bench ...
... spirit. The chief danger of failure arises from the external direction of the Anglo-Saxon mind. That has been a source of strength in combination with the finer Celtic imagination and has given English poetry a strong hold on life, but the hold has been also something of a chain continually drawing it back from the height and fullness of some great spiritual attempt to inferior levels. Today however ...
... their purpose, for instance the admirable "defence" of Alfred Austin; and in all the essential things are said and said finely and tellingly. There is quite enough for the experienced reader of English poetry who can seize on implications and follow out suggestions; but the Indian reader is inexperienced and has not ordinarily a wellcultivated critical faculty or receptiveness; he needs an ampler treatment ...
... movement welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry: I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night ...
... pay off with tears" he says: "I will pay off tears" as the price of the absolution. Page 643 This Latinisation and this inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry—of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others ...
... be used in the other quantitative metres), what remains of the fundamental metric of the original form? The ground given is not the undactylic nature of English, but the natural tendency of English poetry to resort to modulation for the sake of freedom and variety. I have said that this device should be adopted in transferring classical metres into English, so as to create a natural English quantitative ...
... Indian Poets and English Poetry From K.D. Sethna I have been a little slack in replying to you, but the procrastination has brought me to a very important day on which to launch my letter. August 15 has for India two far-reaching significances to commemorate. There is the birth of Sri Aurobindo whose fight for freedom was seminal in many respects, not least ...
... when Madonna Mia and the subsequent poems had been commented upon, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English poetry or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." In 1946 several lines in the world's poetry which he had once hesitated about were adjudged by ...
... absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank— these eight lines—with the very best in English poetry." To Dilip Kumar Roy: "Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both ...
... of present-day social, political and economic history), The Future ². SABCL vol. 26, pp. 468-69. Page 9 Poetry (essays on poetry in general and English poetry in particular, on the various grades and powers of consciousness finding poetic expression and on a new direction of poetic development under the stress of spiritual experience). Savitri ...
... Dante's bones are laid, A little cupola more neat than solemn Protects his dust... Page 176 Think, again, of Keats, the most extraordinary young genius in the domain of English poetry — Keats, attacked by brutal critics, loving in vain a woman who hardly realised either his love or his genius, suffering not only from heartbreak but also from con-sumption, spitting out in blood-clots ...
... opulent an imagination, too great a gift of flowing and yet uplifted and inspired speech for such descents..." 2 Apropos of Keats he declares: "Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, — not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era." 3 To get all this into proper focus we may note further that, although Shelley ...
... the first year of my professorship and give his name as Narik Lama. The name intrigued a Dutch lady who was attending my lectures, a highly Page 60 educated person interested in English poetry. She could not trace this poet anywhere. She must have consulted Indo-English antho-logies and then looked for Tibeto-English ones, if any. I may provide you with a clue to the poet's identity ...
... lures us with magical or tranquil distances and Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Tennyson regarded this line from Tintern Abbey as the grandest in the entire range of English poetry. Perhaps Tennyson indulged in a little exaggeration, but part of the exaggeration consists in overlooking the fact that some other lines of Wordsworth himself merit to be ranked beside it among ...
... approximately the same period. [2] Written on a page of a letter-pad containing writings that can be dated 1916-18. [3] Jotted on the last page of a notebook containing Vedic translations and English poetry written at different times. [4-5] Written on two pages of a notebook used around 1926. [6] Written on the back of a letter to Sri Aurobindo dated 16 August 1926. [7-8] Written on the front ...
... Richardson, writing in The Aryan Path of March 1944, remarks about this "admirable essay" that it is "an essay which deserves wide currency and consideration by all those interested in the future of English poetry and of poetry in general". It is further remarked: "In it he seems to have struck at the root of the problem which modern poets have been attempting to solve by recourse to free verse forms. Both ...
... He wrote back in his characteristic vein: "Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer—at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come—the 'future poetry' perhaps ...
... the rarest and most unplumbable note sounded by the "multitudinous seas" of word-music that are Shakespeare. Outside the writings of Sri Aurobindo and a few of his disciples, there is little in English poetry to match its suggestive vibration except Milton's Those thoughts that wander through eternity and Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. ...
... 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 Ms., 54,55, 92 Rosenthal, M.L., ...
... Speculum, XVI, 1941. Paradise Lost (Chicago), 1940. Milton, John De Doctrina Christiana Paradise Lost Paradise Regained Monk, F. F. Representative English Poetry (London), 1927. Plowman, Max (Editor) Poems and Prophecies by William Blake (Everyman's Library, London), 1939. Psalms Raine, Kathleen Blake and Tradition, Two ...
