Keats : John (1795-1821), considered one of the greatest of 19th century lyricists, for his vivid imagery, sensuous appeal, & rich classical themes.
... inspired speech for such descents..." 2 Apropos of Keats he declares: "Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, — not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era." 3 To get all this into proper focus we may note further that, although Shelley and Keats are called the most purely poetic minds, Sri Aurobindo... artistry of rhythmic utterance is the essence of Keats. Poetry is an art, and so every poet is an artist. But the poet is he who sings, the artist is he who makes the song. In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of... age. Shelley saw in Keats a soul exquisitely struggling for expression within an entanglement of hypersensitive art-conscience, and he was eager to impart to him all the elan and speed through the ether that were his own speciality. When, however, Keats died, Shelley wrote the superb Adonais, in which he recognises and proclaims his own essential oneness with all that Keats stood for and strove ...
... but Jeffrey lumped them with whatever faults of taste he could spot, and he exploited to his own advantage the fact that Keats came from a humble family and was a Londoner who had never had higher education but was a mere physician's assistant. Jeffrey's verdict was that Keats the illiterate Cockney compounder should stick to his master's dispensary and not dabble in the making of poetry: the dictations... be followed by an intelligence fit only for the apothecary's prescriptions. Jeffrey's attack was in such ferocious and venomous terms that all readers thought it would drive Keats to abandon poetry for good. But Keats was a tough little fellow who had quite a self-critical mind that knew both his own defects and his own finer possibilities: he never swerved from his sense of poetic destiny, any... attacked too, for his high-flying lyricism as well as for his sup-posedly loose morals: so his heart went out in greater sympathy to Keats, and his own resentment at the bitterness of non-Roman-ticists against the new poetry lent itself easily to the idea that Keats had been mortally hurt by the injustice and abuse of Jeffrey and his crew. Shelley also did not live long, but nobody could imagine he ...
... themselves there is a pointer to it in Page 159 the work of Keats. Sri Aurobindo has some interesting remarks on it. He considers Keats and Shelley as "perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, -not... a subtler and more ethereal level." Sri Aurobindo cites as successes in this effort some lines of Keats: Page 175 The journey homeward to habitual self! and ... solitary thinkings, such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven... "These lines of Keats," he 16 observes, "are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word... not yet', but it was from the first the real sense and goal of his genius." 2 Not in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, not even in the great Odes does Sri Aurobindo see the real soul of Keats: this "inner genius... lay in that attempt which, first failing in Endymion , was again resumed in Hyperion . It was the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its ...
... I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid, A little cupola more neat than solemn Protects his dust... Page 176 Think, again, of Keats, the most extraordinary young genius in the domain of English poetry — Keats, attacked by brutal critics, loving in vain a woman who hardly realised either his love or his genius, suffering not only from heartbreak but also from con-sumption... to a Nightingale and the serene yet intense symphony of the Ode on a Grecian Urn — Keats who died at the age of twenty-four and voiced the depth of his disappointment by offering for his own epitaph the sentence: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." In the eighteenth century, a little earlier than Keats, there was the English poet on whom Wordsworth himself has two touching lines, the youth... for The Light whose smile kindles the universe and pain at the scorching abuse thrown on it by bigots. The remains of the author of Adonais, that superb elegy on Keats, were buried in the same cemetery at Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos- Page 177 sible: Cor cordium — "Heart of hearts". Byron, the poet doubled with ...
... How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand, Ah! Psyche, from the regions which Are holy land!, Poe, however, has quite another temper of presentation than Keats. Keats here is earthly-concrete despite his reference to some "untrodden region" of his mind and to "shadowy thought". Poe brings that very region and that very thought into play without yet losing the... actively, by one greater and better than we are. Prose, a lively and leaping phosphorescence which pulls us away from ourselves. Poetry, a reminder of the inward...") Bre-mond quotes the phrase of Keats about poems yet to come: "There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." Then he comments: "Ce poids, ou veut-il nous preci-piter, sinon vers ces augustes retraites ou nous attend... The highest spiritual contemplation is a suspension of thought. So the rational or reflective or logopoeic part of poetry is not the true spellbinder, the pure poetic essence. Bremond tells us that Keats originally started his Endymion with the line: A thing of beauty is a constant joy — but later changed it to: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. I shall postpone at the moment my ...
... his own ethereal beauty. As with Wordsworth and Byron, so too we find Shelley and Keats standing side by side, but with a certain antinomy. They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry,—not grandiose, classical... middle realm, is the singer of a greater and deeper liberty and a purer and nobler revolt than Byron, has the constant feeling of a high spiritual and intellectual beauty, not sensuous in the manner of Keats, but with a hold on the subtler beauty of sensible things which gives us not their glow of vital warmth and close material texture, but their light and life and the rarer atmosphere that environs them... largeness and opulence and admits intimations of the ideal goddess, are almost all of them among the scanty number of the chief masterpieces in this high and deliberate lyrical form. But the real soul of Keats, his inner genius, the thing he was striving to bring out of himself is not to be altogether found even here; it lay in that attempt which, first failing in Endymion , was again resumed in Hyperion ...
... on to Keats: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of mom, Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star, Sat gray-haird Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. What strikes one is the difference of approach: if Milton is grand, Keats is entrancing;... choose such a form ? Let us try to analyse the situation. Blank verse prior to Sri Aurobindo had become perfect as far as it could go with the group of poets that came after Milton: Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, to name only some. Each gave something to it, some lucidity, grandeur, beauty, sweetness or flow. Sri Aurobindo's earlier attempts, like Love and Death, Urvasie and Baji Prabhou... mystic poetry, for narrative verse, for all kinds of lyrical or epical forms. We can distinguish, not as in Milton's heroic style, or as in the heroic couplet of Pope or as in the lyrical verse of Keats, a style that was used for one purpose alone, but a style that is universal. Used in one context it is epical, in another it is narrative and in yet another it is lyrical. Such is Sri Aurobindo's ...
... Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life - a verse already cited in the earlier comparison - When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Then listen to Keats talking of dying with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears: To thy high requiem become a sod. Again, here is Shakespeare on release from the obstructive tangibilities of... In Shakespeare at all times we have a quiver of the Life-force, a passion of the entrails, as it were, an impact on the sensational being, a most vivid vibrant word. In Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats we have a calmer fineness, the more conceptive intensity starting as if from the brain proper in imaginative action. Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out this difference while dwelling on the... many-hued reli- Page 87 giosity and Vaughan's intellectual vision's luminous attempt at transcendence of itself, there glimmers out a presage of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. A forerunner more immediate in time as well as in several moods is the effort made by poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton and Cowper in the third quarter of the eighteenth century to ...
... There are immense stretches of aridity and abstractness in him, especially in his later work. And not everything that even fine critics have praised is pure gold. Thus, it is impossible to agree with Keats when he remarked that The Excursion was one of the wonders of the age. Much less can we join Coleridge in that fantastic estimate of The Borderers, a play of Wordsworth: "His drama is absolutely wonderful... possible unless often enough he had the capacity to be, in Keats's phrase, "a miser of sound and syllable." POETIC ARTISTRY However, we must distinguish his artistry from Keats's. Keats was the word-craftsman par excellence and it almost appears as if he wanted intensity of vision and feeling more because they could electrify language into breath-bereaving exquisiteness or splendour... its own revelatory life-enrichment. Wordsworth had the conviction that he had extraordinary things to say and that poetry was the best instrument of embalming as well as transmitting his experience. Keats was drunk with the wine of words and in order to make it always'champagne instead of common claret or even good Burgundy he desired the richest and loveliest ideas and emotions to distil it from. The ...
... and dispassionate in his estimate of any literary form or poet or period in the history of English literature. Not many critics who have undertaken to compare Shelley and Keats have been absolutely fair to both. Keats easily winning their sympathy and admiration for various reasons, Shelley would have to serve as the foil. In Leavis's uncharitable comparative Page 276 ... able to identify the merits and limitations of both with clinical precision: “In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings... Blake criticism is too well-known to demand reiteration. But, unfortunately, it has overshadowed his writings on other romantic poets. Though his observations on Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats are profoundly illuminating, it is Wordsworth who receives the warmest praise and whose poetry is quoted repeatedly with love and admiration. There is no full-length essay*on Wordsworth in Sethna's ...
... lifted by the winnowing wind". But in places Hood equals Keats in the richly packed and carefully chosen phrase: e.g ., "The squirrel gloats on his accomplished hoard", or "With the last leaves for a love-rosary", or "Like a dim picture of the drowned past", and the line I have already quoted about the hushed mind. This line exceeds the range Keats has accepted here but it is not something alien to... comparison you wanted from me of the two "Autumns" - Hood's and Keats's. (1)Keats's style is more objective. There is no mention of "I". Where Hood says "I saw old Autumn in the misty morn", Keats simply apostrophises "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness". Even when the motif of "seeing" comes in, he uses the third person: "Who hath not seen thee...?" The personal subjective element is completely... the phrase I have just quoted, a profound note beyond anything in Keats's picture -a note which may legitimately be called the Romantic Age's anticipation of the Aurobindonian style. (2) Keats packs his lines with richer details: every phrase is laden with descriptive matter: there is much more poetic information. Only one is laxly built: "Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find". Hood's ...
... English verse had fused here together with an absolutely original ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips, along with something of Shelley and Coleridge. I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view; I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you mention except... influence of Shelley and Coleridge, but since I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry, they may have been there without my knowledge. The one work of Keats that influenced me was Hyperion —I dare say my blank verse got something of his stamp through that. The Page 219 poem itself was written in a white heat of inspiration during 14 days of... But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or inattention that can fail to see ...
... al cult. Poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by a return to Miltonic blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form,—an influence which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley,—to lyrical movements, but more prominently the classical ode form, or Page 103 to freer and richer moulds of verse. Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Sha... form tends to be still rather hard and external or else ineffective in its movement; the native lyric note has not yet returned, but only the rhetorical stateliness of the ode, not lyricised as in Keats and Shelley, or else lyrical forms managed with only an outward technique but without any cry in them. Romanticism is still rather of the intellect than in the temperament, sentiment runs thinly and... privilege of the earliest initiation. This new poetry has six great voices who fall naturally in spite of their pronounced differences into pairs, Wordsworth and Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Byron sets out with a strangely transformed echo of the past intellectualism, is carried beyond it by the elemental force of his personality, has even one foot across the borders of the spiritual, ...
