Homer : principal figure of ancient Greek literature, & the First European poet. Legends about Homer were numerous in ancient times. He was said to be blind, & seven different cities claimed him. Modern scholars generally agree that there was a poet named Homer, who lived before 700 BC, probably in Asia Minor, that he wrote for an aristocratic society, & that the Iliad & the Odyssey are each the product of one poet’s work. “For centuries during the Mauryan-Scythian era (4th cent BC – 4th cent AD) India was in intimate contact with the Graeco-Roman world. Embassies were exchanged…Indian philosophers, traders, & adventurers were to be found in the intellectual circles of Athens & in the markets of Alexandria…. A Greek orator, Dion Chrysostom, informs us that the poetry of Homer was sung by the Indians, who had translated it into their own language & modes of expression so that even Indians were not unacquainted with the woes of Priam, the weeping & wailing of Andromache & Hecuba & the heroic feats of Achilles & Hector.” [Advanced History of India, R.C. Majumdar et al, 3rd Ed., 1973-1974, p.135]
... Classicism are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need be no quarrel on this score. But does Page 20 Homer belong exactly to the... certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and .outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer". 22 Homer thus is not supreme in the strict Classical category where the eye of the poet rises to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives... not wholly illegitimate extension of the psychological meaning of Greek Classicism we may for our purpose deem Homer Classical. Standing on a common basis, each of the six masters in Graeco-Roman Classicism has his own quality.* Homer is eminent by the simultaneous presence of simplicity, ampli-tude, dynamic sweep, smoothness and ...
... assumed that Homer came from Asia Minor and was probably born on the island of Chios, or possibly in the city of Smyrna. A guild of poets did exist on Chios and in his hymn to Apollo, Homer sings of: "A sightless man on stony Chios /All whose poems stand capital." From these lines and the fact that both the bards in the Iliad and the Odyssey are blind, it has been suggested that Homer was most probably... Gods and the World A bust of the epic poet Homer (2nd century BC) The Iliad Introduction The earliest examples of Greek literature are two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which most scholars today agree to attribute to one single great poet, Homer. Both epics were written down sometime in the 8th century BC. During this period... no longer existed in Greece at the time of Homer. However, they possessed an elaborate oral tradition. According to tradition, the goddess of memory as well as of poetry inspired the poet to tell his tales, and successive generations of trained poets learned and taught a wealth of literary material orally. In keeping with the oral tradition. Homer created the Iliad and the Odyssey by taking ...
... the demigods out of their glory emerging, Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that perish. 1 This is Sri Aurobindo turned Homer—the Indian intimacy with occult presences is riding on the Aegean's "dance of the surges". Now comes Homer turned Sri Aurobindo. The inner consciousness which the depicted superhuman forms and dynamisms 1 P. 4. Page 124 symbolise... one of the greatest in the power of his substance, the energy of his vision, the force of his style, the largeness at once of his personality and his universality. He is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modern's ruder, less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in this that he has the nearness to something elemental... continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not, is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness from its defects—that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki—and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine." Thus, in Sri Aurobindo's estimate, Whitman, with the help of his modern intellectualism ...
... Whatever else it may or may not be, llion is certainly a tour-de-force, a Homeric exercise in the heroic but almost out-Homering Homer in the fullness of the delineation and the gorgeousness of the imagery. In attempting a continuation of the Iliad of Homer, Sri Aurobindo was taking no small risk, but it was also an irresistible challenge. George Steiner has described the Iliad as "the primer... with an understandable gusto. One of the most eloquent and illuminating passages in the whole book is the one in which Sri Aurobindo elaborates an unexpected, but not unconvincing, comparison between Homer and Whitman: Whitman's aim is consciently, clearly, professedly to make a great revolution in the whole method of poetry, and if anybody could have succeeded, it ought to have been this giant... poetic thought with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity.... His is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modem's ruder, less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in ' this that he has the nearness to something elemental ...
... also with regard to Homer. You once spoke of Goethe as not being one of the world's absolutely supreme singers. Who are these, then? Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa? And what about Aeschylus, Virgil and Milton? I suppose all the names you mention except Goethe can be included; or if you like you can put them all including Goethe in three rows—e.g.: 1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki... intensely inspired or revealing inevitability; few quite supreme poets have that in abundance, in others it comes only by occasional jets or flashes. When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of the scope of their work as a whole, for there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from that point of... greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line In cradle of the rude imperious surge is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, e.g. Homer's Page 370 Bē de kat' Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr "He went down from ...
... Aphrodite (4th century BC) Page 110 Apollo Aphrodite: Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility. She was the daughter of Zeus and Dione according to Homer. In another account, she arose from the foam of the sea that gathered around the severed genital organ of Uranus when his son Cronus, the Titan, mutilated him. She instigated the abduction of Helen... Trojan war. Dionaean: An epithet of Aphrodite Dionysus Attic cup, c. 480 BC Dione: Original consort of Zeus, supplanted by Hera, and mother of Aphrodite according to Homer. Dionysus: In origin Dionysus was simply the god of wine; afterwards he became god of vegetation and warm moisture; then he appeared as the god of pleasure and the god of civilisation;... depth of a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. He had many functions: protector of the home, god of the travellers; he was also charged with conducting the souls of the dead to the underworld. In Homer, Hermes appears as the messenger of Zeus and is often charged with delicate missions. In order to rapidly cross the celestial spaces, Hermes wears winged sandals. He sometimes adds wings to his hat ...
... ity. Intense description may pertain directly to the actual theme in hand or indirectly to it through a simile or metaphor which instead of being briefly etched is elaborated as so often in Homer. Homer, taking one or two main points in common between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset... reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam — and in those early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo... penchant for the extravagant and the contorted which were very much in vogue in Shakespeare's day and which Shakespeare himself often dange-rously skirted — things like that outrageous distortion of Homer by Chapman in his translation of the Iliad: And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, Page 184 When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of over-throw ...
... along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton - just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the elite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, Page 205 power of expression... between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad, but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that... word which Racine, for all his beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals. Page 206 Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply ...
... in its contents-value. Homer makes beauty out of man's outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step further and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyas there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And... courage often led him into a rash enthusiasm and exaggeration of hardihood which had its recoil reactions of depression and self-blame leading to another kind of rashness, that of despair. This is how Homer depicts him and we can take it at that. ___________________ 1. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC). Latin poet. 2. Gaius Valerius Catullus (87-54? BC). Roman poet and epigrammatist. ...
... are stages in a fluctuating movement, moments of ever-changing fire. 3. The Iliad and the Odyssey: Great epic poems composed by Homer. The Iliad is the earliest written work of ancient Greece. It tells us the story of the siege of Troy. Scholars believe that Homer composed it as a young man in the middle of the 8th century BC. The Odyssey: It is believed that if the Iliad was a product of... the rich crop of religious imagination that has shaped the mind of the Western world. Our third text thus is taken out of the Iliad, one of the two famous epics written by Greece's greatest poet. Homer, and which, together with the Odyssey, has probably been the most read poem for the past three thousand years. Finally to conclude this monograph, we have included an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's... well as the Olympians belonged to a much higher order. They were great powers, supporting universal laws and functions, and were not bound by life and matter. In Greece, already at the time of Homer, the gods had developed deep moral and psychological functions. Zeus, very similar in some aspects to the Vedic god Indra, Lord of the sky and Illumined Intelligence, was Lord of wind, rain and ...
... even included in Homer's tale), it is the reconciliation of two of its most powerful antagonistic figures. This may not be a verifiable historical fact, but it is a poetic fact of the highest" order. Homer allows us to enter into a spirit and atmosphere which passed away centuries ago, but still has the power to uplift us because it expresses the universal human possibility of rising above the lower nature... for his physical strength, boldly describing him-self as "swift and excellent... brilliant." He furthermore pro-claims that "no man is my equal among the bronze-armed Page 54 Acheans." Homer gives an example of his strength in comparison to normal men: "A single pine beam held the gates [to Achilles' camp] and it took three men to ram it home, three to shoot the immense bolt back and... It's wrong to keep on raging, heart-inflamed forever. Quickly, drive our long-haired Acheans to battle now!" When the Greeks send an embassy to persuade the proud hero to re-join the fight, Homer gives us a brief but telling glimpse of Achilles at home: "Reaching the Myrmidon shelters and their ships, They found him there, delighting his heart now, Plucking strong and clear on the ...
... precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret Page 83 consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality,... activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poets – Shakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes... Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture – that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and ...
... both ways have their dangers and attractions - and the translator's own sense of measure (or matra) should guide him. Poetry is often turned to prose in translation; that was how Lang translated Homer into English. Likewise, can prose in one language be turned into verse in another? Yes, says Sri Aurobindo, but only in very special cases: I think it is quite legitimate to translate poetic prose... Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters, Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his comrades. 9 That surely is not far from the vibrant authentic voice of Homer, and to have brought about this effect is not an insignificant achievement. III The Homeric enchantment was, of course, not to be easily or ever to be shaken off; but once - after his... experimental, and belonged to the early Baroda period. Sri Aurobindo's first taste of our two great epics must have given him the same feeling of excitement and exhilaration that the reading of Chapman's Homer gave to young Keats: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken... The mind racing swiftly, the heart expansive and in a flutter of thrilled delight ...
... include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than Homer in the Page 11 Iliad. Similarly, Valmiki has a greater range than Homer in Odyssey. Both Vyasa... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -03_Homer and the Iliad.htm Homer and the Iliad A Brief Note I H omer is the name attached by the Greeks of ancient times themselves to the two great epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey. Unfortunately, not much is known of him, but there is no doubt that there was indeed an epic poet called Homer... primary part in shaping those two great poems. The text of these two poems exists, and their literary merit is so great that Homer is considered one of the very greatest of the world's literary artists. According to a popular idea which was prevalent through out antiquity, Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War (1194-1184 BC) about which he sang. There is a so called Homeric Hymn ...
... term may be taken to mean two things — the mind of Homer and the poetic art of Homer. To both must Sri Aurobindo bring a basic resemblance if his Ilion is to be Homeric to the full. Basic — and not superficial: that point is important. Sri Aurobindo need not ask himself at every turn: Page 46 Am I thinking and feeling precisely as Homer would vis-a-vis the same object, event or situation... Homeric locutions like "god-haunted peaks" and "the many-voiced roar" that affine these verses to Homer: it is the majestic energy of the words and the speed and sinuousness and sonority of their rhythms that put them on a par with the spirit of the Iliad, And these elements preserve that spirit even though Homer, treating the same scene, would have had a less "inward" description of things nor dwelt so... classical hexameter could be "Englishified" our poets would have two sovereign strings to their bow, each with its own special quality. So it is worth asking whence arises the marvellous metrical swing of Homer and Virgil. The classical hexameter is a run of five dactyls ending with a spondee, allowing a substitution anywhere of the first four dactyls by a spondee — the fifth being usually left untouched — ...
... line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch, I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only... depends on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense Page 25 vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if one could get a continuous inspiration from the overmind, that would mean a greater, sustained height of perfection... the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of the elevation or depth or intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot then enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the ...
... versions into true poems is a true marvel! Usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer." A further statement of Sri Aurobindo's may be quoted. Looking at Roy's version of two stanzas of Shelley - "I can give not what men call love", etc. - he pointed out how the translation was "vulnerable... other translator." Commenting on somebody's argument that a translator is not free to render a passage in a form not exploited in the original, -Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters!" Sri Aurobindo also allowed the license of translating poetic prose into poetry, adding: "And what of the reverse cases - the many fine prose translations... can ever equal the original, yet there have been great translators who have, as it were, transposed some original into what is in its own right fine poetry - one has but to name Chapman's or Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Arthur Waley's Chinese poems, all of which have had a deep impact on the English language. Many excellent translations have done less than this but have brought something of the original ...
... blank verse can be called traditional. But to be traditional is not to be debarred from originality and greatness. While being traditional, one can be, if one has the genius, as original and great as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Marlowe, Milton, Keats. An infinite diversity is possible within traditionalism, and numberless heights and depths of vision and emotion can be reached through traditional technique... speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories... with nuclear energy. No directly mystical element is there and the sole Indianism is an allusion to the Bo-tree in the midst of four allusions from which three touch on European things: the epics of Homer, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Napoleon's career. The other poem is wittily quizzical about a cat. There just one phrase—"fur-footed Brahman"—brings India in. And that phrase too is not exactly a key- ...
... those in his translation or rather transposition of Homer – When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her light, Page 91 or, The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes - has an explosive effort, a muscular or nervous wrestling, in order to break out into poetic brilliance, both Homer in ancient Greek and Shakespeare in Elizabethan English... English achieve their tremendous effects with a godlike ease. Homer, like Milton, is self-gathered behind all his surge of "many-rumoured ocean". Shakespeare passions forth, yet with no gesticulation, no furious shouting: always a mighty natural-ness he brings at his greatest, he bursts as if by innate right to disclose his lustre: limits fall before him with the very breath of his poetic power, he ...
