Mallarmé Mallarme : Stéphane (1842-98), French poet, a master of the evocative use of the French language, & a major influence on the Symbolist movement.
... Sethna's penetrating research in Mallarmé's symbolist poetry is most welcome. The book divides roughly into two equal parts. The first is a close study in 8 sections of Mallarm é - Man and Poet. The second comprises English translations of 35 of Mallarme's poems, and commentaries on a few of them. Throughout the book, the citations from Mallarmé are in the original French as well... Sethna repeatedly quotes Sri Aurobindo, especially on Mallarmé's poetry, and the spinal column of the argument is that past Mallarmé, past Valery, past Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens, there shines Sri Aurobindo the pole star, the laureate of Overhead Poetry and Savitri . In the second part, Sethna remarks that Mallarmé "is likely to suffer least by being translated into English"... renovation it needed. His successors were the Symbolists - Mallarmé , Rimbaud, Verlaine - who sought to "bury their meaning in a tissue of images and symbols" (Bernard Weinberg). Page 421 If Verlaine was the purest singer of the group and Rimbaud the 'god-struggler' and the laureate of desires, Mallarmé sought to crystallised the essences of things in symbols, and ...
... from the works of Sri Aurobindo. Mallarmé's ideas are often compared with those of Valèry and others. Such a comparison with different authors helps the reader to better appreciate the poems of Mallarmé . Sethna has succeeded in helping the reader to grasp the essential significance and technique of Mallarmé. Mallarmé the Man: Sethna portrays Mallarmé as a "man with a disciplined... the realm of Art and Mysticism. Thus, like a motif on a tapestry the symbolism of Mallarmé suggests his inner mood. Whether it is the exotic nature or a concrete object, Mallarmé’s portrayal of the world is as vivid as an aquarelle. The Essential Significance of Mallarmé: Mallarmé considers writing poetry as an adventurous mission. It is like a voyage on the seas in rough... study of the 'hair-theme’ by Sethna enables the reader to get at the essence of Mallarmé's Symbolism and psychology. The Essential Technique of Mallarmé: Being the founder of the Symbolist movement Mallarmé uses symbols to convey his thought, to speak out his inner mystery. According to Sethna, Mallarmé takes the reader "beyond the suggestive semi-clarity that on occasion rises out ...
... extract artistic beauty from it. But that is not the only stuff of his poetry. 22 July 1936 Mallarmé Blake is Europe's greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the current of French poetry (one might almost say of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were the opening. Mallarmé's works are, in one word, "unintelligible". Then why did they have so much influence on the... impressionism go beyond intellect to pure sight—and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism. Page 382 Nolini says that in poetry simplicity leads to beauty. Applied to Mallarmé, would this mean that due to his acrobatics with words, his poems are not beautiful. Only Nolini can say what he meant, but to refuse beauty to Mallarmé's poetry would be itself an acrobacy of the intellect.... even if they do not hold the theory. I do not understand what Mallarmé means here, but it seems different from what Housman says, that the poet's mission is to transfuse emotion—of which Mallarmé had none! I do not know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the surface vital joy and grief of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can include also the deeper spiritual ...
... early admirers, in a forceful German phrase: Und fur sein denkbild blutend Mallarme. which means, And bleeding for his ideal, Mallarme. It is well known how whole-heartedly Mallarme dedicated his life to achieving his poetic object. But people who feel that he sought some Beyond mistake certain expressions in his poetry as giving the real mystic magnet to which his aspiration was drawn.... in the mystical suggestion of the line: Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue — a line recalling the phrase I quoted to you some days back from Mallarme himself: Je suis hante: l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! Evidently this phrase has haunted Conquest. It is also the phrase, by the way, with which the students at the school where Mallarme was condemned to teach English used to tease... Thus Robert Conquest, at the end of a sonnet, has very memorably but still mistakenly summed up Mallarme's search by a contrasting combination of him with another poet, the English Andrew Mar-veil. The sonnet-end formulates a general ideal for poetry: Marvell's absorption into local green, Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue. These are splendid lines and by themselves they set up an ideal ...
... creator than Mallarme, but in terms of the Azure, however dulled by Puritanism in the midst of the sublime vitality that the Renaissance temper in him brought to his work. Mallarme's delicacy and depth are not in Milton, just as Milton's vibrant vastness is lacking in Mallarme. We cannot think of Milton raising the soul of Winter to that intensity of remote coldness we find in the phrase Mallarme gives to... TALK THIRTY We have now to take a close look at Mallarme's Azure. We have already seen it as something of a lost Eden to which he has a nostalgic relation in the midst of his quest for a new kind of poetic utterance that keeps eluding him. You may note that the Azure makes here for Mallarme a joint reality with rose-woods. Flowers on the earth and the blue sky above fused... fecundity — all-creating, all-containing, all-constituting. But this fecundity is found by Mallarme to be not altogether a cause of innocent hunger in the human heart. There is a subtle sensuousness in the very essence of the Azure and it evokes a rapture of response in the depth of our flesh-built being. Mallarme figures a young girl stirred by it and saying: le tiede azur d'ete, Vers qui nativement ...
... to Mallarme and, scratching his head and making a sour face, said to the poet: "Cher Maitre, how is it that I have so many fine ideas and yet cannot write poetry?" Mallarme, gently putting one hand on the dejected shoulders of the painter and with the other caressing his own little beard, replied: "My good friend, poetry is not written with ideas: it is written with words." What Mallarme meant... somehow Music has monopolised what should belong to Poetry also. But when Mallarme's dictum is quoted, people imagine that he wished to create very melodious verse: what we have called Melopoeia. Well, Mallarme did create certain wonderfully rhythmed lines, but if we wish to have Melopoeia in French we do not particularly go to Mallarme. We go more to Page 248 Verlaine than to him — Verlaine... orderliness belonging to the thinking mind. The French people, by and large, have not yet accepted Mallarme. We have a few critics who go mad over him but the majority of Frenchmen look on him as a sort of traitor to the literary genius of France and condemn his work as mostly a failure. But Mallarme's wrestle with a tongue such as French had its own advantages for his admirers. This tongue imposes ...