... as Dryden himself has shown in his best work. But there my appreciation stops; I cannot rise to the heights of admiration of those who put them on a level with or on a higher level than Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley—I cannot escape from the feeling that their work, even though more consistently perfect within their limits and in their own manner (at least Pope's), was less great in poetic quality. These... always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in spite of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion—for mark that even at the... upon a French poet or vice versa , that is due to a difficulty in entering into the finer spirit and subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine,—for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an Englishman knows it, can get the full intuition of a poet like Shelley well enough ...
... hidden beauty out of the picture is for each reader to feel Page 339 or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats' "magic casements" and "foam of perilous seas" and "fairy lands forlorn", but I do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character. I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by this that they... contemporary world he might be said rather to throw his poem in its face and leave it to resent this treatment as an unpleasant slap, as a contemporary world treated the early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modern times... Cicero, Bossuet and Burke are rhetoricians, but their work ranks with the greatest prose styles that have been left to us. In poetry the accusation of rhetoric might be brought against such lines as Keats' Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. To conclude, there is the "swords of sheen" in the translation of Bande Mataram . That might be ...
... was Keats's friend Henry Stephens who, on seeing the first draft of Endymion, remarked that its opening line — A thing of beauty is a constant joy — was good but still "wanting something". Keats pondered the criticism a little, then cried out, "I have it", and wrote: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. We can see at once that here, as the Abbe Bremond says, "the current passes". I... with Keats's context, there is nothing in it to prevent a poet from making it memorable in a different context — if he knows how to do so: that is, if he knows how to give it a finer expression than Keats did. Indeed, that finer expression will hold a nuance which the original line lacks — the change will come about by the very recasting of it. Yet, in the overall aspect as distinguished from the detailed... ever". They lack the perfect inevitability of inner and outer form possessed by Keats's phrase. Going to the root of the question, we shall find this perfect inevitability to be a mystical value. Keats himself supplies a clue by the Platonic sense of beauty he has brought into his line. That "for ever" extends, as I have indicated, the joy of beauty to a divine Page 342 ever" extends ...
... contemporary world he might be said rather to throw his poem in its face and leave it to resent this treatment as an unpleasant slap, as a contemporary world treated the early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modem times... each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats's "magic casements" and "foam of perilous seas" and "fairly lands forlorn", but I do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character. I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by this that they might have some force with regard to another kind... But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in Page 26 essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or ...
... pre-eminent artist among English poets. Only five others qualify to come anywhere near him: they are, in order of time, Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, - not gran- Page 72 diose, classical and derived... severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Page 76 Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides...." 15 "There can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his poems gives the image ...
... The absence of this natural "we" should indicate that Keats is not personally underlining anything addressed to his reading public and that "ye" is spoken by the Urn. It may be asked: "Why should the Urn say 'Ye' instead of 'thou' when, as Keats tells us in line 8, it is addressing 'man'?" A con-vincing answer can be made in several steps. Keats had already Page 295 used "thou" in... highly original proposition that Keats is addressing the Urn. Since he has been often addressing it in the course of the Ode and has started the poem with an address to it, there is no inherent implausibility in the proposition. Further, we have established that "ye" can stand for "thou". So, when we find Otway and some others using "you" for "thou", why could not Keats make "ye" do the same job? Lin... about a passage from Keats's famous Ode on a Grecian Urn where both these topics are involved. The passage has posed a textual problem too and critics have debated the reading ever since the time of Keats. We shall deal with all the difficulties. Let me first outline to you the complex theme of the Ode. The poet takes the scenes and figures carved on a Grecian Urn and imaginatively reconstructs the ...
... are, however, other circumstances more catastrophic than a long yet unconsummated career; and their classical victims are Keats and Shelley and, before them, Marlowe. They did not have even an opportunity to answer the command which the daimon lays upon the outer life. Keats has left us his precise plans — namely, to write poems combining the colour of St. Agnes' Eve with a greater ... by the dazzling darkness of a Cleopatra's eyes. But would Keats have realised his wish? If he had had the slightest capacity to create live characters — and without that no drama worth the name can exist — it would have displayed itself, at least to some degree, in his extant dramatic efforts. These efforts make no living gesture, and Keats would have, in the last analysis, ill-used his mature years... of view a wider gap was left in English verse by the squall in the Bay of Spezzia which drowned his voice for ever than by the coughing lungs that wasted the life-breath of Keats in Rome; besides, even the inspired fluency of Keats can be compared in swiftness with Milton's and not with Shakespeare's. From another point of view, that squall was more disastrous than the stab which ended Marlowe; ...
... desired, conducers to what Keats in another letter terms "fellowship with essence" - "essence" here under the aspect of Beauty. Thus "all our Passions" are a species of imaginative energy - Page 142 and, conversely, the Imagination that seizes the Beautiful is a species of passionate energy. Does not Keats himself, in a communication to George and Georgiana Keats, write: "the yearning... not an extinction, much less a degradation of the individual, but an apotheosis. The being of Keats too is not conceived as merged and lost in the Universal Spirit: The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." To be more precise and positive: the being of Keats is not only said by Shelley to suffer no self-loss in the Spirit that is Page 134 ... Classical and Romantic 8 Romantic Pantheism and its philosophy - Coleridge on the Imagination -Keats on Beauty and Truth In a general way all the great Romantics of Wordsworth's time are true to the "type of the wise" illustrated by him when he let his poem To a Skylark end as an answer in the negative to its owri opening question: Ethereal ...
... moan of doves and murmur of bees. 12 As to your next comparison, you must not expect me to enter into a comparative valuation of my own poetry 13 with that of Keats; 14 I will only say that the "substance" of these lines of Keats is of the highest kind and the expression is not easily surpassable, and even as regards the plane of their origin it is above and not below the boundary of the overhead... × ...solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain. —Keats ...
... feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line. Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or Page 369 ... alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using "divinité", "infinité" "éternité", as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose Hyperion compelled even the sneering Byron to forget his usual condescending attitude towards "Johnny" and confess that nothing grander had been seen since Aeschylus. Racine, too, cannot be left ...
... offer his devotion to the object of love which the poet feels akin to the Divine, Page 100 Keats wrote those immortal lines :— "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Beauty is one with the Reality. But Keats found the world far from being beautiful. So, he burst forth into a magnificent and fiery aspiration :— ... experience of beauty is the tragic vein of disappointment and a justification of the possessive impulse. In Shelley's experience of beauty there is an ethereal and mystic strain. Shelley and Keats are like caged birds trying to escape from the imprisonment of human limitations beating ineffectively their wings against the bars. But their perception has great truth and power; they stress the need ...
... instead an ardent aspiration to offer his devotion to the object of love which the poet feels. akin to the Divine. Keats wrote those immortal lines : "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Beauty is one with Reality. But Keats found the world far from being beautiful. So, he burst forth into a magnificent and fiery aspirations : " -... the experience of beauty is the tragic vein of disappointment and a justification of the possessive impulse. In Shelly's experience of beauty there is an ethereal and mystic strain. Shelly and Keats are like caged birds trying to escape from the imprisonment of human limitations, beating ineffectively their wings against the bars. But their perception has great truth and power; they stress the ...
... Wordsworth and Keats It is better to be as simple and direct as possible in one's writing. One can't make rigid rules like that. Wordsworth is as simple and direct as possible (not always though). Keats aims at word-magic. One can't say Wordsworth is a greater poet than Keats. Whatever style is poetically successful, is admissible. 21 December 1935 Keats and Shelley As regards Keats and Shelley... 7 February 1935 With regard to Keats, is it not rather difficult to deny a great poet a possibility when his whole ambition is set towards acquiring it? If we didn't have Hyperion, would we have thought it possible for him to strike the epic note? None of the poets round him had the least epical gift. Page 377 It can easily be seen from Keats' earlier work. And with ripeness he could... Shelley why attach so much importance to fluency? Keats besides produced enough in his few years of productivity and enough besides of a high excellence to rank him among the greater English poets. What might he not have done if he had lived to fifty? But I don't believe he had any dramatic genius in him. None of these poets had. Shelley's Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic construction and poetic ...
... of them 'prick a hidden beauty' out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats' 'magic casements' and 'foam of perilous seas' and 'fairy lands forlorn', but 1 do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character." Before I proceed further, let me ask you to guard against a notion you may catch... self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from antiquity and the great Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - from the near past. A new turn came only when I had on a few rare occasions the direct contact of India's still lived spirituality, and glimpses were dimly caught of the light treasured for ever in... its spirit and did not know how to make it genuinely English. Even an established medium like pentametrical blank verse has failed to spring alive in most hands. We do not run across a Milton or a Keats in every century. An Arnold may triumph in a certain vein in a piece like Sohrab and Rustum, a Stephen Phillips (unfortunately a forgotten voice now) may draw forth an exquisite in-toned somewhat ...
... true 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... discovers new lands and oceans in his imaginative vision, reveals new truths and beauties and hidden routes and pathways quite unfamiliar and unknown to the workaday humanity, and his word acts, what Keats would say, as ... the leaven That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth. Thus Mayakovsky, the modem Russian poet, who was "bombarding... but in Wordsworth's imagination he is transformed into a 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 ...
... tranquil, of a landscape where those natural and bright and vivid entities flourish merge in the grey motionless unfamiliarity evoked by Keats in all the other lines? There is no poetic failure, only a failure in consistency, a lapse of the dominant motive; and Keats, artist to the marrow, was troubled by the discrepancy. So, before sending his manuscript to the press, he tried to improve the lines:... could not excuse. * I do not share the present-day cult for the frigidly terse, the roughly deliberate, which inveighs against Swinburne's so-called effusiveness, verbal and rhythmic. Keats, too, would seem pompous, romantic, colourfully emotional, and thus open to the charge of effusiveness in the eyes of the extremists of cold and dry light in poetry. My criticism of Swinburne is directed... much life as a young vulture's wing Would spread upon a field of green-ear'd corn, Page 62 so clever and delicately suggestive of its meaning was the indirect allusive turn Keats had given to the language in order to keep the manner of the whole passage consistent. Yet in the passage itself the two complete lines from the above seem out of place: Deep in the shady sadness ...
