Milton : John (1608-74), English poet, whose 19 English & five Italian sonnets are considered greatest ever written, but his Paradise Lost has made famous.
... more deep than Tennyson. Compared to Milton, he can stand his ground by his contemplative strength and his love of Nature. He has no power; but he attempts sublimity. As blank-verse form, his poetry lacks the architectural hand of Milton, the conscious hand of the artist. Here he allows the thoughts to lead him and form becomes a secondary matter. But in Milton there is balance of form and substance... substance. Also the physical element that is in Milton is absent in Wordsworth. Wordsworth stands between the spirituality of Sri Aurobindo and the rationality of Milton. Yet Sri Aurobindo is nearer to Wordsworth than Milton in his subjective approach to things. Wordsworth's style is that of a contemplator, Milton's is that of a conscious artist, Sri Aurobindo's that of a seer. In greatness... personal. He is lyrical on one side and epical on the other but avoids the heroic drumbeats of Milton. This blending of two opposite methods is his special feature. Milton can never be lyrical. His heroic approach debars this. But Sri Aurobindo can be lyrical without losing his epic dignity. Milton is severe as a rule and on this is based his element of strength. But Sri Aurobindo is ever felicitous ...
... both the sleeping and the waking conditions at night. It also uses equivalent phrases for either condition. The Celestial Patroness "dictates" to Milton slumbering and "inspires easy" the non-slumbering Milton with verse which is "unpremeditated". Milton gets his song as a sheer gift: he is nothing except its hearer or transcriber. Page 21 The second quotation does not at all d... the Miltonic process of creation. If it ere the young Milton, the student at Cam-bridge and at his father's place at Morton, the phrase might be accepted as a description of the frequent headache to which he was subject. The old Milton suffered only from gout, which is not known to affect the head, not even to give a swelled head which Milton perhaps had. All the rest of the description is rather... personal initiative, not at all composed by Milton. Notes and References 1 . A Milton Handbook by J.H. Hanford, (1946), pp. 50-65. 2 .Bk. VII, 28-30. 3 . Ibid., 20-4. 4 . Ibid., 46-7. 5 .Bk. III, 45. 6 . Ibid., 23-4. 7 . Ibid., 37-40. 8 . Ibid., 51-5. 9 . John Milton (1955), pp. 146-47. 10 . Ibid., ...
... Ibid., p. 680 (ibid., 49, 11.34-41). 12. ibid., p. 663 (ibid., 36, 11.31-32). 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 520 (Milton, II, 31, 11.23-24). 15. Ibid., p. 264 (Vala, or the Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.16-17). 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 510 (Milton, I, 24, 1.71). Page 143 "Orc" is resolved into an anagram of the Latin "cor" meaning "heart", "Luvah" is ... Jesus, who is the Divine Vision" 61 and 56. Ibid., p. 605 (A Vision of the Last Judgment pp. 69-70). 57. Ibid., pp. 605-606 (ibid.). 58. Ibid., p. 482 (Milton I, 3, 77.3-4). 59. Ibid., p. 531 (Milton II, 39, 11.27-28). 60. Ibid., p. 519 ((ibid., 30, 11.30-31). 61. Ibid., p. 287 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Second, 1.261). Page 152 ... he could even say, "both Time & 231. Op. cit., p. 71. 232. Ibid., p. 84. 233. Ibid., p. 216. 234.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 517 (Milton I, 29, 1 .41). 235. Ibid., p. 818 (The Letters, 24, 1 .58). 236. Ibid., p. 505 (Milton, I, 22, 1 .8). 237. Ibid. 238. Ibid., p. 510 (ibid., 24, 11 .72-73). 239. Ibid., p. 360 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth ...
... did Milton. There is more softness in them. Milton has less of it not because the ideal Renaissance epic has to crush out all softness but because of his own pheno-menal strength of soul which got its sensibilities considerably hardened by those twenty years of acrimonious and thunder-throated controversy. All the factors in operation we have to take together in order to understand why Milton became... Roundheads (the Puritans) to whose Page 141 party Milton belonged. Just before the war Mary's parents invited her to their house. Hardly a month had passed since the marriage. Milton consented to her visit on condition that she would return soon. But Mary prolonged her stay at her parents' place and refused to come back when Milton wrote pressing letters. She shared her parents' Royalist views... the sweet had been natural to Milton and the concentration of power constantly in their very opposite resulted Page 132 in a hardening of his sensibilities which marred his later poetry inasmuch as it led to a grandly lop-sided culmination of his genius. Another cause of this kind of development was the intense influence exercised on Milton by what we may call the poetic mind ...
... having supplied Milton with precedents which he freely imitated. We are also told of a drama in Italian, Adamo, by Giovanni Battista Andreini, published in 1613, and another drama in Latin, Adamus Exul, by Hugo Grotius, which came out in 1601 and from which Andreini himself is said to have borrowed. But hardly any book specifically devoted to Milton points to the work to which Milton owed the greatest... for the first time, 4 Milton drew the most from a little-known Italian contemporary, the poet-playwright Serafino della Salandra who put before the public in 1647 his Adamo Caduto. Salandra's development of his theme is repeated by Milton in Book after Book of Paradise Page 70 Lost. Even the details tally in many places and there are passages in Milton running parallel to those... Thus our four paradoxes about Milton can find points of indirect support in Sri Aurobindo who did not set out to write on the problems we have discussed. A fifth paradox we may frame about Milton apropos of Sri Aurobindo's recognition of him as a "great artist" and apropos of Sri Aurobindo's observation 8 that, even where "the supreme vitalising fire has sunk", "Milton writing poetry could never fail ...
... explicitly by Milton but it is hinted at by him and perhaps most interest-ingly when God is made to say that nought done by Satan or by Adam was "immutably foreseen" by Him. Evidently, if anything is immutably foreseen, it cannot help happening precisely as foreseen: otherwise God would be proved essentially fallible. And, if immutably foreseen, everything would be predestined. Milton specifically says... angelic or human freewill, Milton seems to be in line with the usual Christian thought. Page 173 And, in consonance with that thought, man's freewill in his system is a necessary postulate in relation to - among other things - the punishment God metes out to him. But when we consider the content of the punishment we are brought up once more against a Milton wildly at loggerheads with... Mortalism has no fears: it is neither an intermediate waiting nor an endless extinction, it is but the moment before the resurrection. Perhaps we may ask Milton: "How can a substance like the spirit die?" Here we enter the whole philosophy of Milton regarding Body and Spirit. This philosophy is clearly formulated in Book V when the visiting Angel explains how it is that he is able to eat of earthly food ...
... long passage on the Garden of Eden. In that passage Milton employs first a positive, then a negative method; the latter throws into relief Page 82 in the imagination what Eden must have been by telling us what wonderful fields or gardens known to song or story must not be identified with it. Milton the scholar is here at work with Milton the artist-poet. He sees to it that reference is... also to bring out another difference between Milton and Shakespeare - the difference of "plane" of inspiration over and above "style" of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo has characterised Shakespeare's plane as that of the Life Force, Milton's as that of the Mind. Not that Shakespeare always feels or senses and never thinks or that Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt... artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses." 3 Quoting from Milton as well as Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo says: "Such lines... are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid ...
... PARADISE LOST AND SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose, My glory, my perfection! 1 But in a poetic sense Milton can be likened to Adam and regarded as our glory and perfection if... speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..." Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he... from above, charging the creative vitality with its poetic burden, even as the Divine Spirit whose wide wings are seen by Milton alighting and brooding over the Abyss to impregnate it. The Elizabethan Life Force had already come under the stress of intellectuality before Milton and the speech of Classicism had been essayed: there was even a pressure towards something more than mind, a pressure which ...
... in the world was a long brilliant essay on Milton. Essay on Milton - this brings us to our second picture. Instead of a young Englishman going to India, we have a younger Indian at Cambridge, the University of both Macaulay and Milton. This Indian undergraduate has lately come up from St. Paul's School of London, the very school which Milton had attended. Now the year is 1890. On the second... bombastic." Thus the earliest piece of worthwhile critical writing we know of as Sri Aurobindo's was on Milton as well as Shakespeare - reminding us in one-half of it of Macaulay's first famous theme. There is the further curious coincidence that the earliest piece of writing by Milton himself, which the world came to know of, was a poem on Shakespeare, a tribute published in the Shakespeare... easy numbers flow... 3 Some further facts in connection with Milton and Sri Aurobindo deserve our notice. When I asked Sri Aurobindo in 1933 about influences of other poets on his own work, the first name he mentioned, after speaking of his older contemporary Stephen Phillips, in relation to Love and Death, was Milton. He wrote: "I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets ...
... which he was born." 4 Sri Aurobindo here catches Milton's supreme insight in a nutshell. But Milton does not conceive and execute Satan always from a deep-seeing height. Instead of making both his bravery and his baseness natural, as it were, to his fallen supernature on every occasion, a fear in Milton lest the Arch-Rebel should completely run away with the poem works in places, charging the poetry... God more glory, more goodwill to men From God - and over wrath grace shall abound. 17 Milton-scholars know this passage as the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall. Arthur C. Lovejoy 18 has written on it at some length and traced the general idea of it, through several predecessors of Milton in the poetic field, ultimately to an old hymn of the fourth or fifth century A.D., which says, "O... Man, about whom rumour has reached them, Milton attributes this "devilish counsel" in origin to Satan himself: for whence But from the Author of all ill could spring So deep a malice, to confound the race Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell To mingle and involve, done all to spite The great Creator? 19 Then Milton adds: Page 158 but their ...
... time, and not he only, were admirers of Milton and reflected something of his manner the moment they ceased to be directly lyrical. But, while Milton at his best is superb, his mind is more external than theirs. Even Byron who is the most external-minded among them has at times a speech with a keener edge of bright inner perception about it than Milton, though in sheer poetic quality he is on... continuation of the intellectuality developed by Milton after the Metaphysicals had partly freed themselves from the Elizabethan Life-force though without quite passing beyond its quivering nerves and therefore without acquiring properly the typical qualities of the creative Intelligence. In the field of the true intellectuality brought forth by Milton, "a new larger endeavour in the same field might... one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, -not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era .... Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect or almost perfected instrument of his native temperament ...
... voice that belongs to the truly Classical. We have merely to pick anything representative out of Pope and set it beside a similar culling from Milton (not even necessarily from Milton at his best in Paradise Lost), in order to prove the crudeness of this Classicism. Next to the satiric, the reflective vein is most congenial... utterance, but in its two great names it is the philosophical intellect ruled by theology: Dante brings mediaeval Roman Catholic thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were, in Graeco-Roman Classicism is Lucretius of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)... rich religious fervour, a sustained artistic form as in Virgil though not so elaborate as in the author of the Aeneid whom he took for his literary master. Milton is distinguished by a complex grandeur matched with immense and copious yet controlled energy. His too is a sensuous imagination over which the shadow of a very for- malistic ...
... l949, p. 140. 2. Cf. S. Foster Damon: "...the works of Milton influenced Blake more than any other book except the Bible" ("Blake and Milton" in The Divine Vision, Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto [London], 1957, p. 95). Also Northrop Frye: "Blake...was brought upon the Bible and on Milton" ("Blake After Two Centuries", op. cit., p. 62). Page... passing that in The Tyger as well as in this poem "tears" forms the line-ending and that in the Milton-passage too "tears" ends a line. Even when Milton repeats his phrase a little later the word has the identical position: "...and pardon begg'd, with tears." 13 We may next mark that in a passage in Milton about Christ's attack the locution "threw down" which Blake employs in regard to Satan's army... God, Milton himself uses "cast out from Heav'n" and "hurl'd... from th'ethereal sky... down" in Book I, 17 but there is no open reference there to Christ's action. Blake's choice of a substitute Miltonic turn of phrase occurring twice in a Christ-context appears to be no coincidence. Even Blake's association of Satan and his armies in Heaven with stars is not wanting in Milton. Here Milton cannot ...
... books stand for ever among the greatest things in the world's poetic literature. If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Page 22 Paradise Lost that gives him that... comparison of Wordsworth' s Skylark with Shelley's. You may say that Milton was a greater poet than Blake, but there can always be people, not aesthetically insensitive, who would prefer Blake's lyrical work to Milton's grander achievement, and there are certainly things in Blake which touch deeper chords than the massive hand of Milton could ever reach. So all poetic superiority is not summed up in... difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages I have quoted from Milton, On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues... Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,* here the epithets are the same that would be used ...
... might have been if Milton had written it in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision instead of putting the romantic glow of the Elizabethans far behind him. I say "most completely" be-cause one of Milton's grandest passages can be picked out for comparison to it as a whole. The ones we have so far juxtaposed with citations from Love and Death have shown Milton in a slightly mixed... those famous verses from Lycidas whose exact meaning has not yet been determined by critics. They come soon after Milton has talked of the greed of the new clergy, the failure of the pastors to look after their flock of believers. After recounting this clergy's slothful wickedness Milton caps the description of the harm done with the semi-mysterious lines - Besides what the grim wolf with privy... world. 35 Not weird, but semi-spiritually suggestive like some of the early-Milton effects, is the line in the above passage: A million mystic breasts suddenly bare... Love and Death has other subtleties too, with a pointer soft or strong to strange profundities of which the young Milton held the vivid promise: This passionate face of earth with Eden touched. 36 ...
... harmonious numbers and the nightingale's nocturnal note we have the indication that Milton used to practise getting into the right mood for the voluntary movement of his poetry. He would feed on such thoughts as would naturally bring forth poetic utterance. I suppose thoughts like these differ with poets: what would touch Milton to music might not touch his contemporary and friend, Andrew Marvell. Marvell... presence half a dozen Courts competed. The Council of State in England called on Milton to reply. The work demanded incessant application. He had already lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was getting weaker. His doctors warned him that if he took up the job of answering Salmasius he would go completely blind. Milton ignored the warning and strained himself to the utmost for a year. Salmasius... presence in a man's library risked the reader's head. Milton seems to have packed into his own head whatever there was to know, so that his great poem, whenever it did get composed, would not merely set out to justify the ways of God to man but also survey mankind as if with God's omniscient eye! In regard to purely literary preparation, Milton, before bringing forth his own epic, assimilated the ...
... Poetry of the Thought-Mind and "Overhead Poetry" Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose, My glory, my perfection! 1 But in a poetic sense Milton can be likened to Adam and regarded as our glory and perfection if... speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..." Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not... from above, charging the creative vitality with its poetic burden, even as the Divine Spirit whose wide wings are seen by Milton alighting and brooding over the Abyss to impregnate it. The Elizabethan Life Force had already come under the stress of intellectuality before Milton and the speech of Classicism had been essayed: there was even a pressure towards something more than mind, a pressure which ...
... into play. Milton, when he speaks of feeding on thoughts, discloses to us his way with them. It is the way of all true intellectual poetry and most directly the way of the lyricism of the intellect. Thus Milton presents us with two characteristics of lyricism in the poetry of his thoughts: absolute spontaneity and the warm concrete turn. Nor does the curious truth hinted by Milton himself... things which strike us throughout Paradise Lost is the presence of Milton himself. Again and Page 43 again he speaks in his own person. There are the elaborate introductions which precede the first, third, seventh and ninth Books. And everybody knows that in the figure of his Satan we have a strong dash of Milton the rebel against Charles I, the vehement defender of regicide who... history of six thousand years of splendour and folly. The only human being who breathes and passions and moves through Paradise Lost is Milton with his knowledge and his experience. Thus, before the Fall, Adam and his angel visitors talk as if to them, as to Milton, the world's processes were familiar matters. John Bailey 6 well observes: " 'War seemed a civil game / To this uproar,' says Raphael ...
... Panikkar's book) very wonderfully concrete. You then speak of cliches in Milton! No. Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself. By the time all the minor Victorians had imitated Milton from afar, and Sri Aurobindo had received his education at an English school... seats, White chambers of dalliance with Eternity And the stupendous gates of the Alone... You touch on Milton once more to prove me wrong in my attempt to match from him just the kind of phrases which you dubbed "cliches" in Sri Aurobindo. You answer: "No, Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's... forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form". Inwardly, "the texture of language itself was affected by Milton through an importation of the manner of Greek and Latin epic creation into English, the expressive mode of the classical as contrasted to the romantic spirit. Milton - in the words of Sri Aurobindo - "has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of ...