... Kumar Sambhav, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment 138 ) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala)— Our v... line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer, for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. I appreciate the previous lines much more. Amal too... Sir. But the latest poems don't seem to come to much, do they? What the big h do you mean? Don't come to much? What did you expect more than the praise that has been given? Want to be told that Homer, Aeschylus and Shakespeare all rolled into one were not a patch on you? What's the idea? The poem which you have marked throughout with single and double marginal lines, is only a fine sonnet?. ...
... poetical ideas and he develops them in his poems. A poet need not have intellectual ideas to be great. Homer has no intellectual ideas. There are only one or two lines that contain a great thought in the first five or six books, Otherwise the Iliad is all war and action and movement. And you can't say that Homer is not a great poet. If you do, you'll have to ignore many poets of the past. When Nishikanto started... poem is not fine or that it has no force or thought in it. It is an epic-but it is not creative. It has no vital substance. PURANI: People say he tried to imitate Milton. SRI AUROBINDO: Milton, Homer and everybody else. ...
... sleep, 600-2; on susupti state, 602; on role of 'hostile' forces, 602ff; on predestination, 602-3; letters to disciples on literature, 604ff; on Goethe and Shakespeare, 605, 606; on Valmiki & Vyasa, Homer & Shakespeare, 605; on Donne's poetry, 606; on psycho-analysis, 607; "four Aurobindos", 607-8; question-answer duet, 608-9; The Future Poetry, 610ff; Ahana, 620ff; experiments with... 404,448,511,610ff; the mantra, 610-1, 612; the poetic word, 611; the poet as seer, 611-2; on Chaucer, 613; on the Elizabethans, 613-4; on Paradise Lost, 614; on Byron and Wordsworth, 614-5; on Homer and Whitman, 615; five powers of poetry, 616; Sun of Poetic Truth, 617ff; form and verbal expression, 618; role of the future poetry, 619, 660 Gait, E. A., 311 Gandhi, Kishor H., 439fn... handling of blank verse, 94ff; polychromatic rhapsody, 96ff; an Elizabethan play predating the Elizabethans, 98fn Hill, E. F. F., 752 Hitler, Adolf, 127-28, 695, 696ff, 707, 711 Homer, 21,605 Hopkins, G. M. 330, 536, 615,695 Hour of God, The, 209 House of Brut, The, 120, 152, 153-54 Human Cycle, The, 404, 448, 470ff; revised version of 'The ...
... believing so. For, among poets of this plane, we have no less a figure than Homer. Homer has shown to what heights the poetry of the subtle physical can rise. Like Chaucer he too is preoccupied with external life, but his vision is vast and his eye is interpretative and not only representative. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and... phrase from the Odyssey. Cotterill has done the whole poem into accentual hexameters and off and on he achieves grand effects, but sometimes at the peak-points of Homer he fails in poetic sensitiveness, both in rhythm and word. Here is Homer, godlike yet direct: Zenos men pais ea Kronion autar oixun Eikhon apereisien. Here is Cotterill: Son of Cronion, of Zeus the Almighty was I, but... English as "Saturn".) Homer is always simple even in his profundity, straightforward even in his subtlety, natural even in his majesty. A typical instance of this style is at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Odysseus has lost all his companions — most of them because they slew the oxen that were sacred to Helios, the sun-god, who in return brought about their death. Homer says, as F. L. Lucas has ...
... of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter. But why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer? If I remember aright Valmiki's 'inspiration' came in the form of the metre in which he wrote the Ramayana. Homer may have used a metre current in his day or likewise have received that 'form', as the ballad metre is the expression of the Scottish border-ballads... imitation of poetry. Page 73 not the newly created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'. Would Virgil have been impressed, or Ovid (not to speak of Homer) by some clever schoolboy or graduate's imitation of the Aeneid or the Iliad? There is an astonishing virtuosity (of course Aurobindo would have carried off the prize, whether from Eton or from Cambridge... The Soul Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire? The Heart Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire! The Soul Look on that fire, salvation walks within. The Heart What theme had Homer but original sin? or in A Dialogue of Self and Soul the soul says: Such fullness from that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind Page 75 That ...
... he is most like Homer, it is just in this respect. So Homer himself, who initiated the Homeric simile, which the paper calls the image of impression - the simile where the "vehicle" is elaborated into a full-scale picture and the "tenor" is either ignored or omitted - so Homer too can hardly be said to rivet the reader to the narrative. As F.L. Lucas has observed somewhere, Homer does not care for... eye and striking one dumb: Homer likens this visual moment to the one when the Trojans all on a sudden heard the terrifying war-cry of Achilles. If my memory is correct, we get here a passing insight into the psychologico-poetic Page 192 complexity of Homer's proverbially "simple" mind, the kind we attribute to the singer of a "primary epic". Even Homer in several respects cuts... richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" - except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough of the "epic élan" such as Homer and Milton in their own individual styles possess. Of course all these shades I have distinguished are not easy to appreciate and perhaps I am talking an esoteric language; but I feel that ...
... battlements of Troy Homer compares to grasshoppers because of their thin legs and screechy voices. Though one receives a sort of shock, it is a shock wholly assimilable into the poetic passion of the narrative; it is not the intrusion of the clever mind endeavouring to produce a startling effect; rather is it a leap of the imagination itself to a certain extremism. Neither Crashaw nor Homer are plumbing any... the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work. Neither does Homer pause at scattered... any notable depth in the instances I have cited, but Homer easily achieves poetry that is perfect of the surface-kind, Crashaw in spite of his rich point is touch-and-go, precariously poised on the edge of perfection. Inspired "conceit" has mostly that slight falling short of the absolute. Even Donne who has an extraordinary gift for aligning disparate elements does not poetically go home with ...
... he is most like Homer, it is just in this respect. So Homer himself, who initiated the Homeric simile, which the paper calls the image of impression — the simile where the "vehicle" is elaborated into a full-scale picture and the "tenor" is either ignored or omitted — so Homer too can hardly be said to rivet the reader to the narrative. As F. L. Lucas has observed somewhere, Homer does not care for... richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" — except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough of the "epic elan " such as Homer and Milton in their own individual styles possess. Of course all these shades I have distinguished are not easy to appreciate and perhaps I am talking an esoteric language; but I feel that... on his moonlit moorland. I seem to remember another full-blown simile of Homer's, where we get a night-scene, this time with a sudden lightning bringing a surprise to the eye and striking one dumb: Homer likens this visual moment to the one when the Trojans all on a sudden heard the terrifying war-cry of Achilles. If my memory is correct, we get here a passing insight into the psychologico-poetic complexity ...
... greatest power of poignance is yet poised, ordered, harmonised. Appropriately does Keats speak of Homer ruling his kingdom — "demesne" — that is, showing a balanced mastery in his inspiration. Line 8, on the other hand, gives us Chapman to perfection. Keats did not intend a contrast, rather thought of equating Homer and Chapman; he did not realise that Homer's energy is unlike Chapman's vehemence and vigour... Inspiration and Effort KEATS'S ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER* SOME CRITICAL NOTES This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night... And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into ...
... Page 165 full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyasa or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? 18 February 1936 Poetry does not consist only in images or fine phrases. When Homer writes simply "Sing, Goddess, the baleful wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which laid a thousand woes on the Achaeans and hurled many strong souls of heroes down to Hades and made their bodies a prey... that it is wrong in thrilling to these things but that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus will remain deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also... expression which are a sufficient body for the significance. 2 September 1938 Nobility and Grandeur I am unable to agree with you that Chapman's poetry is noble or equal, even at its best, to Homer and it seems to me that you have not seized the subtler quality of what Arnold means by noble. "Muscular vigour, strong nervous rhythm" are forceful, not noble. Everywhere in your remarks you seem to ...
... poetic working out of it; but they are highly relevant to the field of poetry in general and to certain confrontations of self and world emerging today. I The Problem of Translating Homer Sri Aurobindo has framed a theory of what he calls true quantitative verse in English and amply illustrated it with nearly 5000 lines unravelling the greatest knot of the difficulty: the hexameter... skill in technique." With the advent of the Aurobindonian hexameter in tune with the genius of English as well as catching the temper of the classical medium, the vexed question of translating Homer into truly responsive English verse has received at last an answer. Interestingly enough, in his early days Sri Aurobindo himself attempted a set translation of the Odyssey. 1 But he did not carry... the Times Literary Supplement "There is no equivalent between a metrical six-foot line [i.e. the quantitative hexameter] and one dependent on stress, but the technique 1 "The Masks of Homer", col. 3. Page 308 developed by Mr. Day Lewis and Professor Lattimore has proved more successful than most...." Now, to have a true measure of the claimed success we have only to take ...
... curious on the matter may study with both profit & amusement Frazer's History of Indian Literature—we shall perceive how this method has been worked. A fancy was started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus. This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great poetry... a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown. Very possibly the whole discussion will finally end in the restoration of a single Homer with a single poem, subjected indeed to some inevitable interpolation and corruption, but mainly the work of one mind, a theory still held by more than one considerable scholar. In the meanwhile, however... justifying facts. It is not difficult to build these intellectual card-houses; anyone may raise them by the dozen who can find no better manner of wasting valuable time. A similar method of "arguing from Homer" is probably at the bottom of Professor Weber's assertion that the War Purvas contain the original epic. An observant eye at once perceives that the War Purvas are far more hopelessly tangled than any ...
... every part of it that affects him equally; the extent to which it affects him and the distribution of its various influences can only be judged from the poem itself. The milieu of Shakespeare or of Homer or of Kalidasa so far as it is important to an appreciation of their poetry, can be gathered from their poetry itself, and a knowledge of the history of the times would only litter the mind with facts... scholasticism, cutting itself off from the fountainheads of creation and wilfully preparing its own decline and sterility. The age of which Callimachus & Apollonius of Rhodes were the Simonides & the Homer and the age of which Tennyson is the Shakespeare & Rudyard Kipling the Milton present an ominous resemblance. Page 174 ...
... race may mount to greater heights of the spirit's life. An early poetry therefore is much occupied with a simple, natural, straightforward, external presentation of life. A primitive epic bard like Homer thinks only by the way and seems to be carried constantly forward in the stream of his strenuous action and to cast out as he goes only so much of surface thought and character and feeling as obviously... deep or very far. Moreover, the poet's greatest work is to open to us new realms of vision, new realms of being, our own and the world's, and he does this even when he is dealing with actual things. Homer with all his epic vigour of outward presentation does not show us the heroes and deeds before Troy in their actuality as they really were to the normal vision of men, but much rather as they were or ...
... one of the greatest in the power of his substance, the energy of his vision, the force of his style, the largeness at once of his personality and his universality. His is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modern's ruder less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in this that he has the nearness to something elemental... continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not, is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness from its defects—that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki—and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine. Whitman will remain great after all the objections that can be made against his method or his ...
... would have been impossible. In a letter to me, dated 20th October 1936, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the form of their symbolic images from the material life around them." What are we to conclude from this? We may be sure of one thing: the Vedic poets... charged with overabundant vitality. But Shakespeare's deficiency in thought as such was hammered into Bardolaters by Shaw through a piece of jocular impudence. He said: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his." Instead of accepting some amount of truth in ...
... line in Greek and Latin should have the hexameter's fifteen syllables, and that French should have the twelve-syllabled alexandrine as the staple line and English the ten-syllabled iambic pentameter. Homer has an average of five words to his hexameter, which means that the average length of a Greek word is three syllables. The same can hardly be said of an English word. There are thousands of lines in... Professor Campbell has somewhere drawn our attention to Homer's phrase about the dog Argos which, old and uncared for, is lying at the doorstep when Ulysses returns home after his long wanderings. Homer says of the dog: "enipleios kynoraisteon." The first word has four syllables, the second has five scanned as four. Considering their reference to a common thing, the English translation which would ...
... restlessness and curiosity. No doubt, the qualities mentioned are there, but in isolation from several others they look somewhat hap-hazard. Thus it is a mistake to confine energy to Romanticism. If Homer and Aeschylus, Lucretius and Milton are not energetic, then one does not know what energy can mean. Only, theirs is an energy more contained, more organised than in the Roman-tics. Again, to give s... staging of romantic passion." 31 Finally, he has the observation: "There is much, then, that is 'romantic' in classical Greek literature; yet it would Page 53 be easy to exaggerate. Homer is never unreal as Spenser is; Aeschylus never outrages common sense or common taste like Marlowe." 32 It is evident that Lucas is not unaware of Roman-ticism in Elizabethan poetry. Still, no whole-hearted ...
... not doubt the sincerity of poems expressive of such seeing. Again, a poet may be simple in one respect and complex in another. Homer is said to be the best example of simplicity. His sentences have on the whole a simpler construction than Milton's or Keats's. Still, Homer has an extraordinary variety of inflexions and a recurrent play of polysyllables beside which the cast of Miltonic or Keatsian words ...
