... ages into a mightier arc of interpretation and realisation, it would be the crowning of one and the opening of a new and greater cycle. The poets of yesterday and today, Whitman, Carpenter, the Irish poets, Tagore, but also others in their degree are forerunners of this new spirit and way of seeing, prophets sometimes, but at others only illumined by occasional hints or by side rays of a light which... the burden of a tendency of aesthetic feeling, form and treatment which lead away from the pursuit of the direct seeking and the perfect manner. The consistent note we get more constantly in the Irish poets who, freer in mind from Page 173 this past tradition, though something of it must cling perhaps to all who write in the English tongue, unless they start with the superb revolutionary ...
... emergence of the higher perceptions of a larger and purer psychical and intuitive entity in direct contact with the Spirit could not but come, and this greater impulse is represented by the work of the Irish poets. It is the sign of the end, now in sight, of a purely intellectual modernism and the Page 120 coming of a new age of creation, intellectualism fulfilled ceasing by a self-exceeding in ...
... this externality, that motives a new kind of utterance. Much of present-day English poetry drives in the same direction but with less subtlety and a more forceful outwardness of sight and tone. The Irish poets and in a different way the few Indians, Tagore and Chattopadhyay and Mrs. Naidu, who have written in English or transferred their poetical thought into that medium, aim at pure intuitivities of a ...
... vivid spiritual interpretation of Nature. We find it in Phillips' Dreadful suspended business and vast life Pausing, or in his trees Motionless in an ecstasy of rain. In the Irish poets it comes with less of the Shakespearian kinship, though Yeats has often enough a different but corresponding manner, but most characteristically in a delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision ...
... a common tendency—strained to an exaggeration of half vital, half psychic motive. There is a purer and more delicate psychic intuition with a spiritual issue, that which has been brought by the Irish poets into English literature. The poetry of Whitman and his successors has been that of life, but of life broadened, raised and illumined by a strong intellectual intuition of the self of man and the ...
... still no reason why the next wave shouldn't carry poetry to higher points of achievement than even Shakespeare's. Sri Aurobindo finds in Meredith and Phillips vague hints of a new voice, and in the Irish poets, A.E. and Yeats, something more too: an intimation of the filiations between man's earthly life and the unseen psychical life; an intimation of an ideal eternal beauty beyond the real and the evanescent; ...
... And profit-making being the sole motive behind commercialism, it is to earn money any how, by hook or crook, by means fair or foul that has become the order of the day. More than 200 years ago, the Irish poet wrote in an inspired vein : Till fairs the land to hastening ills a prey/Where wealth accumulates, men decay. This truth is more than amply borne out by the insane craze for accumulation of wealth ...
... NOTES BY THE AUTHOR Page 9. I have been forced to introduce the Indian word, lila, (here as well as later, again and again) meaning the cosmic play of the Divine. The great Irish Poet A.E. had to introduce in his Yogic poems a number of such words because — to quote from a letter he wrote to me years ago: "English is a great language but it has very few words relating to... Sarojini — tilak, koel etc. Koel has since passed into English usage though words like tilak, ras, lila etc. have not. But they will, when, in the near future, Indian poets will have received their due recognition as real creative poets in English.) Page 19. The opening hymn is translated from an ancient Sanskrit couplet, a hymn to the Sungod: Javakusumasamkasham kashyapeyam mahadyutim... personal glory, but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry.... You are right when you say that up till now the English people have not favoured Indian poets writing verse in English; but the mind of the future will be more international than it is today. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance. * ...
... A situation similar to India's was Ireland's, making for a degree of check on genuine poetic utterance. May not this situation be one out of several factors owing to which, whatever the prose achievements, there was no Irish poet of authentic first-rate power before Yeats came on the scene? In the pre-Yeatsian period, the peak was Thomas Moore with his Irish Melodies', but the peak was pretty... our using the English language as in the difficulty of being a true poet in any language. Of course, it is more marked where a foreign tongue is concerned, yet it is not necessarily insuperable. And for Yeats in particular to have overlooked this is curious short sight. Page 16 The true language of Ireland is not English. English was imposed on her as part of the British rule... the supreme poet of the Infinite and the Eternal in English has still to come. Perhaps he will never come from among Englishmen. Certain traits of the English temperament might stand in the way of his advent. But the wonderful instrument is now within the reach of a race to which the Infinite and the Eternal is the very life-breath. All that responds rapturously in the English poets to the One ...
... words (even when they seem unpoetic to us) being chosen and arranged in the right rhythm. In short, the poetic is welded and fused with the actual, subjective truth with objective reality. The Irish poet, A.E., once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy that the English language was pitifully ill-equipped to convey spiritual ideas; but Sri Aurobindo could not subscribe to this view: Page 459 ... to men"; they wished, like the Seer-Poets of old, to see the inner structure of the Cosmos—the wires, the machinery, the currents, the processes, the powers—and to use the "magic of the divine Logos" to describe what they had seen. Did Dante succeed? Did Milton succeed? To quote Sri Krishnaprem, Page 458 Perhaps the last great Western poet to have made any real attempt... trinity"—started governing the affairs of man, poets like the Vedic rishis glimpsed the great truths relating to the matrix of universal life in sudden lightning flashes of illumination and expressed them through myth and symbol, in mantric incantation and song. If poetry is to be written again with such inner certainty and total cosmic vision, the new poet has both to return to those ancient wells ...