... detail a well-known example of the poetic art in action. When Keats made the first draft of his Endymion, his friend Henry Stephens remarked about the opening line - A thing of beauty is a constant joy - that it was good but still "wanting something". Evidently the fine sentiment correctly metred was not enough for him. Keats weighed the criticism for a few minutes, then cried out, "I... "I have it", and rewrote: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. All readers of Keats would agree that here, as Abb6 Bremond once commented, "the current passes". But what exactly has brought about the difference between the original version and the revised one? To begin with: the former sounded like a truth needing to be pressed upon our attention rather than going home to... with a ring of spontaneity, an air of immediate creativity, whereas the earlier bore the look of a built-up effect, a striking construction, even though it may have been written without effort. As Keats had to work for the revision, he cannot be called spontaneous in the ordinary sense. But in poetry the quality of the end-product alone counts. It does not matter how that quality is reached - at first ...
... as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early Keats, leaves us with only a keen symbol of lofty feeling. As far as the sonnet-mode allows, it gives brief snatches, often intermixed, of nearly all the various manners and tempers compassed by Keats in his poetic career. There is the romantic mood of wonder and exultation, the penchant for Greek... Muse that in the midst of the 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... jolty four-line ballad-metre converted into a striding, coupleted fourteener, but nowhere revives the surge and thunder of the multi-motioned yet sinuous and calmly controlled Greek hexameter. Yes, Keats hardly realised the difference, but some unconscious intuition brought into the three lines where he speaks of Homer something of the very accent of the Greek poet, while in the one line where he talks ...
... 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 clear. This is what has happened... is the Miltonic, the second the Shakespearean form of the sonnet. Other forms can be made but these are the two classic sonnet structures in English literature. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats are the greatest sonnet writers in English. You can find the best sonnets in the Golden Treasury . There are others also who have written sonnets of the highest quality e.g. Sidney, Shelley—you will... 20 December 1936 The Ode What is meant by an ode? Is it another name for an invocation? No. It is a lyrical poem of some length on a single subject e.g. the Skylark (Shelley), Autumn (Keats), the Nativity (Birth of Christ) (Milton) working out a description or central idea on the subject. 14 June 1937 Lyric, Narrative, Epic I am having much difficulty with the akṣara-vṛtta (yaugika ...
... either a strong armoured structure of the thought or a carefully developed unity of the building which all poets can't manage. However there have been attempts at an irregular sonnet rhyme-sequence. Keats tried his hand at one a century ago and I vaguely believe (but that may be only an illusion of Maya) that modern poets have played loose fantastic tricks of their own invention; but I don't have much... if brilliant, is thin because the deeper creative founts and the kindlier sources of vision are not there. 27 April 1931 The Ode A successful ode must be a perfect architectural design and Keats' Odes are among the best, if not the best in English poetry, as I think they are, at any rate from the point of view of artistic creation, because of the perfect way in which the central thought is ...
... of the Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden. Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the spirit. The Victorian period did not deny their influences; it felt them in the first form of its work, and we might have expected it... comes back with them on the external life and tries to subject them to its mould and use them for its purpose. This turn is not universal,—Blake escapes from it; nor is it the single dominant power,—Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have their hearts elsewhere: but it is a constant power; it attracts even the poets who have not a real genius for it and vitiates their work by the immixture of an alien ...
... Ananda or, you may say, beauty and Ananda become indistinguishably one. 14 March 1933 Your poem expresses very beautifully an aspect of beauty as it is circumstanced in this world. The lines of Keats also give one aspect only which it tries to generalise. In fact, Beauty is Ananda thrown into form—if it casts a shadow of pain, it is because the Divine Bliss which we mean by Ananda is watered down... a companion or a reaction. But if the consciousness of earth could be so deepened and strengthened and made so intensively receptive as not only to feel but hold the true Ananda, then the lines of Keats would be altogether true. But for that it would have to acquire first a complete liberation and an abiding peace. 16 February 1935 Beauty is not the same as delight, but like Love it is an expression ...
... direct mode of saying things which you favour to the exclusion of other approaches to a situation strikes me as self-impoverishment and critical Page 120 misjudgment. Early Yeats and Keats write indirectly of the sex-act. Another kind of indirectness, an extreme of nothing save suggestion, a most delicate and moving fusion of speech and silence meets us in Dante's famous episode of Paolo... says to Dante no more than the words: Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante. (Upon that day no further did we read.) Quite a contrast on the one hand to Early Yeats as well as to Keats of the nineteenth century and on the other to Later Yeats of the passage you admire so much for its touching directness. And yet all the various statements are poetry. Sparing language or rich utterance ...
... eighteenth century," writes Bowra, 1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things... They brought to poetry... tracing to the Freudian Subconscious or Unconscious the Movement in English poetry which began in 1789 with Blake's Songs of Innocence and ended in its typical characteristics with the deaths of Keats and Shelley. Doubtless, the Freudian "impulses and drives" had a say in certain parts of this Movement and a much greater one in the Romanticism of the Continent which it shares as well as exceeds ...
... has found a channel or a false facility has got an outlet. A corrected version is not bound to be "sophisticated", it may be the very soul of simplicity and Page 35 sincerity. Keats originally began his Endymion with the line: A thing of beauty is a constant joy. Only later, when a friend found it lacking something, he rewrote: A thing of beauty is... forlorn — had in the first draft "windows" for "casements" and "keel-less" for "perilous". The whole spirit of the thing was lost: the magic atmosphere and the fairy feeling entered only when Keats started being what you term "sophisticated". I must here mention that by your coupling of sincerity with simplicity and opposing them to sophistication you appear to suggest that to be sincere ...
... and keeping our senses sweet with the old sober ecstasies, may imagine ourselves independent of it since we do not require to worship him, having Shelley and Keats as our first guiding stars; but our independence is unreal — Shelley and Keats are the two poets whose affinity to Spenser is the deepest and in their own manner they have distilled anew his musical attar for us. His stamp on the language ...
... that in it the Tennysonian influence is the strongest—especially from the Idylls of the King— strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats, Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. 1 Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical... 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. There is quite an amount in the later ...
... philosophy and poetry remains a key requisite for the poetry of the future. In his comment on Amal's poem Orison in Overhead Poetry, for instance, Sri Aurobindo offers the telling example of Keats. "Keats," he tell us, "was the most romantic of poets, but he could ‘write to philosophise I dare not yet’, he did not write 'I am too much of a poet to philosophise'. To philosophise, he regarded ...
... "wide-winged hymn" is a compound word coined by Sri Aurobindo and most will agree that it qualifies "wind" with marvellous propriety. Then, "altar hills" is a collection modelled after the manner of Keats and other Romantics who themselves took it over from the Elizabethans. Sri Aurobindo is very fond of such combinations of substantives and they are to be found in profusion in Savitri. ... to use at first sight. The word "priest" helps us and we remember Keats's famous lines: The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. 10 Keats' s cosmic image enables us to capture the heightened beauty of a similar cosmicity in Sri Aurobindo's imagery. We have referred to Sri Aurobindo's allusive style here only to throw some light ...
... suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper, Breaking the silence of the... miasmes morbides; Va te purifier dans 1'air superieur, Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur, Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides. "Elevation"— Spleen et Ideal. ' Keats: "Ode on the Poets". Page 306 days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts ...
... suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper, Breaking the silence of the seas... miasmes morbides; Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur, Et bois, comme tine pure et divine liqueur, Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces Iimpides. "Elévation" pleen et Idéal. ² Keats: "Ode on the Poets". Page 78 days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and ...
... things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein ...
... question: "Length in a poem is itself a sin, for length means padding... a long poem is a bad poem... only brief work, intense, lyrical in spirit, can be throughout pure poetry." 53 On the other hand, Keats has remarked that "a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Pole-star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder". Even in Milton's, and certainly in Wordsworth's... is very little doubt that Sri Aurobindo had easy access to the mantra, and hence he could, since the early years at Baroda, command the Djinn's services. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, they all knew the secret, and they all could breathe into the seeming irregularity of blank verse the norm of iambic rhythm - a norm that permitted a hundred and one fl ...
... a sort of official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are Shelley, Tennyson & Byron and to a less degree Keats & perhaps Spenser. Now the manner of these poets, lax, voluptuous, artificial, all outward glitter and colour, but inwardly poor of spirit and wanting in genuine mastery and the true poetical excellence... Kalidasa's numbers and Page 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many "educated" young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories... touched with a subtle significance of thought or emotion. There are others who hold her with a strong sensuous grasp by virtue of a ripe, sometimes an overripe delight in beauty; such are Shakespeare, Keats, Kalidasa. Others again approach her Page 313 with a fine or clear intellectual sense of her charm as do some of the old classical poets. Hardly in the rank of poets are those who like Dryden ...
... shown in his best work. But there my appreciation stops; I cannot rise to the heights of admiration of those who put them on a level Page 133 with or on a higher level than Wordsworth, Keats or Shell —I cannot escape from the feeling that their work, even though more consistently perfect within their limits and in their own manner (at least Pope's), was less great in poetic quality These... always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in its of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion—for mark that even at the... upon a French poet or vice versa, that is due to a difficulty in entering into the finer spirit and subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine, for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an English- man knows it, can get the full estimation of a poet like Shelley all right ...
... holy water. Phanopoeia of the mysterious that just peeps into the mystical is sovereignly brought us by Keats without any such description, any outlined image of this sort, in a line which is not even a mood-picture but only the statement of an emotional fact plus an intellectual conception: Keats does the miracle with the help of one indefinite colour-word: I loved her to the very white of truth... under the constant influence of fathomless forces from the vast depths of his soul-being which is purificatory with its ocean-like reflection of some immaculate heavenliness. We have said that Keats phanopoeia here is more intellectual than sensuous — "priestlike", "pure ablution", "human" serve hardly a visual purpose. The only sensuous word is "moving". But Page 194 there is... second would give the notion: "I loved the true self of her." The third would frame the thought: "I loved the divine truth in her." By not tilting the expression in favour of any of the three concepts Keats fuses all of them and renders his vagueness many-meaninged: the vagueness arises not by a lack of ultimate clarity but by a denseness due to three clarities being simultaneously present. The word "white" ...