... experience with literature as well as spiritual strivings. Though the Indianness of the poems is obvious because of the prayerful note in all the poems (you do not get this tone in the English poetry of Great Britain and America except perhaps in the Psalms and the Prelude) and the in-depth references to Indian names like Sakuntala and Parasara as well as concepts like Yoga and Maya ...
... absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank — these eight lines — with the very best in English poetry.” Ne Plus Ultra ( To a poet lost in sentimentalism ) A madrigal to enchant her — and no more? With the brief beauty of her face — drunk, blind To the inexhaustible vastnesses ...
... Another feature of Sri Aurobindo's writings is that whether it is the exegesis of ancient scriptural texts like the Gita, or the Vedas, or the future of evolution, or of something as specific as English poetry, he always speaks with the supreme assurance of one who knows what he is talking about, of somebody who is merely describing what he has seen. Often the details which he gives of them are ...
... count. Keeper of luminous vigils and kin of endless God-horizonry, Mr. Sethna is a poet of profound thought and polished utterance. He is truly a spirit-illumined son of song — of whom Indo-English poetry may feel legitimately proud! V.N. BHUSHAN Page 133 Are Philosophical Questions Self -Answering ? I am very happy to respond ...
... in Pondicherry, or my own attempts at poetry. I often had cause to wonder how a few lines or a small gift could inspire the wonderful replies I received. I once sent him a volume of early English poetry, and was rewarded by a paragraph ex-ploring the nature of poetry itself from a most original angle: Alexander's Introduction brings up the question of what a poet does. The old Anglo-Saxon ...
... it as a sort of psychic calamity, if you stopped in the good way at anybody’s suggestion. If for nothing else they would be worth doing as an expression of bhakti (the Indian kind) which in English poetry has had till now no place. * Page 107 October 4, 1943 I had to wound a fellow-sadhak to the quick with blunt and offensive words. You know it is against ...
... laziness. In fact Aravinda spent most of his time in general reading, giving himself a kind of complementary education that would constitute the stock of his enormous erudition. He 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 ...
... or his heart lose warmth when he has the invigorating luck of being among your "loved ones"? (17.12.1985) I am glad you are delighted with the anthology you have bought of 400 years of English poetry. Your re-discovery of Donne (pronounced "Dun") must have been thrilling. The lines you quote are famous but are surely worth repeating: Our two souls, therefore, which are one Though I ...
... knows almost the whole of Ghalib and Iqbal by heart in the original Urdu or Persian. I don't think I can recite at short notice even my own poetical works in toto. But a good number of lines of English poetry float through my mind at all hours and if a particular word of note is brought up it recalls half a dozen or more lines of various poets in which it occurs. For the joke of a test 1 am picking ...
... flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, and affirm feeling A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. You may have been out of contact with English poetry and, if my Talks brings back to you the happy thrill you had in times past, I shall think myself rewarded. I live in a vast Page 92 inner world of many-moded poetry — scores ...
... slot in another book of correspondence, the exchanges that took place between Miss Kathleen Raine and me over nearly three years and has now been published under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit. It is hoped that the third volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove ...
... Aurobindo wrote back in his characteristic vein: "Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things to come - the 'future poetry' perhaps, but ...
... God-bliss the heart incarnadine. Merely the fact that "incarnadine" comes immediately associated with a noun does not render it adjectival. I have marked only two earlier employments of the word in English poetry and, according to me, Sri Aurobindo's is in accord with them. The first occasion is in Shakespeare's Macbeth: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Page 3 ...
... another book of correspondence, the exchanges that took place between Miss Kathleen Raine and me over nearly three years and is now being published under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit. It is hoped that the first volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove welcome not only ...
... vein: "Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the Page 29 only possible answer — at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come — the 'future poetry' perhaps ...
... Instead of saying T will pay off with tears' Ruru says T will pay off tears' as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licenses in English poetry, - of course, it is Page 283 incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, ...
... He wrote back in his characteristic vein: Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are Page 52 things yet to come ...
... Other Poems, and the poems in quantitative metre carry us a step further. Vision, Dream, and Thought are abandoned and we get direct yogic experiences, in rhythm and music that is entirely new to English poetry. At last Sri Aurobindo has got the lyric metre in which he can portray his experiences, the external eye being closed and the thinking mind stilled. The condition of the poet in which these poems ...