... rhythm. This rhythmic largeness is unique to Milton among English Page 4 poets. Several attain it, but never all through. Almost from the first line to the last of many thousands in Paradise Lost we have - though at varying altitudes - a spaciousness of sound which seems to be the echo of the very soul of Milton. Writers on Milton have justifiably found certain sides of his... penetration of sight, a concentration upon keen details against a background of ultimate immensity. To Milton the ultimate immensity is itself the principal fact of both personal and poetic imagination though not of mystical intuition, much less of spiritual experience. Milton the man, Milton the poet, the whole individuality of him, his entire soul is charged with the boundless, the unfeatured... the curve of a circle. In fact, Milton has left it really "undetermined" whether the Empyrean was a circle or a square: in one place his Beëlzebub speaks of "Heaven's whole circumference", 8 while in another the daughter of Satan, Sin, refers to God's "quadrature" 9 as distinguished from the "orbicular World" which Satan succeeded in subverting. Perhaps Milton means to create a mystery about ...
... more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree— he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the... comparison of Wordsworth's Skylark with Shelley's. You may say that Milton was a greater poet than Blake, but there can always be people, not aesthetically insensitive, who would prefer Blake's lyrical work to Milton's grander achievement, and there are certainly things in Blake which touch deeper chords than the massive hand of Milton could ever reach. So all poetic superiority is not summed up in the... supra-intellectual vision, Page 20 and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making ...
... looked back sometimes in the manner and movement of their verse and who was mainly responsible for the establishment of an authentically intellectualised speech in English poetry: Milton. Particularly in the early Milton of the Nativity Hymn, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and Lycidas we have a richness and Page 88 flexibility and supple penetrativeness which are almost lost... the Metaphysicals who came before Milton, is already master of the Life-force, though not aloof from that power's characteristic play. Only, this poetic intelligence is still of the old type and not of the modem variety. All the more is its alignment with the Graeco-Roman spirit visible in Paradise Lost where in his own style of packed Latinised English Milton presents us with imaginative structures... impulse." That the essential note of the new Romanticism was not of the creative Life-force but of the creative Intelligence can easily be marked if, just as we put Shakespeare face to face with Milton or Chaucer or Bacon, we compare certain lines from the supreme Elizabethan to those of the most outstanding later poets. Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life ...
... exploration of the inner countries of the mind, heart and soul. But here we must pause a little. Dante and Milton are great figures in poetry, and it would of course be wrong to include them as mere steps in an argument in any cavalier fashion. Both Dante and Milton had an exalted view of their poetic function and responsibilities. They tried, in fact, to "assert Eternal Providence, and... what they had seen. Did Dante succeed? Did Milton succeed? To quote Sri Krishnaprem, Page 458 Perhaps the last great Western poet to have made any real attempt to grasp the inner unity was Dante, and even he made use of merely traditional myth—and somewhat degenerated myth at that—for most of his structure, while Milton who came later used even more degenerated... poems. Ultimately the intellect rules both Dante and Milton, and the intellect alone is not enough. Neither can the modern man dispense with the intellect. It is because Sri Aurobindo has been able to reach and function from the overhead—the above-mind—planes and write in terms of an overhead aesthesis that what was not possible even for Dante and Milton has been largely possible for him. He has relied ...
... another of the three. Further, we hear: "...the epic bard should never distract the listener's attention from the on-rushing flow of the narrative. Milton following the Homeric tradition also does the same thing." Well, does he? Milton is famous — or notorious — for his large digressions and even his personal asides like parts of the exordiums to Books Three and Seven, where we learn of his... though she disappears soon after Canto Two for nearly ten thousand lines. But Milton cannot be exonerated from complicating his epic by all that endless thunder of the opening three Books. Actually, there are two stories in Paradise Lost , and what is meant to be the secondary story steals the show. And yet we are told that Milton is carrying on the genuine epic tradition. So far I have dealt... cannot be equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid . Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri . And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring ...
... another of the three. Further, we hear: "...the epic bard should never distract the listener's attention from the on-rushing flow of the narrative. Milton following the Homeric tradition also does the same thing." Well, does he? Milton is famous - or notorious -for his large digressions and even his personal asides like parts of the exordiums to Books Three and Seven, where we learn of his... she disappears soon after Canto Two for nearly ten thousand lines. But Milton cannot be exonerated from complicating his epic by all that endless thunder of the opening three Books. Actually, there are two stories in Paradise Lost, and what is meant to be the secondary story steals the show. And yet we are told that Milton is carrying on the genuine epic tradition. So far I have dealt... cannot be equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid. Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring ...
... basic Marlovian idea consummated? Of course, important contrasts strike one: Milton was an intellectual and his hero could never be Marlowe's sheer life-force, the mind with its deliberate experiences, its half-spiritual "exultations and agonies", has come on the stage; but the salient feature remains that Milton has thrown himself heart and soul into a theme and figure than which nothing more... chatting to him over his shoulder. For inspiration acts according to the peculiarities of a writer. Schiller could not compose his dramas unless he had a boxful of rotting apples under his table, and Milton could not continue fluently his Paradise Lost between the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes: wintry dullness which might freeze the genial current of other poetic souls let loose cataract on cataract... curve of progress to trace: whether the curve comes full circle or not depends upon a large complex of circumstances. Among English poets, only two got to the end of their journey — Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser fell within eyeshot of his goal: nobody else did even so much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring simplicity ...
... against a notion you may catch from so much allusion to Milton on my part and on Sri Aurobindo's as well. You may conceive that Sri Aurobindo is trying in so post-Miltonic an era as the twentieth century to revive some sort of Miltonic epos in a style reminiscent of Paradise Lost in various traits. One cannot be farther from the truth. Milton does illustrate preeminently certain basic features of... ordinary intellect" to ranges of consciousness which are more inward or else above that intellect, and though Milton on the whole has nothing of the knowledge or vision of those 'planes' in either his style or his substance, "there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something... and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know not how many hundreds of words poorer than that used by Alfred the Great, not to name Marvell or Milton or, I imagine, the Romantics. But I still think we have to go on making every effort until the last day - which after all is not named on any calendar. One point - it was made by Ramchandra Gandhi ...
... covered before - and I am bound to say that your Milton quotations richly illustrate the extent to which Blake's mind and thought was filled with Miltonic mythology and Miltonic language. A good point, too - Bateson's, I think - about the pages of the Notebook being filled with thumbnail sketches of Miltonic themes. I only differ from you in thinking that Milton was by no means the only source of Blake's... sympathetic and critically alert. She is right in holding that "Milton was by no means the only source of Blake's ideas and symbols at the time of writing the Songs of Experience". Her monumental study, Blake and Tradition, amply proves her point. I do not dispute it. What I must be taken to imply by my thesis is simply that Milton was the predominant source for The Tyger and therefore might j... vitally to the myth and the symbol which for me are affined to Milton? Do they in any manner deflect the Miltonic line of vision I trace throughout the poem? If, as Miss Raine frankly concedes, Blake's mind and thought was to a substantial extent "filled with Miltonic mythology and Miltonic language" and he owed an "immense debt" to Milton in The Tyger as well as elsewhere, this line of vision may ...
... needs some explanation, perhaps,—but I have here perforce to put a dash and finish— 8 October 1932 I said that Aeschylus like Milton was austere au fond —there is as in Dante a high serious restrained power behind all they write; but the outward form in Milton is grandiose, copious, lavish of strength and sweep, in Aeschylus bold, high-imaged, strong in colour, in Dante full of concise, packed... on power of thought, feeling, language—not on abundance of images. Some poets are rich in images, all need not be. 18 February 1936 What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets, because their poetry is not Page 165 full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyasa or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? 18 February 1936... is wrong in thrilling to these things but that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus will remain deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also to stir ...
... though I don't know if Milton ever used "vasty". It is a Shakespearean word, a famous instance being in that line about calling "spirits from the vasty deep".... I am describing, of course, the Overmind, but does the fact that the poem is only from the Higher Mind, however illumined, come in the way? I know very well the Shakespearean line and I don't think Milton Page 57 uses... diversity of its creation,—so the illumined Higher Mind is quite appropriate for the purpose. P.S. By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sonantly hollow. In the last line there is inspiration but it has to be brought out by this preceding line; that must be inspired... combinations as "its silver hush" are best avoided. How would "the large gold throbbing in a silver hush" do? The second line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost ) some of the largeness and rhythm of the higher mind, but his substance except at certain heights is mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of this ...
... four books stand for ever among the greatest things in the world's poetic literature. If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if... difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages I have quoted from Milton, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues ... or Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old, here the epithets are the same that would be... me was sound but what mattered was my application of the principle, and he seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs. But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in question; ...
... Sri Aurobindo wrote at the same age as Milton wrote Comus —namely, Love and Death, the most finished among his early works in blank verse—holds in its short span of about a thousand lines a snatch of the power and amplitude found in the colossus of Milton's old age and also a delicate plastic splendour reminiscent of Comus. The fusion of the early Milton with the late : this may be taken in general... inspired naturalness which some critics have compared with Milton's born hand for it. His style too has been called Miltonic. But if we accept the term it must be with no thought-saving looseness. For, Milton who produced Paradise Lost in his old age produced also Comus in his twenty-seventh year: the styles of the two are not precisely the same. Indeed Paradise Lost is one of the world's greatest... general to characterise at its best the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo's twenties. But, while some actual influence from Page 64 Milton must be admitted, there is seldom a mere repetition of style or structure: what the fusion mainly displays, besides the assured movement of line after moulded line, is just the interweaving of qualities that mostiy fall apart in Milton's life. Within ...
... abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.: Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts... because of his rather cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind. When he pictures Sri Aurobindo as sometimes stirring and boiling the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his own Muse's cauldron, it is not easy to agree even if the critic's Page 404 statement be applied to Sri Aurobindo's early work which is not that of a... comment 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 ...
... therefore can we say she is not great? What about Milton and Mirabai? Disciple : What Tagore wants to say is that to be a perfect poet one must have variety. Sri Aurobindo : In that case we have to conclude that no poet is perfect. Even Shakespeare has his limitations, Browning has variety. Can we, therefore, say that he is greater than Milton? Page 240 Disciple : In c... experience. Disciple : In comparing Shelley and Milton he says that '' Prometheus Unbound " is not as great a theme as " Paradise Lost ". Sri Aurobindo : It is not great because Shelley does rot create anything there. But the theme is equally great. Disciple : He says that Satan and Christ are living characters created by Milton. Sri Aurobindo : Satan is the only character... fine poetry, or that there is no force, or no thought in it. What I say is that it is not creative, it has no vital substance. Disciple : People say he tried to imitate Milton. Sri Aurobindo : Milton, r and everybody else perhaps! Disciple : Among our poets here do you find X great? Page 247 Sri Aurobindo : I was reading his book and I find it ex ...
... highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist, for unfortunately his sense of art often proved stronger than his sense of inspiration and he was satisfied if his blank verse rolled majestic... sensuous, passionate" and underlining the word "simple" with the purpose of confuting me. We must not set the simplicity Milton had in mind at loggerheads with the complexity under discussion. Decoration, richness, pomp, magnificence, multifoliate beauty - all these are not tabooed by Milton: the ban falls only on the pedantic and the ponderous - intellectual deadweight, logical maziness - what is formed... simplicity is a synonym for the unforced freshness I have already spoken about. A contrast with complexity would come rather ill from Milton whose language no less than sentence-structure was far indeed from being plain and straightforward. It would come ill also because Milton was scholar enough to know that neither Aeschylus nor Pindar could be termed transparent or uncomplex. And he was too near the ...
... utterance. 17 Milton lacks Dante's religious (mystical) intensity; Sri Aurobindo has in him both Milton and Dante. Belief in literal and metaphorical 14 Paradise Lost, II, 890-897. 15 Savitri, p. 98. 16 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 83. 17 Paradise Lost, HI, 60. Page 476 truth of the Bible apart, Milton embodies in his epic his... deprecate Milton for his Latinisms, his inflated, ritualistic or incantatory style lacking intimacy and even for the unmodemistic characters of his two epics; but they would fail to unseat him from his position as the second of the first three great poets of England. Real value must find its Page 474 just place in the durable judgement of the world. In fact Milton is great for... did not blot out a thousand words: he was no artist, he was a creator. Others might be greater as artists, one might recall Racine; greater in his range, the poet of the Mahabharata, for instance; Milton a greater music-maker; but none approaches Shakespeare in word-magic. The "easily-come" word rather than the play was the thing for him. Sri Aurobindo, though regarding himself "first and foremost ...
... into a dead hush. For a whole long dry metallic century the lyrical faculty disappeared from the English tongue. The grandiose epic chant of Milton breaks what would be otherwise a complete silence of all higher or profounder poetic power; but it is a Milton who has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all Pagan delicacies of colour... the other great world epics. Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement; seldom has there been an equal sublimity of flight. And to a great extent Milton has done in this respect what he had set out to do; he has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending on any of the formal aids... by its own intrinsic force and is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain inspired intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it. At the same time he has raised this achievement to a highest possible pitch by that peculiar grandeur in the soul and manner of the utterance and that magnificence of sound-tones ...
... of Alchemical and Hermetic thought, and of Boehme, was no less strong and in this poem has given him the symbolic bones, Milton only the imagery.... To be steeped in Miltonic thought is not to derive wholly from Milton." After all this had been written, the section on Milton was redone. Whatever, in the author's opinion, seemed to "wander" was cut out. But, although he sought to guard against ... when she wrote to Sir Geoffrey: "I agree that the section on Milton wanders and is in great need of cutting. At the same time I think it contains a great deal that is convincing and excellent, and in general I think Mr. Sethna has proved beyond doubt that The Tyger is steeped in Miltonic thought." Later she wrote to the author: "As to Milton, while I agree that he is always with Blake, I think the influence... need be admitted in regard at least to the fundamental significance and structure of the poem's story. If this section tries the reader's patience, which it most probably will unless he is both Milton-struck and Blake-bitten, he need not plough through it beyond the point sufficient to render my case plausible. He may return to the skipped parts after the rest of the book in order to complete the ...
... influenced by Milton at almost every step and even Miltonic words and images were absorbed into The Tyger for a new and individual creation. In this creation the chief person of the drama assimilated certain aspects of both the Satan and the Christ of Milton's epic. Milton gave to his Satan a boundless energy of Desire. Blake held that this energy, rather than the Rationality which Milton considered... proper, pertained to the Messiah. He also found apt to his purpose the warrior energy which Milton attributed to his Messiah in Book VI. So, Miltonic ideas and expressions in relation to both Christ and Satan got fused in the poetic reconstruction of the Miltonic theme by Blake. Then we scrutinized the growth of The Tyger from the early drafts and examined the illustration Blake made of the... background not always easily discernible but, on very close analysis, unmistakable. At the end of our section on Blake's other writings we referred to the lyric prefixed by Blake to his own "Prophecy" Milton. We found the fundamentals of it indirectly elucidating the sense of The Tyger with a direct harking back, though in a new setting, to the account of Christ contra Satan in Paradise Lost. ...
... English version: Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Dante also is no mean master of the same art; and Milton of Paradise Lost can match the poets of both the Aeneid and La Divina Commedia. Indeed Milton demonstrates most Page 244 impressively how Melopoeia could be not only lyrical but also epical, a stupendous music in which a grandiose... harmony, posture and gesture along with the markedly intellectual theme, it cannot be "poiesis" at all. Musical poetry, like any other, is itself divisible into several modes. There is the early Milton effect— With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay— which may be matched with the early Sri Aurobindo: Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks. Of course, the art in both these... the beginning and nowhere else in the verse, thereby rounding off, as it were, the initial motif in spite of the hindering double consonant in which it figures. Melopoeia is also in the late Milton effect about all who Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, conjuring up the exotic, the out-of-the-way, the rich and rare, the mighty and magnificent ...
... appreciate poetry? I think I told you the story of a Spainyard, a commercial man, who was my brother Manmohan's friend. Whenever he came to his room he saw books on Milton lying on table. He cried out, "What is this Milton, Milton? Can you eat Milton?" (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: Poetry without variety becomes, according to Tagore, limited, monotonous. SRI AUROBINDO: What does it matter? Greatness of poetry... great poet? Milton is not understood by many. He is not a great poet then? NIRODBARAN: Tagore doesn't raise the question of understanding in this letter. He demands variety. SRI AUROBINDO: What does it matter if there is no variety? Homer has written only on war and action. Can Tagore say that he is a greater poet than Homer? Sappho wrote only on love: is she not a great poet? Milton also has no... poetry doesn't depend on that but on whether the thing that has been created is great or not. Browning has a lot of variety. Can you say that he is a greater poet than Milton? NIRODBARAN: No, but if a poet combines height, depth and variety, he reaches perfection. SRI AUROBINDO: That poet doesn't exist: and no poet is perfect. As I said, even Shakespeare has his limitations. NIRODBARAN: Amal ...
... Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa? And what about Aeschylus, Virgil and Milton? I suppose all the names you mention except Goethe can be included; or if you like you can put them all including Goethe in three rows—e.g.: 1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki 2nd row Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton 3rd row Goethe and there you are! To speak less flippantly, the first three... poetic seeing mind than by this kind of elemental demiurgic power—otherwise he would rank by their side; the same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by what they have made. 31 March 1932 Is the omission of Vyasa... or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line In cradle of the rude imperious surge is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, e.g. Homer's Page 370 Bē de kat' Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr "He went down from the peaks ...
... ballad-tone whose facility as well as jerki-ness often lowers the inspiration of such pieces in English literature: it has a terse strong construction, often with a touch of Latinisation, reminiscent of Milton, and its movement is perfectly controlled and manoeuvred. Some of the turns are a little obscure. In the phrase, Yielding up, the dangerous gorge Saw only on the gnarled and stumbling rise... processes of consciousness other than the intellectual. The thought-element in Savitri therefore differs from that which is found usually in poets credited with a philosophical purpose—even a poet like Milton whose rhythmic roll seems to have a largeness reminiscent of Overhead inspiration. For, though the rhythm catches something of the Overhead breath, Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed... are foreign to his intelligence". And it is because of the mixture of a semi-Overhead sweep of sound with a mostly intellectual-imaginative substance that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for Milton, has said: "The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'." Some notion of the difference between the "mental Miltonic" and ...
... De Victoria Verbi Dei of the Catholic bishop Rupertus Tutiensus has used it. Then there is a third version brought to our notice by B. Rajan in his Milton-study: 8 commentators in the seventeenth century identified Michael with Christ, and Milton himself, while distinguishing them and portraying Christ as the victor, admits in the De Doctrina Christiana the authority of this version when he writes... 4. Op. cit., 5.XII: 7-11. Page 44 Heaven and of his expulsion from there draws its life from the first half of the passage. C. McColley, referring to it in his study of Milton, 6 states that, while early theologians interpreted it as naming Michael as the conqueror of Satan, some altered the punctuation so that Christ could be regarded as intervening after Michael and Satan... He who appeared to me then was not an angel but was my Lord Jesus Christ in the form of a Seraph..." 17 In poetic vision too a Christ with wings has occurred. Vaughan, a part contemporary of Milton and a near predecessor of Blake, has a poem, That Night, addressed to Jesus and 16.XII: 3-4. 17. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, translated from the original Latin and Italian by Raphael ...
... 45,48,90,93,113,114 "Mills, Satanic", 245, 249,251 Milton, 155,240,245,247,248,249, 251,252,255 Milton, iii, 32,55,58,59,64,65,75,76, 83, 84,90,91,92,94,95,99,101; 102,103,104,106,107,113,114, 116,119,121,126,127,175,190-91, 204,254,257,261,262-63,264 Milton and Wordsworth, 101 fn. 158 Milton Handbook, A, 102 fn. 161 "Milton's Battle in Heaven and ...
... "Blake After Two Centuries" in English Romantic Poets, Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by M. H. Abrams (New York), 1960. Grierson, Sir Herbert Milton and Wordsworth (Cambridge), 1938. Hanford, J. H. A Milton Handbook (Fourth Edition, New York), 1946. Harding, D. W. "William Blake" in From Blake to Byron, edited by Boris Ford (Pelican Books, Harmondsworth)... Romantic Imagination (Oxford), 1957. Brown, Raphael (Translator) The Little Flowers of St. Francis by Brother Matthew (Image Books, New York), 1958. Damon, Foster S. "Blake and Milton" in The Divine Vision, Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto (Gollancz, London), 1957. Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems - T. S. Eliot (Penguin Poets... Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford Paperbacks), 1960. McColley, C. "Milton's Battle in Heaven and Rupert of St. Herbert", Speculum, XVI, 1941. Paradise Lost (Chicago), 1940. Milton, John De Doctrina Christiana Paradise Lost Paradise Regained Monk, F. F. Representative English Poetry (London), 1927. Plowman, Max (Editor) Poems and ...
... According to Lascelles Abercrombie: "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ." His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, but Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in external opposition to the Divine Will. It seems certain that, after Milton, an epic dealing fully with an objective... conventional. On the contrary, it has been continually developing. This is clear in the remark of a critic who observes: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Taking all epic poetry into consideration, one may divide it into two main classes: the authentic epic generally intended for recitation and the literary epic intended... objective story is not possible; in modem age it is pushing towards a subjective trend. After Milton hardly any successful epic in European language has been written. The general feeling among the critics is that at present epic manner and 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 ...
... impression of a multifarious knowledge of things, but it was a knowledge picked up from life as he went; Milton gets a certain culture from his studies and learning; but in neither case is the genius or excellence of the poetry due to culture, but there is a certain turn or colouring in Milton which would have not been there otherwise and which is not there in Shakespeare. It does not give any ... or a great number of people; it depends on the kind of vital movement that is there. The kind of vital energy that you find in Kipling's ballads appeals to large mass of people; the vital element in Milton which is very powerful appeals to only a few in comparison—the rest take him on trust because he is Page 208 a great classic but have not the same intense enjoyment of him as of Kipling... speaking of something that need be low or fitted only to catch the general mind, not fit to appeal to a higher judgment, but of something that can be very valuable—from the highest point of view. When Milton writes Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable or describes the grandeur of the fallen archangel, there is a vital force there that is of the highest quality—so is that of Page ...
... 10. Letter to Joseph Baptista, dated 5 January 1920. See Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 26, p. 430. (Also in Purani, The Life, p. 168) 11. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 654 12. Milton, Comus, II. 73-5 13. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 2, p. 107 14. Ibid. 15. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 658 16. From C. C. Dutt's Puranokatha — Upasanhara (Bengali), ... 51. Ibid., p. 652 52. Ibid., p. 654 53. Ibid., pp. 637-38 54. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 5, pp. 101, 102 Chapter 18: The Supramental Manifesto 1. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, 11. 55765 2. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 22, p. 159 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. M. Heidegger, What is Philosophy? Translated by W. Kluback and... 1. The Mother, Vol. 2, p. 47 2. Ibid. 3. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 19, pp. 1048,1049 4. K. Gandhi, The Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1965), p. 16 5. Milton, in Areopagitica 6. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 15, p. 2 7. Ibid., p. 3 8. Ibid., pp. 5-6 9. Ibid., pp. 6, 7 10. Ibid., pp. 7, 8 11. Ibid., ...
... Savage Landor (1775-1864), an English writer and poet. Page 252 October 9, 1932 I said that Aeschylus like Milton was austere au fond [at bottom]—there is as in Dante a high serious restrained power behind all they write; but the outward form in Milton is grandiose, copious, lavish of strength and sweep, in Aeschylus bold, high-imaged, strong in colour, in Dante full of concise... father. Tagore's poem is written at a high-pitch of feeling perfectly intelligible to anyone who had passed through the exaltation of the Swadeshi days, but not more high pitched than certain things in Milton, Shelley, Swinburne. In Govinda Das's lines,—let us translate them into English— Am I merely thine ? 0 Love, I am there clinging In every limb of thine—there ever in my creation... spirit altogether. In the spirit of the writing you can feel it as a something constant, self-restrained, grave and 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 ...
... even a single stroke. But is there a special meaning in such a sword being selected by Milton? Some critics opine that he is referring to Parliament with its two Houses — the House of Commons and the House of Lords. And indeed Parliament did behead the chief of the English clergy, Archbishop Laud. But surely Milton could not have foreseen this event which happened in 1645, eight years after the writing... of God. There is also phanopoeic poetry which is mysterious rather than mystical or else is mystery hovering on the verge of mysticism. Look at Keats's description of the sea-bottom, taking us like Milton "under the glassy, cool, translucent wave" but showing us instead of a "Sabrina fair" in whom we may recognise just an imaginatively idealised human loveliness, a Nature-scene shot through and through... Milton's Lycidas. A passage there speaks of the greed of the clergy of Milton's day, the failure of the pastors to look after their flock of believers. After recounting this clergy's slothful wickedness Milton caps the des-cription of the harm done with the semi-mysterious lines — Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing done — lines which perhaps have the Church ...
... Aurobindo. A Commemorative Symposium edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (Geórge Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1960). Page 226 A Legend and a Symbol. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit: Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss And mad'st it pregnant... on Earth By model, or by shading pencil drawn. 4 Now look at Savitri : The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, ¹. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 19-22. ². Ibid., Book III, lines 6, 9-12. ³ . Ibid., Book II, lines 1034-7. 4. Ibid., Book III, lines 505-9. Page 227 ... enchanted light That glowed along a fading moment's brink, Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. 7 The passages from Milton are blank verse in a philosophico-religious mood conveying strongly-cut imaged ideas in a tone of exalted emotion with the help of words that have a powerful stateliness and a rhythm that has a ...
... abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g. Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his... miss the mark because of his rather cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobmdo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind. When he says, "Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse", it is not easy to agree even if his statement be applied to Sri Aurobmdo's early work which is not that of a ... vague religious idealism can hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo. like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom à la Eliot of The Waste Page 56 Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or ...
... not English) only. You have again hit me 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... kind of passion to him—like kissing! All statements are subject to qualification. What Lawrence states is true in principle but in practice most poets have to sustain the inspiration by industry. Milton in his later days used to write every day fifty lines; Virgil nine which he corrected and recorrected till it was within halfway of what he wanted. In other words he used to write under any other ... November 11, 1936 Guru, what else could it be if not a "hit" or at least shutting my mouth? Every time I complain of a great difficulty, no inspiration, you quote the names of Virgil, Milton, etc. Same in Yoga—you say 10 years, 12 years, pooh! I thought you were honestly asking for the truth about inspiration according to Lawrence and effort; and I answered to that. I didn't know that ...
... Savitri III Paradise Lost and Savitri When Milton, "long choosing and beginning late", decided at last to make the Tall of Man' the subject of his epic, he felt the need for an aggressive defence of his choice and so devoted the Exordium of Book IX to this purpose: Sad task! yet argument Not less but more... epic had been predominantly secular; he made it theological, and the change of approach meant a great change of temper and of atmosphere." 20 It would, perhaps, be truer to say that Milton tried to fuse Virgil and Dante, the epic manner of the former and the theological insights of the latter. This meant creating a new style, which is best summed up by the word 'sublime'. Analysing... now and then venture to murmur, the spell continues till the end. Hell, all Hell, the whole Page 380 of Heaven and entire Earth are comprehended in the scheme of the poem; Milton makes good the promise: .. .what surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so, By likening spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them ...
... the idea of wit as the basis of poetry; there is no straining for wit and cleverness, but its place is taken by a pseudo-Miltonic eloquence or an attempt at Miltonic imaginativeness. The influence of Milton is paramount in these writers. (3) In metre an almost entire abandonment of the heroic couplet and the return to old metres, especially blank verse, the Spenserian stanza & the octosyllabic couplet... models. Pope and his school aimed at correctness & restraint without high imagination and deep emotion; their poetry is therefore not really classical. Gray, Collins and Akenside endeavoured by study of Milton & the Greek writers to recover the true classical style. They were however all greatly hampered by the traditions of eighteenth-century poetry and none of them quite succeeded. Besides this similarity... But the Augustan tradition of smooth & regular verse has also hampered the writers; the cadences are not managed with sufficient subtlety and the infinitely varied and flexible verse of Shakespeare & Milton has remained beyond their reach. Their verse at its best is on the second plane, not on the first; it shows however a great advance in freedom & variety on that of the Augustans. 2d in language ...
... easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree— he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship... line had run: An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy. Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental... to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is Page 65 fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the ...
... developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. It has not been a form constantly... allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice." Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ," — says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far... Will. Satan, the creator of all evil on earth is conscious — very acutely conscious, of his limitations and also of the Divine Power that contains and drives him. It seems almost certain that after Milton an epic dealing entirely with an objective story is not possible, for, the rationalism with which the modern age began Page 91 has been pushing man more and more towards a greater ...
... transition from the kind of melopoeia here practised to another which we may find there. Milton has not only song-music, he has also sym-phony-music and we should be doing injustice to the total con-notation of "melopoeia" if we failed to put under this term the symphonic splendour of Paradise Lost. In that epic, Milton hears in remarkable rhythm the grand events he visualises as happening in Heaven and... separation are meaningful. Mark first how by putting "Him" at the very start of the passage Milton not only emphasises the being who falls ever downward through the lines but also indicates the sheer top from which the prolonged falling takes place. Mark then how by suspending the connection of "Who" with "Him" Milton suggests forcibly not only the prolongation of the fall through depth on depth of space... musical or the pictorial-sculpturesque. We have already quoted lines that were markedly musical — melopoeic lines. Long passages, even whole poems, can be melo-poeic — for example, the song which Milton has put into his Masque called Comus. I have selected this song because it has nothing momentous to say, no great theme is here, no high thought or sentiment is turned into verse-music: a mere picture ...
... and they will come, but it is to be observed that the greatest poets have written in a few forms and metres—e.g. Shakespeare, dramatic blank verse, sonnet, short lyric. In narrative he was a failure. Milton, blank verse, narrative, sonnet, long meditative lyric, ode. His drama form is not dramatic. Kalidas, narrative epic, drama, one elegiac poem, one poem of nature description—not an inexhaustible variation... closing couplet. The first 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... 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 as it is now called). I can manage ...
... valleys felt her feet - (Another lyric in Milton) or How distant far from Albion! his hills & his valleys no more Receive the feet of Jerusalem... (Jerusalem 4, 79, lines 14-15) Please reflect again over my interpretation: it is more relevant as well as more symmetrical. Besides, the first of the other lyrics in Milton which are the sequel of this famous one, mentions... as yet saw that whole universe as a whole scarcely matters, since it was already implicit, as the oak within the acorn. You have woven every symbolic term into the complete pattern. Perhaps in the Milton chapter I was tempted to think that you had done little more than show that Blake uses a Miltonic vocabulary, that all those grand Miltonic words in The Tyger are simply that - a Miltonic symbolic... and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'. I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted in the Milton diagram of the Four Worlds with these fires without; in this scheme Jesus, the Son, is the principle of Light, whose origin is in the fires but whose nature is different -mild and gentle. The 'fires' ...
... easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree— he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship... second line had run: An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy. Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this... to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence ...
... developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the pur- pose". Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. It has not been a form constantly... allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice". Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ"—says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far and seem... will. Satan, the creator of all evil on earth is conscious —very acutely conscious, of his limitations and also of the Divine Power that contains and drives him. It seems almost certain that after Milton an epic dealing entirely with an objective story is not possible, for, the rationalism with which the modem age began has been pushing man more and more towards a greater and greater subjective trend ...
... and 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... lasted until it was worked out in Love and Death . I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets and of others also, not English, can be traced in my poetry—I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold; but it was of the automatic kind—they came in unnoticed. I am not aware of much influence of Shelley and Coleridge, but since I read Shelley a great deal and took... influence in Urvasie and Love and Death. 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 ...
... immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a complete and disastrous loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had not passed through any training of the poetic and artistic... a strong dryness of the light of the reason and a growing hardness of form and concentrated narrowness of the observing eye. This movement rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton, and falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in Dryden and Pope. Page 89 ...
... 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 his Herodiade when she apostrophises the star-pierced... the far Ideal: L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide... (Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter...) Mallarme's best work used to be done in the cold months. Here he is like Milton who has left it on record that his finest inspiration came between the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox. Between September 21 and March 21 the old Puritan poet sat day after day in his favourite ...
... 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 does not rank them on the whole as high as Milton, much less Shakespeare. Even Spenser he puts above them in a total... if their age had been ready and they themselves had possessed more insight into their general destiny, Shelley and Keats, on account of their supreme gifts, could have stood higher than Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser so far as "fullness of native utterance" and "perfect correspondence between substance and form" are concerned. Neither of them had the capacity to create living characters: so they could ...
... would be still less in view: a suggestion of concrete movement would be still unmistakable, but it would not call up any precise picture. Such a suggestion we find in perhaps the greatest phrase Milton Page 272 ever wrote, a phrase which too introduces the very word "thought": ...this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity. The verb "wander"... suggestions. But there are several ways of dealing in them. Two broad categories would be: explicit and implicit. Sri Aurobindo in the lines cited above is sufficiently outside the borders of the implicit: Milton in his phrase on the intellectual being is not. Wordsworth who with his thought-seas is explicit enough in the element of sight grows implicit with if at the end of his best short poem, the celebrated... kye-mere-a, accented in the second syllable) is a queer mythical creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail — and as if this combination were not enough, its mouth breathes fire. Milton has a line in which several mythological monsters run cheek by jowl: Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire. Sri Aurobindo has made the chimeras even queerer than they usually are: he has given ...