... inward finality. If I were he, the last stanza would run: Perhaps he dreams the luminous corn Eaten by night Will make at last the sable flesh Break into light. A Liberty with Keats To attempt correcting a poet is a "ticklish" job. Often, while one may get a more meaningful rounding-off one cannot be sure that one has kept an equal amount of poetry. But I am in a somewhat... it is not inartistic so much as artistic in a violent fashion - violent because of the use of the word "ye". That word is abrupt and is brought in unprepared without any overpowering necessity. If Keats was desirous of shaping a statement and lesson that should break out of the closed contemplative world he had built around the Urn, why did he not say "we" instead of "ye"? That would have been more... became applicable in the same sense though it was more common in the plural. Even today it substitutes the singular "you" in familiar phrases like: How d'ye do? What d'ye think? Thank ye, I tell ye. If Keats himself had put the closing quotes where I have, his semi-Spenserian proclivities would have prevented him from saying "you": it would have been too prosaic for his taste. He would certainly have liked ...
... but in itself it is a bare statement and some might say that it would not be otherwise written in prose and is only saved by the metrical rhythm. The same might be said of the well-known passage in Keats which I have already quoted in this connection: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know The same might be said of Milton's famous line,... did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write "To philosophise I dare not yet"; he did not write "I am too much of a poet to philosophise." To philosophise he regarded evidently Page 317 ... could get nothing that would either improve the passage or set your objection at rest. I am quite unable to agree that there is anything jargonish about the line any more than there is in the lines of Keats, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. That amounts to a generalised philosophical statement or enunciation and the words "beauty" and ...
... Andrew Marvell conjures up the treasures of the East when in the poem To His Coy Mistress he visualises his mistress on the banks of the river Ganga collecting priceless rubies. John Keats seems to be more prolific in the use of gems and precious metals in his poetry. He uses sapphire to capture the beauty of the firmament. The line "Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned star, 11 ... lines from the poem The Eve of St. Agnes like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose 12 reinforce the poet's basic quality of sensuousness. In the latter poem Keats describes the colourful stained glass of a high casement in Madeline's room. As the moonlight shines through the multi-coloured glass pane, Porphyro sees "soft amethyst" caressing his beloved's cheek... It has looked across the jewel bars of heaven, It has entered the aspiring Secrecy. 14 "It" here refers to the young godlike life of Satyavan that has travelled 11 John Keats: A Selection , Ed. S. Ramaswami, Macmillan Students Edition, Madras, 1975, p. 35. 12 Ibid ., p. 57. 13 The Winged Word, Ed . David Green, Macmillan, Madras, 1974, p. 146. 14 Savitri ...
... Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky... No doubt, Sri Aurobindo is more philosophical than Milton here, but Keats is sufficiently so in the lines I have quoted and Sri Aurobindo is not more abstract-nouned in the service of his philosophical turns than Keats there. What makes those lines poetic is the concrete movement imparted to the abstractions. Sri Aurobindo, too, concretises all... Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Page 243 Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...solitary thinkings such as dodge ...
... blustering round, inclement sky... No doubt, Sri Aurobindo is more philosophical than Milton here, but Keats is sufficiently so in the lines I have quoted and Sri Aurobindo is not more abstract-nouned in Page 198 the service of his philosophical turns than Keats there What makes those lines poetic is the concrete movement imparted to the abstractions. Sri Aurobindo, too... influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave ...
... understand Keats rightly? Most of those who have not read his poem think he meant that new and unfamiliar tunes are more enjoyable than the ones to which we have been accustomed. In fact, this is not at all what he had in mind. He was talking of the carved figures on an ancient vase used for storing the ashes of the dead: some of these figures were shown as playing on pipes, and Keats began to imagine... general, the pleasures of the outer senses are declared to be far less intense, far less valuable than those of the inner world of creative dream. Even without the context, a little brooding on the Keats-ian phrase can give us a clue to its delicately deep significance. But with the majority the absence of the context is likely to diminish the exact bearing. Quite otherwise does such an absence act ...
... impose on the searching audacities of the intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative intelligence. Shelley's Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought, Keats' A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, or his To that large utterance of the early Gods, or Wordsworth's the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world... the pre-Victorian poets, as in Wordsworth's And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face, or see the first motion towards it, the first seeking for a suitable style, as in Keats' Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star, but also though less often, a sudden leaping out of the thing... thing itself,— Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Page 188 or The journey homeward to habitual self. These lines of Keats are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and inner truth other than Shakespeare's; ...
... waged, and one of the fiercest was against the young John Keats. Keats's Endymion was torn into ribbons. Not that this poem was blameless. It had immaturities, and Keats was fully aware of them, but the imma-turities were closely intertwined with genuine poetic expression, and on the advice of his friends as well as on his own judgment Keats chose to let the poem go out into the world. The bell ...
... with the number of years in Yoga plus Virgil, Keats and Milton in poetry. I am preparing a hit-back! There was no hit in that—I was only answering your question about writing only when the inspiration comes. I pointed out that these poets (Virgil, Milton) did not do that. They obliged the inspiration to come. Many not so great do the same. How does Keats come in? I don't think I mentioned him. ... it. When hour after hour passes in barren silence bringing unspeakable misery, these examples of great poets—Miltons, Virgils—who cannot be compared with small ones are no consolation at all. (Keats you mentioned on another occasion.) All that about great poets is absolute imbecile nonsense. There is no question of great or small. It is a question of fluency or absence of fluency. Great, small ...
... little story in it and very few incidents. Yet it is an epic. PURANI: Some think that Keats' Hyperion would have been as great as Milton's poem if he had finished it. SRI AUROBINDO: Well, if the whole had been as great as the first part, then it would have been equal to Milton's work. But I doubt if Keats could have kept up that sustained height, for I find that he already declined in the second... Plenty of people have written successfully, such as Byron, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustom and some others. But there are only three who have written great blank verse: Milton, Shakespeare and Keats. NIRODBARAN: What about Harin? SRI AUROBINDO: I don't think he has written anything wonderfull in blank verse. NIRODBARAN: And Amal? SRI AUROBINDO: The trouble with him is that he has a ...
... 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 clear. This is what has happened... lised, but no damned meaning. A height is a height of being, sir, and the seas are seas of the soul, and the path is a path to infinite peace and light. "That is all we know or need to know" as Keats has been telling you every day for the last hundred years. The path naturally goes across the tranced figure—it couldn't possibly get home otherwise. ...Please clarify. Absolutely refuse to ...
... immortality. Keats by calling the nightingale 'immortal Bird' and Shelley by calling the skylark 'blithe Spirit' have thrown a challenge to common sense. A bird is but a bird and must share the mortality of the world; how, then, can a bird either be a spirit or be immortal? "There are people", Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a correspondent, "who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley... Page 309 we have doubtless moments of excitement, the mind is quickened for the nonce by the rasa of the passage, but a second or third reading brings disappointment. It is here Keats scores magnificently: Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam, Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn— 56 for one may read or repeat the lines to oneself ...
... It is an epic. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few incidents, yet it is an epic. At present men demand something more than a great story from an epic. Disciple : Hyperion of Keats, – is it an epic? Sri Aurobindo : The first draft of it would have been an epic – if he could have kept to the height and finished the poem. But in the second draft there is already a drop –... Paradise which is exceedingly fine. There is a tendency to run down Morris, because he derived his inspiration from the Middle Ages as the Victorian age did not give him any subject. Shelley and Keats both tried to bring in the epic with the subjective element, but they failed because they tried to put it in the old forms. Disciple : Toru Dutt has written poetry in English and was well-spoken... quite another thing. For instance, if Milton had not written Paradise Lost he would have still been a great poet, but he could not have occupied so great a place as he does in English literature. Keats, some people say, would have been as great as Shakespeare, had he lived. At least there was the promise in him, but it was not fulfilled. Disciple : Some people have demanded of Y to attempt ...
... new poetic fashion afterwards perfected by Wordsworth, (2) the reintroduction of the supernatural influencing all subsequent writers but mainly Coleridge, Shelley & Keats, (3) the introduction of Hellenism into poetry, carried out by Keats & Shelley & (4) the restoration of the lyric & especially the Ode form, which became a favourite one in the early nineteenth century & of the general subjects suited ...
... amplitude of light. Still, they have a general overhead influence and their difference from fine poetry of the mental order can be marked if we put side by side with their last three verses a snatch from Keats which has a similar motive. In Hyperion an action almost identical with Savitri's is given to Thea, the companion of Saturn during his fallen days: One hand she pressed upon that aching spot... luminous soul enduring the darkness of earth, taking upon itself the heartbreak that is mortal existence, finds voice in the very rhythm of that ancient heartbreak. The emotion in the excerpt from Keats does not draw upon this intense psychic sadness, it neighbours it in the phrase, "that aching spot where beats the human heart", but passes on to the imaginative idea of the Immortal's pain instead ...
... matter omitted after "devour". Third, Keats did not use "spirit" as noun-adjective in the phrase "spirit ditties of no tone". The word goes with what precedes it. Properly punctuated, the whole line would read: "Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone." So, I would make your sentence run: "...Vishnu who piped 'to the spirit ditties of no tone', ..." That would save Keats from turning in his grave. ...
... the centre — universally — in the direction of the line's beginning and in that of its end. An apt technique is everywhere to do justice to the marvellous aptness of the words. Excepting the best of Keats and early Tennyson I know of scarcely any descriptive writing to approach the all-round expressive power of this short passage in the "grand style". Nor is Sri Aurobindo perfect only when his... tangled trees and heaped Page 25 Moss-grown disordered stones, and all the water Is hidden with its lotuses and sways Shimmering between leaves or strains through bloom. Keats and early Tennyson would have been proud to sign also under this picture. So finely realised are Sri Aurobindo's word-pictures that they are as if on a canvas before us, or rather in three ...
... amplitude of light. Still, they have a general overhead influence and their difference from fine poetry of the mental order can be marked if we put side by side with their last three verses a snatch from Keats Page 18 which has a similar motive. In Hyperion an action almost identical with Savitri's is given to Thea, the companion of Saturn during his fallen days: One hand she pressed... luminous soul enduring the darkness of earth, taking upon itself the heartbreak that is mortal existence, finds voice in the very rhythm of that ancient heartbreak. The emotion in the excerpt from Keats does not draw upon this intense psychic sadness, it neighbours it in the phrase, "that aching spot where beats the human heart", but passes on to the imaginative idea of the Immortal's pain instead ...