... many can hope to come within a hundred miles of the more famous achievements of this kind such as Fitzgerald's splendid misrepresentation of Omar Khayyam, or Chapman's and Pope's mistranslations of Homer which may be described as first-class original poems with a borrowed substance from a great voice of the past. Mendonca does not refer specifically to Love and Death, to which your enthusiasm first... the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of the elevation or depth or intrinsic beauty Page 40 of the thing said cannot then enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us ...
... neglect more categorical than in India. Mallarme, whose dream was to create a poetry that would express deeper and higher truths, wondered if there were no poets before Homer, the Western ādi-kavi . His answer was that before Homer there was Orpheus: "Avant Homére, quoi? - Orphée." 136 The Future Poetry , SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 201. 137 Ibid ., p. 283. 138 Ibid ., p. 202. ...
... Savitri. As a form of literary expression, epic has not been static or conventional. On the contrary, it has been continually developing. This is clear in the remark of a critic who observes: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Taking all epic poetry into consideration, one may divide it into two main classes: the... Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. According to Lascelles Abercrombie: "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ." His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, but Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in external opposition to the Divine Will. It seems certain ...
... Chaldea, London, 1897; S. Reinach, Orpheus: A History of Religions, New York,1909 and 1930; Lynn Thorndike, Short History of Civilization, New York, 1926. 2 Homer, Iliad, translation by W. C. Bryant, Boston, I898' Homer, Odyssey, text and translation by A. T. Murray, Loeb Library. 3 Murray, G., Five stages of Greek Religion, Oxford, I930. 4 Harrison, G. E., Prolegomena ...
... and virile spirituality. Mr. Archer evidently puts his own sense, a novel and interesting and very occidental sense, on the word.... The thought and suffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we are told, is the sane and virile spirituality. The calm and compassion of Buddha victorious over ignorance and suffering, the meditation of the thinker tranced in communion with the Eternal... highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action ...
... By the way, I hope you didn't intend to make me an April-fool mentioning Virgil and Nirod in the same pen-stroke! [ In pencil. ] What a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. Another letter from Jatin. He has asked for the reply to his previous letter. Please do write something tonight, Sir. I request you, I beseech you, I... you wrote yesterday, Sir. Absolutely unreadable! Not even by Nolini was it possible! I repeat then from memory. "What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other." 183 Tomorrow is 4th April! 184 We are commemorating it thus: 1) Nishikanta sends a big poem—splendid, exquisite ...
... footing with the greatest poetry. However natural or mundane may be the delight in poetic creation, it can never surpass the poetic greatness of the mantra. Neither the ancient poet Valmiki nor even Homer or Shakespeare are an exception. It is said that "the highest art is to conceal art". The famous poets of to-day cannot so easily conceal themselves in their poetic creation as did the poets of the... have some from the womb of future, for time has no end and the earth too is boundless." From this point of view Milton and Virgil may be looked upon as mere poets. Those who consider Shakespeare, Homer and Valmiki superior to Milton, Virgil and Kalidasa come to such a conclusion from a subtler consideration. One group of poets makes use of vaikhari vak, while the other of pasyanti vak. Seer ...
... to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these stars of the first magnitude is a king, a paramount ruler in his own language and literature, and that for two reasons... its coming into contact with Europe; under its influence our language and literature have taken a turn that is almost an about-turn. But this revolution was not caused by a single person. Dante and Homer are the creators, originators or the peerless presiding deities of Italian and Greek respectively. Properly speaking Tagore may not be classed Page 177 with them. But just as Shakespeare ...
... mean alexandrines. NIRODBARAN: Yes, yes. SRI AUROBINDO: That is different. Plenty of people have written alexandrines. But this is the dactylic six-foot line, the metre in which the epics of Homer and Virgil are written. It has a very fine movement which is most suitable for Epic. I wrote most of my hexametres—the poem Ilion—in Pondicherry. Amal and Arjava saw them and considered them a success... substance is poor. It is surprising that he could write an epic, for Bengalis haven't got an epic mind. The Bengali Ramayana and Mahabharata are not worth much. But I believe he got his inspiration from Homer and Virgil whom he read a lot. NIRODBARAN: What exactly do you mean by "an epic mind"? SRI AUROBINDO: The epic mind is something high, vast and powerful. The Bengali mind is more delicate and ...
... Page 8 reading. Nothing seemed to escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude of which he has said nothing.... 290 Once they even tried to kidnap him. Sri Aurobindo would finally be left in peace the day the French police superintendent came to search his room and discovered in his desk drawers the works of Homer. After inquiring whether these writings were "really Greek," the superintendent became so filled with awe and respect for this gentleman-yogi, who read scholarly books and spoke French, that he simply ...
... that form itself only exists as a manifestation of spirit and has no independent being. When we speak of the Homeric hexameter, we are speaking of a certain balance [of] spiritual force called by us Homer working through emotion into the material shape of a fixed mould of rhythmical sound which obeys both in its limiting sameness & in its variations the law of the spirit within. The mere quantities... the exultation & increased strength of frenzy without its loss of self-control; and within this even is the spirit, that unanalysable thing behind metre, style & diction which makes us feel "This is Homer, this is Shakespeare, this is Dante." [All these are essential before really great verse can be produced; everyone knows that verse may scan well enough & yet be very poor verse; there may beyond... Conversely even if all these requisites exist, they will not succeed to the full without the discovery of the right metre. Is the right metre then the metre of the original? Must an adequate version of Homer, a real translation , be couched in the hexameter? At first sight it would seem so. But the issue is here complicated by the hard fact that the same arrangement of quantities or of accents has very ...
... transfers its vibrations to the word, with a fusion in it of Valmiki's poetic felicity, Veda-Vyasa's thought-sublimity, though not its extensibility and, in addition, a 20th-century sensibility. Homer possessed of a vision as wide as the world of his day, a sympathy as deep as the heart itself and a vast interpretative sense created, like a demiurge, in his Iliad and Odyssey, a world of his... that too as well couldn't be Homer's. Homer's is a world of Helen — a human passion; Sri Aurobindo's of Savitri -— a divine passion; and yet as creative geniuses both are supreme. Sri Aurobindo put Homer along with Valmiki and Shakespeare in the first row of the world's supreme poets. One thing, however, is strikingly similar in both the epics. Homer's Iliad is full "of images... resounding with the secret heart-throb of the cosmos, one will have to turn to Savitri rather than to Commedia. Sri Aurobindo said that there was no poet greater than Shakespeare (Valmiki and Homer excepted).* When he said so he was thinking of him as a master of rhythm and language and of poetic beauty — of his essential poetic force: the pure and uncorrupted spontaneity, "expressions wherein ...
... along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, power of expression, creative genius, range... between Savitri and the Divine Comedy . We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad , but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that... magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals. Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply ...
... precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret Page 311 consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality... creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them, gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poets—Shakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes... Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture —that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and ...
... unbiased Page 337 study of the work canto by canto, passage by passage, line by line, which can alone bring us to any valuable conclusions. A fancy was started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus. 1 This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great... a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown. Very possibly the whole discussion will finally end in the restoration of a single Homer with a single poem subjected indeed to some inevitable interpolation and corruption, but mainly the work of one mind, a theory still held by more than one considerable scholar. In the meanwhile, however... justifying facts. It is not difficult to build these intellectual card-houses; anyone may raise them by the dozen who can find no better manner of wasting valuable time. A similar method of "arguing from Homer" is probably at the bottom of Professor Weber's assertion that the War Purvas contain the original epic. An observant eye at once perceives that the War Purvas are far more hopelessly tangled than any ...
... there is a touch wanting—the touch of an absolute inevitability; this lack leaves his poetry on a lower level than that of the few quite supreme poets. When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either... English or the Greek poet. I leave aside the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer. September 12,1931 Sri Aurobindo's comments on Dilip's translation into Bengali of three poems from James Cousins, Jehangir Vakil and Tennyson. Page 103 The first translation... versions into true poems is a true marvel as usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else—as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer. Page 104 September 15,1931 A very charming lyric—but why J ā tismar 1 though it is a taking title? Yes, I thought " aus unserem Stall" meant "from out of our ...
... of its poetry. The other epic poets are more or less submerged in their subjects. So little of Homer the man is in the Iliad that scholars have even hatched the silly theory that Homer is the name of half a dozen different hands that have pooled their works - silly because one Homer is already a mighty freak difficult enough in the economy of Nature. Virgil rarely intruded upon his story: ...
... But all poetry is not of this kind; its rule does not apply to poets like Homer or Valmiki or other early writers. The Veda might almost be described as a mass of repetitions; so might the work of Vaishnava poets and the poetic literature of devotion generally in India. Arnold has noted this distinction when speaking of Homer; he mentioned especially that there is nothing objectionable in the close... close repetition of the same word in the Homeric way of writing. In many things Homer seems to make a point of repeating himself. He has stock descriptions, epithets always reiterated, lines even which are constantly repeated again and again when the same incident returns in his narrative, e.g. the line, doupēsen de pesōn arabēse de teuche' ep' autōi. "Down with a thud he fell and his armour clangoured ...
... style, epic (Chapman also)—it becomes difficult to deny these epithets to many others also. Even Kipling and Macaulay can put in a claim. What then is the difference between them and Homer, Milton etc.? Only that Homer is polysyllabic (he is not really) and Chesterton monosyllabic? 31 January 1935 Yeats and the Occult The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult is due to... not attract me. Scott no longer ranks as a poet; Chesterton's verse struck me as a modernisation of Scott. I have told you I do not share contemporary enthusiasms. As for the "best war-scenes since Homer", that is exactly the phrase that was used for a long time about Scott. 1932 I am sending you the first pages of an essay on Chesterton. I hope you will wait till you have finished the whole ...
... freely adorned with images and rich phrases. The latter kind is not the only "poetic" poetry nor is necessarily the best. Homer is very direct and simple, Virgil less so but still restrained in his diction; Keats tends always to richness; but one cannot say that Keats is poetic and Homer and Virgil are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer... Kalidasa's Kumarsambhava, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala)— 4 May 1937 ...
... in its contents value. Homer makes beauty out of man's outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step farther and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond ...
... a vibration of mystical ecstasy had an extraordinary imagination open to spheres of reality which transcend the reach not only of the average man but also the average poet of the first rank — say, Homer or Shakespeare. For, in poetry the main factor is imagination: we should never forget this central truth if we are to gauge rightly the nature of inspired utterance. Emotion makes poetry throb: it is... sincerity, truth, authenticity, value is, first and last, Inspiration — Inspiration working through any part of man's nature. The outward-going body-conscious Page 110 mind of Homer describes Apollo's descent from Olympus with an intense atmosphere of the god's subtle physicality of power. Shakespeare passes a sudden voice from spiritual heights through the life-force's peculiar... supreme Spirit's Force one with unimaginable rest. In all these expressions the inspiration is absolutely unmarred. Sri Aurobindo has experienced the very state he poetises, while Homer never knew Apollo's deific puissance nor Shakespeare the world-soul's profound reverie; yet their language when filled with a mystic intuition has not suffered the least weakness in imparting a real-sense ...
... you is so disposed I do not expect it, but there is the possibility I think that I should be quite justified in saying to him "My dear sir, of course I have some relatives. To quote the very words of Homer, even I am not sprung 'from an oak or from a rock',³² but from human parents, and consequently I have relatives; yes, and sons33 too, gentlemen, three of them, one almost grown up and the other two... other half divinities who were upright in their earthly life, would that be an unrewarding journey? Put it in this way: how much would one of you give to meet Orpheus44 and Musaeus,45 Hesiod46 and Homer? I am willing to die ten times over if this account is true. It would be a specially interesting experience for me to join them there, to meet Palamedes47 and Ajax48 the son of Telamon and any other... his benefactions consisted in giving oracles and instruction for the curing of disease 46 Hesiod of Ascra in Boeotia was the first didactic poet; he was generally ranked next after Homer in antiquity and merit. 47 Palamedes a Greek warrior in the Trojan War, exposed a discreditable trick on the part of Odysseus, who by forged evidence got him executed for treason (Virgil ...
... so disposed — I do not expect it, but there is the possibility — I think that I should be quite justified in saying to him "My dear sir, of course I have some relatives. To quote the very words of Homer, even I am not sprung 'from an oak or from a rock', 32 but from human parents, and consequently I have relatives; yes, and sons 33 too, gentlemen, three of them, one almost grown up and the other... were upright in their earthly life, would that be an Page 87 unrewarding journey? Put it in this way: how much would one of you give to meet Orpheus 44 and Musaeus, 45 Hesiod 46 and Homer? I am willing to die ten times over if this account is true. It would be a specially interesting experience for me to join them there, to meet Palamedes 47 and Ajax 48 the son of Telamon and any other... but his benefactions consisted in giving oracles and- instruction for the curing of disease. Hesiod of Ascra in Boeotia was the first didactic poet; he was generally ranked next after Homer in antiquity and merit. Palamedes a Greek warrior in the Trojan war, exposed a discreditable trick on the part of Odysseus, who by forged evidence got him executed for treason (Virgil, ...