... spiritual result." To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance between the creative Life-force and the creative Intelligence we have only to juxtapose Shakespeare and Milton. Even a descriptive passage will serve: Shakespeare on wind and water apropos of Sleep's sealing up the eyes of the shipboy upon "the high and giddy mast" and rocking his brains In cradle of the... And in the visitation of the winds Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds - and Milton on the same theme, adopting as Shakespearian a style as possible to him yet betraying the less nerve-thrilled, more deliberate spirit of the intellect and its more generalised manner: Page 57... being." The emotional life-mind rather than the intellect proper can Page 63 be traced at once as Spenser's poetic source if we hark back to the accents of Belial's speech in Milton or of that passage in Shelley about Heaven's light and earth's shadows and set them over against the lines in which Despair is represented as trying to lure man to self-destruction with the bait of ...
... Aeschylus, Lucretius and Milton are not energetic, then one does not know what energy can mean. Only, theirs is an energy more contained, more organised than in the Roman-tics. Again, to give spirituality to Romanticism without grant-ing anything analogous to Classicism is to forget what a living sense of powers beyond the human is at work in the Greek poets as well as in Dante and Milton: Classicism is hardly... colouring each with its own genius. On the subtle-physical, it would create a poetry teeming with an externality of observation, like Chau-cer's. On the mental, its creation, unlike what was done through Milton in the main, would not be "a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life, things and ideas" 18 and a replacing of the external presentation of life by "an interpreta-tion, a presentation in ...
... connoisseur of words and threw up his wondrous wealth of them out of a masterly multifarious vitality much more vibrant than Keats's. Wordsworth resembled Milton who, among English poets, was the most firmly structured genius on record, though Milton differed in being far ahead of Wordsworth in sustained artistry and far behind him in Page 226 either poignancy or amplitude of spiritual... must remember that in speaking of "men" he did not confine himself to his ordinary contemporaries, much less his humble Cumberland neighbours: he included also "men" like Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the three poets he perhaps valued most. What he really aimed at when he intuitively rather than intellectually understood and followed his theory was a certain simplicity and austerity wedded to intensity ...
... rhythm remains unsupported by the sight and the word." In Milton spiritual things do not "reveal their own body, as it were, and do not utter themselves in their own tongue: they are reflected in the mental imagination and given forceful speech there." Mantra is altogether unknown to Milton. Modern-ism does not have even that music of Milton. Long ago Sri Aurobindo himself said that the rise ...
... of consciousness other than the intellectual. The thought-element in Savitri therefore differs from that which is found usually in poets credited with a philosophical purpose -even a poet like Milton whose rhythmic roll seems to have a largeness reminiscent of overhead inspiration. For, though the rhythm catches something of the Overhead breath, Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed... are foreign to his intelligence." And it is because of the mixture of a semi-Overhead sweep of sound with a mostly intellectual-imaginative substance that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for Milton, has said: "The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'." Some notion of the difference between the "mental Miltonic"... be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit: Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss And madst it pregnant. 1 ...
... World-Force, Self of Mind, World-Soul, Mother Might, Supemature, The Supreme, All-Truth, Sun-word, are no more poetic than words like pole, centre, diurnal, etc. are poetic in Milton. Like the astronomical terms of Milton and the theological terms of Dante, they yield to us their meaning only when we set out to study them. The impression of what P. Lai calls the vague "luminosity" of form... "sugary" sonneteers of the period. He resorted to the use of technical terms and unusual turns of speech, like the Metaphysicals, and to the use of Latinisms and involved syntax ("periods") like Milton. In his satirical and reflective passages, he instinctively goes back to the vigour of Dryden and Pope, their epigrammatic and antithetical manner, as in the following lines: There is no miracle ...
... Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Sri Aurobindo: Good Heavens... all that! You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon my... misquoting me. He garbles my words, misreads my corrections, Page 315 attributes to me opinions I am quite innocent of! A few weeks back he coolly told me that I had definitely declared that Milton had written his "Paradise Lost" from the Overmind! Meher-cule! what's to be done with that fellow? Sri Aurobindo: He ought to be sentenced to penal servitude - let us say, condemned to produce ...
... we take a passage from Milton in which the nameable merits are precisely the same, a simplicity in strength of diction, thought & the run of the verse "What though the field be lost". 2 And when we pass farther down in the stream of literature & read "Thy thunder, conscious of the new command" 3 we feel that the poet has nourished his genius on the greatness of Milton till his own soft & luxurious... luxurious style rises into epic vigour; yet we feel too that the lines are only Miltonic, they are not Milton. Page 290 Now there are certain great poetical styles which are of a kind apart; they are so extraordinarily bare and restrained that the untutored mind often wonders what difficulty there can be in writing poetry like that; yet when the attempt is made, it is found that so far as... pomps of vision and colour, partly on the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry. Like Englishmen they are taught to profess a sort of official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are Shelley, Tennyson & Byron and to a less degree Keats & perhaps Spenser. Now the manner of these poets ...
... homage to the gold calf in Oreb till the Lord struck the idol-worshippers with his wrath. 8 The flag of Lucifer, when unfurled, is compared to a meteor blazing with gems and golden lustre. 9 Milton often contrasts natural Edenic perfection after the fall with corrupt imitations produced by art. Adam's dignity stems from within and is completely independent of external pomps. Similarly, Eve's... Chapman's Homer with "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold" captivates instantly the precious and permanent value of literature and how the poet finds his native region here. Unlike Milton who regards gold as profane, D. G. Rossetti elevates this precious metal to the high heavens. In The Blessed Damozel the eponymous character yearns for the bliss on earth from her home in heaven... jewellery with which the earth adorns herself. If not the forest itself then the aspiration of the forest is rare and precious. The word "gem" derives from the Latin word "gemma" meaning a bud. Milton, in the following lines, uses this word in the sense of blossoms spreading their petals: Rose as in dance the stately trees, And spread their branches hung with copious fruit; Or gemmed ...
... abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.: Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts... cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind. Page 122 When he pictures Sri Aurobindo as sometimes stirring and boiling the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his own Muse's cauldron, it is not easy to agree even if the critic's statement be applied to Sri Aurobindo's early work which is not that of a full-fledged Yogi; but... vague religious idealism can hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom a la Eliot of The Waste Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like ...
... in a very powerful and complex nature. 10 July 1932 Dante and Milton Would it be correct to call Dante a mystic poet? And how would you compare the inspiration-sources of Dante and Milton? Both the poets have a metaphysical background and a strong religious fervour. I don't think either can be called mystic poets—Milton not at all. A religious fervour or metaphysical background belongs... there to justify them and make them alive and lively. On the other hand he keeps to an Elizabethan or semi-Elizabethan style, but the Elizabethan energy is no longer there—he does not launch himself as Milton did into a new style suitable for the predominant play of the poetic intelligence. Energy and force of a kind he has, but it is twisted, laboured, something that has not found itself. That is why he ...
... possibility of reading into it something that Shakespeare's outer mind did not receive or else did not express. 10 March 1935 Milton And they bowed down to the Gods of their wives... 1 Burnt after them to the bottomless pit ... Certainly, Milton in the passages you quote had a rhythmical effect in mind; he was much too careful and conscientious a Page 395 metrist... gods of his wives".—Ed. × The result is bound to be like Landor's rewriting of Milton—very good Landor but very bad Milton. × Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, Except these kisses of my lips ...
... have frequently protested, but Milton was adamant. When one of his friends asked him why he had not taught them Greek and Latin properly, he tartly replied: "One tongue is sufficient for any woman." He meant, of course, that a woman makes more than enough use of even one language and if she had more than one at her command she would — to employ a coinage of Milton himself — turn a house into a ... le babble and by their overflow of talk setting him a pattern of blank verse in which the lines very often push on and join up instead of properly pausing or concluding? At least we know that when Milton went blind he taught Page 29 his daughters to read Greek and Latin to him without understanding what these languages said. He did not teach them the meanings of Greek and Latin words... Grierson, his most moving — that is, most tragically poignant — line is the one in which the blind Samson under the open midday sky cries out: O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon! Well, if Milton had been deaf and not blind, his most happy line would have been an utterance under his own roof when his women-folk got up at sunrise: O calm, calm, calm amid the uproar at dawn! In the interests ...
... and creator but his scale of creation is much smaller: the same may be said of Sophocles. Virgil and Milton command a still less spontaneous breath of creative genius, though their expressive power is immense. Where in their works do we meet a teeming world like that of the Shakes-pearean plays? Milton has his fallen archangel Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but... them to be inevitable there. For it is possible to have high thoughts and lofty phrases without creating anything except resonant rhetoric. The rhetorical element is not in itself an enemy to poetry — Milton is often rhetorical in the best sense, Byron is frequently rhetorical in a fairly good sense, but theirs is a rhetoric natural to a certain genuine mood and springs from within. False rhetoric is what... but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative originality and expressive power and creative genius, the widest scope and the largest amount ...
... him recognised centuries ago, is neither to teach nor merely to please: it is to impassion and to transport. And does not a Classical poet himself, Milton, support Longinus? "It is probably by no accidental conjunction," writes M. H. Abrams, 26 "that Milton, immediately after referring to Longinus (apparently for the first time in England) went on to introduce the pithy phrase that poetry is 'more simple... Laurente sepulchrum. Here was the bourn of death for thee - lofty thy house under Ida, Lyrnesus' high-built house; in Laurentine soil thou 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... nectar quaffed by the immortals flows through Classical poetry no less than Romantic, and if the intoxication shows less flush in the former and if the enthou-siasmos even of an Aeschylus or of a Milton works with a hand that never trembles, the world of true Classicism cannot yet be described as "strictly sober". The more tempered look, the less agitated gesture, the suggestion of the lamp and the ...
... SAVITRI: A COSMIC EPIC 1. 'The Hungry Eye: An Introduction to Comic Art, pp. 131-2. 2. Principles of Poetry, pp. xciv-xcv. 3. From Virgil to Milton, p. 5 4. The Idea of Great Poetry, pp. 72-3. 5. Heroic Poetry, Preface, p. v. 6. (Italics mine) Sri Aurobindo, Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 330-1; also see... has now been translated from modern Greek into English verse by Kimon Friar (1959). 9. The Future Poetry, pp. 376-7. A.B. Purani also reports that to a question whether the epic, after Milton, will tend to be more subjective, Sri Aurobindo answered: "Yes, it is so. The idea that an epic requires a story has been there for long, but the story as a subject for an epic poem seems to be exhausted... See also the chapter on 'Early Epic and Modern Poetry' in John Holloway's The Charted Mirror (1960). 10. The English Epic and its Background, pp. 5-12. 11. From Virgil to Milton, p. 15. 12. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 127. 13. Dante's Other World, p. 73. 14. Possibility, p. 27. 15. The Figure of Beatrice, p. 195. ...
... Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo II Sri Aurobindo and the Hexameter 1 Blank verse, ever since Shakespeare and Milton gave it the shape of their genius, has been the mould par excellence of English poetry. Its unrhymed lines of five feet, variously modulating on the iambic base of a light unstressed syllable followed... haunted by the cadences of the ancient world and have often tried to transfer into their language the hexameter itself — the "heroic" blank verse of Greece and Rome. The mould which Shakespeare and Milton adopted and perfected is unlikely ever to fall into desuetude. It had its birth in the predominantly iambic nature of the English tongue and its span of five feet holds a poetic gesture admirably ... hexameter. A good line of Milton's is nearer the sound of prose than one of Virgil's. No matter how intense the word and the rhythm, the metrical structure is not as distinct, as markedly harmonious. When Milton writes about Satan: His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined and the excess Of glory obscured, it is not impossible ...
... generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language." 'There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all [overhead] styles, Mi ton's 'grand style' is... for the adjective, you passed the verdict: "pseudo-Miltonic." What exactly did you mean?) # "By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sometimes hollow.... An expression like lofty region, vasty region, myriad region even expresses nothing but a Page 128... sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Be de kat' oulumpolo karenon choomenos ker (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart) ...
... experience. PURANI: In comparing Shelley and Milton, Abercrombie says that Prometheus Unbound does not have as great a theme as Paradise Lost and so it couldn't equal the latter in greatness. SRI AUROBINDO: It is not as great because Shelley doesn't create anything there. But the theme is equally great. PURANI: Abercrombie says that Milton has created living pictures of Satan and Christ... Christ. SRI AUROBINDO: Satan is the only character he has created. The first four books of Paradise Lost are full of creative force. But Christ? I disagree with Abercrombie there. Milton has not created Christ. PURANI: About Dante he says he has created Beatrice and her memory was always with the poet. SRI AUROBINDO: What about Dante's political life in Florence? I am sure he was not thinking ...
... and appreciate it? Does it follow that Thompson is not a great poet? Milton is not understood by many. He is not a great poet then?… What does it matter if there is no variety? Homer has written only on war and action. Can Tagore say that he is a greater poet than Homer? Sappho wrote only on love: is she not a great poet? Milton also has no variety and yet he is one of the greatest poets. Mirabai has... that life… Greatness of poetry doesn’t depend on [variety] but on whether the thing that has been created is great or not. Browning has a lot of variety. Can you say that he is a greater poet than Milton? … Nirodbaran: Tagore means to say that everybody must have variety like himself. Nishikanto saw in a vision that Tagore was satirising Nishikanto’s expressions like “light-fountain” before people ...
... a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. MYSELF: (I couldn't read it) Absolutely unreadable, Sir, not even by Nolini! SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory. What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. ... I am not very rich in the faculty of imagination. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. SRI AUROBINDO: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? MYSELF: What thinkest Thou ...
... the genuine and the counterfeit are not the same. The works of Milton and Page 48 Pope, of Corneille and Delille, are not classics of the same type. For us Pope and Delille do not appear as true classics, at the best they are perhaps classical. Pope and Delille followed the same technique that had been introduced by Milton and Corneille in the literary art, but they went to an excess... before the eyes of the world. The city of Rome and the goddess Juno and the hero Aeneas are mere symbols and excuses to express a great universal truth. In a parallel manner, the epics of Dante and Milton have specifically dealt with the Christian ideas. To us, modern intellectuals and adorers of materia1 science most of the ideas of these two poets may seem not only grotesque but also superstitious ...
... Literature, and an Honourable Mention in the Bedford History Prize. Twice in November 1889, he participated in debates, once on the inconsistency of Swift's political views and on the second occasion on 'Milton'. 20 When he had caught up with Greek during the first two years, Sri Aurobindo was able to take his regular studies easy in the last three years and devote his spare time to general reading, especially... papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours.... AS for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), Page 33 I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real... sky.... is nearly met by Æthon's; But day is sweeter; morning bright Has put the stars out ere the light.. . 46 * It is a variation of the II Penseroso-L'Allegro colloquy, for like Milton, Sri Aurobindo was a classicist too, and a classicist when young cannot choose but see and hear, tie cannot choose but catch like the shower in the sunshine, dazzling rainbow his and present them ...
... and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Good Heavens, all that! You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and ...
... ise it's not much good." [p. 89] All statements are subject to qualification. What Lawrence states is true in principle, but in practice most poets have to sustain the inspiration by industry. Milton in his later days used to write every day fifty lines; Virgil nine which he corrected and recorrected till it was within half way of what he wanted. In other words he used to write under any other... which come in that way. Yes. Usually the best lines, passages etc. come like that. 10 November 1936 Every time I complain of great difficulty, no inspiration, you quote the names of Virgil, Milton, etc. Same in Yoga—you say 10 years, 12 years—pooh! I thought you were honestly asking for the truth about inspiration according to Lawrence and effort; and I answered to that. I did not know that ...
... As this fades away, we see standing high and apart the lonely figure of Milton with his strenuous effort at an intellectual poetry cast in the type of the ancients. The age which succeeds, hardly linked to it by a slender stream of Caroline lyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and ...
... people; it depends on the kind of vital movement that is there. The forceful but inferior sort of vital energy that you find in Kipling's ballads appeals to a large mass of people,—the vital element in Milton which is very powerful affects only a few in comparison—the rest take him on trust because he is a great classic but have not the true intense enjoyment of him as of Kipling. Yet Milton's greatness... speaking of something that need be low or fitted only to catch the general mind, not fit to appeal to a higher judgment, but of something that can be very valuable—from the highest point of view. When Milton writes Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable, or describes the grandeur of the fallen archangel, there is a vital force there that is of the highest quality,―so is that of Shakespeare; ...