... straight to Oscar Wilde. He was a friend of Mallarme's and even attended several of the Tuesday-soirees. He must have been rather young and raw at the time, for otherwise Mallarme would have got no chance to talk. Wilde would have flooded the company with his own witty and rainbow-tinted fancies. And he was a bit of a pushing fellow, quite unlike Mallarme who was timid in his manner, retiring in his... "No, reaping." I don't know whether Mallarme was as much of a wit as Wilde, but his talk was said to exert a deep influence on all his listeners. It is likely that the cult of the artistic which flourished in England during Wilde's day had a lot to do with Mallarme and his doc-trines, doctrines mostly inculcated in the Tuesday-talks. But Wilde and Mallarme were cultists of the artistic in rather... means the insistent sound of limpid moving waters. Mallarme was preoccupied with words more than any other poet and he was not just attached to a few special words, though he had his preferences: he was interested in words in a sense in which even poets in general are not. I shall come to this topic presently Let me first introduce Mallarme to you as a man. A contrast may immediately be noted between ...
... have made the physical universe so queer, so unpicturable in its ultimates that the mind gets almost a paroxysm in trying to conceive it. In Mallarme's time things were different. The pronouncements of Science were in an absolutely assured tone. And Mallarme fell under their sway. But he did not set poetry at a discount. He felt that there was value in poetry and he felt that there was value in philosophy... formulas of Physics. Of course, a little more acuteness of mind would have led Mallarme to argue: "If the entire value of life is centred in what Science cannot give, then surely Science has not said the last word on life and on the world in which life has come to hope and yearn, to aspire and be idealistic." And if Mallarme had been a little more of a mystic he would have been enabled to hold against... are always on the verge of vanishing. This does not mean that Mallarme is vague in his visions. The idealities of Absence are well-defined in their strangeness, but the strangeness comes charged with a power that draws our mind into depth on depth of something for which no words can be found and to which no image can prove adequate. Mallarme thus is not a poet of the shimmering Shelleyan wash: he is very ...
... am passing from one funny poet to another (Mallarmé)." Well, if she thinks it derogatory to be compared to such great poets as Blake and Mallarmé! Blake is Europe's greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the whole current of French poetry (one might almost say, of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were the opening. "Mallarmé's works are, in one word, 'unintelligible'.... 59 There Kastner seems to say about Mallarmé just what I have said, though he speaks of him as being an acknowledged master, and of his great influence on contemporary poetry. He can't deny such an obvious fact, I suppose—but he would like to. He says, "A purely intellectual artist, convinced that sentiment was an inferior element of art, Mallarmé never evokes emotion, but only thought... Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets. He says that "Mallarmé's verse is acquired and intricate" i.e. a thing not of spontaneity, but of intellectualisation. Saying that Verlaine is an inspired poet, he seems to mean the contrary about Mallarmé. If these two magnificent sonnets (the last two) 64 are not inspired, then there is no such thing ...
... Stéphane Mallarmé. Grappling with his obscurity was to strive with the covering under which the light which is beyond the mind puts itself when the mind approaches it with its own terms and standards. An Upanishad says: "The Gods love the obscure." In an analogous sense Mallarmé loved it. Once, after a lecture, he asked a student to hand him the notes the listener had taken. Mallarmé said: “... our mind is accustomed. By the challenge which Mallarmé posed all the time to the mere mental, I felt I was getting in contact with a consciousness which made everything in the world a riddle instead of a plain fact and demanded an answer other than our normal life, even our normal imaginative life, could give. I do not say that Mallarmé's way of conjuring up mysteries is the highest,... then that one is authentically mystical: there strikes on us a glory of Truth which dazzles us into an ecstatic inner intuition of realities, each having a precise form with an infinite halo. With Mallarmé we are left not with realities but with symbols that by their baffing vividness, their dynamic vagueness, annul the ordinary system of experience and create what I may call a pregnant void, an ...
... haunting the blank sheet of paper? The boldness of your rendering, though more in keeping with contemporary idiom, misses the delicacy always going with Mallarme's audacity. Carried over into another age no less than into another language, Mallarme should still preserve his characteristic temper and tone - provided he is saved from the unconsciously awkward or the deliberately archaic in our effort... in this matter. A sensitive faithfulness, both to the way Mallarme makes the solid world disappear towards subtle secrecies by means of words and to the manner in which the symbol-charged words relate to those secrecies so that le mystere du nom becomes musicienne du silence , is of capital importance. And I may add, wherever Mallarme has cast his symbolist creations in a rhymed poetic form... which names itself You. Let this letter be the "blessing" you desire from your less mixed-up friend. (13.6.87) Apropos of the small sample you have put before me of your way of translating Mallarme, may I say a few personal words on the "how" of translating this super-symbolist poet, as if I were penning a postscript to my book on him? In the work of modern translators of old writers, there ...
... ian 367 soul and 134,160 transformation 83 Longinus 161 Lucas, F.L. 192 "lustrous lid" 36,37,307 M Mahabharata 60,61,141,182,183, 211,214 mahimā 89 Mallarmé 201 Mandukya Upanishad 99 Mantra 51,177,270,341 Sri Aurobindo's letter on 200 Marlowe 216 Milton52,102,132,186,205,219,229, 258,326,336 mind and overhead poetry 229... and the Mother's Contribution to it 25.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 26.The Mother: Past, Present, Future Page 380 27.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 28.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 29.The Problems of Early Christianity 30.The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems 31.The Sun and the Rainbow : Approaches to ...