... the Divine's work. Bosanquet's death in early manhood has always struck me as comparable in its own way with the mortal collapse of Keats at the age of twenty-three as a result of pulmonary tuberculosis — a stupendous promise cut short. But, while Keats left behind him a body of poetic composition which will keep his name alive forever, we can apply to Bosanquet with perfect truth the se ...
... supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius". These factors should include what I would call "quantity of quality", the abundance of the work. Thus Sri Aurobindo has said about Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth: "their best work is as 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... into English - The love that moves the sun and the other stars - it sounds like a medieval anticipation of Shelley's insight into the universal movement while poring over the death of Keats and feeling the dead young poet to have been "made one with Nature": He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Page 366 Spreading ...
... nocturnal note. 1 By the way, it is interesting from the literary point of view that Keats, writing his "Ode to a Nightingale" two hundred years after Milton's day, brings in the same somewhat unusual usage: "darkling". While Milton applied the adjective meaning "in the dark" to the bird, Keats refers to himself: "Darkling I listen." (14.6.1992) 1. Paradise Lost, Book ...
... words, 1 "by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms... And as he lived a busy, purposeful, happy life so he died the happiest of deaths, making the rafters of his poor room ring with the songs of joy he improvised and sang on his death-bed." Even Keats who was once supposed to have been snuffed out by a critic's article and to have languished into extinction with hopeless love is now known to have been a plucky man quite ready to face his own shortcomings ...
... built. Parenthetically I may add that in poetry "Keel" denotes in general a boat or ship by the figure of speech called synecdoche in which a significant part does duty for the whole. Before Keats gave the world those wonderful lines - ...magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn - he had written "keelless" instead of "perilous", but, feeling... ble "inevitable", the ultimate voice of poetry, beyond the inevitabilities of the four styles he defines: the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired. Now back to Arjava from Keats - from the latter's "perilous seas" to the former's "unreal sea-line". This expression points to the horizon which is not a real terminus to the voyager but proves illusory as one sails further and ...
... the first blush or at the "umpteenth" trial you catch unsullied the shining spontaneity of the secret realms where inspiration has its throne. Shakespeare never "blotted" a word; Keats "blotted" a thousand, and yet Keats is looked upon as the most Shakespearean of modern poets in "natural magic". Even Shelley, to all appearance the most spontaneous of singers, was scrupulous in his revisions. What ...
... the English Spenser. While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering "Wordsworth". Well, Sri Aurobindo has said that Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats have been left out of consideration not because their best poetry falls short of the finest ever written but because they have failed to write anything on a larger scale which would place them among... nt".) If even Hugo with his wide scope and large scale has to be left with one foot across and one foot outside the threshold of the sheer first class how can we admit Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats? A Frenchman, of course, would not easily accept the non-inclusion of any French poet at all when India and Greece get three, Italy and England two, and even Germany One. Perhaps what keeps France out ...
... in it the Tennysonian influence, especially from the Idylls of the King, is the strongest strikes one as too sweeping. There is an audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats , Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical... 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. There is quite an amount in the later ...
... tenderness. Brothers and sisters tease each other - I used to do so at least - friends tease each other, lovers certainly do. So teasing is a fine art, if you know how to do it. Perhaps you remember Keats' famous line addressing the Grecian urn - any of my students here? Ah, there! 148Self-rule. The struggle for self-rule was part of the Indian Independence movement. 149When Princess Savitri... So as usual I sat down for meditation -rather, tried to meditate; meditation is still a trial for me! - in Sri Aurobindo's room, somewhere in the morning at about 6:00 or 150John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820), lines 44-45. 151Book I, Canto 1,2. Page 100 6:30. Somehow fortune favoured me, I at once became - I hope you know what that means ? But ...
... Tagore, Das, Monomohan, etc. He also says "Love and Death" and "Baji Prabhou" are ballad poetry. (Laughter) People are funny. Somebody criticising "Love and Death" said it was all Keats, and Girija says there is nothing of Keats, but it is a ballad! SATYENDRA: As in your Life Divine, people find Shankara, Ramanuja, etc. (Laughter) EVENING It appeared that Veerabhadra had been going to the ...
... is better to be as simple and direct as possible. One can't make rigid rules like that. Wordsworth is as simple and direct as possible (not always though), Keats aims at word-magic. One can't say Wordsworth is a greater poet than Keats. Whatever style is poetically successful, is admissible. Next point she makes is that it is better not to close a poem too often with a direct prayer. ...
... there was a lot of trouble, there indeed was a lot of trouble. From that time on, I have learnt from experience and realised the truth of the gospel "Pothe nari biborjita" And I modified the verse of Keats 65 : "A woman of beauty is a trouble for ever." Then now, after all these introductory preliminaries, I hope you don't mind, after all these prefaces which were somewhat long, a la Bernard Shaw... with us. Isn't that wonderful? Here, in this case, identity of consciousness happened through love. 65 Referring to "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" from "Endymion" (1818) by John Keats. Page 35 Love brought about that identity, and love is a great, powerful means of bringing it about. But mind you, my friends, it is a special, rare kind of love that you see here; ...
... abstractions, any more than Keats did with words like Beauty and Truth. "Men have not yet learned to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built", wrote Sri Aurobindo, "or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built. But it is not so with me and I take my stand on my own feeling and experience." 215 Keats writes in his Ode on a ...
... grounding in Latin and made him proficient in English, and taught him history, etc. While Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French, Sri Aurobindo found time at home to read on his own Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare and the Bible, and he even wrote some verse for the Fox's Weekly. While games did not appeal to him, he seems to have played cricket in Mr. Drewett's garden, though not... of flowers In the sweet ambiguous hours.... Beauty pays her boon of breath To thy narrow credit. Death, Leaving a brief perfume; we Perish also by the sea. 50 Didn't Keats say: "Ay, in the very temple of delight/Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine"? Live and perish, love and cease— night and sea cover up everything. It is a long poem, but the trochaic measure and ...
... in language & metre, from that of preceding & subsequent poetry. This difference proceeds from a revolt against the poetical language of the seventeenth century, just as the language of Wordsworth & Keats is a revolt against that of the eighteenth. The Elizabethan poets aimed at a poetry which should be romantic, sensuous and imaginative; romantic, that is to say, full of the strange and wonderful, sensuous ...
... becomes the inhabitant of a moonlit world of romance and yet—there is the unique gift, the consummate poetry—remains perfectly natural, perfectly near to us, perfectly human. Shelley's Witch of Atlas & Keats' Cynthia are certainly lovely creations, but they do not live; misty, shimmering, uncertain beings seen in some half dream when the moon is full and strange indefinable figures begin to come out from ...
... here only a little over a year and had when he came a thousand ties with the world. It is also something that a man already marked out by some of the greatest English writers of the day as an equal of Keats and Shelley should renounce all publication and all fame and write only for myself and the Mother and the sadhaks. I know how impossible such a renunciation would be to most poets and writers and it ...
... spiritual Ananda, the secret of truth and beauty in it for which it was created; it is in the sense of that spiritual joy of vision, and not in any lower sensuous, intellectual or imaginative seeing, that Keats' phrase becomes true for the poet, beauty that is truth, truth that is beauty, and this all that we need to know as the law of our aesthetic knowledge. He is right too in wishing to make poetry more ...
... certain elements of technique, but these come in the course of the formation of the verse. Each poet finds his own technique—that of Shakespeare differs from Marlowe's, both from Milton's and all from Keats'. In English I can say that variations of rhythm, of lengths of syllable, of caesura, of the structure of lines help and neglect of them hinders—so too with pause variations if used; but to explain ...
... value. Also I do not make comparisons—I take it by itself as a thing apart in its own province. I know of course that my old schoolfellow Binyon and others in England have spoken in this connection of Keats and Shelley; but I do not myself feel the need of that comparative valuation. After all one can only give one's own view of contemporary poetry,—we must leave it to Tagore's viśva-mānava (posterity ...
... the greater and more significant work of Wordsworth and Shelley is dismissed as an ineffective attempt to poetise a Germanic transcendentalism, Carlyle's ill-tempered and dyspeptic depreciation of Keats, Arnold's inability to see in Shelley anything but an unsubstantially beautiful poet of cloud and dawn and sunset, a born musician who had made a mistake in taking hold of the word as his instrument ...
... then of the superior universality of music, even in the cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling's s Barrack Room Ballads exercises a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or Keats—we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas ...
... Hamlet talks of passing away from the turmoil of life: When we have shuffled off this mortal coil... A quiver of the entrails is felt in the midst of the idea. How different is the accent of Keats talking of dying away with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears: To thy high requiem become a sod. Once more take Hamlet on release from the obstructive tangibilities of ...
... course, Phanopoeia can be a failure too if it is not the inner becoming the outer: no amount of imagery will save the poet from being a versifier if he uses his images with a superficial hand. Even Keats whose superb capacity for the phano-poeic we have observed can come out with a picturesque ludi-crousness in an imaged expression: A bunch of blooming plums Ready to melt between an infant's ...
... Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows. After the magic casements of Keats, Sri Aurobindo's gate of dreams will be the proper thing to show you first. The hour is of dawn-break, when the mind hovers as if on a meeting-point of the physical world and some wonderful Beyond whose ...
... music. Not that I run away from music — oh no, I do not share the opinion of the student who paraphrased most originally Keats's Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter... Keats, as you must be aware, is referring to the engravings on a Grecian Urn, engravings of a procession in which musicians are playing on pipes. Their music is of course inaudible but therefore all the more ...
... shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive ...
... artistic potency of suggestion. The Song of Solomon is exotic in its poignant richness of word and vision; the Book of Job is exotic in the figurative revel of its grandiose closing argument; Spenser and Keats are exotic when they diffuse their heavily-charged sen-suousness. What is essential is that confusion should be avoided and some clear outline cling to the warm colour-riot both en masse and in the ...
... sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classification and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most 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 ...
... did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet'; he did not write T am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on ...
... the kind of poetry he calls "adequate" or "effective", and he points beyond it to a finer grade of poetic style. He regards even that grade — which can be exemplified from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, Keats — as still not the ultimate. Sri Aurobindo is writing from a comparative vision. That is my first contention. The second is that when he further talks of Browning's "robust cheerfulness of temperament" ...