... to these ideals as though without them we could not live, just as Wordsworth felt that We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. It makes me happy to know that you, my friend, have been carrying on Temenos for years against heavy odds and are at present launching the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies where you... impairment of hearing after a bout of flu some months back - a defect luckily gone now - I can well understand your greater predicament. Although one may pride oneself on being in the august company of Milton in his fifties no less than of Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old, or on receiving the same stroke of adverse fate as that superman of music, the aged ...
... poetry. Men with intellects can be intense poets if they know how to put into their poems not their intellectuality but the passion of thought that often goes with it. Lucretius and Dante were such men, Milton also in his own manner. Shelley was another. Wordsworth too. In them thought was passionate, in Shakespeare passion was thinking. He seems time and gain to set up fireworks of ideas, but actually we... between the creative Life Force and the creative Intelligence in their intensities of reflection if we first tune in to two soliloquies from Shakespeare and then get the wave-length of a passage from Milton. Hamlet's most celebrated speech, out of which we have already detached that verse about "this mortal coil", contains the lines: Page 385 To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream; ...
... think they would equally savour a line I might make about the sister of a Parsi student of mine: The daughter of Minoo and Shirinbai'.) Similarly they would turn on their tongues the phrases of Milton about all who Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebisond... There is no intellectual content here, nor any emotional content to speak of. There is only a beauty... understanding discover? As Middleton Murry tells us, we get a sense of the exotic, the out-of-the-way, the rich and rare — an exoticism soft and languorous in the Racine-line, martial and clangorous in the Milton-verses. A distinguishable sensation or perception is almost all we have. But if we are after such an effect in "pure poetry" we should go beyond even the little touch our understanding receives from ...
... they had not yet realised the full possibilities of the enjambed variety. Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much... scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's end-stopping in a good part of his verse should push one into the equal and perhaps worse glibness of Tennysonifyihg an afflatus so remote ...
... free out of one's own being—one living Page 407 creature & character,—himself. Milton has produced several bold & beautiful or fine outlines or descriptions, but only one living being, the rebel Archangel Satan, and only so in the first four books of Paradise Lost does Satan really live. When Milton ceases to portray himself in his fallen state and thinks only of his plot & subject, Satan ...
... generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane ?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language." "There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all [overhead] styles. Milton's 'grand style'... for the adjective, you passed the verdict: "pseudo-Miltonic." What exactly did you mean?) "By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sometimes hollow.... An expression like lofty region, vasty region, myriad region even expresses nothing but a ...
... matter. Haven't you heard of Meredithese and Carlyle's? Carlyle often writes English with a German turn and tone. Some critics even condemn Milton for corrupting the genius of the English language by his Latinism of construction in Paradise Lost. Yet Milton is generally put in the frontline of English poets. Today neither Australia nor British Africa is innocent of slight peculiarities, whereas ...
... however, that romanticism is not only the cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery — that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls,... in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, very rare in Milton for all his compact force. I am not quite clear as to what conclusion I should draw about the nature of poetry from your paragraph about aesthetics and the Overmind. Of course it is plain ...
... "Wordsworth's double poetic character" has been discussed by almost all major critics. Though Arnold expressed his firm belief that Wordsworth's achievement is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in English, he felt that if the romantic poet was to have general recognition the first necessity was to separate his best from the mass of his inferior... European poets. A fusion of Pound's concept with Sri Aurobindo's ideas on the nature of poetry yields interesting insights into even the classics that have been exhaustively probed: "Milton has not only song-music, he has also symphony- music." (p. 133) "He (Yeats) stands supreme in modern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia ...
... Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery -that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between... quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Page 135 Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic picture of dawn is built up by ...
... more because it brought a breath of England with its conjuration of flowers from Sussex hills and woods on the music of a language which is part of my inmost being. There is a slight touch of early Milton and a half-hint of Shakespeare in the verbal turn here and there, but both are taken up most felicitously into the quintessential You, and this taking up is all the richer because of that faint waft... to thrive upon or when their ambitious careers have been crowned with success, I am referring to those who are not of the common run, people who carry in their bones the drive of some great mission. Milton, for instance, who knew he had been born for a worthwhile poetic creation. 1 believe Dante too had to wait for the Divine Comedy to emerge. After this poem's music had come to rest with ...
... he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable... attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that ...
... had not yet realised the full possibilities of the enjambed variety. Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was... the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib Page 219 comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's end-stopping in a good part of his verse should push one into the equal and perhaps worse glibness of Tennysonifying an afflatus so ...
... Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between... points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic picture of dawn is built up ...
... projected confrontation is discerned in Book VI of Paradise Lost . A deep affinity, worked out with attention to what Blake would call "minute particulars", is disclosed with the action depicted by Milton and even with the language and imagery of the depiction - though everything has undergone a subtle recreation in terms of Blake's individual vision and mentality. This mentality is less severely... Hence the query addressed to the Tyger apropos of the double role divinity has assumed: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee? Apart from Milton, comparative aspects are found in various features of the general Christian tradition to elucidate the relationship the poem suggests between God the Father and Christ the Son, as well as the poem's ...
... 1. When Milton went blind he taught his daughters to read Greek and Latin to him without understanding what these languages said. He did not teach them the meanings of Greek and Latin words nor their syntactical structure but only how to pronounce them. The poor girls were bored with long hours of gibberish recitation to their papa. They must have frequently protested, but Milton was adamant. ...
... By the way, I hope you didn't intend to make me an April-fool mentioning Virgil and Nirod in the same pen-stroke! [ In pencil. ] What a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. Another letter from Jatin. He has asked for the reply to his previous letter. Please do write something tonight, Sir. I request you, I beseech you, I entreat... yesterday, Sir. Absolutely unreadable! Not even by Nolini was it possible! I repeat then from memory. "What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other." 183 Tomorrow is 4th April! 184 We are commemorating it thus: 1) Nishikanta sends a big poem—splendid, exquisite. By Jove, what ...
... earth, and if not I will have some from the womb of future, for time has no end and the earth too is boundless." From this point of view Milton and Virgil may be looked upon as mere poets. Those who consider Shakespeare, Homer and Valmiki superior to Milton, Virgil and Kalidasa come to such a conclusion from a subtler consideration. One group of poets makes use of vaikhari vak, while the other of ...
... blank verse differs from Milton's. There are practically no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. Blank verse after Milton has not been very great. So if you write the kind that is in Paradise Lost, you imitate Milton's style and there can be only one Milton. Yeats has written some successful blank verse in the Tennysonian form on Irish Celtic subjects. There is one long piece about ...
... artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical... beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently ...
... thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it. Herein lies the greatness of his achievement. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of Milton, has been regarded by poets as "harsh and crabbed" and as such unfit for poetic delineation. Not a few poets indeed foundered upon this rock. A poet in his own way is a philosopher, but a philosopher... describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet." Page 52 like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso. I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate ...
... don't say that his poem is not fine or that it has no force or thought in it. It is an epic-but it is not creative. It has no vital substance. PURANI: People say he tried to imitate Milton. SRI AUROBINDO: Milton, Homer and everybody else. ...
... spots, his eyes uncannily observant enough but not so as to miss in the woods the twisted, fallen or darkened trees, Sri Aurobindo's criticism is unexceptionable indeed. As with the Elizabethans, with Milton too - and notably with Paradise Lost - Sri Aurobindo merely holds the mirror up to the man and his work, and the high magnificent face is caught in it and so are the warts: Paradise Lost... any one of his predecessors except Dante.... To justify the ways of God to man intellectually is not the province of poetry; what it can do, is to reveal them. Yet just here is the point of failure. Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin and Hell and Chaos; there is a Scriptural greatness in his account of these things: he has not so seen God and heaven and man or the soul of humanity at once divine ...
... "work in progress", Savitri came up in the course of the talks more than once. On 3 January 1939, for example, Sri Aurobindo said that in his blank verse he had gone back from Shakespeare and Milton to Marlowe: Each line stands by itself and each sentence consists at most of five or six lines.... There are no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. 10 Again, on 5 March... last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few - and more and more as the months and years passed - came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper: We know we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic ...
... the soil", too Sanskritised and not written for the masses. English poetry, he says, is founded on the Anglo Saxon language. Sri Aurobindo : Not at all. The great Shakespeare and poets from Milton to Shelley did not write, consciously in the Anglo Saxon language – except William Morris, who used Anglo Saxon words. They have followed Latin and Greek vocabulary. And the idea of writing for the... written for the mass. It is only a minority that read and appreciated poetry. The definition of modern poetry is what the poet himself and a few of his admirers around him understand. Shakespeare and Milton are not mass poets. Martin Tupper and Mrs. Hymans wrote for the mass – "He stood on the burning deck, when all but he had fled" – That sort of thing. Tupper sold more in his life than all the best ...
... 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 English to conjure up an atmosphere of the Divine and the Superhuman around their highest moments, an instinct aligning itself with the inward impulsion that led Homer to appeal to his Thea and Milton to cry "Sing Heavenly Muse." A sense of the mysterious Divine is always leaping out in Page 73 this manner through great poetry. In general, it is the unformulated background whose... summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses Such lines as In hideous ruin and combustion down [To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire] or Wilt thou upon the ...
... had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is ... for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with ...
... everything is "Melopoeia" itself. Now, this word — but no! let me not digress, let me take it only as a musical warning and come back to the point where we stopped last time. We were with Milton. Milton excels in both lyric and epic melopoeias; and, in either, he exploits to the full what I may term an earthly delicacy or richness: the moods he turns to music belong, for all their imaginative ...
... but severely concealed. .. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as In hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire or Wilt thou upon... also a spontaneous contemplation. No doubt, 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 ...
... very rich in the faculty of image-making. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. Sri Aurobindo: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he wrote... Sir. Even Nolinida couldn't read the words. Sri Aurobindo: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. Question: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional as regards my early success in English versification." But how ...
... by moonlight? We may remember Milton: the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her 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 ...
... committing ourselves literally to its classification of the three artists concerned or to its ascription to them of the qualities defined. The Classicism of the Graeco-Roman poets as well as of Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe Page 183 and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare... thy immortality Broods like the Day is not in style Classical; writing ... Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality he might have been a Milton letting the creative Intelligence be replaced by a light from beyond it. Thus, Classicism, in manner though not in matter, will be part of the spiritual speech whose primary genuine outburst in the ...
... by both being in love with poetry. By the way, poetry itself is, according to Milton, "simple" no less than "sensuous and passionate" - "simple" in the special sense that it is a direct language rather than one that is complicated by speculative discourse - a fresh-welling Page 283 utterance due, as Milton himself says, to dwelling on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious ...
... consciousness? Intellectual criss-cross and sophisticated maziness are definitely objectionable in poetry — and I am of the opinion that it is these that Milton excluded when he talked of poetry being simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Milton himself — as compared to a poet like Homer — was far from simple. I don't believe his construction and his mode of thought were even as simple as Sophocles's ...
... diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those forces that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. ... that! You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon ...
... will touch on the diverse branches of the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work... of a classical poet, but the vital substance of them is, I think, not misrepresented. It would be interesting to observe how far they recur in other epics. C. M. Bowra's study, From Virgil to Milton, might be helpful. The table of contents reproduced in my catalogue from his book prompts me to - but no! I won't say to what it prompts me. Enough of these leaps: I must draw myself back from making ...
... metre. All depends 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,... rhythm, variations of pause and caesura. The iambic metre itself was at first taxed with monotony in a drumming beat until it was used Page 141 in a more plastic way by Shakespeare and Milton. All depends on the skill which one brings to the work and the tool is quarrelled with only when the workman does not know how to use it. The English language is not naturally melodious like the ...
... in which Virgil's dignified pensiveness found voice, the soaring yet mountain-secure intensity to which Dante shaped his compulsive vision, the smiling certainty of vast wing-stroke which upbears Milton through all the revelatory detours of his mind. Chapman at his best rushes, dazzles, distracts: he has compass without full harmonious sweep, brilliance without elevated control, imaginative passion... The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes. Page 48 It is most vivid, impressive, puissant, but the last touch of effortless elevation is not there such as Milton could give even for pages. To quote Chapman at any length is at once to prove the weakness bound up with his vigour: As in a stormy day In thick-set woods a ravenous fire wraps in his ...
... he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable... attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that ...
... ancient Indian scriptures with the sustained potency that in these four lines turns the etherealities of religion and idealism into an immediate and palpable greatness. Perhaps in their rarest flights Milton and Wordsworth have captured something similar, but there is in these verses by Sri Aurobindo a continuity, a completeness, an all roundness, an exhaustive loftiest expression of the truth of our whole... found expression. Every plane has its own voice, its own spontaneous manner of utterance. A vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion is Shakespeare, the plane of the Life Force par excellence. Milton is a less vibrant play with our guts but a more resounding impact on our grey cells, the plane of the Mind Force raised to its climax. Beyond these forces are other planes: there the basis of all ...
... rapid access to the worlds of visions and voices to which only the masters have the key. This is brought out even more convincingly in another passage which challenges comparison with those lines by Milton which have often been considered some of the most majestic in the language—the description of Satan's army of rebels: Cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion to behold ... his Paradise Lost as good as allowed to atrophy, a subtle yet puissant interfusion of fantasy with strength and grandeur, a touch half Coleridgean half Shelleyan in the midst of Miltonic energy. Milton himself would have been full of it, had he followed up and perfected his early manner and written his magnum opus after a life of continuous poetic development instead of turning to do so after a ...
... already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and... The last line here is a veritable Mantra crystallising the nature of the true Mantric articulation. If we may apply Sri Aurobindo's own description 1 of those two great lines from Wordsworth and Milton: "one has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite ...
... him a wealth of words. Instead of saying one word he says five. Similarly in Milton you have a plethora of words, art which is enriched, art which is abundant. But sometimes even in Shakespeare you come across very bare lines which are just as effective as his wealth-burdened move- Page 421 merits. Milton too has such effects. In Dante you have, according to Sri Aurobindo, a perfect ...
... successful blank verse in England after Shakespeare and Milton. What about Shelley's Prometheus Unbound? SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say there is no successful blank verse. 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 ...
... expression, as well as range and variety. According to him, Shelley is not equal in range to Milton. SRI AUROBINDO: Range? What does he mean by range? If he means a certain largeness of vision, then Shelley does not have it. Homer, Shakespeare, the Ramayana and the Mahabhara have range. But neither Virgil nor Milton has range in the same measure. Their range is not so great. Dante's range too is partial ...
... say, but he is a different case. Once he used to be rated a great poet. NIRODBARAN: Browning? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Both Browning and Tennyson ranked as great—they were just below Shakespeare and Milton. But can Browning be taken to be a greater poet than Thompson? Has he any single poem as great as "The Hound of Heaven"? NIRODBARAN: Satyendra Dutt was also called a great poet once. SRI AUROBINDO... content of the power. The Subject Madhusudan deals with is poor in substance. I don't say he is not a great poet, but with his power of style, expression and rhythm he should have got the first rank like Milton, but he didn't because of the lack of substance. He has said things in a great way but what he has said is not great. ...
... am not very rich in the faculty of image-making. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. SRI AUROBINDO: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he wrote something... illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida could not read the words. SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. QUESTION: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional" as regards my early success in English versification. But how are they ...
... Marut, 22, 28-9 Marx, 126 Mayavada,278 Mazumdar, Dipak, 213 -"Baritone", 212 Mazzini, 253 Mephistopheles, 250 Metaphysicals, the, 57, 71,286 Michael Angelo, 170 Milton, 52-3, 85, 93, 125, 147, 163, 168,245 --Camus, 245n Page 373 -Paradise Lost, 163, 168n Minerva, 284 Mitra, 45, 157, 159-60, 180, 294 Modern Review, the, 229n... beauteous Evening, calm and free", 232n -"The World is too much with us", 68n., 169n -Ode on the Intimations of Immortali y, 234 -Poems Dedicated to National Inde pendence & Liberry, 233n -"Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour", 233n -Poems of the Imagination, 231-2n -"I wandered lonely as a cloud" (The Daffodils), 169n., 232n . -"Laodamia", 231n -"She was a Phantom ...
... artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical... beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted ...
... mésalliance. He declared a new apocalypse and said that Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell: But first the ...
... years for Aurobindo. He used to take an active part in the Literary Society at St. Paul's. It is recorded that he spoke on the inconsistency of Swift's political opinions on 5 November 1889 and on Milton on 19 November of the same year. ¹ It appears quite certain that the three brothers were compelled to live in a very embarrassed financial position in London because remittances from their father... that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers, at the scholarship examination). As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint ...