... This is called the first fixed date in Greek history, the year in which the Olympic Games were founded in honour of Zeus. But this was by no means the beginning of Greek athletics. We know from Homer, the author of the two famous epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, that the events of the Games had been practised in the Greek world many centuries before the Trojan War. In the Iliad, right in the middle... does he consider that he has paid a proper tribute to his friend. Athletics were thought the best way of honouring the gods and those striving to surpass them, the "heroes". Let us turn back to Homer for a moment. The poet of the Iliad had what some misguided people today think the most necessary qualification for the artist: he was class-conscious. He writes only of kings and princes; the ordinary... in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arete. So too has the hero of the older poem, Achilles — the most formidable of fighters, the swiftest of runners, and the noblest of soul; and Homer tells us, in one notable verse, how Achilles was educated. His father entrusted the lad to old Phoenix, and told Phoenix to train him to be "A maker of speeches and a doer of deeds". The Greek hero ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -04_Sri Aurobindo and Ilion.htm Sri Aurobindo and Ilion I S ri Aurobindo was born on the 15th August 1872 at Calcutta. At an early age of seven, he was taken along with his elder brothers to England for education, since his father wanted him to have no Indian influence in the shaping of his outlook and... environment to accept its domination. He was, indeed, in an earlier phase aggressive and brutal, but his soul-power pushed him to higher grades of a noble and visionary hero. Already in the Iliad of Homer, the way in Page 38 Athena Page 39 which he responds to Priam's request to deliver Hector's dead body manifests a noble salute of a hero to a hero and a deeper perception... unfolding vistas of experience. The poem achieves a powerful union of intensities of rhythm, vision and varied shades of aesthetic beauty and joy. Above all, the greatness and supremacy of Homer revisits us here through the surpassing poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo. There is here fresh youthfulness and enlivening revelations of the deeper springs of action that actuate gods, goddesses, heroes ...
... but natural that Sri Aurobindo should feel particularly attracted to the hexameter. It appears that one of his classmates at Cambridge, Hugh Norman Ferrar, once read out a line from Homer or a line from Arthur Hugh Clough that was typically Homeric which he thought was the most characteristic line, and that gave Sri Aurobindo the swing of the metre. 118 Beside developing... queen, a girl who braved heroes in combat. 120 It was thus with a sure sense of epic appropriateness that Sri Aurobindo cast his epic as the clash between Penthesilea and Achilles, even as Homer had concentrated on Hector and Achilles. Probably, Ilion, had it been completed, would have ended with the death of Penthesilea at the hands of Achilles and of Achilles at the hands of Paris. ... Eastern, even an Indian, warrior queen– is superb. The debate s are elaborated with extravagance in true epic style, and the similes too are characteristically Homeric, at times indeed out Homering Homer without quite ceasing to be Aurobindonian. Even metrically the poem , especially the earlier portion which had received careful revision at Sri Aurobindo's hands , is strikingly articulate , the steady ...
... eternal, towards perishable life, not towards any greater reality which overpasses and supports the superficial phenomena of life. The thought and suffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we are told, is the sane and virile spirituality. The calm and compassion of Buddha Page 121 victorious over ignorance and suffering, the meditation of the thinker tranced in communion... highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action ...
... pristine perfection; and not many poets are willing to pass through this experience. Hence so very few create each time a living form of the highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist... Greeks themselves, for all the similes were borrowed from familiar experience and were current in the unrecorded minstrelsy out of which the Iliad rose like a culminating blossom. But on that ground Homer does not become "jejune and claptrap": the splendour and nobility of his words, the swiftness and largeness of his rhythmic tone as well as the "high seriousness" of his mind of which both his word ...
... sailor: Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. A similar experience of perusing a book has again been transformed by Keats in his famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Here a book becomes a realm of gold, a state and kingdom Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Spelling his way through this duty and musty volume, he felt the exhilaration of breathing... purpose is illustrative and revelatory, they aim at communicating the poet's experience in all its power and glory. We can see the difference in the above quoted sonnet of Keats, on reading Chapman's Homer. Keats first wrote: Yet could I never judge what men could mean Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold; but then he changed the first line to Yet did I never breathe ...
... expression has not been static and conventional but has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped... Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ," — says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in eternal opposition to the Divine Will. Satan, the creator ...
... and art the poem has embodied. Besides, are compound terms in quick succession a purely Aurobindonian practice? As far as I know, they have been part of poetry from the most ancient times: Homer is chockful of them. And they are an outstanding feature of the poet who more than any other has been praised and commented on in modern criticism. In this respect as in several others, Mr. Ezekiel... compelled by mortality's transience Leaving a Roman memory stamped on the ages of weakness..." All this is epic utterance, and for nearly 5000 lines we have Sri Aurobindo fused with Homer. Evidendy Mr. Ezekiel knows nothing of Ilon's superb achievement—and yet he passes final sentence on Sri Aurobindo's value as poet. In the very field of spirituality we have not only lofty ...
... between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the... nuclear energy. No directly mystical element is there and the sole Indianism is an allusion to the Bo-tree in the midst of four allusions from which three touch on European things: the epics of Homer, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Napoleon's career. The other poem is wittily quizzical about a cat. There just one phrase - "fur-footed Brahman" - brings India in. And that phrase too is not exactly a ...
... Others also started with a poetry of external life, Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with the historical epic of Ennius, French with the feudal romances of the Charlemagne cycle and the Arthurian cycle. But in none of these was the artistic aim simply the observant accurate presentation of Greek or Roman or feudal life. Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action ...
... Physical Consciousness The Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the frame of their symbolic imagery from the material life around them. 20 October 1936 Homer and Chaucer are poets of the physical consciousness—I have pointed that out in The Future Poetry . 31 May 1937 You can't ...
... God-realisation, and nobody will ever outsing Valmiki and Homer and Shakespeare. But a new region of reality will be laid bare, untrodden expressive paths penetrated. While the former ages gave us something of the world's wonder as seized by the body-sense, the life-gusto, the mental aesthesis, there will be found in the future a poetic word equal to Homer and Shakespeare and Valmiki but packed with a superhuman ...
... tissue of simile and metaphor. Similes of a certain kind are themselves descriptions while functioning as comparisons vivifying a theme all the more. Such similes have been dubbed Homeric, because Homer, taking one or two main points in common between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long comparisons which are complete pictures in their own right—small dramatic scenes inset... reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives—particularly his Sohrab and Rustam —and in the early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death and Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo ...
... ensure profundity. This was a mistake in artistic method. But behind it was also a psychological flaw in the poet. Hugo had a lot of self-conceit. To a youth who said to him that he had been reading Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe, Hugo said sharply: "Mais a quoi bon? Je les resume tous." 1 The colossal confidence with which he thought he summed up all the poetic giants of the past and with which he... satisfy these criteria in a greater or smaller measure. Sri Aurobindo chooses eleven poets for the sheer first class, but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme ...
... * You must have received by now the typed copy of the opening pages of Sri-Aurobindo's Ilion, the epic in hexameters moulded according to his insight into what this great medium of Homer and Virgil should be in a natural English form. Ilion is not ostensibly poetry of the sacred but it has still a depth of vision made dramatically vivid. Surely you Page 19 wouldn't... movement and a quality like those of this grand measure in Greek and Latin, has been a problem for centuries. There is no sustained hexametrical creation in English coming anywhere near the work of Homer and Virgil or even lesser Classical poets. Part of the lack is due, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, to the absence of a true conception of the form which a genuine English hexameter should have. All attempts ...
... Page 230 mantra , the eternal word spoken of and sought for and often found by the Vedic Rishis. Perhaps it is the pressure of this voice that from far behind gives, in Homer, through his nearness to something elemental, a ring of greatness and an air of divinity to everything said by him and endows his power of straightforward yet splendid speech with a rush of oceanic... live unforced to grieve And help by calm the swaying wheels of life And the long restlessness of transient things And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world. 16 Homer and Virgil combine in an Aurobindonian tertium quid: Bear; thou shall find at last thy road to bliss. Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives. 17 The descent as of a beatific ...
... blank verse can be called traditional. But to be traditional is not to be debarred from originality and greatness. While being traditional, one can be, if one has the genius, as original and great as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Marlowe, Milton, Keats. An infinite diversity is possible within traditionalism, and numberless heights and depths of vision and emotion can be reached through traditional technique... speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still Page 69 remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a ...
... literature - as old as the Odyssey. It is even older." He considers the legends of Greek mythology highly Romantic, nor does Greek Romanticism end for him with the fabulous and the fantastic in Homer: imagination breaks bounds in Aeschylus, passion snaps the leash in Euripides and strange as well as violent themes are found in much Greek drama. Touches of the Romantic occur in Latin literature too... Similarly, Dante rests Classical for all his poignancy and sensitivity. Lucas 23 himself feels that though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus never sound the extreme Romantic note that is heard in Spenser and Marlowe, while Catullus in even his "Romantic frenzy" is still "Classically clear". Could we argue that impulses and ...
... Page 92 mirror their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, Homer, Shakespeare and Dante..." * * * "Many centuries after these poets [Valmiki and Vyasa], perhaps a thousand years or even more, came the third great embodiment of the national consciousness... Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna ...
... NIRODBARAN: Tagore doesn't raise the question of understanding in this letter. He demands variety. SRI AUROBINDO: What does it matter if there is no variety? Homer has written only on war and action. Can Tagore say that he is a greater poet than Homer? Sappho wrote only on love: is she not a great poet? Milton also has no variety and yet he is one of the greatest poets. Mirabai has no variety either and ...
... it follow that Thompson is not a great poet? Milton is not understood by many. He is not a great poet then?… What does it matter if there is no variety? Homer has written only on war and action. Can Tagore say that he is a greater poet than Homer? Sappho wrote only on love: is she not a great poet? Milton also has no variety and yet he is one of the greatest poets. Mirabai has no variety either and ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -02_Preface.htm Illumination, Heroism and Harmony Preface The task of preparing teaching-learning material for value-oriented education is enormous. There is, first, the idea that value-oriented education should be exploratory rather than prescriptive, and that the teaching learning material should... to a high pitch of accomplishment. He was, indeed, in an earlier phase aggressive and brutal, but his soul-power pushed him to higher grades of a noble and visionary hero. Already in the Iliad of Homer, the way in which he responds to Priam's request to deliver Hector's dead body manifests a noble salute of a hero to a hero and a deeper perception and urge for harmomzation, In Ilion, Sri Aurobindo ...
... part seems very poetic, but can poetry come in narrative poems? Do you mean to say that the rest of the poem is prose or mere verse? Poetry does not consist only in images or fine phrases. When Homer writes simply "Sing, Goddess, the baleful wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which laid a thousand woes on the Achaeans and hurled many strong souls of heroes down to Hades and made their bodies a prey... fitness of the subject, it depends on how you treat it. The epic tone can be used very well for it, but it must not be pitched too high, as if one were speaking of Gods and Rishis and great heroes as in Homer and Virgil or in Meghnadbodh or similar poems, so the river swelling in echo 161 of the lamentation of one who is an ordinary woman is out of place. The possibility of epic treatment lies in the ...
... adorned with images and rich phrases. The latter kind is not the only "poetic" poetry nor is necessarily the best. Homer is very direct and simple; Virgil less so but still is restrained in his diction; Keats tends always to richness; but one cannot say that Keats is poetic and Homer and Virgil are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer ...
... pencil: What a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. MYSELF: (I couldn't read it) Absolutely unreadable, Sir, not even by Nolini! SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory. What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each ...
... and never the self-centered body. The moderns may ask: "Is it obligatory that one should have a great soul in order to be, a great poet?" In the hoary past it was almost so. Valmiki, Vyasa and Homer rightly deserve to fall into that category. But the ancient Latin Catullus, the French poet Villon of the medieval age, most of the 'Satanic' poets of the Romantic age, and Oscar Wilde and Rimbaud of... creations and activities never suffer in manners. His creations will not be vitiated by gross touches. He alone is a great poet whose consciousness is hardly clouded, although it is said that even 'Homer nods'; to me the lesser poet is he who at times breaks through the cloud, and a non-poet is he who is ever strongly shrouded with indelible cloud. Page 133 ...
... expression has not been static and conventional but has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the pur- pose". Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped... . In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ"—says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in eternal opposition to the Divine will. Satan, the creator ...
... and tournament... ...Me, of these Not skilled nor studious, higher argument Remains... He has a theme better in its own way and for his particular purpose than the themes of Homer and Virgil, of Ariosto and Tasso. Milton's ostensible aim is to "assert Eternal Providence,/And justify the ways of God to men." It is almost a theological aim; and he would therefore try to effect... partly at least, to the poetic style, to the power of its unifying harmony. Highet's pointed emphasis on Milton's style in Paradise Lost is by no means misplaced. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the anustup of Vyasa and Valmiki, the terza rima of Dante, the symphonic blank verse of Milton, the crystalline iambic pentameter of Savitri, all play no mean part in charging these ...
... voice since Homer", because "he has the nearness to something elemental" and he has, "the elemental Homeric power of sufficient straight-forward speech, the rush too of oceanic sound though it is here the surging of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece." 28 The magic, the disciplined grace, the unfailing beauty of Homer are absent ...
... shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle, Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. 75 The Ilion is an epic after the manner of Homer, continuing the story of the siege of Troy from the point where The Iliad ends; but of the 5,000 lines pf the epic that Sri Aurobindo left behind him, only the first 381 lines were cast in the... mortality there looms, massive and sombre, the figure of ominous Doom. The verse, too, with its succession of five dactyls capped by a trochee—instead of the five dactyls followed by a spondee in Homer—-has a majestic falling rhythm, while the range of modulations gives the verse a certain natural mobility and grace. While the hexameter is in the main an epic measure and needs a ...
... time represent and mirror their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante. It has been said, truly, that the Ramayana represents an ideal society and assumed, illogically, that it must therefore represent an altogether imaginary one. The argument ...
... substratum of moral and an admixture even of psychological & philosophical ideas. If in their origin, they were material and barbarous, they had already been moralised & intellectualised. Already even in Homer Pallas Athene is not the Dawn or any natural phenomenon, but a great preterhuman power of wisdom, force & intelligence; Apollo is not the Sun—who is represented by another deity, Helios—but a moral ...
... its drama. Here too it is difficult to follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind at least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as the personalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not less living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala and other feminine types not less Page 251 sweet, gracious and alive than Alcestis ...
... headmaster of St. Paul's school took up Aurobindo himself to ground him in Greek and then pushed him rapidly into the higher classes of the school. [At St. Paul's Aurobindo made the discovery of Homer.] The Head Master only taught him the elements of Greek grammar and then pushed him up into the Upper School. × ...
... previous lives. The other day I happened to ask X whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius ...
... wherein Mr. Tilak's nationalism differs from that of Mr. Gokhale. He fancies he had been cherishing and nursing the national spirit—and this disgust at the very name of the nation is the result. Even Homer nods; and the wise editor of the Indian Nation and his other compatriots have to be told that the supreme test of nationalism is a belief in the future of the nation and a love for it—with all its ...
... constantly dinned into our ears that Mr. Hare intends to visit the scenes of disturbance. Yet he has not left Shillong as yet, and disturbances are as rife as ever. What does Mr. Hare mean?" Even Homer nods; and even Mahatmas are at times slow to understand the significance of events. Our contemporary declines to accept the Jamalpur affairs as a link in a chain that has been forged by people interested ...
... into expression. Therefore the essence of poetry is eternally the same and its essential power and the magnitude of the genius expended may be the same whatever the frame of the sight, whether it be Homer chanting of the heroes in god-moved battle Page 224 before Troy and of Odysseus wandering among the wonders of remote and magic isles with his heart always turned to his lost and far-off ...
... behind it and evoke from a something that was waiting for us within its own inevitable speech and rhythm. That inwardness is the triumph of great poetical speech, whether the poet has his eye like Homer on physical object and power of action and the externalised thought and emotion which they throw up into the surface roll of life, or else like Shakespeare on the surge of the life-spirit and its forms ...
... critics now who are in ecstasies over Pope's Rape of the Lock and put it on the very highest level, but we could hardly reconcile ourselves to classing any lines from it with a supreme line from Homer or Milton. Or can the perfect force of Lucan's line Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni which has made it immortal induce us to rank it on a level of equality with the greater lines ...
... on Poetry and Art Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style Examples from Classical and Mediaeval Writers Would you please tell me where in Homer the "descent of Apollo" occurs? 1 It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the Iliad. 2 I don't suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately. Of course ...
... of high notes in his criticism, (an essay he sent long ago on the "Ashram poets"—what a phrase!—made me aghast with horror at its Pindaric—or rather Swinburnean—tone, it gave me an impression that Homer and Shakespeare and Valmiki had all been beaten into an insignificant jelly by our magnificent creations.) He is also sometimes too elaborately ingenious in his hunt for detail significances. But what ...
... may stand in principle in a majority of cases, but in the minority (which is the best part, for the less is often greater than the more) it need not stand at all. Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters. Again, what of the reverse cases—the many fine prose translations of poets so much better and more akin to the spirit of the original than any poetic ...
... vaguely historic stage as moralised religions. Their gods had not only distinct moral attributes, but represented moral & subjective functions. Apollo is not only the god of the sun or of pestilence—in Homer indeed Haelios (Saurya) & not Apollo is the Sun God—but the divine master of prophecy and poetry; Athene has lost any naturalistic significance she may ever have had and is a pure moral force, the goddess ...
... power of his vision, of his speech, of his feeling, by his rendering of the world within or the world without or of any world to which he has access. It may be the outer world that he portrays like Homer and Chaucer or a vivid life-world like Shakespeare or an inmost world of experience like Blake or other mystic poets. The recognition of that power will come first from the few who recognise good poetry ...
... many can hope to come within a hundred miles of the more famous achievements of this kind such as Fitzgerald's splendid misrepresentation of Omar Khayyam, or Chapman's and Pope's mistranslations of Homer which may be described as first-class original poems with a borrowed substance from a great voice of the past. Mendonҫa does not refer specifically to Love and Death , to which your enthusiasm first ...
... tells us these are the real spiritual things, man's highest aim and endeavour and all else is vain mysticism, asceticism, evasion of life. It appears that the lined and ravaged face of a Greek bust of Homer is a thousand times more spiritual than the empty calm or the ecstatic smile of the Buddha! We are told by others that to care for the family and carry out our social and domestic duties, to be a good ...
... of protoplasms, been able to effect? It has analysed the elements; it has weighed the suns and measured the orbits of the stars; it has written the dramas of Shakespeare, the epics of Valmekie and Homer and Vyasa, the philosophies of Kant and Shankara; it has harnessed the forces of Nature to do its bidding; it has understood existence and grasped the conception of infinity. There is something fas ...
... The Future Poetry would not be written from the usual sources of the world's literature—the levels of consciousness which, according to Sri Aurobindo, may be classified: subtle-physical mind (as in Homer and Chaucer, where the inner imaginative response is mostly to external gesture, movement and action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation ...
... heart is sensitive with chords that vibrate at once — as keen to feel the smite of earthly sorrow as to feel the caress of unearthly felicity. At the very head of European literary history we have Homer, a poor blind beggar wandering with his harp and dying without a home. After his death, seven cities disputed with one another to be considered his birthplace! Then there is Dante, exiled from his beloved ...
... combining qualities which often fall apart. In the first stanza the theme — "Helen, thy beauty" — comes redolent of the legendary Helen of Troy over whom a nine-year war was fought as we learn from Homer. It comes also with an echo of Marlowe's great lines on that Helen: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burned the topless towers of Ilium? Page 334 The "thousand ...
... or that bard — and this omission may lead us to underestimate their presence in his consciousness. At least we may tend to overlook the full force of Plato's impact. We cannot do so with regard to Homer, since Sri Aurobindo has several substantial passages on him in The Future Poetry as well as in his numerous letters and there is a whole long epic Ilion (over 4,500 lines) which directly takes ...
... may pick out from the famous dramas . While we are about Bacon we may quote what Sri Aurobindo says in another context - the discussion of "Sight" as "the essential poetic gift" which renders Homer, Shake-speare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa supreme poets. "There is often more thought in a short essay of Bacon's than in a whole play of Shakespeare's, but not even a hundred cryptograms can make him ...
... luminous horizons are foreign to dear old Alfred for all his floating hair and prophet beard and mist-rapt eye trying to swim beyond our ken on a portwine-dark strange sea of thought. (I must apologise to Homer and Wordsworth for tainting the lovely "stock-description" of the one and the grand trouvaille of the other with a touch of the bibulous.) Page 254 Please do not think I am prejudiced ...
... Bible, Shankara's theories as familiar as the speculations of Teutonic thinkers and Kalidasa, Valmekie & Vyasa as near and common to the subject matter of the European critical intellect as Dante or Homer. It is the difficulties of presentation that prevent a more rapid and complete commingling. Page 393 ...
... determined in His own unfettered but infallible fantasy. Out of His infinite personality He creates all these characters & their inevitable actions & destinies. So it is with every divine creator,—with Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa. It is perfectly true that each has his own style of language & creation, his own preferred system or harmony of the poetic Art, just as the creator of this universe ...
... transcendence of the conversational turn and temper. The latter is no defect in itself; what the poet has to be on guard against is the bathetic or the prosaic. Professor Campbell has observed that Homer could speak of Ulysses' dog Argos as being full of lice without sacrificing all that Arnold claimed for him — rapidity, simplicity, nobility — because the phrase in Greek had a rich rhythm and dignity ...
... hness. Here are Page 346 aspirations, the anxieties of the explorer, the regulated passion of the expert tennis player, the Keatsian joy on looking in Chapman's Homer. In this extended monologue with the Supreme, the aspirant mortal simply rejects sorrow in one clean sweep, for how can be sorrow present in the presence of the All-Beautiful Anandamaya ? ...
... Nishikanto Roy Chowdhury (Kobi) (A man who walked in his shadow) He ceas’d; but left so pleasing on the ear His voice, that list’ning still they seemed to hear. Homer (Odyssey; Translation: Pope) He is an exception to the series of “Among the Not So Great”. For, long before I thought of writing on him, he was great and well-known. He was commented upon ...
... his own. Starting with Sri Aurobindo's placing of Shakespeare in the highest rank in the orders of the eleven world's greatest and best so far of poets in his estimate, along-side Valmiki, Vyasa and Homer, Sethna re-emphasises that Shakespeare is the supreme poet of the vital, the elemental and the human plane of life-force, informed and impelled by the creative demiurge. The phenomenal creative range ...
... He was thoroughly familiar with the tradition and cultures of the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their epics and lyrics, Homer and Shelley as well as Vyasa and Kalidasa. He admired Plato greatly and classical Greek culture as a whole – “where living itself was an education” – witness his essay on Heraclitus and the four thousand ...
... evolving world. The Ways of the West The three grades or levels of being are deeply ingrained in the thought of the West. The very first time a graded world is mentioned seems to have been by Homer, who’s golden chain reaches from God’s throne down to the meanest worm. Plato, drawing his inspiration from Pythagoras, divided the human consciousness into three levels. The lowest was the desire soul ...
... yore had nothing to offer that could be called “spiritual”, and the Greeks, admired as creators of culture and the arts, had no tradition which exceeded the arbitrariness of a world as depicted by Homer or Sophocles’ tragic human destinies. However, true spirituality, fulfilling all the requirements, could be found where the great Romantics had looked for it and where “the new romanticism” followed ...
... subversive activities, but when a French examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) on a domiciliary visit saw his Greek and Latin books, he annulled the prosecution on the spot. An Indian who read Homer and Virgil in the original language! No, this could not be the sinister conspirator depicted to him. Pondicherry was — and is — a small port on the Coromandel Coast, one hundred and sixty kilometers ...
... older foundations of Cambridge University. As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome — these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture ...
... flocculation. This is the colloidal theory of ageing. (A. Lumière, Marinesco) (9)A progressive induration and ossification taking place in the body are the causes of old age and natural death. (Homer Bostwick, De Lacy Evans) Page 392 (10)The intestinal contents are supposed to be full of millions of types of micro-organisms secreting toxins or poisons whose re-absorption in ...
... but strikingly depicted by Peter Heehs: ‘As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome – these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture ...
... what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in ...
... horizons are foreign to dear old Alfred for all his floating hair and prophet beard and mist-rapt eye trying to swim beyond our ken on a portwine-dark strange sea of thought. (I must apologise to Homer and Wordsworth for tainting the lovely "stock-description" of the one and the grand trouvaille of the other with a touch of the bibulous.) Please do not think I am prejudiced in favour of ...
... 315 Gods 253 Goethe 1,22,57,205 Gokak, Dr. V.K. 333 golden lid 307 Gray 234 H Hartz, Richard 356,360,362 higher and lower hemispheres 306 Hiranyagarbha 99 Homer 132,186,205,213,258 horse 310 hostile forces 303 Housman,A.E. 26,265 hrdaye guhāyām 165 Huta 281,298,330 hymns to Agni 299 I Ignorance 248 immortality ...
... Sri Aurobindo has let us believe, though very indirectly, that he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of ...
... studies in metrical perfection; but he rejected rhyme because he found it unnecessary. Still, he did not follow Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse. Most probably, he had before him the verses of Homer and Virgil — these served as his models. But what is possible in Greek or Latin is impossible in English. The reasons are often repeated, so I refrain from stating them. Sri Aurobindo's blank ...
... mind-values, soul-values that enter into Art... In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare..." Thus more appealing, even gripping, than the actual Page 570 death of Satyavan in the Shalwa wilderness is the grim prophecy of death made by Narad in Aswapati's ...
... of Savitri himself to the social psychology of the modem. Purani's comparative discussion of epical form stands out for its analytical insight: he marks a difference between the early epic of Homer, Valmiki or Vyasa, where a vast and complex outward action is the subject; and the departure towards subjectivism introduced by Dante and strengthened in Milton. Savitri could be seen as a modern ...