... basically a poet, later a Yogi, and only incidentally a philosopher, is hopelessly mistaken? And that the response of all those (including many cultured Britishers) 1 Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, 1994, p. 30. who find bottomless wells of inspiration in his poetic works is pure illusion? Surely not. It will be more instructive ...
... books, he has written extensively on Savitri AMAL KIRAN (K. D. Sethna): Is a polymath knowing many arts and sciences. But he stands tall above everyone as a literary critic, particularly English poetry. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo V. K. Gokak: A recognised literary critic and poet, his Sri Aurobindo— Seer and Poet, his Sri Aurobindo Seer and Poet, from which Diction of ...
... that he might rectify the numerous howlers before publishing the work in book-form after obtaining his degree. My shorter report was read out to the Mother. It had a passage on technical points of English poetry. She said: "I don't know English prosody. So I couldn't have written this passage." I generalised and abbreviated my remarks and brought the passage within the Mother's acceptance. She signed the ...
... and meticulous guidance Page 8 his poetic faculty too, especially in writing English verse, flowered beyond comprehension. At every step, day in and day out, this great master of English poetry would teach his beloved disciple through his letters the intricacies of the different metres in which English poems are written, even penning new poems to illustrate some metrical point. Dilip's ...
... great personalities: Jesus Christ (a detailed study). Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry. Need to control and master the lower nature (topic for study and reflection). Diet and health. Exercises to be recommended: To make in daily life the choice for control and ...
... personalities: Jesus-Christ (a detailed study). 5. Listening to music: selected ragas (Indian) and harmonies (Western). 6. Examples of poetic excellence: regional poetry, Sanskrit poetry, English poetry 7. Need to control and master the lower nature (topic for study and reflection) 8. Diet and health. III. Exercises to be recommended: 1. To make in daily life the choice for control ...
... "fountain music", "bright ethereal voices", "echoing notes", "far wind-blown lyre", "break upon my listening ear" etc. are perhaps new to you and full of colour, but to experienced readers of English poetry they sound as old as Johnny, — one feels as if one had been reading hundreds of books of poetry with these phrases on each page and a hundred and first book seems a little superfluous.... The third ...
... eye. So you compare and do not compare things; Your soul prepares, not prepares heavenly wings." 16 (10) "Enough? Amenl" NB: Please give a few examples of conceit in English poetry. Not very clear about it. Sri Aurobindo: Conceit means a too obviously ingenious or far-fetched or extravagant idea or image which is evidently an invention of a clever brain, not a true and ...
... his destination). Please have a look at the typescript on Thompson. It will be kept to a limited company. I am sure it will do a lot of good to many of us who think like Thompson as regards English poetry, of which I was one, as you know. Can't sanction communication to others. First of all, I have slated Thompson in a way which cannot be made public—for he has done nothing to deserve a public ...
... whereas the sound-structure of Greek and Latin, like Sanskrit is based on quantity i.e. the length of a syllable, so that it is extremely difficult to bring the swing of quantitative metre into English poetry successfully and it had eluded Matthew Arnold and other English poets of the past who had experimented with it. In later years Sri Aurobindo wrote some magnificent poems in quantitative metre. ...
... encouraged him to learn music and poetry and asked Nolini to teach him English and French. She used to see him every day and instructed me to look after his health. Sri Aurobindo used to correct his English poetry. This is what she did when she took charge of somebody, but she could be very strict too. When he wrote that he wanted some other work instead of the one she had given him, she wrote (in French): ...
... intuition to flow in and by golly, it has! what? By Jove, yes! April 8, 1938 I cherished a wish to flourish as a story-writer long before the English and Bengali Muse sat on me. Now English poetry has caught me and Bengali poetry has gone to sleep. It seems my English poems are much better and deeper than the Bengali ones... Should I try my hand at story-writing? Your Bengali poems seem ...
... 183 knocked me on the head when you slammed the door on correspondence. Now my head is all right, so it wants to try its luck again. So? Very beautiful. You seem to have found yourself in English poetry. "... Dim reminiscences Of flights across thy skies..." Too many S's? [Sri Aurobindo cancelled the s of "flights"] I have beheaded one that was in excess. September 13, 1937 ...
... and rode the emancipated language as a master horseman, bringing the best out of it. What the living tradition had to give he received as a gift of grace; but his eyes spanned the future no less. English poetry - the great Romantics especially - inspired him to attempt new forms of poetic expression and a variety of metres. From Walt Whitman, to whom probably Sri Aurobindo introduced Bharati, he learnt ...
... wrote as follows: The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambement or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it ...
... of the poet. Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides, or else, Or hear old Triton blow his wrèathed horn are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry. Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into ...