... in the wilderness after his forty days of fasting; the story of the temptation is detailed both by Matthew and Luke, 130 and elaborated into epic proportions by Milton in Paradise Regained. Following in the main Luke's version, Milton gives each temptation its particular stress, and it is not surprising that the second and main temptation—in which Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the w ...
... wilfully preparing its own decline and sterility. The age of which Callimachus & Apollonius of Rhodes were the Simonides & the Homer and the age of which Tennyson is the Shakespeare & Rudyard Kipling the Milton present an ominous resemblance. Page 174 ...
... COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO.) The present draft is structured more as a drama, and is published as such here. The exact relationship between the two texts is not clear. Both obviously owe much to Milton. Fragment of a Play. This piece was written in Pondicherry sometime around 1915. The plot appears to be based on an episode in the Bhagavata Purana. STORIES More than ...
... straightforward vigour, a freshness and greatness and pulse of life, a simplicity of strength and beauty that makes of them quite another kind than the elaborately constructed literary epics of Virgil or Milton, Firdausi or Kalidasa. This peculiar blending of the natural breath of an early, heroic, swift and vigorous force of life with a strong development and activity of the ethical, the intellectual, even ...
... the greatest world-poets and not always combined in them in so equable a harmony and with so adequate a combination of execution and substance. Kalidasa ranks among the supreme poetic artists with Milton and Virgil and he has a more subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater breath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than the Latin poet. There is no ...
... that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours (meaning my classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay it was wonderful." In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint ...
... Articles known to be by Shyam Sunder Chakravarti and Hemendra Prasad Ghose often contain long quotations from or allusions to certain British prose writers (Mill, Macaulay) and poets (Shakespeare, Milton). Sri Aurobindo's articles contain few quotations but occasional allusions to a wide range of Biblical, classical, European and Indian literary works. Clichés . Writings known to be by ...
... and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed commonplace in Pope and Dryden, played with elegance and beauty on the lesser strings with the Victorians or cast out here and there a profounder strain of thought ...
... The main reliance on the metrical stress can leave room in powerful hands for very great rhythms, but it has its limitations, from which different poets try to get release by different devices. Milton sought it in variations of pause and the engulfing swell of periods of large and resonant harmony, Swinburne by the cymbal clang of his alliterations and a rush and surge of assonant lyrical sound ...
... but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry,—not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era. His astonishing early performance leaves us wondering what might have been the masterpieces of his prime, of which even Hyperion and ...
... decasyllabic and hexameter verses. In the blank verse decasyllabic I would count it as a rule for variability of rhythm to make the caesura at the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh syllable, e.g. from Milton: (1) for who would lose Though full of pain, | this intellectual being, (4th) Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, | swallowed up and lost? ...
... circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. 1 October 1943 Indo-English Poetry I suppose ...
... supporting them in their return to their eternal source. This high departure was not an inevitable outcome of the age that preceded Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley. The intellectual endeavour had been in Milton inadequate in range, subtlety and depth, in those who followed paltry, narrow and elegantly null, in both supported by an insufficient knowledge. A new and larger endeavour in the same field might ...
... Shakespeare's most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the "oral" epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth thou Eye among the blind, Page 646 That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, is there very much to object to in this ...
... becomes 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 ...
... murdering King Duncan: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red... Milton, too, with his frequent disdain of the Horatian maxim about art lying in concealing art, would fall under your mentor's ban. Does he not spurn economy of words when he tells us of Christ going forth ...
... mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence). The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer levels whose ...
... Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad'st it pregnant.... Milton is writing in consonance with the early Christians' imaginative tendency to give a supernatural power a subtle-physical form and a personal-looking function. This tendency the early Christians ...
... compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam — and in those ...
... scheme, except for his "Purgatory", would have remained identical in the spirit of its theology and in its picture of the Hereafter. (The very word Paradiso derives from the Persian Pairidaeza.) Milton too would have written of the war between God and Satan, angels and devils, though the story of the Garden of Eden might have differed. Goethe also would have thought of his Mephistophiles the Devil ...
... several words which have common-ly no dignity (whether monosyllabic or polysyllabic) can in the hands of an inspired poet kindle up with a peculiar charm or force. Take the word "shop", give it to Milton and see what he does: And set to work millions of spinning worms That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk. A most original surprise suggestive of exquisite industry springs ...
... carry off a sense either trivial or thin or else prosaic. A chronic case of thinness of sense is Swinburne who in later life lost himself in complex eddies of sound with hardly perceptible mean-ing. Milton, on the other hand, had always substantial significance, but at times he permitted it to be prose set to organ music — grand resonance sweeping merely intellectual matter along. Tennyson suffered from ...
... that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired ...
... delight through earth's dim and coarse stuff. Or analyse: Falls off like a leaf torn by a short breath Of wind. Page 127 Outside Donne and Hopkins — and occasionally Milton — it is difficult to meet with such metrical license indulged in so masterfully. The line is a pentameter but composed of a semi-spondee, a semi-pyrrhic, a full spondee, a pyrrhic and again a full ...
... same confined and narrow scope. In our schools & colleges we were set to remember many things, but learned nothing. We had no real mastery of English literature, though Page 1102 we read Milton & Burke and quoted Byron & Shelley, nor of history though we talked about Magna Charta & Runnymede, nor of philosophy though we could mispronounce the names of most of the German philosophers, nor ...
... Overhead Poetry Pharphar ("...Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams" —Milton) Where is the glassy gold of Pharphar Or its echoing silver-grey When the magic ethers of evening Wash one the various day? I have travelled the whole earth over Yet never found The beautiful body of Pharphar Or its soul of secret sound ...
... his half philosophical half scientific thinking, the "Novum Organum" note? If a writer creates even in part out of himself, how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his essential nature out? Milton, Wordsworth, even Shelley had, unlike Shakespeare, an intellectual substance and their rhythm reflects it; Bacon too would have given his dramas some touch at least of an inspiration uttering in a ...
... He is speaking of 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 ...
... heavenly delight through earth's dim and coarse stuff. Or analyse: ...Falls off like a leaf torn by a short breath Of wind. Outside Donne and Hopkins - and occasionally Milton - it is difficult to meet with such metrical license indulged in so masterfully. The line is a pentameter but composed of a semi-spondee, a semi-pyrrhic, a full spondee, a pyrrhic and again a ...
... extent I have been able to follow the winding bout of reasoning in the book, I'm more inclined towards yours rather than Raine's interpretation, but this may be because I am far more familiar with Milton than with the "sources" investigated by her. It is a pity the two readings - the result of so much research and hard thinking - cannot be entirely reconciled with each other. 5 If there ...
... exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Ro- mans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly let loose ...
... Haffner calls Hitler “a truly evil man” and writes about “the enormous evil in him”. Ambassador François-Poncet is of the opinion that Hitler was “a man driven to the extreme by a demon”. The historian Milton Himmelfarb says: “I don’t think that Hitler was a statesman. I don’t think that Hitler was an accidental agent. I think he was an evil man, an evil genius.” In Gitta Sereny we find: “Hitler’s evil ...
... circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don’t find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. My view of your poetry is different from Annada’s ...
... Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. My view of your poetry is different from A's. Some ...
... affairs of the whole of India was a very difficult task. I added that even running a small factory and controlling labourers was not easy. She smiled and nodded. Then suddenly I told her that Mr. Milton Obote—the President of Uganda—had been our clerk once upon a time in Africa (Kenya) where my father and four brothers had owned a factory. She asked me: "What factory?" I said: "Sugar factory." ...
... appeal to you most as well as those which strike to your mind the greatest note of originality. Also tabulate in numerical order the various steps leading to "the height of the great argument", as Milton would have put it. You have both to enjoy and to absorb the splendid process - or rather the grand procession of Sri Aurobindo's illumined thought. If enjoyment has not been there, you will not be ...
... figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton - just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the elite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria ...
... he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of a torrent for him and, as for Caesar, he said: "You have forgotten ...
... last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few — and more and more as the months and years passed — came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper: 8 We know we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic ...
... of ascensioa " Ibid ., p. 727. 147 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 198. 148 Savitri , p. 750. Page 473 English blank verse of such poets as Shakespeare, Milton or Wordsworth. It is a form that he has evolved as the most apt vehicle for his purpose. In a letter he speaks of some of the technical peculiarities as well as the two most important influences ...
... fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's long poetic career. In one poem, perhaps the greatest epic of the human soul yet written, the poet records his knowledge of whatever wisdom the human soul is heir to. Milton set out to write a poem which would justify the ways of God to man but failed in his purpose. He has written a grand epic which has the elevation of the Hebrew mind, which has flashes of high intuitive ...
... difference between the early epic of Homer, Valmiki or Vyasa, where a vast and complex outward action is the subject; and the departure towards subjectivism introduced by Dante and strengthened in Milton. Savitri could be seen as a modern efflorescence of this trend, an inner epic of spiritual integrality and vastness. Romen's comparative study of Savitri and Milton's Paradise Lost is another ...
... Perception, edited by James Edie, Evanston, North Western University Press, 1964. Mehta, J.L., Philosophy & Religion : Essays and Interpretation, Indian Council of Philosophic Research, 1990. Milton, Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, Praeger Publications, New York 1972. Mira, Veda Education in Ancient India, Arya Book Depot, N.Delhi, 1964. Mircea Eliade, Editor-in-chief ...
... found perhaps more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this harmonious combination, Kālidāsa ranks not with Anacreon and Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. 7 There are references to Kālidāsa's greatness as a poet at different times, in our own country from scholars and poets of eminence, even of the stature of Bānabhatta, the famous author ...
... mine] which you wouldn't approve: "the voice of a devouring eye"? "The voice of an eye" sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective.... If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth Page 186 Thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, readst the eternal deep, is there very much to object to in this ...
... What 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 ...
... that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay it was wonderful." In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint ...
... lapis-lazulis of, rare value were the reward extracted from his supramental quarry, though at the cost of being dubbed a "wooden head" and many other complimentary epithets. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Napoleon, Virgil, Shaw, Joyce, Hitler, Mussolini, Negus, Spanish Civil War, General Miaja, romping in, oh, the world-theatre seen at a glance exhibiting many-coloured movements for the eye's ...
... that it is wrong in thrilling to these things but that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus remains deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also to stir ...
... personal experience of Yoga, they may be objected to on that ground. But a poet is not bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost. Are all D's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and ...
... which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal." 15 Again, in yet another letter: "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother." 16 Like Homer and Milton, Sri Aurobindo also plunges in medias res in the opening canto; exclusive of the sections devoted to necessary retrospective narration, the main action of the epic comprises but a single day, and ...
... balanced single lines in Savitri recall Pope, the richly elaborated similies must be conceded to be in the true epic manner, almost Miltonic in their impact though not in their technical organisation. Milton himself thought that the virtue of blank verse lay in "apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." Can it be said that in Savitri the ...
... Mahabharata 103, 104 Mamata 9 Manmohan Ghose, Prof. 92,102 Mantra 25 Manu 5 Marcellus 23, 24 Matthew Arnold 102 Medhatithi Kanwa 8 Michael Angelo 19 Milton 9, 16 Mitra 1, 4, 5, 31 Montevideo 55 Modern Review, the 93 Mount Kailas 17 Muse 61, 88 Page 104 N Naiad 32 Neapolitans 50 ...
... The sleet drives hissing in the wind, Yon toilsome mountain lies before, A dreary treeless waste behind. Or we may take a pictorial presentation of a gorgeous kind from Milton: High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her Kings Barbaric Pearl ...
... third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead Page 251 of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out in the end only a second class or worse production ...
... Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation,4 Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied ¹ "Burnt Norton" ² Ibid. ³ Ibid. 4 Ibid. Page 147 to the modern. To the modern ...
... across the moor The sleet drives hissing in the wind, Yon toilsome mountain lies before, A dreary treeless waste behind. Or we may take a pictorial presentation of a gorgeous kind from Milton: High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, Satan ...
... saw strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they are now familiar even to the ...
... of greatness in Wordsworth, where the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an intimacy but to the voice of a highest infinity: ¹ "Three years she Grew," ² "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour", Poems Dedicated to National lndepenrknce and Liberty, XIV, ³ The Winter's Tale, Act IV, Sc. 4. Page 233 The marble index of a mind ...
... revivifying waters released. It is a simple truth that we state 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 ...
... common vessel." SRI AUROBINDO: The artist can base his poem on heaven: why necessarily on earth? Does Tagore mean to say that everybody understands or appreciates all poetry? How many appreciate Milton and other great poets? Besides, one must have the power of understanding. NIRODBARAN: Tagore further writes about the Ashram poets; "Among you, Nishikanto alone has proved his easy mastery over ...
... examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours' - meaning my Classical papers, at the scholarship examination. 'As for your essay' - a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton - 'it was wonderful.' Later I wrote all this to my father describing the way my life at Cambridge had begun." Sri Aurobindo had almost finished speaking when the light failed and the room was plunged ...
... and drawn out many intricate expositions on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length, he corrected ...
... Leo X, 196 Lindberg, 316 MAETERLINCK, 71 – The Blue Bird, 71 Mahalakshmi, 206, 228, 297 Maheshwari, 206 Marlowe, 399n Maruts, the, 279-80, 331-2 Mayavada,182 Milton, 371 Minerva, 328 Mitra, 189 Mohammed, 379 Mother, the, 29n., 205-6, 208, 224, 229, 231-6, 247, 249, 253-7, 260, 263, 269, 281-2, 293, 317, 333, 339, 341, 343, 360 – Prayers and ...
... 191, 233 Measure for Measure, 132 ; Mehta, Pherozeshah, 227, 264, 267, 272, 273,295 Menezes, Armando, 695 Meston, Lord, 11 Meghaduta, 91ff, 97 Milton, John, 34,39,176,177,241,314,415 Minto, Lord, 205, 206, 237, 240, 248, 304, 350,365, 368, 390 Minto-Morley Reforms, 240ff, 261, 340ff, 348,362, 364 Mistral, Gabriel, 515 ...
... utter obedience - and there 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 ...
... although he had examined papers at thirteen examinations, he had never during that period seen such excellent papers as Sri Aurobindo's and his 'essay'—a comparative study of William Shakespeare and John Milton—was "wonderful". 11 Sri Aurobindo passed the Classical Tripos in the first division, and Page 7 also secured a prize for Greek and Latin iambics. Besides he passed the I ...
... prapya bhajaswa mam " "Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me." 10 .________________ 7 Wordsworth 8 Sri Aurobindo 9 Milton 10 Letters Vol. III Page 103 What is sparks and flashes in other poets in " Savitri " becomes a blaze from end to end. "This is a sailor on the flow of time, ...
... the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function... . 43 Sri Aurobindo finds in Kalidasa a poet who ranks with Milton and Virgil, but with Page 505 "a more subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater breath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than ...
... the full equipment of tiger qualities"; he learned his politics from the Anglo-India press in India, his poetry from Rudyard Kipling, his history from records of oppression: Shakespeare and Milton did not illumine his imagination when he peered into the future of India. Mill, Carlyle or Herbert Spencer did not shed any light on his reasoning when he applied himself to the study of the ...
... with distinction in a debate on 'the inconsistency of Swift's political views.' This was on 5 November 1889 at the meeting of the School Literary Society. On 19 November he took part in a debate on Milton. A. A. Ghose was an active member in the St. Paul's School Literary Society. Already in 1887, he had joined the Union, another school society. And, yes, in spite of his lack of fluency and accuracy ...
... no longer be classed with the genus irritabile vatum; nor does he square any better with the popular idea that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity—except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality & strong character are in themselves madness. But ...
... who has taken English Literature for Page 361 his optional subject, know of that literature? He has read a novel of Jane Austen or the Vicar of Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon's or Burke's full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other, & to crown this ...
... inspiring word be uttered and it will breathe life into dry bones. Let the inspiring life be lived and it will produce workers by thousands. England draws her inspiration from the names of Shakespeare and Milton, Mill and Bacon, Nelson and Wellington. They did not visit the sickroom, they did not do philanthropic work in the parishes, they did not work spinning jennies in Manchester, they did not produce cutlery ...
... The Secret Splendour (Suggested by a phrase from Milton) The "utmost Indian isle, Taprobane", Where the soul is ringed by the coolness Of a sleeping sea— There the mute sages go, Washing away A ll touch of colour and climbing The nameless gray Of hills that give no answer Across the foam To the cry ...
... naturalness and inevitability with nothing cheap and vulgar and theatrical about it, though this does not preclude the grand pride or godlike confidence that inspiration has in itself through a Dante or a Milton or a Shakespeare sonneteering about his "powerful rhyme" and its ability to outlast monuments of brass and marble. Sometimes the sterling artist and the gaudy actor co-exist: but we must never mix ...
... mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence). The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer levels whose voices ...
... greater being to implant That heaven might native grow on mortal soil. 1 This is just a hint. The full significance of the story may only be known reaching the end of the poem. Milton starts Paradise Lost with an intellectual synopsis, which is expository in nature. Sri Aurobindo starts like a story-teller with a powerful descriptive style. He begins with the pre-creation darkness ...
... movements on rhythm, overhead Page 80 poetry, etc., which is now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified, were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length, he corrected ...
... literary creation we would miss 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 ...
... puts us directly in contact with the source of inspiration itself. This we can perhaps better appreciate if we compare Jnaneshwari with, say, Paradise Lost . The Celestial Patroness used to visit Milton in the night, or when “Morn purples the East”, and it is she who gave him the easy “unpremeditated Verse”; she made him see and tell “Of things invisible to mortal sight.” But after a while her visits ...
... the blank verse decasyllabic I would count it ass a rule for variability of rythm to make the caesura at the Page 118 fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh syllable, e.g. from Milton: (1) For who would lose Though full of pain,¦ this intellectual being, (4th) Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather,¦ swallow'd up and lost ...
... Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire or Page 13 ...
... howl and sitting on red-hot coals which make you scream. But wit is raised to a sort of diamond point of world-pathos in that second line, at once subdued and penetrating, tender and torturing. Milton expresses the substance of the first line with some magni-ficence in one of his descriptions of the different regions making up Hell: he speaks of Satan moving O'er many a frozen, many a fiery ...
... eloquence, but not taken absolute prisoner — sense and soul laid under a spell — as one is again and again by the speeches in Shakespeare. Shelley was a "born" poet, so much so that, after Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, nobody has been productive to such an extent and with such a sustained poetic quality as he, yet it was not because of his facility only that he could be a channel of almost continual ...
... among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the first row except that they do not have enough of "a kind of elemental demiurgic power" ...
... securely lodged in my heart no less than in my drawer. Never to forget that it had been set aside for a less crowded time is really not to have set it aside at all in the true sense of the word. If, as Milton often says in Paradise Lost, small things may be compared to big ones, this morning when I have pulled your letter out I am reminded of what the Mother once told me after her son Andre's first visit ...
... some places a little complicated in verbal turn or structure and may thus be regarded by those who make a fetish of the simple and the straightforward as in some degree unnatural, artificial, awkward. Milton, speaking of Satan's expulsion from Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him - and yet the passage ...
... the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest compassion for the outcast and the oppressed, or who, like Shelley ...
... the latter's role in this case being played by a less gorgeous personage, though one may not go so far as to dub this personage Parsi-phoney, a sheer contrast to that gatherer of flowers, herself, as Milton says, the fairest flower, by gloomy Dis Gathered. Yes, I am a Parsi, as you already know, but not too much of a phoney - except in the sense that my ancestors have been in India for the ...
... and that is what you must take me to have done. (1.5.1956) Your remark about wintertime reminds me of two poets in whom the cold season somehow set free the inner founts of creativity. First, Milton whose inspiration used to flow most in the six 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 ...
... satisfy the observing artist-conscience. We can gauge the new alertness from the fact that he actually turned to blank verse where the grip on the medium must be most steady. Even a poet like Milton who was born with a blank-verse genius had to revise and polish in daytime what Urania had whispered to him in the still hours. With Shakespeare the art was immediate but because he was the most wide-awake ...
... figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria ...
... ranging through styles that can be distinguished one from another — Marlowe's explosive energy, Chapman's violent impetuousness, Shakespeare's passionate sweep, Webster's quivering outbreak. But beside Milton, however, they all seem kin and offer a contrast to the no less powerful yet more purely reflective or ideative voice heard in Paradise Lost. A contrast by plane can be drawn even between the several ...
... more intense and come straight from the Intuition itself—an expression not of mind, but of truth-sight pure and sheer." * PHARPHAR ("...Abana and Pharpha; lucid streams"—Milton) Where is the glass gold of Pharphar Or its echoing silver-grey When the magic ethers of evening Wash one the various day? I have travelled the whole earth over Yet ...
... acquaintance with the vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion that is Shakespeare's is enough for noting 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 ...
... no less poetic for not being purple and which has had a creative past not in the seventeenth century alone but also among the Elizabethans and on rare occasions in so solemn and majestic a bard as Milton, not to mention the more lyrical Blake and the more dramatic Browning. This style is perfectly defensible so long as it does not put on exclusive airs and parade as the sole poetic medium or, worse ...
... the Mother and Amal become almost a trinitarian phenomenon. One of the essays is on Freewill in Sri Aurobindo's Vision. This is an essay that had received the Master's specific approval. In Milton, freewill is yoked with fixt fate. Satan, Adam and Eve are free to choose, but cannot avoid the relevant consequences, but, then, Page 420 with Grace reigning supreme ...
... magazine Mother India of which he was, and is, the editor. As an Englishman, I was at once struck by his detailed familiarity not only with English poetry - especially that of Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics - but also with that of Europe. And he appeared familiar not only with the literature but with the best of Western criticism, too. As was Nolini Kanta Gupta, Sethna has ...
... something like 800 pages is a work 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 ...
... help of French romance models and the work Page 65 of Italian masters; the Elizabethans start anew in dependence on Renaissance influences from France and Italy and a side wind from Spain; Milton goes direct to classical models; the Restoration and the eighteenth century take pliantly the pseudo-classical form from the contemporary French poets and critics. Still this dependence is only in ...
... summa ars est celare artem . Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses. Such lines as In hideous ruin and combustion down or Page 282 Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains ...
... grand style, epic (Chapman also)—it becomes difficult to deny these epithets to many others also. Even Kipling and Macaulay can put in a claim. What then is the difference between them and Homer, Milton etc.? Only that Homer is polysyllabic (he is not really) and Chesterton monosyllabic? 31 January 1935 Yeats and the Occult The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult ...
... and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints—but at length. Lord God in omnibus ! 29 March 1936 Every time I complain of difficulty in writing, you quote the names of Milton and Virgil, but you forget they had no Supramental Avatar or Guru to push them on. Considering that the Supramental Avatar himself is quite incapable of doing what Nishikanta or Jyoti do, i.e. ...
... What does Cousins' bad opinion about The Rishi matter to me? I know the limitations of my poetry and also its qualities. I know also the qualities of Cousins as a critic and also his limitations. If Milton had written during the life of Cousins instead of having an established reputation for centuries, Cousins would have said of Paradise Lost and still more of Paradise Regained "This is not poetry ...
... personal experience of Yoga, they may be objected to on that ground. But a poet is not bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost . Are all Dilip's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi ...
... life as he went; Milton's gets a certain colour from his studies and learning; in neither case is the genius or the excellence of the poetry due to culture, but there is a certain turn or colouring in Milton which would have not been there otherwise and is not there in Shakespeare. It does not give any superiority in poetic excellence to one over the other. 12 November 1936 Page 682 ...
... his alone. There is another species of tamasic stimulus which transmits an inspired and faultless expression, but the substance is neither interesting to man nor pleasing to the gods. A good deal of Milton comes under this category. In both cases what has happened is that either the inspiration or the revelation has been active, but its companion activity has refused to associate itself in the work. ...
... its level. Again there are some who try to give it a habit of coming by always writing at the same time; Virgil with his nine Page 10 lines first written, then perfected every morning, Milton with his fifty epic lines a day, are said to have succeeded in regularising their inspiration. It is, I suppose, the same principle which makes gurus in India prescribe for their disciples a meditation ...
... the success is not always commensurate with the energy of the endeavour. 9 July 1931 Poetic Eloquence It [ poetic eloquence ] belongs usually to the poetic intelligence, but, as in much of Milton, it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and largeness. 29 November 1936 Page 19 ...
... effectively challenged. So strong was or had become the instinct of this domination in the male animal man, that even religion and philosophy have had to sanction it, very much in that formula in which Milton expresses the height of masculine egoism, "He for God only, she for God in him,"—if not actually indeed for him in the place of God. This idea too is crumbling into the dust, though its remnants still ...
... kind of chanting poetical prose or else based itself on a sort of irregular and complex metrical movement which in its inner law, though not in its form, recalls the idea of Greek choric poetry. Milton disparaging rhyme, which he had himself used with so much skill in his earlier, less sublime, but more beautiful poetry, forgot or ignored the spiritual value of rhyme, its power to enforce and clinch ...
... now a world. A greater spirit and a less intellectual and more imaginative sincerity and elevation of thought, feeling and vision will give us a sublimer poetic rhetoric, as in certain lines of Milton belonging to his more external manner,— Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down Page 291 To bottomless perdition. At a more temperate ...
... accentual pitch, wherever these came in, coincided as far as possible. But the result was not encouraging; it made the verse readable indeed, but stiff beyond measure. Even Tennyson in his lines on Milton, where he attempts this combination, seems to be walking on stilts,—very skilfully and nobly, but still on stilts and not on his own free God-given feet. As for other attempts which followed the Spenserian ...
... Gita which, like the Upanishads, ranks at once among the greatest literary and the greatest spiritual works, was not written by one who had no experience of Yoga. And where is the inferiority to your Milton and Shelley in the famous poems written whether in India or Persia or elsewhere by men known to be saints, Sufis, devotees? And, then, do you know all the Yogis and their work? Among Page 107 ...
... Gita which, like the Upanishads ranks at once among the greatest literary and the greatest spiritual works, was not written by one who had no experience of Yoga. And where is the inferiority to your Milton and Shelley in the famous poems written whether in India or Persia or elsewhere by men known to be saints, Sufis, devotees? And, then, do you know all the Yogis and their work? Among the poets and ...
... sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Bēde kat' oulumpoio karēnōn chōömenos kēr (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart) ...
... June 14. As I shall be eighty-four next November 25,I am 3 years, 6 months and 19 days older than you - if my mathematics is not far out. I was never good at numbers, except, I hope, those which Milton had in mind when he wrote of dwelling "on thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers". In regard to arithmetic what seemed the truth of the matter dawned on me when on failing miserably in the ...
... literature will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the ...
... in him. In the eyes of some judges of literature, this first child is also the highest form reached by the English poetic genius except for just two who overpass the maker of it: Shakespeare and Milton. Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote The Future Poetry, did not hold Chaucer in very high regard: he was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high seriousness" as ...
... come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets is such that we can count them on the fingers of one hand. Similarly, even writers of short poems, those who have written successful ...
... some places a little complicated in verbal turn or structure and may thus be regarded by those who make a fetish of the simple and the straightforward as in some degree unnatural, artificial, awkward. Milton, speaking of Satan's expulsion from Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him — and yet the passage ...
... quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth Thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, is there very much to ...
... are artists; it is as if the hair shirt of illness gives boundless stimulus to creative activity. But political figures have had some famous handicaps. Choosing in all fields one need only think of Milton, who was Page 464 blind, Beethoven, who became deaf, or Lord Nelson, who, mutilated by wounds, had to fight pain all his life. Julius Caesar suffered from epilepsy, Alexander the Great ...
... before you! So I have stood and answered: But no amount of standing and answering will serve the purpose. I shall now learn to "stand and wait" as "they also serve who only stand and wait", says Milton. Thank God! A most comforting resolution—for me at any rate. Doctor Saheb I am sending to the dispensary two cases— 1) P—she had tuberculosis? at 19 for six months, she says, and at 25 for ...
... not be. It seems I am not very rich in the faculty of imagination. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible. What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets, because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is fuller of images? After what you have seen of my English ...
... submit no apology to you. But you should also remember that I've given you sufficient hints as to the nature of this talk, so you can't blame me either. Imagination, friends, is a great power. Milton has said that by the Page 96 power of imagination you may "make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven". 141 Just think where I would have been if I were not a poet, and what if ...
... 381 Mayavada,326 Mazzini, 59, 91 Mephistopheles, 83 Michelson-Morley experiment, 315 Middle Age(s), 69, 145, 150, 152, 155, 213, 221, 346 Mill, 140 Milton, 194, 251 Minerva, 222 Mitra, 9 Modem Age, 145, 152 Moghuls, 58, 239 Mohammed, 208,215 Mohenjo-daro, 238, 243 Moliere, 197 Moloch, 220 ...
... It is believed that his home was in Ionia in Asia. Among the front ranking poets of the world we could include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than Homer in ...
... 225 Mahashakti, 67, 198 Mahavira, 44, 207 Maheshwari, 44, 207, 209-10, 225 Manicheism, 127 Mary, 82 Matariswan, 44 Michael Angelo, 210 Middle Ages, the, 134, 139, 149, 421 Milton, 156n. – Paradise Lost, 156n Mimansakas,137 Mitra, 207 Morgan, 56-7 Mother, The, 63, 65-6, 270, 282-3n., 285n., 289n., 29In., 319 Page 432 -Prayers ...
... another harmony richer and higher, and this is done in the human consciousness by the growth of a free will in the individual that disobeys the established law. That is the great Disobedience of which Milton speaks so thunderingly in his famous epic poem and which is at the very centre of the Christian religion. It means a Fall: the sense of separation itself is a fall – a separate egoism standing out ...
... of the ideal, the imaginative or the fictitious. Indeed it is the antagonism between the two that has always been emphasised and upheld as an axiomatic truth and an indisputable fact. Of course, old Milton (he was young, however, when he wrote these lines) says that philosophy is divine and charming: Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute.! ...
... degrees and levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For ¹ Milton: Paradise Lost. Bk. 1. 253 Page 156 it is only one among a million contending forces and its effect will depend upon the allies it can count on its side. Similar is the case with ...
... or less the indication of something beyond the grasp of the senses, something divine and infinite. The aspiration of every poet flies to an immaculate realm of Beauty and Truth, to a world beyond. Milton, Wordsworth and Dante need no introduction in this field, for they are undoubtedly spiritual. They seriously resorted to spirituality. But it is strange enough how Shakespeare, whose creation is replete ...
... of the ideal, the imaginative or the fictitious. Indeed it is the antagonism between the two that has always been emphasised and upheld as an axiomatic truth and an indisputable fact. Of course, old Milton (he was young, however, when he wrote these lines) says that philosophy is divine and charming: Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute. 1 Well ...
... strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic-poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they Page 9 are now ...
... time seen such excellent papers as yours' (meaning my classical papers, at the scholarship examination). 'As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my oriental tastes to the top of their bent, it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery, it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint ...
... Company, New York, 1934). Bowman, Archibald Allan. A Sacramental Universe, the Vanuxem Lectures edited by J.W. Scott (Princeton University Press, 1939). Bowra, CM. From Virgil to Milton (Macmillan, London, 1945). Heroic Poetry (Macmillan, London, 1952). Brockington, A. Allen. Mysticism and Poetry on a Basis Of Experience (Chapman & Hall, London, 1934). Brooks ...
... 33,34 Mallarme317 Marlowe, Christopher 337 Masefieldjohn 268 Mehta, Phirozeshah 10 Meleager 45 Mickiewicz, Adam 376 Miller, Henry 4,281 Milton, John 7, 142, 214, 243, 265, 309, 336, 356, 362, 371, 377, 378, 381-386, 461,462 Mirandola, Pico Delia 332 Morgan, Charles 316 Mother, The (Madame Mirra Richard) 9, 14-18 ...
... there is less of the blaze of action and assertion and more of the twilight revelation of inner striving and struggle and achievement. Of the European epic poets between Dante and Milton, two Italians, Ariosto andTasso, and the Portuguese, Camoens, stand rather in the forefront. Camoens's Os Lusiadas preceded by a few years Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and was itself preceded ...
... —Gita Those thoughts that wander through eternity; —Milton Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments; ...
... Aurobindo does not get, as do some other great creators of beauty, intermittent glimpses of the supreme beauty; he seems to have his permanent station on those heights. 233 If Milton in his 'mighty-mouthed' moments is inspired by the Higher Mind, if Shakespeare in his great dazzling moments of supreme utterance is the poet with the Illumined Mind, if Dante's poetry is charged ...
... fascination never palls. It is true metaphysical speculations often prove to be arid and inconclusive, offering no key to current perplexity, no clue to get out of our "existential predicament". Milton describes how some of the fallen angels ..apart sat on a hill retired. In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate — ...
... Maitra, Somnath 534 Mali (Rafael Corona) 778 Manilal, Dr 398-401 Manoj Das Gupta 677 Manubhai Patel 496 Mao Tse-tung 459, 463, 772 Marx, Karl 762 McPheeters see Shantimayi; Vaun McPheeters Milton, John 312 Misra, Justice S.C. 282 Modern Review 157, 159 Mona Pinto 278-9 Moni (Suresh Chakravarty) 91, 131, 201, 211, 217, 496 Monica Parish 738 Monod-Herzen, Dr G. 282 Moonje, Dr B.S ...