... of different poets. His comparative study of the two Autumns — Hood's and Keats's — is a case in point. While the discussion of the two poems leaves no doubt that our poet-critic considers Keats the better, not to say greater, he grants that in the-line "In Page 127 the hushed mind's mysterious far away". Hood brings "a profound note beyond anything in Keats's ...
... miracle will happen. Page 58 (By the way, there seems to be a prepositional mix-up in your sentence: "I take my stand on my own feeling and experience about them as Keats did about his on truth and beauty." Shouldn't "about" and "on" at the close change places? I hope you don't mind my mentioning the slip.)' In the passage about the "errant marvel", I agree ...
... Modern psychology confirms the phenomenon of inspiration. From the several recorded facts we may pick out a few to get the nature of this phenomenon into focus. A brief account is available of how Keats came to describe Apollo in the third book of his unfinished epic, Hyperion. The passage arrived "by chance or magic — as if it were something given to him". He did not realise how beautiful the poetic ...
... gives at once a concrete and visual suggestion to the compound noun and evokes the suppressed "sight", the implication of brightness, of light, in the word "glory". Some compound epithets from Keats and Thompson were quoted by my critic as of the right poetic sort. They were fine; but Thompson's "tawny-coloured" though poetic enough, does not strike me as anything subtle when applied to a desert ...
... necessary connection with the consciousness and will." How many poets must recognise in these dignified phrases a cri du coeur about the divine caprices of the Muse! Still more discouraging appears Keats, quite a wet blanket with his simple and pointed utterance: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." Of course anybody who knows Keats's own methods ...
... broken shadows and vague quivers we contact in the time-world. What impregnates a line of verse with its sovereign tone is this ultimate presence. The urge to release it in word-music is what made Keats write about his poetic moods: "There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality." One with a mystical bent of mind can disengage through the words and the rhythm of each fine ...
... poets had followed in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, that great savant and revolutionary, but a terminal poetic disaster?" Here are rootless self-styled professionals arrogant to the degree who, as Keats would say "Standing apart in giant ignorance", pass judgments about matters for which they have never developed sensibilities. Page 141 That great savant and revolutionary but not ...
... and Spanish to read Dante, Goethe and Cervantes in the original. As to English literature, he showed much interest in the Elizabethan theatre and for the great romantic poetry, particularly that of Keats, Shelley and Byron. He was also fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc, Mazzini and other heroes from history who had fought for the liberation of their motherland. As later told by him, he felt the urge to work ...
... Plays, published a few years back, are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri, still unfinished, is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality ...
... the author of the universe!" (4.8.1990) Page 91 I am happy to learn that you have always taken an interest in poetry. The names you have listed bring a glow to my memory - Keats for the rich texture of his verbal felicities evoking significant imaginative pictures, as in his description of the sea-bottom: ...nor bright nor sombre wholly But mingled up, a gleaming ...
... intuition 235 Overmind 323,347 Iqbal 70 K Kabir 126 Kalidasa 182,205,216,218 Katha Upanishad 115 kavayah satyaśhrutah 184 Kavi 163 Kazantzakis, Nicos 60,213 Keats 18,197,336 knowledge Agni and 306 lustrous lid and 36,37,311 Savitri full of 208 Transcendent 248 Kundalirti 116 Kyd 216 L Lal, P. 125 Landor 166 ...
... Perhaps these lines have strongly associated a "branchy" tree with' bareness, a late-autumnal near-leailessness, in your mind, but poetically there is no reason for the association in general. Take Keats in his Hyperion: As when, upon a tranced summer-night Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night ...
... his theandric being gathers up all creation" - this "theandric" action itself hardly yields satisfactorily to theological essays at explanation. But it is a conceivable conclusion. The other, as Keats would have said, "dodges conception". Teilhard has provided no shred of plausibility for the cosmic all-time supremacy Paul enigmatically ascribes to the historical Jesus. The "pre-action of the ...
... epic content are trying for a divorce. The last effort, on a large scale, was Goethe's Faust, which also falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Similarly, Shelley' Revolt of Islam, Keats' s incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they too do not succeed much. Victor Hugo's La Legende des Siecles, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, and Thomas Hardy's ...
... sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classilication and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style —Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his Page 100 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae ...
... expectation. Take the four lines of Lawrence*—in what do they differ from the old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language ? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence ...
... becomes then of the superior universality of music, even in the cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads exercises a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or Keats—we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas ...
... in English? Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages—it is good to know them, at least. "Paradise Lost", yes. In the other Milton's fire had dimmed. In English Paradise Lost and Keats' Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharat, Ramayan, Kalidasa's Kumar Sambhav, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's ...
... plenty. Amal has "stars" coming in almost every one of his poems, said his friend Saranagata. That was Amal's own preference, not the spiritual poems' necessity. I read the other day a comment on Keats' poetry that he always writes about stars and that there is a spiritual reason for it. We haven't had many of your poems to go by. This is one point against spiritual poetry. Another, it seems to ...
... Joking? I am tempted to say like Monodhar—"I beg to differ with you in this respect." Not at all; quite serious. If you take the short lyrics and sonnets (not longer poems) of great poets like Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, how many are there of the first class written in a whole lifetime? Thirty or forty perhaps at the outside. And you have written 15 in 6 months. October 18, 1938 ...
... Mystic poetry will ever remain for him misty and mysterious and occupy a second place. That is another matter. It is a question of personal idiosyncrasy. There are people who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty. The clear precise intellectual meanings of Pope are to them the height of poetry—the emotional and romantic suggestions of the Skylark or the Ode to a Nightingale unsatisfactory ...
... century saw the birth of a group of poets whose body of work was so astounding as to perpetuate the notion that "Romantic" refers directly, even solely, to their poetry. These were Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. William Wordsworth's "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads is considered the manifesto of the Romantic movement from a poet's viewpoint. The following extracts are taken ...
... and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed ...
... is Grace. Mark you, "within, there is a soul, and above, there is Grace." And He continues: "This is all you know or need to know" This is a reference to Keats ... and, if you don't, well, even then you have at least somehow stumbled into the path and have got to remain there till you get hauled along it far enough to wake up to the knowledge. ...
... description. And in Nishikanto's poem, "Gorurgadi" ("Bullock Cart"), the cart is real and the man in it is real, yet the cart is both a personal one and a world-cart. Take Shelley's "Skylark" and Keats' "Nightingale". The birds in either poem are nothing. It is the thoughts and feelings of the poets that have found expression and the birds tansmit those thoughts and feelings while remaining only occasions ...
... " "What exactly do you mean?" "They are rather difficult." (Laughter) "Oh, then it means that your English is weak." "But I find no difficulty in understanding the poetry of Shelley or Keats." "That's because they are Romantics and so are primarily emotional poets. Some of my early writings were often compact and had a greater thought content, rather in the classical style. Perhaps that ...
... The, 201,250, 335,336ff, 345, 346ff, 359ff, 362H, 370, 375, 376, 390, 399, 449, 514, 531 Kathasaritsagara, 147 Katha Upanishad, 337 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 649 Keats, John, 30,41,176,177 Kena Upanishad, 337,459, 461ff, and Isha, 461; comparison with Mother's prayer, 462; and stair of consciousness, 462; and The Life Divine, 463 Kennedy, John ...
... Text and Pretext (Phoenix edn.), p. 75 9. Elizabeth Barren Browning 10. Gerald Manley Hopkins 11. William Blake 12. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 18, p. 1 13. Keats' Ode to a Nightingale 14. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 18, pp. 10,24 15. Ibid., Vol. 17, p. 133 16. Ibid., Vol. 18, pp. 240-41 17. Ibid., pp. 264-65 18. ...
... Tagore. It had become United India. In all fairness, it must be said that utilitarianism was not the sole commodity exported by Britain. She spread the language of Shakespeare, of Shelley and Keats. True, the general run of the officers, who practised the oppressive policies of their government, left much to be desired. Yet many from the British Isles, in their individual capacities, greatly helped ...
... penetrating into various fields of artistic creation. Some illustrations from poetry, which Sri Aurobindo characterised as due to the overhead influx, may be cited. The following lines from Keats : " Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain. " The expression is charged with a perception that indicates the overhead ...
... proceeds from the Higher Mind may be cited the following:— Page 259 "Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain" Keats II. ILLUMINED MIND "Beyond this Truth-Thought (i.e. Higher Mind) we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity ...
... 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, the sensibility ...
... Madhu Sudan comes not again. Some are pointing to this as a sign of intellectual barrenness; but it is not so. Shakespeare and Milton came within the limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton. Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there have been Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second Dante or Boccaccio ...
... the result is merely artificially elegant & skilful technique; if emotion movement is super-added, the result is melody, lyric sweetness or elegiac grace or flowing & sensuous beauty, as in Shelley, Keats, Gray, but the poet is not yet a master of great harmonies; for this intellect is necessary, a great mind seizing, manipulating & moulding all these by some higher law of harmony, the law of its own ...
... such lapses will. From one error indeed Kalidasa's vigorous and aspiring temperament saved him. He never relaxed into the cloying and effeminate languor of sensuous description which offends us in Keats' earlier work. The men of the age with all their sensuousness, luxury and worship of outward beauty were a masculine and strenuous race, and their male and vigorous spirit is as prominent in Kalidasa ...
... instinct with fire, No spell to chase triumphant wrong, No spirit-sweet desire. Mine is not Byron's lightning spear, Nor Wordsworth's lucid strain Nor Shelley's lyric pain, Nor Keats', the poet without peer. I by the Indian waters vast Did glimpse the magic of the past, And on the oaten pipe I play Warped echoes of an earlier day. To a Hero-Worshipper - II My friend, when ...
... Page 676 Sakuntala's Farewell "It is very good poetry and there are many fine lines. I don't know about influence — probably several have coalesced together. Perhaps Keats, Yeats, Love and Death and one or two others." (28.6.33) "Each line is a cut gem by itself and there is sufficient variation of movement or at east of rhythmic tone." (8.7.33) "Sero ...
... This use can go far beyond the ideas of ornamentation or embellishment to create certain effects in writing. In fact they become embodiments of secret deities to breathe majesties in our life. Keats travelled much in the realms of gold and was led to the discovery of oneness of truth and beauty. Savitri abounds in the unity of many other powers of conscious existence. Its sunlight can be golden ...