... recognised in him their own typical temper, however strange-hued, and accorded him a high place in their poetic pantheon, unlike Mallarme whom most of them deem an exotic growth and a fantastic failure rather than a sphinx-like success. Something of the subtlety of Mallarme's Symbolism merges in something of the clarity that is French Classicism's to make the "pure poetry" of Valery. An instance is the... seventeenth-century Metaphysicals practised — say, Marvell at his most delicate and most deep. I may quote a stanza from The Garden on which we once drew when speaking of Mallarme and of a modern English poet's ideal in which Mallarme was coupled with Marvell. Marvell also speaks of a dreamy luminous disembodiment anticipating the "longer flight" from the sense - world at time of death. His lines... stop there: it should be a poetry of sheer sight or at least bring before us colour and shape and gesture, and banish information or exposition. Page 302 Symbolism, as developed by Mallarme, was perhaps the most famous school that laid claim to being "pure poetry". It did so, as we have noted, by distinguishing poetry sharply from prose: prose was called reportage, something intellectual ...
... told of the usual interpretation of the poem in terms of Mallarmé's poetic situation, Sri Aurobindo has said: "The swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, the poet, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, being only a signal instance... moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness, than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarmé." 2 In view of this gloss, Mallarmé's phrase makes a very pertinent juxtaposition with Sri Aurobindo's. Poetically it matches it: philosophically it polarises it with an equally expressive audacity. For, the Au... come on the breath of an incantation from a masterful height of realised spiritual consciousness. When the clear is achieved, then, unlike as in "the heritage of Symbolism," the work of the post-Mallarmé poets like Valéry, Rilke and the later Yeats, the shades and shimmers of the Beyond are not caught into an intellectual chiaraoscuro but what looks such is rather the art-pattern of some lucid-languaged ...
... comme la nuit et comme la clarte the adjective for "night" is such a gross sin as you make out with the remark: "Where does that Titan come from? Not Mallarme. Why bring in Titans?" First of all, the original sonnet is not Mallarme's though Mallarme himself could have inspired the Titan-image by a line like L'avare silence et la massive nuit. The sonnet is Baudelaire's and he had a penchant... free time was limited. I have pondered it as I have explored with you Mallarme and his implications for poetry - the wonderful new perceptions which he explored - the affinity with Indian thought and how Sri Aurobindo saw him as the fountain-head of a 'future poetry'. It is a very fine contribution not only to the study of Mallarme but to the unfolding of poetry. You cannot imagine the density of... done in this field which will flower. I particularly have enjoyed your detailed readings of poems not only of Mallarme but of other poets - Yeats and Sturge Moore, you really see into poems in a way the academic critics, dissecting analysts, do not. To return into the world of Mallarme through your guidance has been a delight. I am a great Francophil, you know (or perhaps you did not) and have long ...
... written in that way from the subliminal depths, e.g. Mallarmé, but it needs a supreme power of expression, like Blake's or Mallarmé's, to make it truly powerful, convincing, and there must be sincerity of experience and significant rhythm. 2 August 1943 Surrealism What the deuce is this Surrealism? I gather Baudelaire was its father, and Mallarmé his son. Surrealism is a new phrase invented... The inclusion of Baudelaire and Valery seems to indicate something wider than that. But the word is of quite recent origin and nobody spoke formerly of Baudelaire as a surrealist or even of Mallarmé. Mallarmé was supposed to be the founder of a new trend of poetry—impressionist and symbolist, followed in varying degrees and not by any means in the same way by Verlaine, Rimbaud,—both of them poets... reality than the surface reality. I don't know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine and others used to be classed as impressionist poets: sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets. 12 February 1937 I really can't tell ...
... in the literature supermarket. He demands our concentration. For instance in the following passage, he deals with a very subtle issue relating to Mallarme's not-too-apparent spontaneity. He explains in his high serious style of exposition how Mallarme's work has an appearance of "premeditation". The premeditation is an appearance only, because what it does is just to employ a certain mode... trying to write prose that would not go bad. He has thus ensured a permanent place for himself in the literary firmament. 4. Sethna, K.D., The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1987, p. 64. Page 215 ...
... the famous painter, once said to Mallarme, the famous poet: "How is it that though I have plenty of ideas I still can't write poetry?" Mallarme replied: "My dear man, poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words." This statement may seem at first to poke fun at Degas, archly pointing out an obvious truth to the rather dense painter. Mallarme no doubt, had often his tongue in... coterie. A wide circle is no less legitimate than such a coterie for the poet's audience. Symbolism, whose dedicated mouthpiece was Mallarme, is itself inclusive of several modes of poetic utterance. Superb symbolist verse of the esoteric coterie is the opening of Mallarme's Le Cygne (The Swan): Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui Va-t-il nous dechirer avec un coup d'aile ivre ... is because the intellectual mind has been made a medium, not because this mind is their Page 292 source. The source is something significant without being itself intellectual. Mallarme attempted to cut out the intellectual medium altogether. That is why he is often accused of obscurity and he went himself to the extent of making a cult of the obscure. With the puckish that was seldom ...
... significance of Keats's new line is the wonder-worker. I may here throw your mind back to Mallarme's answer to the question of Degas the painter: "How is it that I have so many ideas, yet can't write poems?" Mallarme said: "My dear Degas, poems are not written with ideas — they are written with words." Mallarme surely did not refer to meaningless words: poems are not written with gibberish. Nor was ...