... several parts of Adamo Caduto. But these very passages are yet typically Milton's, full of what has been called his "grand style". Literary pilfering is an old profession. Virgil lifted chunks out of Homer, and Shakespeare took most of his plots from Bandello and versified Plutarch in many places. But Milton stands at the head of those who have made a pastiche or mosaic of pilferings. And his own attitude ...
... dedicated to the Muse with a profound prayer that he might be perfected some day for the achievement of a master-work. No other poet was born with so intense a sense of mission to do for England what Homer and Virgil had done for Greece and Italy, no other poet worked throughout his life with so deeply felt a direction towards a God-given poetic fulfilment. Well might his life be crowned with that ...
... overhead plane or has the Overmind Page 106 touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from loweR planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only the ...
... plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that Page 114 would mean a greater ...
... power of his vision, of his speech, of his feeling, by his rendering of the world within or the world without or of any world to which he has access. It may be the outer world that he portrays like Homer and Chaucer or a vivid life-world like Sakespeare or an inmost world of experience like Blake or other mystic poets. The recognition of that power will come first from the few who recognise good poetry ...
... Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati 's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama ...
... Sri Rama Sri Krishna in Brindavan Nala and Damayanti Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa Svapna Vasavadattam The Siege of Troy Gods & the World Homer and the Iliad -Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Socrates Alexander the Great The Crucifixion Joan of Arc Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet ...
... and Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi ...
... committed to memory (not being allowed any writing material) and wrote down after being released. 2. Hexameters: A line of verse consisting of six metrical feet. The hexameter was very much used by Homer, Virgil and other Greek and Latin poets. 3. "To thunder through Asia plain to the Ganges": With this line Briseis takes us almost a thousand years after the Trojan war when Alexander the Great ...
... International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville ____________________________ Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men —Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna in ...
... nature of reality, concerned with such questions as the existence of God, the external world, etc. 2 The Iliad is an epic poem on the Trojan War traditionally attributed the ancient Greek poet Homer. 3 To annotate: to supply (a written work, such as an ancient text) with critical or explanatory notes. Page 23 and named it Alexandroupolis. He also took part in the battle against ...
... sections the Sanskrit verse (ofttimes as musical and highly wrought as Homer's own Greek) bears, as I think, testimony... to an origin anterior to writing, anterior to Puranic theology, anterior to Homer, perhaps even to Moses." This story was told and retold many times after the composing of the original Mahabharata. M Krishnamachariar in his History of Classical Sanskrit Literature mentions ...
... previous lives. The other day I happened to ask Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius ...
... Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Taittiriya Upanishad Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas ...
... think that I have done something in poetry? People say that one can't take your remarks on poetry, painting, etc. too literally, because you want to encourage us. A very good beginning. Not yet Homer or Shakespeare, of course. Mother is giving us doctors a very good compliment, I hear! that we confine people to bed till they are really confined! Yes. Mother did pass on that epigram. Doctors ...
... experimented with translations of passages from Greek and Latin poetry. Later he told us of a significant incident in this connection. Once a class-mate of his, Norman Ferrers, was reading a line from Homer which he thought was one of the poet's finest lines and, as Sri Aurobindo listened, his ear caught the true rhythm of quantitative metre. As you may appreciate, English is an accented language whereas ...
... not that it is wrong in thrilling to these things but that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus remains deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also ...
... three miles from the sea. Of these nine cities, Troy VI was destroyed by fire at about the time of the traditional date of the Trojan War (1194-1184 be). It is likely that this is the Troy to which Homer refers. Trojan: the people of Troy. They claimed descent from a legendary hero, Ilus, who founded their city. Myths tell us that two gods helped to fortify the city walls, making it a s ...
... Greeks and the Trojans revolve around issues of power and honor. The Iliad shows us the conflict between mighty human spirits, and how the Gods intervene in such conflicts to workout a Divine Will. Homer casts the life of Man in divine proportions. This is the power which the true seer offers to those of us who are able to enter into the ancient spirit and atmosphere, and to feel what is going on behind ...
... meditations. But occasionally he too did not hesitate to join in our childish pranks. One day I asked to hear from him something in the Greek language. He gave us a recital of ten or twelve lines from Homer. That was the first time I listened to Greek verse. Such was the picture of our outer life. But how about the inner feelings? There a fire had been smouldering. Barin had suggested that it would ...
... spark and lustre of inner knowledge, there is in him a swift natural movement of a primal concentrated consciousness. He is therefore allotted a seat in the very first rank, with Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. Sophocles reminds one of the French dramatists with their restraint and measure, their skill in delineating subtle feeling. There is here nothing in excess, but there is a sense of subdued force and ...
... feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal." 15 Again, in yet another letter: "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother." 16 Like Homer and Milton, Sri Aurobindo also plunges in medias res in the opening canto; exclusive of the sections devoted to necessary retrospective narration, the main action of the epic comprises but a single ...
... philosophical Page 263 statement as a tragedy by Aeschylus bears to an exposition by Socrates. 21 Max Muller asserted that, "There is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth." 22 Modern writers like Joyce, Eliot, Gide and Camus ...
... theme gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found possible for Sri Aurobindo to continue with his own studies or even to help us in ours. For, as I have already hinted, our mode of living, our ...
... Gloucester 20, 21 Graves, Robert 31, 33, 77 Greece 48, 50, 52 Greek 32, 47, 53 Greek legend 4 H Hades 56, 77 Hamlet 10, 23, 38 Hebrides 103 Hecate 77 Homer 27 Horatio 23 I Ind 92 India 76, 78, 89, 91, 98, 104 Indra 31 Ionian 52 J Japan 92 Jeanne d'Arc 48 Jules Romains 39 Jules Supervielle 55 ...
... chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation,4 Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied ¹ "Burnt Norton" ² Ibid. ³ Ibid. 4 Ibid. Page 147 to the modern. ...
... generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the godhead that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron ...
... great. It is the name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed ...
... not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida. Human evolution took a decisive turn with the ...
... rarest spectacles.¹ I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet – I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything ¹ James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet." Page 52 like philosophy in their poetic creation ...
... Every creator has to identify himself with his characters in order to make them live and bring out their essential points. This doesn't mean that he has sympathy with each and every character created. Homer put many good things into his Hector's mouth. But his sympathy was, if at all anywhere, on the side of Achilles. ...
... 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, Milton and others which he said should be verified were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative ...
... others it comes by occasional jets or flashes. 79 Equally illuminating is the distinction Sri Aurobindo draws, in the course of the same letter, between Vyasa and Valmiki on the one hand and Homer and Shakespeare on the other. In another letter, Sri Aurobindo elaborates the point that, although in the Yogin's vision of universal beauty, all is indeed beautiful, yet all cannot be reduced to a ...
... self. The most famous ballads, those which never perish, have been written by such thwarted geniuses. Although the influence of romanticism has made it a literary fashion to couple these ballads with Homer, yet in truth ballad-writing is the lowest form of the poetical art; its method is entirely sensational. The impact of outward facts on the body is carried through the vital principle, the sensational ...
... Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Sri Aurobindo 28.May-22.Dec.1907 Bande Mataram A Consistent Patriot 04-June-1907 Even Homer nods, and even the Hindu Patriot makes slips at times. Referring to the endeavours of the Kashmir Durbar to suppress "sedition" the Patriot wrote on the 22nd May:— "The Maharaja of Kashmir's demonstration of fidelity ...
... lived except as an image,—nay, does not omniscient learning tell us, that even his creator never lived, or was only a haphazard assortment of poets who somehow got themselves collectively nicknamed Homer! Yet these images, which we envisage as real and confess by our words, thoughts, feelings, and sometimes even by our actions to be real, are, all the time and we know them perfectly well to be as mythical ...
... has been doing little else since it began to serve the human imagination from its first grand epic exaggerations to the violences of modern romanticism and realism, from the high ages of Valmiki and Homer to the day of Hugo and Ibsen. The means matter, but less than the significance and the thing done and the power and beauty with which it expresses the dreams and truths of the human spirit. The whole ...
... Great Bheeshmadev Chatterjee He ceased; but left so pleasing on the ear His voice, that listening still they seemed to hear. The Odyssey, Homer Bheeshmadev was known to many of us of the older lot of ashramites, but many probably never gave him a second thought, nor did know something about him. He was just another “one” of them. ...
... compelled both the Roman poet and the English to conjure up an atmosphere of the Divine and the Superhuman around their highest moments, an instinct aligning itself with the inward impulsion that led Homer to appeal to his Thea and Milton to cry "Sing Heavenly Muse." A sense of the mysterious Divine is always leaping out in Page 73 this manner through great poetry. In general, it is ...
... Spring-spirit Persephone by Pluto, the god of die Underworld, I wrote this poem more as an experiment than seriously, a pleasurable indulgence in word-colour touched with mystery. The suggestions from Homer are marked by an asterisk.) The crocus like a sun made soft and small, The pansy like a kiss of gleam and shadow Begemmed, together with the colour-call Of flag and hyacinth ...
... poem Madeline is referred to as "silver shrine" by her lover Porphyro indicating that she is an icon of worship for him. A spontaneous response in the poem On first Looking into Chapman's Homer with "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold" captivates instantly the precious and permanent value of literature and how the poet finds his native region here. Unlike Milton who regards ...
... ambitious politician wooing the people for support. Fools create a hell for themselves on earth. One should tell oneself that even the best of men are dead and gone. Among the celebrated poets of the past Homer bore the sceptre without a peer but now he sleeps the same sleep as others. By his own spontaneous act, the great philosopher Democritus offered up his head to death. Even Epicurus passed away when ...
... what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except ...
... mind-values, soul-values that enter into Art... In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare..." Thus more appealing, even gripping, than the actual death of Satyavan in the Shalwa wilderness Page 119 is the grim prophecy of death made by Narad in Aswapati's ...
... out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead Page 80 poetry, etc., which is now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified, were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative ...
... It is too subtle, too refined, — it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed. And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot Page 47 understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know ...
... concisely depicted by Peter Heehs as follows: “As a classical scholar, Aravinda was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome – this was considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture ...
... other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European ...
... which is often practised by poets, even by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue and harmony. Virgil's quarrying from Homer is well-known, so also are Chaucer's beautiful imitation of the Italians and Milton's recutting the gems he discovered in the splendour of the Classics. Wordsworth's finely intonated Or ...
... illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida couldn't read the words. Sri Aurobindo: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. Question: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional as regards my early success in English versification ...
... fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside ...
... poetry it created did not sustain itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo ...
... hopefully mean at times the noting down of Those thoughts that wander through Eternity. Page 104 Your choice of the word "odyssey" is apt. For this "man many-counselled", as Homer designates him, passed through quite a number of perils and temptations during his nine-year tossing on the high seas. Will you be able to resist the song of the Sirens or the lure of Circe? Perhaps ...
... cannot complain that by their devotion to the mysteries of life the Romantics failed to appreciate life itself. It is of course true that they do not belong to the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of ...
... can catch even in a single short poem the full force of Page 27 this unmanifest grandeur, one would be more loyal to one's soul than if one out-Shakespeared Shakespeare and knocked Homer into a cocked hat. I'm sorry I have been somewhat carried away into a bit of highfalutin'. Old Bill of Stratford, from whatever heaven to which his "poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" may have ...
... objectionable in poetry — and I am of the opinion that it is these that Milton excluded when he talked of poetry being simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Milton himself — as compared to a poet like Homer — was far from simple. I don't believe his construction and his mode of thought were even as simple as Sophocles's or Euripides's. His "simple", therefore, I understand as "unforced" or "fresh" or "alive ...
... or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Be de kat' oulumpolo karenon choomenos ker (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth ...
... the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of elevation or depth or of intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic ...
... revelation of the lovely - this may be called the one and sole function of the artist. All supreme artists have declared loveliness to be a reality and a reality distinct from the vulgar and squashy. Homer did it when he made Helen come to the battlements of Troy and walk before the elders who had just been bitterly bewailing the loss of so much life for a mere woman. As soon as they caught sight of the ...
... still unable to rid our minds of the overpowering influence of the dismissal by western scholars of our own ancient records: The Puranas? They believe in the historicity of Homer and excavate Troy, but will not allow that same probability to the Puranas simply because they speak of a civilized antiquity in a colonized country when the western man was living in caves, and ...
... own vitality. Not only have we oblique references to them in Paradise Lost: we have also the sense of their very presence in the temper and texture of the poem. It is as though the oceanic sweep of Homer pulsed through Milton's arteries, the broad even river-flow of Virgil ran in his veins, the concentrated titanism of Aeschylus made his bone and marrow, the grandiose passion of Lucretius tensed his ...
... Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those forces that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, ...
... thought out; they have not been seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measures and free lines of inspired perfection. The difference will become evident if we make a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having ...
... have been always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa, however much they may differ in everything else, are at one in having this as the fundamental character of their greatness. Their supremacy does not lie essentially ...
... only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. We are told by Europeans that the lined and ravaged face of the Greek bust of Homer is Page 416 far more spiritual than the empty ecstatic smile of the Buddha. We are told often nowadays that to earn for one's family and carry out our domestic duties, to be a good and moral ...