... common language, an image is a picture made out of words that appeal to various senses; it is a picture in words with some sensuous appeal. Is this meaning enough for us? Yet the most sensuous of poets, Keats in an inspired moment of the Ode to a Greciaan Urn tells us that Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear ...
... the sun. Slowly the discoverer voyages on seas Reaching calm waters across the cosmic shores Where under the horned moon is adrift his barge. 19 April 2002 Nest of Pain: Keats Page 6 Canto Five In the murky cave awoke the god of sleep Who builds in trance the starry worlds of dream, And Aswapati understood their meaning And the spiritual sense in ...
... much of its aesthetic delight which flows from its spiritual inspiration and spiritual word. We should not look at it as the Page 145 work of a poet like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats, even like that of Dante or Kalidas. It must be seen as the work of Valmiki or Vyasa though not on that level of aesthetic-spiritual creativity. Textbook or academic criteria are certainly not applicable ...
... severe; Page 250 it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Words worth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the ...
... contemplation is not philosophical, it is the vital mind and not the intellectual at poetic activity here. Shakespeare contemplating is different from Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or even the mature Keats: still a beat of thought, along with a beat of sensation and emotion, is communicated through the quick core-piercing phraseology and the profoundly ringing rhythm, which makes Shakespeare's body of ...
... Aurobindo in his late teens during his stay in that Cambridge-room. His expression of them is surprisingly mature with a distinct originality in a genre that is part Wordsworth, part Shelley and part Keats: Page 330 When earth is full of whispers, when No daily voice is heard of men, But higher audience brings The footsteps of invisible things. When o'er the glimmering ...
... that, but a new growth has started which is not operable, and I do not expect to be in this body a great while longer. The packing-up process takes a lot of energy, which is why this letter is what Keats called 'such stuff. But it is a necessary process... 'All suffering in the evolution is a preparation of strength and bliss.' It is this which has to be set up against the prevalent and, I am sure, ...
... visit to me, when the Mother gives one a work to do she gives at the same time the capacity for it and the joy in it. "Your last visit" - the phrase is almost like the word "forlorn" which brought Keats back from his nightingale to his "sole self". It was such a delight to be with you and talk endlessly. Now that the "immortal bird" that is in you - or should I mention Browning's equivalent apropos ...
... y beautiful in its meaningful depictions without ever saying a word for thought to fasten on takes us beyond thinking just as the feeling aroused by the idea of eternity dumbs and numbs the brain. Keats has another moment too of Eternity's teasing, though without the actual term being employed. In an Ode to Pan woven into his Endymion, Pan's temple is addressed: Be thou the unimaginable lodge ...
... If thou Hast from pity come to help us, fly — and despite drops again and again into a half-kindled style, The House of the Titans is a notable performance. There is a reflection of Keats, naturally enough since the theme is affined to that of Hyperion where also grand music is made from the falling of Titana. Especially the start, after the first five lines, is reminiscent of Keats's ...
... did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet1; he did not write 'I am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on ...
... power of one fair face. 7. I saw them walking in an air of glory. (Vaughan) 8. Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain. (Keats) 9. But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. (Vaughan) 10. I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm as ...
... some master-urge within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living. But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither Page 87 facile nor cheap, weak nor watery. They are ...
... "resolved to outdo him". He outdid his cousin by writing five hundred lines. His cousin also introduced him to some of the major British poets like Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which he was strictly forbidden to read at home. ...
... Plays published in August 1942 are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri, still unfinished, is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality ...
... Collected Poems and Plays... are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri ... is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality. Add to ...
... in terms of an aesthetics which is not purely based on Indian tradition. In trying to find a purer aesthetics, Tagore sometimes depends too largely on the western romantics like Shelley and Keats, and he seems to have been neglecting a vital point relating to the Tantric cult. Nor that he was unaware of the thrill of Mother-worship. In fact, some of his lines clearly indicate that he was ...
... Swinburne,—but a change of levels, a transition to other more varied but Page 148 less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intellectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature ...
... Wordsworth of all people, the least Elizabethan of poets, penning with a conscientious dullness his Borderers , Byron diffusing his elemental energy in bad blank verse and worse dramatic construction, Keats turning from his unfinished Hyperion to wild schoolboy imitations of the worst Page 81 Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and fine literary form for dramatic ...
... it drew so much of its inspiration, but gives an impression of great inferiority when compared with the work of the Victorians and one is tempted to say that a little of the work of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley has immeasurably more poetic value than all this silver and tin and copper and the less precious metals of these workers whose superficiality of workmanship was a pride of this age. But ...
... perhaps in the lyrical cry and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are comparatively rare moments, the mass of their work is less certain and unequal in expression and significance. Finally we get in Keats a turning away to a rich, artistic and sensuous poetical speech marvellous in its perfection of opulence, resource and colour which prepares us for the more various but lower fullnesses of the intellectual ...
... brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature, stretching from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and taking on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, which forms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of yesterday. Much of it we can now see to have ...
... lines of Lawrence 5 —in what do they differ from the Page 418 old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence ...
... a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of Page 185 all classifications and is 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 ...
... remember them but something in the style of "Night's tapers are burnt out and jocund day" etc. seems to give him a wonderful flash of the Unknown Country! He also alludes to the four magical lines of Keats about Ruth "amid the alien corn" and Victor Hugo's at least-for-once truly delicate, unrhetorical passage on the same theme in La légende des siècles. I wonder if you recollect the passage. Its last ...
... and imaginative visions beyond the bounds of the right and permissible. Or else the true idea is rejected or fatally anticipated by another which is or seems to be more catching and boldly effective. Keats is Page 31 the principle exemplar of the first tendency, the Elizabethans of the second. The earlier work of Shakespeare abounds with classical instances. As distinguished from the Greek ...
... did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write "To philosophise I dare not yet"; he did not write "I am too much of a poet to philosophise." To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on ...
... the soul begins to make its direct demand and yearn for a profounder satisfaction: they awake when the inner ear begins to listen. Technically, we may say that this comes in when the poet becomes, in Keats' phrase, a miser of sound and syllable, economical of his means, not in the sense of a niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its possibilities of sound. It is then that poetry gets farthest ...
... observation, and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton's early poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ordinarily in this mould. But this too is not that highest intensity of the revelatory poetic word from which the Mantra starts. It has a certain power of ...
... lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more Page 208 properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of ...
... sensation and emotion of the life-spirit in us and out of this arose an intellectual and aesthetic sense of hidden finer and subtler things and, more profound, in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Keats and Shelley an attempt at communion with a universal presence in Nature and a living principle of peace or light and love or universal power or conscious delight and beauty. A more deeply seeing and ...
... —self-gathered, grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the ...
... on how you handle them,—if as much pain is bestowed as on the iambic, the fault attributed to them will disappear. Even as it is, the trochaic metre in the hands of great poets like Milton, Shelley, Keats does not pall—I do not get tired of the melody of the Skylark . Swinburne's anapaestic rhythms, as in Dolores , are kept up for pages without difficulty with the most royal ease, without fatigue either ...
... be met by an order to X "Go and manage" or else an intimation to Durvasa not to be unreasonable. 4 September 1936 Page 39 What about my planning to read Meredith, Hardy, Shelley, Keats and the Continental and Russian writers? Lord, Sir, I wish I had time to follow out a programme as massive as yours. I have none even to dilate upon yours. 22 September 1936 Reading in Pondicherry ...
... If thou Hast from pity come to help us, fly — and despite drops again and again into a half-kindled style, The House of the Titans is a notable performance. There is a reflection of Keats, naturally enough since the theme is affined to that of Hyperion where also grand music is made from the falling of Titans. Especially the start, after the first five lines, is reminiscent of Keats's ...
... of one fair face. 7.I saw them walking in an air of glory. (Vaughan) 8. Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain.(Keats) 9.But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.(Vaughan) 1 Millions of golden birds, O future Force! (K.D.S.) Page 135 10. I ...
... you can indirectly be poets. And who knows that even in the direct sense you may not poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live the expression of other poets? At least it was the experience of Keats that he awoke to his own poetic possibili-ties by intensely re-living the work of Spenser. And most poets draw a quickening spark from great poems when their own crea- Page 3 tive fire ...
... coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' ...
... look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller though not poetically inferior scale, Stephen Phillips conjuring up the story of Marpessa, Idas and Apollo? In our own day, Kazantzakis has ...
... stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence ...
... art buried. (K.D.S.) The Classical Milton is said to have it - And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses - no less than Keats with his magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Seeking a psychological basis for the associations which the words "Classical" and "Romantic" ...
... Charles V had gout, arteriosclerosis, and dropsy. Many eminent men had syphilis (Henry VIII, Benvenuto Cellini, Baudelaire), and sufferers from tuberculosis can be listed with out end — Voltaire, Kant, Keats, Dostoevsky, Moliere, Schiller, Descartes, Cardinal Manning, Spinoza, Cicero, St. Francis. But in the realm of physical deformity names are not so numerous. Several celebrated writers were eunuches ...
... either a strong armoured structure of the thought or a carefully developed unity of the building which all poets can't manage. However there have been attempts at an irregular sonnet rhyme-sequence. Keats tried his hand at one a century ago and I vaguely believe (but that may be only an illusion of Maya) that modern poets have played loose fantastic tricks of their own invention; but I don't have much ...
... literatures of the world? Not indispensable,—even by being steeped in one literature, one can arrive. But useful of course. What do you say about my plans to read Meredith, Hardy, Shelley, Keats and the French and Russian writers? Lord, Sir, I wish I had time to follow out a programme as massive as yours. I have none even to dilate upon yours. You know I have hardly any experience of ...
... parts are really two separate books. Goethe wrote the second part in his old age. It is entirely different from the first, just as Milton's Paradise Regained is different from his Paradise Lost . Keats also has two versions of his Hyperion : in the later version Hyperion tends to become an idea. PURANI: Abercrombie remarks about Paradise Lost that its Satan is a symbol of human will struggling ...
... which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives ...
... 220 KABALA, 151, 214 Kahler, Erich, 358-9 -Man the Measure, 358 Kali, 327 Kalidasa, 8, 55, 136, 197 Kant, 326, 345 Kanwa, 247 Keats, 120, 194 Kepler, 301, 308 Khilafat, 51 Kierkegaard, 362, 375-6 Koran, the, 70 Korea, 209 Kosala,91 Kurukshetra, 80,81 LAERTES ...