... I took away with me his study of Mallarme, and - a gift that I will always treasure - his last remaining copy of The Adventure of the Apocalypse . Already I could see on the book's cover the ravages wrought by the humid climate of Pondicherry and its thriving insect population. I feared greatly for the fate of the works still in manuscript! Eventually the Mallarme translations found their way to Oxford... who should have been there instead. But nobody else arrived and in the meantime we discovered a whole range of mutual interests: Sri Aurobindo of course, but also Teilhard de Chardin, William Blake, Mallarme and the French symbolist poets, the sonnets of Alfred Douglas, the strange historical/visionary perspectives of Immanuel Velikovsky - the list seemed endless, while Amal's enthusiasm and his extensive... ability to quote accurately from memory the works of any poet whom he had read. Only once I was able to tell him something he did not already know, and it was that Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and Mallarme had something else in common besides their genius, for they had all spent time in Hastings, a small town on the South coast of England. All must have climbed to the top of Castle Hill to look out ...
... exquisite search for the essence within the appearance, the single within the many, the infinite in each finite - the Symbolism of Mallarme and his heirs. It would be difficult to surpass in any poetry of our day the sublime profundity of insight in that line of Mallarme's on the dead Poe: Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change, (At last to Himself he is changed by eternity)... in Rimbaud's Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur! (Millions of golden birds, O Vigour to come!) What is, in several respects, the modern opposite of Symbolism à la Mallarmé by a stress not on the secret and unifying, universal and eternal essence but on the concrete and separate, individual and time-fissured existence - Existentialism à la Sartre may itself be ...
... characteristics of the Symbolist poetry of Mallarme. Mallarme was perhaps the most astonishing phenomenon in poetic history up to the end of the nineteenth century. Sri Aurobindo has observed that he marks a new turn in European poetry, a turn which is the first step to what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry. All the more astonishing is Mallarme in the context of the poetry of France. We may... between which we have to leap not by thought or imagination so much as by inner intuition. The coherence of the subliminal is different from the coherence of earth-situations, earth-significances. Mallarme was the first to realise this truth and the need to project into speech the authentic realities of the beyond, the need to surpass the intellect's direct or indirect smoothing and linking hold on ...
... and who can with credit break lances with Kathleen Raine, the foremost authority of our times on William Blake; and who can write a book which makes an in-depth study of French poet Stephane Mallarmé ; and another on the origin of Israel and also write two tomes on the supposed invasion of India by the Aryans; who with astounding mastery proves that the chronology of ancient India is wrong ...
... admirable as a specimen of great workmanship, but it will not last. Well, but did they not say the same thing about Mallarmé? And what of Blake? Contemporary opinion is a poor judge of what shall live or not live. The fact remains that the impressionist movement in poetry initiated by Mallarmé has proved to be the most powerful stream in France and its influence is not confined to that country. The whole... only a few remains uneliminated. It is not that a poet deliberately sets out to be appreciated by a few only—he sets out to be himself in his poetry and the rest follows. But consider a poet like Mallarmé. In writing his strange enigmatic profound style which turned the whole structure of French upside down he cannot have expected or cared to be read and appreciated even by that part of the general... one of the public at large? I don't agree at all with not publishing because you won't be understood. At that rate many great poets would have remained unpublished. What about the unintelligible Mallarmé who had such a great influence on later French poetry? 24 July 1936 Housman's Poetics I have been waiting for a long time to take a look at A. E. Housman's little book The Name and Nature ...
... thought than philosophers can ever dream of. Mallarme, the French Symbolist poet, has sometimes caught the higher Thought by polishing and repolishing language and eliminating from it all the dross of mental thinking. However the true spiritual breaks through only on rare occasions and mostly in flashes which may leave a sense of frustration. Mallarme's line about the swan caught in the glacier ... writes, "no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarme." 10 The frustration itself is an indication that the poet knows there is a region overhead. And the line itself, even though it expresses the soul's inability to rise to those "high-peaked dominions"... Replaces all... ("Nirvana") the words "Permanent" and "Peace" are not abstract notions; they are more concrete to the seer-vision than material things. Likewise in the following line of Mallarme "Nothingness" is a concrete experience: 12. Sn Aurobindo, The Life Divine , SABCL, Vol. 18, p. 277. 13. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art , SABCL, Vol. 9, p ...
... of exceptional merit, his prose writings cannot be contained even in a few dozens of books. And what diverse topics! Poetry criticisms shedding light on Shakes-peare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Mallarme, Sri Aurobindo; scrutiny of scientific thought while grappling with the philosophical questions of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics no less than problems of biological thought; chronological ...
... melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of which – balance, regularity, fixity, solidity – was greatly utilised by the French painter Cézanne and poet Mallarmé who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin ...
... Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12.Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 15.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 16.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 17 ...
... man should move by opening out of physical "World" into psychological "Space". Valéry, whose thinking mind is analytic, agnostic, doubtful of norms and reluctant to subscribe to his teacher Mallarmé's aesthetic mysticism, is yet at one with Rilke and Bloc in the personality he unfolds in his poetry. He becomes a penetrating sorter of delicate psychological depths, a poised visionary of the secret ...
... sm had reached its zenith and was already splitting up into other, no less amazing or disturbing schools of art. In its footsteps followed the literary symbolism of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Valéry, now venerated as god-like statues at the gates of all modernist writing. “It may be pure accident or arbitrary selection”, writes Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Empire 1875-1914, “that ...
... with Sri Aurobindo's Comments, Pondicherry: Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Page 490 25. 1987 The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry, Pondicherry: SAICE. 26. 1989 Ancient India in a New Light, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2nd ed. 1997. 27. 1989 Talks on Poetry, Pondicherry: ...