... reaches the doors of Divine Beauty. Lest it may be thought that this is a mystic ideal, a speciality of the Indian temperament, I give here a few quotations from A. E. the great Irish Poet. He asks the poet and the artists " Are we alone ". ? " Are we secure from intrusion ?" And then he asks the artists : " Are you not tired of surfaces ?" There is a form that comes to you and says " I come... come from the land of immortal youth." " These forms inhabited Shelly's luminous cloudland and they were the models in the Pheidian heart, and they have been with artist, poet and musician since the beginning of the world, and they will be with us until we grow into their beauty and learn from them how to fulfil human destiny, accomplish our labour which is to make this world into likeness of ...
... picture of supramental transformation. As students in the Ashram School, there were many ways • we learnt to relate to poets like Amal Kiran. From the time Tehmi-ben, our peerless professor of English, introduced us to "A.E." by reading out his "Babylon" to us, this Irish poet has exercised a tremendous fascination on me. Although I was then just a callow youth, my whole being immediately thrilled... our attention on the sole, luminously efflorescing branch. Here we discover another truth about poets - that the poet and the man who houses the poet are two completely different beings. They must never be confused. The man may be the swaying Page 200 shadow of the dark tree but the poet is lit by eternity. The metaphor of the tree continues throughout the octave, giving such a minute... especially the poets of the 1930's. The 1930's mark a golden age in the life of the Ashram not only in the field of Sadhana - we hear that almost every sadhak and sadhika in the Ashram used to have rich spiritual experiences at that time - but also in the fields of poetry, painting and music. On the one hand Sri Aurobindo was either creating poets out of non-poets or inspiring inborn poets to greater endeavour ...
... to interminable quarrels between Cousins and the American Hirsch on debatable points in the language but especially on this battlefield and never once could they agree. It is true that one was an Irish poet from Belfast and the other an American scholar and scientist, so perhaps neither could be Page 640 taken as an unquestionable authority on the English tongue; but among Englishmen themselves... to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me. The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter. Poetry is permitted to be insane—the poet and the madman go together: though even there there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only—though they can be perfectly sane when they want. In poetry anything ...
... or identification with the subject may be suitable to ancient India but can have no utility for the modern man. This is far from actual experience. The example of George Russell, alias AE, the Irish poet, shows that not only in modern times but even outside India, this subjective method of creating forms is practicable. His book "Candle of vision" bears witness to his experience of it. The case of... a harmony trying to express itself. This harmony is not merely a harmony on the life-plane, though life is its most important field for expression. This harmony is spiritual; some glimpse of it the poet had when he spoke of "the music of the 'spheres'." It belongs to a supreme spiritual plane, but its aim is to manifest itself here on our life-plane. Art is one medium through which it can express itself ...
... Brother found, The Younger melts in fondness in his arms". — Leaves of Grass. In addition to the work of innovator of the new world here is an example from A. E. the Irish poet, inheritor of the old Irish culture: "Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress; Each chimney's vapour, like a thin grey rod, Mounting aloft through miles of quietness, Pillars the skies of God".... the Word is so well-known to the Vedic Seers but here we find a modem poet echoing the faith of the most ancient poets. The whole poem would be too long to reproduce here but it is one of those remarkable poems produced during the war-time which gives us a hopeful vision of the destiny of man. In effect, he says, that the poet who is obliged to live in the present cannot know all the forces at work... it to what Sri Aurobindo calls, "the seeing mind" where the expression becomes illuminative speech, and if the poet can rise still higher, to the very home of creative force, he would there find that his creation rises to "the inevitable, absolute and revealing word". "The greatest poets have been those in whom these movements of a highest intensity of intuitive and inspired speech have been of frequent ...
... stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor form nor colour, nor ever any word." Perhaps the Yeatsian tightening and connectivity add to the overhead intonation; the Irish poet's greater intimacy with the poetic potentialities of English seems to help out better the accent which the Indian has acquired. The poetry written by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya before he turned... English singers, the first among them to be a Yogi in the oriental sense. Even in an oriental poet like Tagore the overhead language-stir is mostly absent. Tagore is the ideal psalmist of the emotions - emotions not feverishly uncontrolled and rendered a confusing flame as in so many devotee-poets of the West but harmoniously psychicised and tinged by the superb serenity which enters into all Indian... the poet trains himself to be sensitive to them. But a sustained stream of light can arrive only if the poet practises that self-training in a deliberate integral way. Yoga is the desideratum - and an important part of Yoga for the poet of the Spirit is a tuning-up to the overhead speech by constantly revolving within his consciousness the Mantra and its approximations. Even for the non-poet the ...
... explanations of visions and dreams given by modern psychology sound quite untenable. It is more likely that visions and dreams have an independent existence of their own on subtle planes. A. E., the Irish mystic poet, after describing a vision in which he saw everything illumined says: "people pass them (visions) by too easily saying, ' it is imagination,' as if imagination were easily explained as a problem ...
... stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor form nor colour, nor ever any word," Perhaps the Yeatsian tightening and connectivity add to the overhead intonation; the Irish poet's greater intimacy with the poetic potentialities of English seems to help out better the accent which the Indian has acquired. The poetry written by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya before he... the first among them to be a Yogi in the oriental sense. Even in an oriental poet like Tagore the overhead language-stir is mostly absent. Tagore is the ideal psalmist of the emotions — emotions not feverishly uncontrolled and rendered a Page 129 confusing flame as in so many devotee-poets of the West but harmoniously psychicised and tinged by the superb serenity which enters... the poet trains himself to be sensitive to them. But a sustained stream of light can arrive only if the poet practises that self-training in a deliberate integral way. Yoga is the desideratum — and an important part of Yoga for the poet of the Spirit is a tuning-up to the overhead speech by constantly revolving within his consciousness the Mantra and its approximations. Even for the non-poet the ...
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