... need a new Power altogether. In the military sphere, a stalemate is sometimes resolved by the deployment of a new weapon of unprecedented destructive potential. In the war in heaven, as described by Milton, the use of the thunderbolt is said to have thrown Satan's rebel army into confusion and compelled a rout. During the World Wars, the use of the tank and the bomber aeroplane hastened the fall of Germany ...
... Stephen Phillips, Robert Bridges, Oscar Wilde, Manomohan Ghose, Bharati Sarabhai, the Hexameter, and the clue to it that a Cambridge friend, Ferrar, gave. Was Blake greater than Shakespeare? After Milton, what was the scope for the epic as a literary form? Of Hopkins, Sri Aurobindo said that he "becomes a great poet in his sonnets. He is not a mystic poet, but a religious one". 6 Talking of T.S ...
... was not yet 'Sri' Aurobindo, just Arabindo Babu. This Cambridge-educated young man seemed to have gathered into himself all the qualities and more of his illustrious predecessors like Bacon, Darwin, Milton, Newton, Wordsworth, all Cambridge men. Arabindo Babu's keen wit was more than a match for the subtle and daring policy of Curzon, who was a statesman of unusual genius. It was disturbing for ...
... young brother: "Would you also mind giving my brother a copy, with your name and Cripps' inscribed on it in your 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 ...
... that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in anti-thesis and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint ...
... In indolent and amicable debate, Inarmed, disputing with laughter who should rule. 179 Sri Aurobindo's description of the 'other Eden', this 'demi-Paradise', recalls Milton's description of Paradise before the Fall. Man, bird and beast are at peace with themselves and with circumambient Nature. Sri Aurobindo's fancy takes wings and snaps a scene of almost other-world felicity: ...
... 'the touch of tears in mortal things': Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Another might be Shakespeare's In the dark backward and abysm of Time or again Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity. Page 52 We might also add Wordsworth's line, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep. There are others... D.S) 2 Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of Page 54 or in Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone. Milton's line lives by its choice of the word "wander" to collocate with "through eternity"; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have been an overhead line even if the surface sense had ...
... does not necessarily depend on it. Let me give you some lines with a distinct musical effect. Herrick has one on music itself: Melting melodious words to lutes of amber. The musicality of Milton's Page 91 And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay is undeniable. Sri Aurobindo's O my sweet flower, Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood? has a remarkable music... 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 Shake-speare's line recur in one of Milton's, which has led a critic to aver that it is the most musical in the English language: To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. Nothing of paramount importance seems said here, though "Athe-... Poetic Diction present, unless we count the inversion "ruin bare" to be constituting it. Nor is Poetic Diction, except again by one inversion, at play in the second of the following two verses of Milton's — And saw the Ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing, Even and Morn — yet this line is a source of endless pleasure to the ear by its ringing of bells. In itself — that ...
... proof of the grand style in poetry. For example, Milton's Fall'n cherub! to be weak is miserable (Paradise Lost, Book I, 1. 157) Or Dante's E'n La sua volontade è nostra pace...¹ (La Divina Commedia 'Paradiso', III. 85) What could be easier or more natural, more common and colloquial than such expression? Milton's line may be taken as an exception to his usual style ...
... Savitri and her p ā tivrata m ā h ā tmya, which may be explained as the 'glorious efficacy of wifely chastity'. The efficacy of virgin purity is the theme of many a story, for example Milton's Comus; but a wife's chastity and utter devotion to her husband (even when he doesn't deserve such devotion) are qualities apart and unique, and the Hindu has believed that they can work wonders ...
... beneath the circling sun;... 32 Why must Savitri harp upon love! Is it any more than the flesh hungering, the nerves burning, the mind dreaming, the heart fluttering? With casuistry worthy of Milton's Belial or Comus, Death tries to wear down Savitri's wall of resistance to the invasion of falsehood. Ah yes, love's momentary thrill seems "a golden bridge across the roar of the years"; but, alas ...
... 'the touch of tears in mortal things': Sunt lacrimae rerum et nentem mortalia tangunt. Another might be Shakespeare's In the dark backward and abysm of Time, or again Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity. We might also add Wordsworth's line. The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep. Page 117 There are... Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of two lines: Page 119 or in Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone. Milton's line lives by its choice of the word 'wander' to collocate with 'through eternity'; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have been an overhead line even if the surface sense had been ...
... This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective sonnet and as such is ...
... storms and whirlwinds to speak in: he caught and studied his diction from the echo and rumour of the sea. All the stormiest passions of man's soul he expressed in gigantic language. We seem to hear Milton's Satan speaking in every line he wrote. But in Bankim's hands the Bengali language, before stammering and inarticulate, became a rich, musical and flexible organ vibrating to every human emotion and ...
... manifold. The inner soul of Shakespeare is wide and magnanimous. It has, as it were, the quality of water. It takes up the form of that very vessel in which it is put and assumes the colour thereof. Milton's inner Being represents height, density, weight and seriousness. Dante's inner Being represents intensity, virility and Tapasya (askesis). Kalidasa's inner Being represents beauty, while that of the ...
... 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 is as permanent and unmistakable as Shakespeare's and Milton's, and it is the surest test of critical judgment to find amidst contemporary excitements an impartial hour for appreciating the languid greatness of the "Faerie Queene". Page 13 ...
... plenty of examples from Chaucer, when he is indulging his imagination rather than his 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 ...
... persistence is in the thick of diversities and never clings to a monotonous or single-track method. Many shades and grades of words must be permitted: The vocabulary of Donne need not be cast out by Milton's, the Hopkinsian by that of Bridges. To be able to appreciate the poetic moment — even while noting the absence of one's favourite themes and turns and tones — constitutes, besides an enviably large ...
... in more unhappiness and distress. All happiness, all satisfaction and all peace reside in the Lord. This hard fact is ignored and modern life is virtually in an open revolt against the Almighty as Milton's Satan did in Paradise Lost . It is small wonder therefore, that man has lost his paradise, his happiness, and finds himself groping in the pervading gloom without the slightest ray of hope. And in ...
... by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Graves calls the "White Goddess" (none other than Homer's "Thea" and Milton's "Heavenly Muse") that he feels nothing more is necessary to be done about it. Praise or blame seems irrelevant. At times even publication appears to be pointless. All that the poem, if it is really ...
... tutorship, I made a singular request. I wrote: "I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity or Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone, which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary... step in the final version we have this kind of proliferation. Sri Aurobindo justified it in a letter to me answering some criticisms by a friend of mine who had a penchant for compositions like Milton's Lycidas or Comus and who reacted unfavourably to the gradual detailed Page 326 unfoldment of the theme in the very first canto. Sri Aurobindo explained the reason for such ...
... tutorship, I made a singular request. I wrote: "I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity or Wordsworth's Page 172 Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone, which has a brief burst of it, but something ...
... made a singular request. I wrote: I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's Those thoughts that wander through eternity or Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone, which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary ...
... movement. Indignation, the saeva indignatio of Juvenal, can produce poetry, but it must be either vividly a vital revolt which stirs the whole feeling into a white heat of self-expression—as in Milton's famous sonnet—or a high spiritual or deep psychic rejection of the undivine. Besides, it is well known that the emotion of the external being, in the raw as it were, does not make good material for ...
... within the psyche's wing? 209 It is clear that the opening canto, even the opening line, is meant to convey in a succinct or quintessential form the meaning and message of the whole poem. Milton's "Of man's first disobedience", the marvellous opening phrase of his epic, at once projects the theme of Paradise Lost, so does the reference to the "wrath of Achilles" at the very beginning of ...
... me now. 'Paradise' is a Persian word and means "garden", particularly a royal one. We always talk of the Garden of Eden, don't we? - and the term "paradise" is used for Eden as in the title of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. And I think the garden-concept is rather appropriate because there is a natural sense of flower and fragrance in connection with the profound consciousness of the psychic being ...
... Shelley's iridescent imagination. Francis Jeffrey, before them, had uttered his notorious verdict on the lyricism of Wordsworth and Coleridge: "This will never do!" Johnson, still earlier, had found Milton's Lycidas commonplace if not crude. When such minds could show blindspots, it is hardly surprising that an Indian reviewer of moderate talent should miss the mark altogether in judging Sri Aurobindo... brightness to entomb." How felicitously vivid for a storm-cloud is the phrase: "wearing rain like a colour"! Then consider the simile of the horsemen: the verbal adjective "disperse" is a successful Miltonism used for the first time in English and harmonises effectively in meaning with "frail" and "light" coming later, while the cavalry-image itself, holding the suggestion of noise and bare swords or spears ...
... er. 1ṣṭ The exclusion of the supernatural from poetry. The temper of the times was rationalistic and sceptical and to the cultured aristocracy of the times Shakespeare's ghosts and fairies and Milton's gods and angels would have seemed absurdities; it resulted also from the idea of commonsense as the cardinal rule of poetry, that nothing incredible should be admitted unless it was treated humorously ...
... sensations are astir all through the thinking process. In contrast see the working of the mind proper, the true reflective being drawing up the living energy into its own uses: here is a speech made by Milton's Satan at sight of the infernal regions to which he has been condemned: Hail, horrors, hail, Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor; one who brings ...
... the original, implying that the composition was an attempt to provide in a poetic form a compacted argument of each canto of the epic. We have precedence available to us, albeit in prose, in Milton's Paradise Lost where the books have at the beginning the thematic substance of what is going to follow in the respective text. The advantage is that the reader is at once provided with a ...
... I made a singular request. I wrote: "I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity or Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone, which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary ...
... was put together. That was a time when people were primitive, now we are very much advanced so we need not have that kind of epic - a story. But epic as a story has ceased to be long ago. Milton's Paradise Lost is not a story in the strict sense of the term, it is what you call a religious myth. Even though it puts forth characters that are human characters, it doesn't Page 4 ... particularly after death, and the conditions of man. Even now history is not indispensable for the creation of an epic. Now the epic has outgrown the objective attitude, .it has become subjective. From Milton's time onward you can see that greater and greater subjectivity becomes the point of departure for an epic, and Savitri, in that sense, is a far greater epic than all the epics put together, from ...
... thesis, with a close analysis of the poem's internal structure of idea, image, attitude and with a host of references to Blake's other works as well as to Christian reli-gious thought in general and Milton's Paradise Lost in particular, I shall prepare a special set of Talks which I may one day expand into a book for the scrutiny of Blake-experts. 1 Today we shall not go any further on a safari to ...
... - and enjoyed the sight of the light very much. Sri Aurobindo quietly sitting down to work when all the world had gone to sleep, at midnight, that reminds me, in a small way, of the lines from Milton's poem "Il Penseroso": Or let my lamp at midnight hour be seen in some high lonely tow'r. 266 Presently, the north-western corner of the Ashram Dispensary. Page 213 ...
... literally, "first rose". We do not know why this rose was called "first"., but some sort of grading in quality or time seems involved and that means attitude and judgment. Perhaps we have a clue in Milton's line: Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies... ("Rathe" means coming or blooming early in the day or the year.) Even to feel the yellow primrose to be beautiful is to bring in more than ...
... "Paradise Regained" help? And who are the other epic writers 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 ... poem usually narrative on a great subject written in a style and rhythm that is of a high nobility or sublime. But short poems, a sonnet for instance can be in the epic style or tone, e.g. some of Milton's or Meredith's sonnet on Lucifer or, as far as I can remember it, Shelley's on Ozymandias. What are the qualities or characteristics that tell one—"This is an epic"? I think the formula I have ...
... and rhyme are said to be played out, things of the past, which can no longer be allowed to chain and hamper the great and free movement which the enlarging spirit of poetry demands; as rhyme was in Milton's later view only a dainty trifle which he flung aside for the organ harmonies of his blank verse, so metre itself is a petty thing, half ornament, half fetter, which has to be flung aside for some ...
... of such seeing. Again, a poet may be simple in one respect and complex in another. Homer is said to be the best example of simplicity. His sentences have on the whole a simpler construction than Milton's or Keats's. Still, Homer has an extraordinary variety of inflexions and a recurrent play of polysyllables beside which the cast of Miltonic or Keatsian words is simple. He is simpler in his basic ...
... n-ring which becomes emphatic in "wandering winged". The present participle "wandering" is irreplaceable by anything synonymous, just as another form of the same vocable is the inevitable touch in Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity. Not only a plunging puissance but also a sense of freedom in all directions is conveyed by this vocable. Further, its opening syllable—"w ...
... unfolding idea after luminous idea in a closely concatenated form. Savitri is built of short sentences as a rule. It mainly dispenses with enjambment, the flow-over from line to line as mostly in Milton's blank verse. Each line here stands strongly by itself, though yet fitting harmoniously with other apparently independent lines, each seeming complete in its span of five feet. This is a technique ...
... Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Page 147 Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all ...
... moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all ...
... of tutorship. I wrote to him: "I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's Those thoughts that wander through Eternity or Wordsworth's Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone, which has a brief burst ...
... claims of "the metrical situation" are conceded there is no reason why unstressed longs should not come into their own even when they stand next door to an accented syllable. Take "contemplative" as in Milton's nor aught By me proposed in life contemplative Or active... Here the word is accented on the second syllable and, wherever it is so accented, the a of the third syllable is ...
... intellectual postulates even when I came to be persuaded now that they were but phantom glimmers of make-believe not steadfast beacons when the storm is abroad. Again and again I quoted with sad approval Milton's famous jeremiad: "For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being?" And the pain, alas, brought in its train my old monitor and sentinel, Doubt, who, keen as a spear, stabbed ...
... critic Prema Nandakumar concludes with the following words: "Thanks to his enormous scholarship, Blake's Tyger turns out to be a valuable tutorial on classical and Christian mythology as well as Milton's poetry. This extensively researched volume establishes him as one of the foremost literary critics in contemporary Indian literature." 17 Likewise, in the review of Sethna's Karpasa in ...
... suggestion. But even detractors are bound to praise the elegance and construction of the plot. "It gave me great happiness that Mr. Norton had chosen me as the protagonist of this play. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Mr. Norton's plot at the centre of the mighty rebellion stood I, an extraordinarily sharp, intelligent and powerful, bold, bad man! Of the National Movement I was the alpha and ...
... related to the power of Thought, and to what extent one created one's own world. If, according to Shakespeare's Hotspur, "thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool", and according to Milton's Satan, The mind is its own place, and in itself Page 312 Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n, for Aurobindo Thought is the paraclete mediating between Here and Eternity ...
... intuitive consciousness, and because it is not direct the Overmind rhythm is absent" SRI AUROBINDO II. "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone" WORDSWORTH or Milton's "Those thoughts that wander through eternity" III. "We can feel perhaps the spirit of the universe feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo ...
... little, he had made Bhawani Mandir both the Virgin and the Dynamo, both a Manifesto for Change and Transformation and an ultimatum to the colonial power. Like all great political literature (like Milton's Areopagitica, for example), Bhawani Mandir too was both admirably pointed to the occasion and yet was seraphically free from the taint of the merely local or temporal. Page 200 ...
... of sympathetic imagery between stanzas 1 and 5 can legitimately be taken as part of The Tyger's poetry. If the "spears"-"forests" association be challenged as fanciful, we have only to refer to Milton's poetic picture of Satan's army: it tells us how "through the gloom were seen" ten thousand banners rising, and how with them rose A forest huge of spears... 20 Again, as if to throw ...
... analyse it and assign 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 ...
... with tons of inference and suggestion".... If Norton was a creative genius, his epic needed a hero or villain - and Sri Aurobindo was cast for that role: Page 313 Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Mr. Norton's plot, at the centre of the mighty rebellion stood I, an extraordinarily sharp, intelligent and powerful, bold, bad man! Of the national movement I was the alpha ...
... favourite tenets. The great passage on Vidya & Avidya, Sambhuti & Asambhuti bristles for him with stumbling blocks. We find him walking amid these difficulties with the powerful but uneasy steps of Milton's angels striding over the burning marl of their prison house. I for my part am unwilling to keep to the trace of his footsteps. For, after all, no human intellect can be permitted to hold the keys ...
... moment we go only by the stylistic considerations, we at once see that Savitri makes a marked departure from the traditional invocation having the story's beginning with the end-stopped line. In Milton's Paradise Lost we have just 26 lines to get going; but in Savitri Sri Aurobindo takes time to state the gist of the theme. The theme itself looks into the fundamental issue as to why Paradise should ...
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