... bright young man, and I used to like him very much because of his pleasing manners and his intellectual gifts. He used to tell me a great deal about English literature, - about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly and Tennyson. He himself was a poet and used to explain to me how to write poems. None in our family or in his family came to know of the developing relationship between him and Alka; but ...
... the mountain, including the wolf. When the goat escapes, it takes to the mountain and roams wildly, happy until the evening, when the wolf kills it. 6"The rope needs to be loosened." 7John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale", 1819, Stanza VI!. Page 2 consolation I have for all this youthful enthusiasm and effervescence is that He found my letters interesting (though interesting has ...
... 216-17 Judas, 120 Jung, III Juno, 182 Jupiter, 108, 180 KALI, 24n., 218 Kalidasa, 39, 85, 98, 176, 181 -Shakuntala, 162 Kant, 246 Kanwa, 162 lOIn., 162, 170, Kasyapa, 133 Keats, 68, 78n., 98 -"Ode on the Poets", 78n Ken, 68n -"A Morning Hymn", 68n Krishna, 180, 218 Kronos, 159 Kushika, 220 Kutsa, 162 LAKSHMI, 293 Lalan the Fakir, 223 Lamartine ...
... of poetry and drama. As a result, I am a bad student and got a zero in mathematics. I failed in my tenth examination even when I bagged prizes for English and Sanskrit. I love Wordsworth, Shelly and Keats; and I love Kalidasa and Bhartrihari. I wonder whether these poets ever learned mathematics. I think their curricula were quite different and they had the freedom to study what they liked and to muse ...
... which mean " forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives ...
... Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats' incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siècles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy's Dynasts— all seem to have some ...
... taught Sri Aurobindo Latin and English, while Mrs. Drewett taught him history, geography, arithmetic and French. Besides these subjects, Sri Aurobindo read himself the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, etc. Mr. Drewett grounded Sri Aurobindo so well in Latin that when Sri Aurobindo went to St. Paul's School in London, the headmaster of that school "took him up to ground him in Greek and then pushed ...
... History : translated from the original Russian by George Reavey (Geoffrey Bles, London, 3rd Reprint, 1949). Blackstone, Bernard. The Consecrated Urn : An Interpretation of Keats in terms of Growth and Form (Longmans, London, 1959). Boodin, John Elof. God: A Cosmic Philosophy of Religion (Macmillan Company, New York, 1934). Bowman, Archibald Allan. ...
... Joyce, James 267,428 Jung, C.G. 437 Kalidasa 46,52,340,341,374,376 Karmayogin 11-12 Kazantzakis, Nikos 330,377,398-408,436, 441,460,461 Keats, John 174,313,315,365 Kenner, Hugh 391-393 Knight, G. Wilson 33,410,458 Krishnaprem, Sri (Ronald Nixon) 339,461, 463 Kurtz, Benjamin 306 Lal,P.357 ...
... etc. Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French. As he was studying at home he had plenty of time to read books according to his own taste, including the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats. He not only read poetry but wrote verses for Fox's Weekly, even at that early age. It 'seems he did not play any games, except cricket, which he tried once without much success. During their stay ...
... 67. ibid., p. 749. Page 471 68. ibid., p. 754. 69. ibid.., p. 755. 70. ibid., p. 757. Cf. Keats: Charmed magic casements opening on the foam, Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. (Ode to a Nightingale). 71. ibid.., p. 759. 72. ibid., p. 760. ...
... with its divine accent and 'sex' with its human base ever fuse into the 'holy' wedded state? Before their 'fall', did Adam and Eve experience what C.S. Lewis has called 'paradisal sexuality'? John Keats could not imagine any mingling of 'goatish winnyish lustful love with the abstract adoration of the deity'. But nothing is impossible to the "greater spirits" who are called into being to enact the ...
... for Sri Aurobindo's greatness. This also is wrong and unconvincing. In this case genius seems to be drawn from the skies, otherwise how would Girija explain Ramakrishna Paramahansa or Shelley or Keats whose greatness could not be attributed to heredity. 3. His explanation of Sri Aurobindo's failure in the riding test is probably based on Sarojini's memory. But this is not a reliable source. ...
... inquiry, literary and art criticism, educational theory — everywhere there is the signature of the inner man, the light from the inner Sun, the tremor of the unique Sensibility. If it be true, as Keats said, that "Shakespeare led a life of allegory, his works are his comments on it", might it not be said of Sri Aurobindo that his was a life of progressive Divine manifestation, and his writings are ...
... of the universe that extremes meet and co-exist all the time, as it were in hyperbolic-asymptotic fashion. If at the very centre of Delight 'veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine' (according to Keats), so too at the very centre of the inconscience there is the shrine of eternal Light. This is how the Mother, refusing to be turned away by the massive lid of hard and rigid resistance, struck deep ...
... Arithmetic. No Science; it was not in fashion at that time." As he was studying at home the little boy got plenty of time to indulge his own tastes in books. He read the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats and others. Young that he was he not only read poetry but composed verses for the Fox Family Magazine. Percy B. Shelley was a favorite of Sri Aurobindo's. "The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite ...
... own handwriting ?" Prolific reader that he was, Sri Aurobindo knew Shakespeare and Milton to the full. "I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry." Keats too, specially his Hyperion. Among the Victorian poets, Stephen Phillips made a considerable impression on him. "I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades, before they were published and as I was just ...
... events, or observe all without evaluating?" We certainly can't ignore events altogether. One may shut out some aspects of the outer world, but one shouldn't take the attitude of that line of Keats's - "Standing apart in giant ignorance". I for one actually stood thus in the early days of my stay in the Ashram. I would go to the Ashram's Reading Room every morning to pick up only the "Literary... "Totalitarian" was a prodigious poser to me and seemed to be such also to the librarian, my diminutive friend Premanand, Our situation was comparable in puzzlement more than in wonderment to that of Keats's "stout Cortez" and "all his men" when with "a wild surmise" they first gazed at the Pacific, standing . Silent upon a peak in Darien. Page 268 Our stunned silence did not last ...
... that looks up at the sky — or, in a more subtle mode, Keats's passage with its breathlessness deepened by a triple negative: No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest. Perhaps the whole of Keats's Ode to Autumn would be acceptable. But the two other Odes ...
... nostalgia half sad half blissful as for a lost Eden of marvellous beauty and tenderness and heroism. In the idea of the super-natural, Coleridge's "romantic" joins with the sense of unearthly realities in Keats's lines: When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, where a straining of thought... semi-pantheistic semi-personalised vision of a single Spirit and of secret entities from "some world far from ours", whose intense rapturous contact he conveys by his enchanted and iridescent lyricism - Keats's worship of perfect Beauty, a soulful sensuousness rising on the wings of a partly mythopoeic partly idealistic thought yearning towards some dream-shrine where Beauty fuses with Truth. What about ...
... ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms. Similarly, Keats's supremely exquisite evocation of a moment of breathless silence might be charged with awkward English because he has used a double-negatived indirectness to enforce the subdued key set by an opening ...
... these regions, however incredible to the normal mind, do exist behind or beyond the familiar and tangible loveliness. The sole criterion, therefore, is: Does poetry come with an authentic power or no? Keats's magic casements may be only the eyes of daydream, they may exist only in his brown-study and in no recognisable room; yet his art is such as to create a feeling of their reality. Our minds are charmed ...
... the less vibrant play with one's guts and more resounding impact on one's grey cells which Milton offers. Other intensities, too, are within the reach of one's instinctive recognition. Shelley's or Keats's or Swinburne's, since we have plenty of them. Not that the plenty renders them cheap but it has been possible to the poet and perceptible in its peculiarity to the reader because the centres of co ...
... of the physical fading away into the inffeble and the transcendental. Page 479 Savitri is epical both in tone and conception and its involvement is cosmic. In this respect Keats's Hyperion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are nearer to it. The idea Spirit, behold The glorious destiny nascent in Shelley's earlier work, Queen Mab, finds its fuller poetic... elemental genii, the beasts and the birds and finally Man, — in a voice of universal sound: This is the day — When Love spings and folds over The world Its healing wings. Keats's Hyperion, a great attempt in epic code, similarly poetises the fall of Uranus (representing the rule of shapeless chaos) at the hands of Saturn (representing the rule of cosmic order), and his ...
... sang" — play with their heavy insis-tence the part of beginning and completing the sense of an un-endurable burden of sadness. About the melody of birds there is another phrase equally musical — it is Keats's — where the poet speaks of their presence and not their absence: And hearken to the birds' love-learned song The dewy leaves among. The words "bare" and "ruin" which are so effective in ...
... the poet. Secondly, making love to a woman is not of the essence of the sense-life: it is just one mode of it: there are various other modes like Wordsworth's animistic and pantheistic Nature-love, Keats's happy self-identification with every kind of natural energy and form, Rupert Brooke's intimate response of joy to the touch of objects, the craftsman's-love of moulding matter, etc. Thirdly, the senses ...
... lines which Sri Aurobindo wrote some years earlier than Love and Death and which, in view of its teeming excellences and the poet's young age (barely twenty-three), may be considered with Keats's Hyperion the most remarkable production in blank verse in the English tongue. Urvasie —the story of King Puru-ravus, a mortal hero, who took a nymph of heaven, an Apsara, for bride—is shot with ...
... because, though among Shakespeare's heroes, Hamlet thinks the most puissantly, the most curiously, we have only to read When we have shuffled off this mortal coil side by side with Keats's To thy high requiem become a sod Page 98 to distinguish the rhythm of the élan vital thinking, from that of the poetic intelligence cast into a beautiful turn of phrase ...
... engendered them by his influence - apropos of this belief Auden 8 frames the statement: "Outside the text that is all we know and all we are ever likely to know...." Much more than Keat's famous dictum at the end of his Ode ("...that is all/We know on earth and all we need to know") this statement is a non-sequitur in its anticipation, repeating briefly an earlier deliverance" ...
... the nimble sail and leave the lagging wind? Ruskin, disgusted with the falseness of such poetry, has shown in contrast the exquisite sincerity of a line of Keats's which, though with a slight Romantic touch in the style, reflects part of the surprise uttered by Ulysses: Page 27 ...
... Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats's incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siécles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy' s Dynasts — all seem to have ...
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