... d'or"-Aux Flancs du Vase. And Pannyre became flower, flame, butterfly.. . . As though through a silky continuity of water In a divine flash showed Pannyre naked. Page 65 or when Mallarmé describes the laurel flower: Vermeil comme Ie pur orteil du séraphin Que rougit la pudeur des aurores foulées, ¹ both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise the earth... which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name ¹¹ Mallarme: "Les Fleurs". "Vermilion like the pure toe of the seraph Reddened by the blush of dawns it trampled through." ²"Quite broken they are, yet they have eyes that pierce like a drill, shine ...
... with his uncollected work are available in his recent volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems 1 ) seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarmé and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, three volumes of research on Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms Kathleen Raine,... when once he said that he had composed 200 lines, Sethna thought that he could compose 1. Unfortunately Sethna has somehow missed including in this volume the translations of some of Mallarmé ’s poems done by him; in this respect his memory has become Nirodianly supramental! - Editors Page 357 more than that and rival him at the game. "When I started writing ...
... Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 12. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 15. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 16. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary ...
... EVENING NIRODBARAN: It seems difficult to have creative force in mystic symbolic poetry. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, it is difficult, but not impossible. NIRODBARAN: Is there any creative force in Mallarmé's famous sonnet on the swan? SRI AUROBINDO: I have forgotten the poem. NIRODBARAN: It is the poem in which he speaks of the wings being stuck in the frozen ice so the swan can't fly. SRI ...
... Symbolism in the special sense is a mode of poetry consummated first in the France of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It is associated with the names of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery and some others. But it is not exactly a single mode of poetry. There are varieties of Sym-bolism and not all continue or consummate the Blakean type. Let me give you the main four heads.... it in our world nor the perceiving subject as we know it in ourselves. In its highest manifestation this Symbolism may be summed up in the words of its most subtle and sophisticated practitioner, Mallarme: "A supreme flash from which is roused That Shape which no one is." (4) A multifoliate all-inclusive play of themes. This means that all varieties of subjects — good and bad, agreeable and horrid ...
... like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy—one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarmé's wrestlings with the French language to find the symbolic expression—the right turn of speech for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort ...
... extract from his lecture on the French poet Mallarme: “Let us continue from where we left off in the last lecture - or, if you think that what I said last time left you in a bewilderedly broken condition of mind, I shall refer not to the last lecture but to the last fracture. Perhaps my words now will set some of the broken pieces together. “Mallarme’s is a mysticism of a very mystifying kind... World’s Future; 2. The Problem of Aryan Origins; 3. Talks on Poetry; 4. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo; 5. The Enigmas of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; 6. The Obscure and the Myysterious: A research in Mallarme’s Symbolist Poetry; 7. The English Language and the Indian Spirit; 8. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo; 9. Blake’s Tyger: A Christological Interpretation; 10. Indian Poets and English Poetry; 11... so that English Mysticism often seems to deserve being spelt Misty Schism… The nature of the French language is ever a check against becoming involuted in idea and expression and construction. Thus Mallarme was forced, by the very medium in which he worked, to produce with each poem a systematic whole of enigmatic imagery. ‘Of course, it was because he was a true artist - unlike the Dadaists and ...
... of the orthodox. This poetry is a modem "heresy" and heretics must have the courage of their non-conformity. Now, what the deuce is this Surrealism? I gather that Baudelaire is its father, and Mallarmé its son. Surrealism is a new phrase invented only the other day and I am not really sure what it conveys. According to some it is a dream poetry reaching a deeper truth, a deeper reality than... than the surface reality. I don't know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine and others used to be classed as impressionist poets, sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets. Does surrealism indicate that the meaning should... inclusion of Baudelaire and Valery seems to indicate something wider than that. But the word is of quite recent origin and nobody spoke formerly of Baudelaire as a surrealist or even of Mallanne. Mallarmé was supposed to be the founder of a new trend of poetry, impressionist and symbolist, followed in varying degrees and not by any means in the same way by Verlaine and Rimbaud, both of them poets of ...
... Page 322 musical patterns of words did not subscribe to the word-music school. Expressive rhythm is one thing — enchanting rhythm without significance is quite another story. Like Mallarme, Valery meant by poetic music not only a play of sound but a play of elusive meaning as in musical compositions. As to the stress on sheer sound in poetry, he was quick to observe: "The richest and... much sounder theory of "pure poetry" on the basis of verse-music. Alan M. Boase writes: "It may or may not be vain to seek to distil 'pure poetry' by a process of patient poetical alchemy — such was Mallarme's method. But 'pure poetry' evokes for most of us some element of spontaneous song. It is this singing quality — perhaps the rarest of all in French poetry — which Verlaine possessed in a supreme ...
... linked up by non-poetic matter camouflaged as poetry. We may note that Poe, although emphasising mystery, does not extol crypticism: he does not make it a sine qua non that poetry should be like Mallarme's or even like Valery's. Also, he does not set expression loose from meaning or from achievement of a significant pattern: all that he wants the music of words to do is rhythmically to articulate vague... inclined to write the last type of poetry and it is through his work of this type that he most influenced the French poets who prepared or founded the school of Symbolism — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery. But in the three-stanza'd composition before us we have a complexity of consciousness poised in a catholic inspiration with no special bias towards the Symbolic or Symbolist except in so ...