... included all that in his speeches in court. Could the original manuscripts be recovered, they would be precious documents today. One day I mentioned to him that I had not had a chance to read English poetry for a long time and would like to have some. Could he help me? The very next day, he wrote out a new poem and handed it to me. As he had no paper to write it on, he had scribbled out the lines ...
... hands of the poet. Breaking the silence of the seas Beyond the farthest Hebrides, and Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn, are indeed two of the highest peaks of English poetry. Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of Page 443 writers. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This clas ...
... educating him. They would all sit round Sri Aurobindo and would recount to them the stories of the French Revolution even while he continued to directly translate on his typewriter the Mahabharata into English poetry. One day, Sri Aurobindo told Sudhir-da that unless one read the Mahabharata, it was impossible to know anything about India. And he asked Sudhir-da to go and buy a copy to read to the others ...
... bare, sheer, penetrating power."-Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism. Page 234 or else, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry. Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" ...
... verbs. I believed that once they had learned to love the beauty and sweetness of French literature, they would master the grammatical rules of the language by themselves." "Didn't you teach English poetry at the Baroda College?" asked Vikas. "Not just poetry, but English literature in general." "It appears that the students greatly enjoyed your lectures." "Lectures?" "Your classes, that ...
... has said nothing. He never sought to form relationships, while Manmohan, the second brother, roamed through London in the company of his friend Oscar Wilde and would make a name for himself in English poetry. Each of the three brothers led his separate life. However, there was nothing austere about Sri Aurobindo, and certainly nothing of the puritan ( the prurient, 8 as he called it); it was just ...
... 1882 Had an intimation of his part in great upheavals of the future. 1884-90 At St. Paul's School in London. Learnt Greek. In I886, started writing English poetry Wrote also Latin and Greek poetry. Learnt European languages to study their lite-ratures. Made a thorough study of European history. Won all Classics prizes ...
... father – Sayaji Rao – in her. Disciple : There is a criticism of Pujalal's poetry by a poet critic. He says, it is not "rooted in the soil", too Sanskritised and not written for the masses. English poetry, he says, is founded on the Anglo Saxon language. Sri Aurobindo : Not at all. The great Shakespeare and poets from Milton to Shelley did not write, consciously in the Anglo Saxon language ...
... and then other 12 will be taken up etc. Sri Aurobindo : "I don't know it, – unless you believe that I hold it as a State secret." 26th March, 1943 S. Iyengar's book on English poetry. "His Judgements are not always sound and his quotations though they seem striking at first they don't stand a second reading. So that they can't be taken as the best. For example, he speaks of ...
... pleasure in poetry. I had loved poetry always but I did not know it had so many aspects to delight us. As I proceeded onward, a door suddenly opened, as it were, of an unknown house and lines of English poetry began to come. Most incredible! I was astonished. I knew very little of English, yet the lines were coming in that tongue. I set them down in this form: Mother, in my deep heart I find A ...
... subjects like the other students. My subjects of study were French, English, philosophy and a few of Sri Aurobindo's works. Nirod-da and Ravindra Khanna were my teachers for English prose. For English poetry, it was Amal Kiran. Bharati-di and Krishnakumari-di taught me French. For Indian philosophy, I was with Prapatti-da, for Western philosophy, with Kireet-bhai. Tehmi-ben took my Savitri classes ...
... unfold. V Of Sri Aurobindo's other contributions to the Arya, the two major sequences, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Future Poetry (the latter being a critical history of English poetry that started as a book-review), will be discussed more appropriately in two of the later chapters. There are some minor sequences and collections too, Heraclitus, The Superman, Evolution, Views ...
... Boehme, M. Théon, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, Kaya Kalpa, Space and Time, Russian Communism, Tagore, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's poetry, current literature, Islamic culture, Indo-English poetry. Art, Education, medicine, psychology - all these and the Sadhana of Supramental Yoga as well! Those of us who were not of the elect can still have some taste of those daily feasts of reason and ...
... Manchester and at St. Paul's, we now know. But "even at St Paul's in the last three years he simply went through his school course and spent most of his spare time in general reading, especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe. He spent some time also over learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish." He spent much ...
... I entered the huge building of the LTC and met its authorised people. They saw the recommendation paper given by my principal and arranged for my study from January to July 1960. I chose English literature, poetry, business management and typing. Sudha and I had also chosen to join one of the educational institutions run by the London County Council. We went to the office of the institution and ...