... Spirit in him to find tongue in the highest key possible to his consciousness. But what on earth did you expect from Baudelaire beyond what he has written. Baudelaire had to be Baudelairean just as Homer had to be Homeric. 7 November 1934 Herbert said yesterday that though Baudelaire is a great poet, he is considered an immoral one. That is not anything against his greatness—only against ...
... thought satisfied some ideal in your temperament and therefore put you into touch with the creative force behind you. A poet for instance can feel himself stimulated enough to creation after reading Homer, yet his own work may be quite different, not epic at all and dealing with quite another order of ideas and things. It is only that the reading stimulates his inner being to create, but according to ...
... revelation and inspiration Page 28 reproduced by a secondary, diluted and uncertain process in the mind. But even this secondary and inferior action is so great that it can give us Shakespeare, Homer and Valmekie. There is also a tertiary and yet more common action of the inspiration. For of our three mental instruments of knowledge,—the heart or emotionally realising mind, the observing and reasoning ...
... is not the Iliad" and yet, looking at the comparative adequacy of the expressions which do succeed in catching something of the original spirit and intention, were at the same time to say "This is Homer", "This is Valmekie." There is no other difference except this of standpoint. The Upanishads speak of the Absolute Parabrahman as Tat; they say Sa when they speak of the Absolute Parapurusha. Page ...
... physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer. Arrived to a greater depth of living, seeing from Page 206 a vivid half outward half inward turn of mind his thought and action and self and world and Nature, man begins to feel more s ...
... something like an English hexameter; but this was only a half accomplishment. The rhythm that was so great, so beautiful or, at the lowest, so strong or so happy in the ancient tongues, the hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the hexameter of Theocritus, the hexameter of Horace and Juvenal becomes in their hands something poor, uncertain of itself and defective. There is here the waddle and squawk of a big water-fowl ...
... other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European ...
... In the preceding conversation, Mother was alluding particularly to this passage. × Reminiscent of Homer and the 'herds of Helios.' ...
... distance. The note of exaggeration has in poetry a triple face. An object is Page 43 seen to be a magnified version of something minute, something commonplace and unpretentious, as Homer describes the elders on the walls of Troy as sitting and chattering like grasshoppers, in order to convey acutely the fact of their thin screeching voices and their lean legs. Or an object is compared ...
... line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only ...
... from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that would mean a greater, sustained height of perfection ...
... greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Bēde kat' oulumpoio karēnōn chōömenos kēr (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth ...
... the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of elevation or depth or of intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the ...
... difficult to stand Silent, upon a peak in Darien, if we find that a mare magnum already familiar to us had all along a shade of glory we had never distinguished—that, for instance, it was Homer who also wrote Plato or that the author of the Republic was the true wizard who even here in the world of Impermanence had made the phenomenal ill-fate of Ilium almost a divine Idea. Such indeed is ...
... very small one. It's true that there are lengthy epics, but how rare they are! Hundreds of long poems are attempted but most of them come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets ...
... al Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville __________________________________________ Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander theGreat Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men -Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna ...
... He was trained in the usual branches of a Greek education, gymnastics, reading, writing, knowledge of arithmetic and geometry, also the committal to memory and power of recitation of the poems of Homer. It is said that not only did Socrates exist at the same time as Parmenides, 20 Protagoras, 21 Gorgias, Hippias, 27 Prodicus, 23 and Thracymachus 24 in Greece but that there are accounts ...
... Education by Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Gods and the World joan of Arc The Crucifixion Other titles published by SAIIER and Shubhra Ketu Foundation The ...
... * * Page 129 Other titles in the Illumination, Heroism and Harmony Series Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men —Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc Page 130 ...
... among the passing shadows and so be best able to divine their future appearances. Will our released prisoner hanker after these prizes or envy this power or honour? Won't he be more likely to feel, as Homer says, that he would far rather be 'a serf in the house of some landless man', 5 or indeed anything else in the world, than hold the opinions and live the life that they do?" "Yes," he replied ...
... heroes embodied their ideal. Yet there is a trend in the Greek conception of life which is intensely tragic: there was a keen sense that life, this life which they loved so fiercely, was so brief. As Homer puts in: "As is the life of the leaves, so is that of men. The wind scatters the leaves to the ground: the vigorous forest puts forth others, and they grow in the spring-season. Soon one generation ...
... contrary, he said: "Those of us who think death is an evil are in error.... For death is either a dreamless sleep or the soul migrates to another world. In the next world, I will converse with Hesiod and Homer and in that world they do not put men to death for asking questions.' And then he added: "The hour of departure has come, and we Page 130 go our way I to die, and you to live. Which ...
... and variety. According to him, Shelley is not equal in range to Milton. SRI AUROBINDO: Range? What does he mean by range? If he means a certain largeness of vision, then Shelley does not have it. Homer, Shakespeare, the Ramayana and the Mahabhara have range. But neither Virgil nor Milton has range in the same measure. Their range is not so great. Dante's range too is partial. PURANI : Abercrombie ...
... their sadhana by reading his poems. SRI AUROBINDO: That is a different matter. You don't understand what I mean. When you read Hamlet, you become Hamlet and you feel you are Hamlet. When you read Homer, you are Achilles living and moving and you feel you have become Achilles. That is what I mean by creativeness. On the other hand, in Shelley's "Skylark", there is no skylark at all. You don't feel ...
... sense as deep as those of modern humanity; but they were finished and completed things, net and clear and full of power. The simple unambiguous virile line that we find in Kalidasa or in the Ajanta, in Homer or in the Parthenon, no longer comes out of the hands of a modern artist. Our delight is in the complexity and turbidity of the composition; we are not satisfied with richness only, we require a certain ...
... AUROBINDO: He engaged several pundits and he had the inborn poetic faculty. PURANI: Besides, he was a linguist; he knew many European languages. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes! You can see the influence of Homer, Virgil and Tasso in his writings. DR. MANILAL: I asked Nirod if he was having experiences. He said, "No, my work is now in the physical." I asked, "What about mind and vital?" "Oh, all that is finished ...
... harmony, sweet reasonableness – that was Greece, reached its highest and largest, its most characteristic growth in that period. Earlier, at the very beginning of her life cycle, there came indeed Homer and no later creation reached a higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it was a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of the national glory. Pericles stood ...
... 150,211,329 Hennes, 220 Hibbert Journal, the, 251 Himalayas, the, 54, 100 Hinduism, 54, 110, 166 Hider. 70, 87-8, 106, 386 -Mein Kampf, 70 Homer, 136, 197,206,219 Hugo, Victor, 197,275 -A Villequier, 275n Huma m, 16, 129-30, 163, 166, 168 Huxley, T. H., 140, 192 Hellas, 219 IDA, 219 ...
... God and declare himself to be 'the monarch of all I survey'. Ever since the day when Protagoras, the most famous of the Greek sophists of the fifth century b.c., whom Plato pitted even against Homer as an authority on the education and improvement of mankind, formulated his famous maxim, Panton chrematon metron anthropos, "Man is the measure of all things", this formula has continued to enthrall ...
... Education by Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna ...
... Gods and the World Poscidon the brother of Zeus and the Lord of the seas, was also the Master of Horses The Gods at War Excerpt from the Iliad by Homer Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions Founds the strong man his strength but the god he carries within him. Extract from Talthybius' discourse to ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion ...
... and Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled ...
... 2 In south-central Afghanistan. 3 Modern Leninabad. 4 Sensitive, impressionable. Page 65 His love of Greek literature remained unchanged to the end. He started out with Homer, and later he sent from the Far East for other works of literature, classical and modern. He had special veneration for the three great tragedians, above all for Euripides, whom he knew so well that ...
... Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati’s Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet ...
... Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna ...
... Tapasya •Nachiketas •Taittiriya Upanishad •Sri Rama •Sri Krishna in Vrindavan •Nala and Damayanti •Episodes from Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa •The Siege of Troy •Homer and the Iliad-Sri Aurobindo and Ilion •Gods and the World •Socrates •Crucifixion •Alexander the Great •Joan of Arc •Catherine the Great •Uniting Men-Jean Monnet ...
... •Nachiketas •Taittiriya Upanishad •Sri Rama •Sri Krishna in Vrindavan •Nala and Damayanti •Episodes from Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa •The Siege of Troy •Homer and the Iliad-Sri Aurobindo and Ilion •Gods and the World •Socrates •Crucifixion •Alexander the Great m •Joan of Arc •Catherine the Great •Uniting Men-Jean ...
... Absolutely illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida could not read the words. SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. QUESTION: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional" as regards my early success in English versification. But ...
... convince Arjuna to take up arms and fight against the Kauravas. He was still hesitating. But when Abhimanyu died at the hands of so many 'heroes' in an unfair manner, that did the trick. You have read Homer, I suppose. You know the story of Achilles. He was sulking in his tent because of a 136 The Universal form of the Divine, as distinct from the Transcendent and the Individual. ...
... , please. I can't get the current back. Even the taste has disappeared. On the contrary a fear has grown, lest my poems be good-for-nothing. Nonsense! No poet can always write well—If even Homer nods, Nirod can often doze—that's no reason for getting morally bilious Once I asked you to give some advice as regards the treatment of a patient, you replied: "... I have no medico in me, not ...
... — it is not in the mind or by the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed. And men have the audacity to compare it and find it inferior in inspiration to that of a Virgil or a Homer. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. It will be known what it is, but in a distant future. It is only ...
... half of world history with their efforts to teach such 'meaning'; they inaugurated the Age of the Feuilleton and are partly to blame for quantities of spilled blood. If I were introducing pupils to Homer or Greek tragedy, say, I would also not try to tell them that the poetry is one of the manifestations of the divine, but would endeavor to make the poetry accessible to them by imparting a precise knowledge ...
... human race Page 133. Other titles in the Illumination and Harmony series Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The siege Of Troy Alexander the great Homer and the Iliad- Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Joan of Arc The crucifixion Gods and the World Printed at Auroville Press Auroville 2005 ...
... grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness—that was Greece, reached its highest and largest, its most characteristic growth in that period. Earlier, at the very beginning of her life cycle, there came indeed Homer and no later creation reached a higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it was a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of the national glory. Pericles stood ...
... 68n Hamlet, 185 Hardy, Thomas, 71, 88 Hegel, 246 Hilton, Walter, 114 -The Scale if Perfection, 115 Himalayas, the, 151 Hinduism, 242, 276-8, 280 Hitler, 274 Hobbes, 108 Homer, 52, 73, 83, 85-6, 93, 147, 176 Horace, 89 Horatio, 173-5 Housman, 88 Hugo, Victor, 52 Huxley, Aldous, 114, 131-3, 144, 181 Index expurgawrius, 23 India, 53, 73, 105, 175, 199 ...
... two aspects of the same Infinite. Even the drama of their earthly life is not merely founded on human qualities. The East wants to explore the Infinite, while the West wants to delve into the finite. Homer, the father of Western literature, is an illustrative example. The men of Homer's world, however mighty and powerful they may be, are after all human beings. Achilles and Hector are but the royal editions ...
... Gita, the, 6n., 9, 21-2, 58, 76-7, 83, 93, 105, 108, 112n., 125n., 143, 157,160-1 Great War, the, 323, 355 Greece, 199,214,419,421 HAMLET, 79 Heard, Gerald, 135 Heraclitus, 305 Homer, 209 Horace, 210 Huxley, Aldous, 136 INDIA, 3, 17,21,96,118,137,141,191-2, 199,209,285-6,419-20 Indo-China, 324 Indra, 208, 253 Indus Valley, 133 Ingres, 429 Inquisitors, the ...
... Dante DANTE is known as a great poet and also as a great seer: Sri Aurobindo mentions him as one of the very greatest. He names three as the supreme poets of Europe, of the very first rank: Homer of ancient Greece, Dante in the Middle Ages, and nearer to us, Shakespeare. Along with these Sri Aurobindo mentions also Valmiki of India. However I shall speak of Dante not so much as a poet but as ...
... ground dare to say that the literature of the ancient peoples was unrefined or insignificant? A Turgeniev, an Amiel, a Leconte de Lisle or a Pierre Loti can take birth only. in the present age. Dante, Homer, Valmiki or the most ancient Vedic sages – none of them, like Turgeniev, Amiel, Leconte de Lisle or Pierre Loti, sought for the tales of various other ages and countries, and yet have these modern poets ...
... and Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati’s Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi ...
... Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama ...
... Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Philosophy of Supermind ...
... and Excellence of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the lliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi ...
... the theme gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found possible for Sri Aurobindo to continue with his own studies or even to help us in ours. For, as I have already hinted, our mode of living, our life ...
... generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the god-head that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their Page 79 movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheswari line. A Dante, on ...
... is charming. But it is equally the world of falsehood. Plato was religious to the marrow. The main cause of his looking upon the poets with considerable displeasure is that in their creations – e.g. Homer – the gods have an inferior nature even to that of a human being. It is an absurdity on the face of it. Having turned falsehood and an evil ideal into a thing of grace and delight Page 105 ...