... d'or"— Awe Flams du Vass. And Pannyre became flower, flame, butterfly.... As though through a silky continuity of water In a divine flash showed Pannyre naked. Page 293 or when Mallarme describes the laurel flower: Vermeil comme Ie pur orteil du seraphin Que rougit la pudeur des aurores foulees, 1 both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise... which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name 1 Mallarme: "Les Fleurs". "Vermilion like the pure toe of the seraph Reddened by the blush of dawns it trampled through." * "Quite broken they are, yet they have eyes that pierce like a drill, shine ...
... utterance of imaginative vision adventuring beyond the normal bounds of a high poetic intelligence. We see in modern French creation a constant struggle with this limitation: even we find a poet like Mallarmé driven to break the mould of French speech in his desperate effort to force it to utter what is to its natural clear lucidity almost unutterable. No such difficulty presents itself in English poetry; ...
... Maeterlinck which is not so much an action of personalities as the drama of a childlike desire-soul uttering half inarticulate cries of love and longing, terror and distress and emotion, in the work of Mallarmé where there is a constant seeking for subjective symbols which will reveal to our own soul the soul of the things that we see. The rediscovery of the soul is the last stage of the round described ...
... blaze of God! Here is an original voice, one that has no real predecessor in the literature of the past. Only rarely echoes of other poets come in. There is a resemblance to Mallarmé in Amal Kiran's sheer delight in the play of language in pun and teasing indirect allusion and the scattering of seemingly unconnected images like clues in a treasure hunt, leaving the reader ...
... of them along with his uncollected works are available in his volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems), seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarme and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, four volumes of research in Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms. Kathleen Raine, besides ...
... commencement in the work of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Chénier, Hugo, the intermediate artistic development of most of the main influences by the Parnassians, the like later turn towards the poetry of Mallarmé, Verlaine, D'Annunzio, stigmatised by some as the beginning of a decadence, give us a distinct view of the curve. In English poetry the threads are more confused, the work has on the whole a less ...
... London, 127, 163 Lucifer, 5, 125 Lucretius, 52, 70, 101 -De Rerum Natura, 52 Luther, 273 HUCHCHANDA, 162 Mahabharata, the, 73, 235 Maitreyi, 105 Malebranche, 286 Mallarme, 66, 88, 152 -"Les Fleurs", 66n Mamata, 163 Manchester Guardian, 239n Manu, 159 Miira, 5 Marcellus, 173-5 Margaret, 138 Marut, 22, 28-9 Marx, 126 Mayavada,278 ...
... stomach. Guru, what do you say to this poem of J's? I am damned if I understand anything of it. Blakish, Mallarmic? Methinks it exceeds both. There is no necessity of going beyond Blake and Mallarmé. Their things are often more difficult than this. Have you any more of these mystic members to compare her with? [Sri Aurobindo put a question mark above "members" which was not very clearly... golden gleam of a dark collyrium. [Translated by Nolini Kanta Gupta from the Bengali.] 83 I don't know what this is driving at. I am afraid I don't know either. You have suddenly shot beyond Mallarmé, J and everybody else and landed yourself into the Surrealism of the most advanced kind. Such a line as বিবসনা কঙ্কালের মরণপ্রভাতে 84 would make any surrealist poet's heart wild with joy. I think ...
... large freedom in word-arrangement as in Latin or Greek, and whatever freedom it does allow is not very deliberately exploited: I know of only one great poet who exploits it to a marked result — Mallarme. Latin simply invites you to virtuosities of word-arrangement. In English the words are related to one another by their order in a sentence and not by inflections. Therefore one single order, with ...
... radiance". You have told me: "Your theme is always the longing to capture your shining quarry in a net of sound." Here I am interested by your finding in me an affinity with Rimbaud rather than with Mallarme. Perhaps the most thrilling prophecy of the new magnificence that has to emerge from the unexplored mystery beyond us is in those two lines of Le Bateau Ivre: Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que ...
... ; for I don't quite know to whom is the fierce sacrifice here supposed to be dedicated. An extremity of pain has nothing in it that is ideal or spiritual. 27 December 1934 Page 403 Mallarmé Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui! ... sol où le plumage est pris. Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne, Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne. I tried to break this nut of Mallarmé's ... but, pardi, it was a hard nut. Really what a tortuous trend and how he has turned the images! "The transparent glacier of flights haunting the hard lake under the frost"! The frost or snow has ...
... which come easily and short lyrics which need only a single revision. But for the rest I have to rewrite 20 or 30 times. Moreover I write only at long intervals. The glacier image is a theft from Mallarmé, and not a clever one, perhaps? It is quite effective here. Thefts from other languages are habitual in poetry October 3, 1938 "A tranced silver flame of thy delight, Within my rapturous ...
... Freed Soul 644 The Golden Hand 351 The Great Bear I 30 The Great Bear II 31 The Great Face 286 The Hierarchy of Being 185 The Ideal of Mallarme 613 The Kiss of Man 28 The Master 297 The Medieval Christian 549 The Missing Touch 343 The Mother: Two Phases 587 The Mystic ...
... months after the autumnal equinox. Somehow the chill of the grey months without used to stir the blind poet and evoke the heat within to generate Paradise Lost. Then there was the arch-symbolist Mallarme who wrote of L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide (Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter) with the sheet of snow mutely suggesting the beyond of some ineffable White towards ...
... How can someone who does not belong to the club—an Indian, and a mystic at that—be admitted to excel in the terrain of the elite? The thing is a priori inconceivable! It is true that, as Mallarme mischievously pointed out to Degas, poetry is made not with ideas, but with words—just as painting is done not with visions but with paints. This does not mean, however, that the aim of poetry ...
... regarding his sentimental adventures. It was the time of one of the great culminations of European art with the music of Berlioz, Franck, Saint-Saëns, the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, the novels of Zola, the operas of Massenet, the recitals of Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist of genius, of the bals (dancing halls), the Moulin Rouge and the Grand Guignol … all that in the ...