... educationists to minimise the importance of English in our cultural self-expression. The Fittest Body for the Indian Genius English is unquestionably the most highly developed of modern languages both by virtue of the large variety of racial and psychological strains in it and by virtue of the extraordinary crop of poets in English history. Poetry is the sovereign power of all language:... and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely... voice in English. The Supreme Destiny of English Not that the indigenous languages should be neglected. They must be developed. But English at present comes to us with a face of supreme destiny. And what that destiny is can be seen even now. For, even now, before our very eyes, it is being wonderfully worked out. A band of Indian poets remarkably gifted are uttering in English the mystical ...
... of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who reveals instead of the revealer who has seen. Shakespeare — the greatest poetic phenomenon in English history, poetry incarnate if ever such a thing has happened — bears out the Indian characterisation by the famous passage describing what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the poet's... true but what it means is simply that a lot of poetry does not directly refer to any divine reality. It does not prove poetry to be non-spiritual in its origin as well as in its process. The spirituality lies fundamentally in the Form and not in the Sub-stance — or, rather, since we have defined Form as really an inward thing exteriorising itself, poetry is spiritual by the manner in which any substance... Talks on Poetry TALK THREE In the last two talks we touched on the poetic mood and the poetic process from various sides and gave them a high significance and value. Today I wish to quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which sum up, as it were, the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. But before I do so I must notice a possible objection to ...
... directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis- à -vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form Page 161 nor colour, and... consciousness seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness: A wandering hand of pale enchanted light That glowed along a fading moment's brink Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out—the poetry richly reflecting them: The brief... employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long Introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes—the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above the ...
... all efforts by our educationists to minimise the importance of English in our cultural self-expression. English is unquestionably the most highly developed of modern languages both by virtue of the large variety of racial and psychological strains in it and by virtue of the extraordinary crop of poets in English history. Poetry is the sovereign power of all language: where poets of high... with other gifts. There is, to begin with, her gift of prose as distinguished from poetry. English prose can be very great, but at its most characteristic it flourishes rather as a beautiful suburb of the poetic metropolis: it is poetry in a less intense medium, it has not its own typical self and movement. Poetry sings and visions and enraptures; prose converses and expounds and pleases, its... that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. ...
... not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity... sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness: Page 62 A wandering hand of pale enchanted light That glowed along a fading moment's brink, Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. [p. 3] Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out - the poetry richly reflecting them:... employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long Introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes - the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above ...
... directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An... ess seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness: A wandering hand of pale enchanted light That glowed along a fading moment's brink Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. 3 Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out — the poetry richly reflecting them: The... employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes — the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above ...
... the word is—quite new and I have neither read the reliable theorists of the school nor much of their poetry. What I picked up on the way was through reviews and quotations, the upshot being that it is a poetry based on the dream-consciousness, but I don't know if this is correct or merely an English critic's idea of it. The inclusion of Baudelaire and Valery seems to indicate something wider than that... safe layers that are tapped. That accounts for the note of diabolism that comes in in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud also, I believe, and in certain ugly elements in English surrealist poetry and painting. But this is only an impression. Nirod's poetry (what he writes now) is from the Dream-Consciousness, no doubt about that. It has suddenly opened in him and he finds now a great joy of creation and abundance... essence of any poetry—and except for unconscious or semi-conscious humorists like the Dadaists—cannot be its aim or principle. True Dream-poetry (let us call it so for the nonce) has and must always have a meaning and a coherence. But it may very well be obscure or seem meaningless to those who take their stand on the surface or "waking" mind and accept only its links and its logic. Dream-poetry is usually ...
... and I have not read either the reliable theorists of the school nor much of Page 264 their poetry. What I picked up on the way through certain reviews, etc. was that it was a poetry based on the dream- consciousness, but I don't know if this is correct or merely an English critic's idea of it. The inclusion of Beaudelaire 8 6 and Valery 8 7 seems to indicate something... layers that are tapped. That accounts for the note of diabolism that comes in in Beaudelaire, in Rimbaud also, I believe, and in certain ugly elements in English surrealist poetry and painting. But this is only an impression. Nirod's poetry (what he writes now) is from the Dream Page 265 Consciousness, no doubt about that. It has suddenly opened in him and he finds now a great... any poetry—and except for unconscious or semiconscious humorists like the Dadaists 91 —cannot be its aim or principle. True dream poetry (let us call it so for the nonce) has and must always have a meaning and a coherence. But it may very well be obscure or seem meaningless to those who take their stand on the surface or "waking" mind and accept only its links and its logic. Dream poetry is ...
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