... a singer and a house-builder have no right to be present in the ceremonies performed for the departed Page 96 of the gods is entertained by such a great poet as Homer? In what respect are such gods superior to men? All the weaknesses of men are found in them, perhaps on a bigger scale, in a more hideous form. These gods are recommended for worship by poets! The ...
... intuition are scattered all over Page 77 the ancient arts, and inspiration marks the modern. The Renaissance of Europe failed in its attempt, however sincere, at imitating the intuition of Homer and Virgil of the remote past and unwittingly managed to usher in the epoch of inspiration. Dante was the harbinger of the spirit of this new age, while Shakespeare of the English and Ronsard of the ...
... variation. Now listen to this hexameter movement: Tytire/ tu patu/laes recu/ bans sub/ tegmine/ fagi... (You Tytirus, lie under your spreading beech's cover)... It is in this hexameter that Homer has composed his wonderful epics with their sublime poetry. I do not wish to plague you with too many quotations from the original Greek, but let me recite the opening line of Homer's Iliad: ...
... English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne were also there. Countless English novels were stacked in his book-cases, littered in the comers of his rooms, and stuffed in his steel trunks. The Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy of Dante, our Ramayana, Mahabharata, Kalidasa were also among those books. He was very fond of Russian literature... "After learning Bengali fairly well, Aurobindo began to ...
... William S. 307,316 Hakim, Khalifa A 33 Hardy, Thomas 251,377 Hartmann 33,34 Hegel 30,33 Highet, Gilbert 383,384,411,412,414 Hodgson, Ralph 367 Homer 53-55,265,267,319,320,370,381, 383,384,387,398,399,401 Hopkins, G.M. 75,98,314,368,455 Horu Thakur 45 Housman, A.H. 56 Hugo, Victor 377 Human ...
... colloquial terms and pronunciation of Bengali. In the year 1895 the first collection of Sri Aurobindo's poems, Songs to Myrtilla , was published "for private circulation". Sri Aurobindo used to read Homer, Dante, the Mahabharata, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti, during this period. He instructed the Bombay firms Messrs Radhabai Atmaram Sagun and Messrs Thacker Spink & Co. to send him catalogues of new publications ...
... In place of these you will meet a valiant Nono Alvares, who did such notable service to his king and country, an Egas Moniz, a Fuas Roupinho, for whom alone I wish I had the lyre of Homer. The twelve knights Magrico led to England are more than a match for the paladins of France, the illustrious Vasco da Gama for Aeneas himself. 16 It is clear Camoens is anxious ...
... man of the world and tried to cram into his life and work divers realms and modes of experience. He knew (like Sri Aurobindo) many languages, he wrote fiction and poetry, he translated the epics of Homer, the Commedia and Faust into modern Greek, and (in 1945) he was for a time Minister of Education. Having come under Bergson's influence as a pupil, Kazantzakis was intrigued by the problem of ...
... practising at Sumatra or Singapore. He saw me in the cage and was much concerned and did not know how to get me out. It was he who had given me the clue to the hexameter in English. He read out a line from Homer which he thought was the best line and that gave me the swing of the metre." ¹ December1939 On 31 August 1908 Narendranath Gossain, who had turned approver, was assassinated in the hospital ...
... Few amongst those of the younger generation have had the liberating experience of seeing him in person. They can but gaze at the published photographs (much as they look at the supposed portraits of Homer or of Sophocles or of Shakespeare), and make whatever conjectures or conclusions may seem valid or appropriate. There were, however, those who knew Sri Aurobindo in person, as pupils or as friends ...
... 8). The "infinite rock" of the inconscient is shattered and the seeker un-covers "the sun dwelling in the darkness" (III.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter. * Reminiscent of Homer and the "herds of Helios." Such is the secret of the Veda, the victory of the seven Rishis Angiras and the Navagwas, who discovered the "path of the gods" : "Our fathers by their words broke the ...
... seen them." But no one has described the innermost secrets. And, indeed, "the mysteries of the Eternal" are only for the initiate. The myth, however, is simply told. It is, of course, older than Homer and Hesiod and has been recounted by them: Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus, is carried off by Pluto, God of the Underworld, with Zeus' consent, when she goes to pluck the narcissus-flower, ...
... splendour touched blind Homer's eye. Once caught in the reverie-rapture of his heart, Never from us the immortal You can part. * Only a troubled, brief, foreshadowing power Was the proud beauty of your perilous life— Nought save the far glint of a voyaging light Glimpsed once before the plenary wonder struck The dreaming loneliness of Homer's brow. ...
... different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely ...
... Calligraphy is artistic handwriting. Haven't you heard of illuminated manuscripts? PURANI: Chinese and Arabic books are very artistic, with beautiful borders. It seems William Morris tried to produce Homer's epics like that. SRI AUROBINDO: The Roman script is too utilitarian to produce a good effect. In England they are trying oriental calligraphy now. EVENING As often happened, Champaklal suddenly ...
... unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' "magic casements", Wordsworth's [ lines on ] Newton and his "fields of sleep", Shakespeare's "Macbeth has murdered sleep", Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's "Sunt lachrimae rerum" and his "O passi graviora". 16 September 1934 You write, in regard to a poem of mine, "it is difficult to draw the line" between ...
... impassioned description, however, is that by Rishi Narad when he sees Savitri returning after her meeting with Satyavan. Her eyes glow with the enchantment of love, she is the bride, the flame-born. Homer's Helen enslaves with her beauty Priam himself and all the Trojan elders; here, in Sri Aurobindo's poem, Savitri casts a spell on Narad the immaculate Rishi and celestial Bard! He flings on her "his ...
... there cannot be, unless by peace you mean a stable tension, a balance of power between hostile forces, a sort of mutual neutralisation of excesses. Peace cannot create, cannot maintain anything, and Homer's prayer that war might perish from among Gods and men is a monstrous absurdity, for that would mean the end of the world. A periodic end there may be, not by peace or reconciliation, but by conflagration ...
... phrase "Starry eyes that falter not, set in an exalted visage" into the champion distortion: "Staring eyes that flatter not, set in an exhausted village." Once he asked me: "Isn't the hero of Homer's epic Odious?" I said: "Lullaby, many people have thought that, but nobody before you uttered such an apt thing about Odysseus." On another occasion he informed me in Nirod's office-room upstairs: "The ...
... there is any neglect by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Graves calls the "White Goddess" (none other than Homer's "Thea" and Milton's "Heavenly Muse") that he feels nothing more is necessary to be done about it. Praise or blame seems irrelevant. At times even publication appears to be pointless. All that the poem ...
... language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive energy, Tapas. In Kalidasa the quantum is that of the energy of the-light in sensuous beauty. And Homer's voice is a quantum of the luminous music of the spheres. The word-unit, the language quantum in Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a packet of consciousness-force, a concentrated power of Light (instinct ...
... His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive energy, Tapas. In Kalidasa the quantum is that of the energy of the light in sensuous beauty. And Homer's voice is a quantum of the luminous music of the spheres. The word-unit, the language quantum in Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a packet of consciousness-force, a concentrated power of Light (instinct ...
... converted into or amount to or by itself constitute in result a conscious operation, a perception, emotion, thought-concept, or prove that love is a chemical product or that Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin was only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges. It is ...
... Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties — yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastness into our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a super-version of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many- rumoured, it is a also many-glimmered, many-figured. The poet's work is principally ...
... the work of poets. Even the Gods are said to laugh — they who are the masters of the Spirit's Delight. Kalidasa charac-terises the whiteness of Mount Kailasa as the eternal laughter of a God. And Homer's Gods are constantly breaking into laughter over the follies of men. Aeschylus, one of the greatest of the Greek poets, saw Neptune laughing in that immortal line: The innumerable laughter of the ...
... been capable in Occidental history, but which in ancient India were common and usual. Mr. Gladstone was considered to be the possessor of an astonishing memory because he could repeat the whole of Homer's Iliad, beginning from any passage suggested to him and flowing on as long as required; but to a Brahmin of the old times this would have been a proof of a capacity neither unusual nor astonishing, ...
... Dante's The Divine Comedy is full of mystic effulgence and unflattering lines in which the poetic Mantra is heard in all its beauty and sweetness, but moves in a shimmering prison of veiled light. Homer's Illiad has not the elevation of Paradise Lost or the effulgence of The Divine Comedy but it has the clear detached vision whose lines suggest the absolute because they take rise in the illumined ...
... odd thing, the Rose! It must be at the same time red and yellow and white, a folded bud and a crowd of petals and a fading fragrance. It must be something that Helen of Troy received from Paris — Homer's Paris, of course, and not Mallarme's — Paris the man to whom she was madly drawn and not Paris the city from which she might have run away frightened as if it had been her own husband Menelaus! And ...
... Occidental history, but which in ancient India were common and usual. Mr. Gladstone was considered to be the possessor of an astonishing memory because he could repeat Page 88 the whole of Homer's Iliad, beginning from any passage suggested to him and flowing' on as long as required; but to a Brahmin of the old times this would have been a proof of a capacity neither unusual nor astonishing ...
... is no supra-naturalistic suggestion. Adhwara yajna stands in need of explanation (for both words in more modern Sanscrit mean sacrifice), unless indeed we are to take it as a parallel expression to Homer’s theleiai gunaikes which scholars long persisted in understanding as “female women”. Visvatah paribhur asi has a singularly Vedantic ring. Nevertheless I will refrain from pressing any of these points ...
... repeat that manhood in innumerable warriors who could clear the ground for the manifestation of divinity that is always concealed in the highest peaks of manhood. Valmiki's Ramayana is comparable to Homer's Iliad and Vyasa's Mahabharata; all the three are great epics and all the three stand out as great hymns of heroism; each has its own excellence and Page 13 even superiority over the others ...
... Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides ...
... of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides ...
... poetic phrase, "Starry eyes that falter not, set in an exalted visage" into the champion distortion: "Staring eyes that flatter not, set in an exhausted village." Once he asked Amal: "Isn’t the hero of Homer’s epic Odious?" Amal said: "Yes, many people have thought Page 73 that, but nobody before you has uttered such an apt thing about Odysseus." I have cited all these trivial instances in ...
... bewildering pall." Suddenly it did not matter if my small attempt had any merit of its own -enough that it had kindled in the mind of a lover of great literature the moment of pure joy that a memory of Homer's lines calls forth! That letter was the start of a correspon-dence that began in the nineteen-seventies and a friend-ship that endures to this day. Page 112 I first met Amal during ...
... part of the ancient Indian epos Mahabharata , is one of the great creations of the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its ...
... Aurobindo has Englished the Iliai-line both literally and poetically. Literally it runs: Page 358 "And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart..." The poetic rendering in Homer's own metre is: Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings... By the side of the elaborate simile, in Book I of Ilion, apropos of Deiphobus, already slain by the... wanderings through which he went for twenty years after the fall of Troy before returning home to Ithaca. The passage has a very dramatic effect, as of prophecy, for all who remember the subject of Homer's Odyssey. The line, put into the mouth of Briseis, in The Book of the Woman, Stronger there by love as thou than I here, O Achilles, sounds a little strange in construction ...
... time onward you can see that greater and greater subjectivity becomes the point of departure for an epic, and Savitri, in that sense, is a far greater epic than all the epics put together, from Homer's time right up to the Divine Comedy. The subjectivity that has found expression in Savitri is tremendous. Savitri is not one world, it is several universes, one, two, three, four, five universes ...
... poetics. Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties—yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastness into our common life by means of "sound-waves"—it is a super-version of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many-rumoured, it is a also many-glimmered, manyfigured. Page 222 The poet's ...
... Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties - yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastness into our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a super-version of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many-rumoured, it is also many-glimmered, many-figured. The poet's work is principally to set ...
... poetics. Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties -yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastnessinto our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a superversion of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many-rumoured, it is also many-glimmered, many-figured. Thepoet's work is principally to set ...
... sacrifice, and so through the whole list. This symbolic duplication was facilitated by the double meaning of the Vedic words. Go, for instance, means both cow and ray; the cows of the dawn and the sun, Homer's boes Eelioio , are the rays of the Sungod, Lord of Revelation, even as in Greek mythology Apollo the Sungod is also the Master of poetry and of prophecy. Ghrita means clarified butter, but also ...
... The Siege of Troy -05_Achilles and Priam.htm Zeus (Bronze statue 470 460 BC) Achilles and Priam This passage is the final chapter of Homer's Iliad. It describes the events that followed upon Prince Hector's defeat by Achilles and how the gods intervened to soften Achilles heart so that he would give the vanquished prince the honor and respect he ...
... but even the Gods are said to laugh - they who are the masters of the Spirit's Delight. The dazzling whiteness of Mount Kailasa is in Kalidasa's visionary eyes "the eternal laughter of a God". And Homer's Gods? - Are they not constantly breaking into laughter over the follies of men below? 5 In this connection, let us recall the witty remark Sri Aurobindo once made to his anxiety-laden disciple, Dilip ...
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