... chronology, Karpasa in ancient India, the world of Sri Aurobindo's poetry, identifying the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, unravelling the mystery of Blake's brightly burning Tyger or Mallarme's Swan submerged in snow, he brings to bear upon his studies of these subjects his wide knowledge and gives minute attention to their treatment in such a manner that his readers can only marvel ...
... has said: "My English soul rebels at abstract nouns preceded by the definite article. It's o.k. in French of course!" Thus, when she was here last year she remarked that the title of my book on Mallarme's symbolist poetry - The Obscure and the Mysterious - was not quite English. In my recent correspondence with her I cited several uses of the kind from English and she wrote her comment on them: ...
... if one fancied the sonority, one could arrange, without impeding the sense, Sri Aurobindo's line in some such pattern as Fierce in too flood art whelmed this wailing thou. In modern times Mallarme practised harmoniously mysterious rearrangements of common sequences as far as the partly inflected nature of the French tongue would allow. His aim was not only musicality but also a suggestion of ...
... Gabriel Monod-Herzen (1899), Doctores-Science. Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-67), French lyric poet, author of Les fleurs du mal. Paul Valery (1871-1945). Stephane Mallarme (1842-98), French symbolist poet; author of Uapres-midi d'un faune. Paul Verlaine (1844-96), French lyric poet belonging to the Symbolist movement. Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), ...
... 8 6 and Valery 8 7 seems to indicate something wider than that. But the word is of quite recent origin and nobody spoke formerly of Beaudelaire as a surrealist or even of Mallarme. 8 8 Mallarme was supposed to be the founder of a new trend of poetry, impressionist and symbolist, followed in varying degrees and not by any means in the same way by Verlaine, 89 Rimbaud, 90 ... tries to write laboriously in the mental way. This seems to be to indicate either that the poet in him has his real power there or that he has opened to the same Force that worked in poets like Mallarme. My labelling him as surrealist is partly— though not altogether—a joke. How far it applies depends on what the real aim and theory of the surrealist school may be. Obscurity and unintelligibility ...
... Indian Spirit: Correspondence with Kathleen Raine (1986) 24. Poems of Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments (1987) 25. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarmé's Symbolist Poetry (1987) 26. Ancient India in a New Light (1989) 27. Talks on Poetry (1989) 28. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation (1989) 29. The Secret ...
... 34 His Will alone is our tranquillity. And here is Mallarme, the arch-symbolist, with one of his greatest lines, opening his sonnet on Poe's death with nothing visual: Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin 1'etemite le change, which I may dare to echo with At last to Himself he is changed by eternity. (Did Mallarme happen to haunt you when you wrote in 'The Sphere': Ourselves... Supermind's life-transformative power. A few months back I posted to you by surface mail my latest publication: The Obscure and the Mysterious - A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry. It not only contains a series of essays on Mallarme the Man and the Poet but also attempts to translate a good number of his poems. I keep dipping with great pleasure into your Yeats the Initiate. By the... shadows, Shelley's wingings in strange ethers, AE's quiet or intense echoes of God-haunted in-worlds, Yeats's early dream-drenched incantations or his later wide-awake gripping of secret significances, Mallarme's complex pursuits of the mysterious Form that no one is, Rilke's sensitive searches for beseeching or commanding presences in the Weltinnen-raum. 'Overhead poetry', while capable of contact with ...
... of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarmé and constitutes almost the whole of Valéry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate ...
... Sigmund Freud and his theory of the subconscious. Impressionism and the post-impressionist schools in painting destroyed the classical norms in the arts, as did the symbolist poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé in literature. All this, and much more, really looked like “an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil” between the outer and the inner realities, necessary for a rediscovery of the psychic ...
... of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarme and constitutes almost the whole of Valery's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate ...
... continued his (outwardly) daily routine as if nothing was the matter. He still wanted to write on modern poetry and a search was on to provide him with volumes of such poetry to read. (He appreciated Mallarmé, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot.) He also dictated, at the Mother’s request, the important series of articles published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth . In these articles he ...
... is the essential element in poetry. He seems to agree with Paul Valéry who holds that poetry is an art of language - "un art du langage" - but goes deeper. Valéry had learnt from his master Mallarme that a poem Page 364 is not made with ideas but with words. Sethna too says that the poetic window opens to the Divine "through Form and not Matter". But there is ...
... like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy — one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression — the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; ...
... French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy -one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression - the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must ...
... interests. He has been able to develop the wide-ranging intellect and sympathy one may expect from a follower of the Integral Yoga. Thus, among other things, he has written on Shakespeare, Blake, Mallarme, on Indian history and philology, on the philosophy of the new physics, on Teilhard de Chardin and on Christian theology - and most abundantly and helpfully on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, ...
... the public being the judge? I don't agree at all with not publishing because you won't be understood. At that rate many great poets would have remained unpublished. What about the unintelligible Mallarmé who had such a great influence on later French poetry? S still feels weak. His bile colour is improving. Shall I give him some iron and nux vomica? Not iron as yet—let the bile go out first—Nux ...
... humanity stood confronted with itself. Mirra was born at a time when the human being turned inwards and subjected to close scrutiny all that had gone before. This happened in literature (Proust, Rimbaud, Mallarmé), philosophy (Nietzsche and Bergson), psychology (Freud and Jung), biology (Darwin, Pasteur) and physical science (the Curies, Planck, Lorentz, Einstein). The incredible twentieth century, the greatest ...
... ce between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13 . Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 14. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 15. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 16. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 17. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression ...
... from India perhaps the most valuable lesson life has to teach, that there are many things I do not know or understand, and that I MAY BE WRONG. I shall be delighted to receive your book on Mallarme. It has not yet reached me. I had forgotten that the Isha Upanishad by Sri Aurobindo had in fact been your gift and had indeed thought it must have been an old friend who died some years ago who had... 'That's nothing, I will show you a super-bird.' To which I, Tagore, William Blake, would reply, 'I don't need a super-bird, this is the Creation that God found good.' Meanwhile your book on Mallarme arrived yesterday and I look forward very much to reading it. I only dipped last night before sleep overcame me at the end of a busy day but I can see how much I am going to enjoy it. (14 ...
... be reviewing Blake's Tyger along with some other Indian publications in the next Temenos. Do you think it is possible for Jean Mambrino to review The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry? The TLS completely ignored it just as it had ignored the book of our old correspondence in spite of your renown. My Shakespeare-book too got no notice. I have sent my Blake-study ...
... much Amal has assimilated Sri Aurobindo's own knowledge and used it creatively. For instance, overtones and undertones in rhythm, various planes from which poetry comes, the French symbolist Mallarmé ’s innovative poetry, overhead poetry, the Mantra, etc. All these characteristics baffle our imagination. Only one wonders how far thisgem of a book will appeal to the taste of modern poets ...
... much as possible for its own uses, but not change its fundamental or characteristically mental law and method; it has to observe them and do what it can to heighten, deepen and enlarge. Perhaps what Mallarmé and other poets were or are trying to do was some fundamental transformation of that kind, but that incurs the danger of being profoundly and even unfathomably obscure or beautifully and splendidly ...
... magic, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and his idiosyncratic Sherlock Holmes, Marcel Proust, chronicler of his time, and the superlative French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. And there were of course the Impressionists, scandalizing but revolutionizing the world of the arts, not to forget the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, loosing his mind in the whirlpool ...
... difficult to bring in creative force in mystic or symbolic poetry. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, it is difficult, but it is possible. Disciple : Is there creative force in that sonnet of Mallarmé on the swan ? Sri Aurobindo : I have forgotten the poem. Disciple : That poem in which he speaks of the wings of the swan being stuck to the frozen ice so that it cannot fly. ...
... intellectual explanation on the thing, but then you destroy its poetical appeal. Very great poetry can be written in that way from the subliminal depths, e.g. Mallarme, but it needs a supreme power of expression, like Blake’s or Mallarme’s, to make it truly powerful, convincing, and there must be sincerity of experience and significant rhythm. In this poem the rhythm is not there throughout and ...
... its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends." But poetry is written, a la Mallarmé, not with ideas but with words. Substance all right, but more than that the creative word. The same matter, the same sublime myth, when retold by different Page 111 authors, always ...
... The Future Poetry , SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 239. See also Savitri, p. 809. 135 There is a similar neglect of the ancient hieratic poetry of Europe - a neglect more categorical than in India. Mallarme, whose dream was to create a poetry that would express deeper and higher truths, wondered if there were no poets before Homer, the Western ādi-kavi . His answer was that before Homer there was ...
... universal than the intellectual appeal. What about that ? Well but did they not say the same thing about Mallarme ? And what of Blake ? Contemporary opinion is a poor judge of what shall live or not live ? The fact remains that the impressionist movement in poetry initiated by Mallarme has Page 210 proved to be the most powerful stream in France and its influence is not confined... only to a few remains uneliminated. It is not that a poet deliberately sets out to be appreciated by a few only—he sets out to be himself in his poetry and the rest follows. But consider a poet like Mallarmé. In writing his strange enigmatic profound style which turned the whole structure of French upside down he cannot have expected or cared to be read and appreciated by the general reading public interested... clarity, but I feel you will find little difficulty in divining what I mean and will come to my rescue, now that you have written something so clarifying (albeit a little perplexing too). You write of Mallarme and Valery. But Valery eureka! Him I had in mind: he is unintelligible to all but a very narrow coterie and even they say he is too intellectual and divorced from the life of emotions which makes ...
... (iv)"His hair all hung over his face in tangled strings like he was behind vines." 79 9. Praise turns unexpectedly into dispraise: Example: "If you could properly make out what Mallarme Page 55 says he would consider himself to have failed. When a young lady once told him that she had understood one of his poems after brooding over it a while, the poet exclaimed: 'What ...
... they? Yes, quite so. It is the freedom from the intellectual limitations which bring in these original expressions—as in many English poets. Ordinarily in French, or in Bengali, (French before Mallarmé and the Symbolists) there is too much lucidity and rationality to let these things get through. 29 October 1936 Poetry Writing and Fiction Can I, without losing the force needed for fiction ...
... richnesses, for its varied sweetnesses of the joy that flows from the spirit of creativity. Not only thoughts and images but many sounds go to make the body of the poem. We are reminded of Mallarme's le Musicien de Silence who is also le Musicien de Son. After having counted all the sounds in the World-Soul what we wonder at is that, paradoxically, they all become countless! What the poet ...
... as you used my hairbrush, I had used your comb. As it is, I wonder what a Jungian psychologist would read in what you did. Both the comb and the brush bring the theme of hair into prominence. Mallarme, as my book may have reminded you, was much preoccupied with this theme. It gets treated at some length in the sonnet La chevelure vol d'une flamme... There the hair stands for the one life-energy ...
... one lodging house to another at the whim of more or less benevolent landladies, with one meal a day, and not even an overcoat to put on his back, but always laden with books: the French symbolists, Mallarme, Rimbaud, whom he read in the original French long before reading the Bhagavad Gita in translation. To us Sri Aurobindo personifies a unique synthesis. He was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872 ...
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