Mrs Shelley : Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), second wife of P.B. Shelley; she is best known for her Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818).
... with this unique and inimitable note. To omit, to change words or lines, to modify rhythms seems to me inadmissible. 2 Page 398 I do not altogether appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly and your cynical and sarcastic picture of the high-born maiden as she appears to you—all that has nothing to do with Shelley's poetic conception which is alone relevant to the matter ...
... hand and, on the other, Shelley and Keats. Then he remarks about the two latter: "They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus." 1 In this matter of pure poetry, we may cite a couple of other observations by Sri Aurobindo. About Shelley he says: "Shelley uses language throughout... the song. In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings, of course, a difference in the texture of their work. Shelley's work is not so... tells us that Shelley sings from the skies earthwards, Keats looks from earth towards Olympus. Shelley is fundamentally aware of the spiritual, though it is never the exclusively spiritual: his three godheads — celestial Light, celestial Love, celestial Liberty — he always tries passionately to bring down to earth without losing their intrinsic shape and colour. People often picture Shelley as a being ...
... scientific or pedantic". His case ran: "Shelley's MS exists; and the inequality, though exquisite, does not exist in Shelley's MS. Shelley wrote with his own hand, Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar... The one verse in Shelley and in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other is the verse, not of Shelley, but of the compositor. Mr. Swinburne's veins... considered it "unworthy of Shelley". What he believed Shelley to have written has not at all been vindicated. What might be credited is something which, in Housman's opinion, could never have been in Shelley's manuscript. In the second place, even Housman's general idea that all the four seasons were enumerated by Shelley, in whatever order, is highly improbable. Shelley did not have to cast about... Effort SHELLEY, SWINBURNE, HOUSMAN — AND MARY SHELLEY 1 The Times Literary Supplement of November 21, 1968 (pages 1318-19), discusses under the title, "Shelley, Swinburne and Housman", the famous eighth line — Fresh spring, and summer and winter hoar — of one of Shelley's most Shelleyan lyrics beginning, in its standard ...
... Shelley's development was much more certain; his death too was more lamentable, since Keats died and inspired Adonais and so in a way his passing was compensated for, while the remembrance of Shelley's dust has never bloomed into immortal poetic beauty. If he had lived, his progress would have been towards reflective mysticism. We are too apt to ignore the intellect Shelley possessed:... being a somewhat fanatical adherent to the Roman Church, yet with so basic a connection with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley the tone is as if he were dealing with an essential part of himself. The connection is basic because in Shelley's mind Plato of the Symposium and Dante of the Paradiso interfused: he burned with a spiritual idealism of thought, the lips of his love carried a flame-kiss... a Divine Virginity whom the child in him called Mother and the man in him Love. Thus Shelley's inmost attitude was matured. There were also other factors conducive to a necessarily novel yet at bottom organic evolution of Shelley's genius. With Shakespeare as hors concours , Thompson stands with Shelley unparalleled for image-opulence, a never-ceasing dance and glitter of fancies, figures ...
... Together with Page 227 Shelley who was an atheist according to conventional Christian standards just as Wordsworth was according to the same standards an apostate — together with Shelley he is the greatest Yogi of pantheism that has appeared in the poetic history of England. But we must not understand either his pantheism or Shelley's in a narrow sense which erases all distinctions... pantheists the more powerful was Wordsworth, though Shelley was the more vivid. Wordsworth it was who awoke in Shelley the pantheist dormant within the rebel against orthodox Christianity, and Wordsworth it was who had the more massive awareness of what he called "Wisdom and Spirit of the universe", an awareness which dissolved more effectively than Shelley's feeling of the "white radiance of Eternity" the... with an enduring calm until Wordsworth could recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. WORDSWORTH'S PANTHEISM AND SHELLEY'S The greater massiveness of Wordsworth's pantheism than of Shelley's derived from the fact that Shelley lived in a certain luminous detachment from flesh and blood, and the Page 228 pantheistic intuition he shared with Wordsworth ...
... see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley's stanza - it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly . mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is no longer there, there is only the ineffectual... we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. About Shelley who would seem to be a sheer "sun-treader" Sri Aurobindo 2 has written: "If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured... Against a suggestion that Shelley's Skylark should be purged of the three or four stanzas where the "blithe spirit" which is the Skylark is likened to human and corporeal things, and that the poem should be "left winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly", Sri Aurobindo 3 contended in a letter: "Shelley was not only a poet of other ...
... hidden behind the veil of the ordinary mind and 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... had they lived, have given them a supreme utterance. But still theirs was the dawn of whose light we shall find the noon in the age now opening before us if it fulfils all its intimations. Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth were first explorers of a new world of poetry other than that of the ancients or of the intermediate poets, which may be the familiar realm of the aesthetic faculty in the future, must... Poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton, Cowper seek liberation by a return to Miltonic blank verse and manner, to the Spenserian form,—an influence which prolonged itself in Byron, Keats and Shelley,—to lyrical movements, but more prominently the classical ode form, or Page 103 to freer and richer moulds of verse. Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth ...
... it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais , is considered by Sri Aurobindo 30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle to a kind... Curse! Veiled glory of the lampless Universe! Even the religious consciousness of the Middle Ages cannot be said to reincarnate in the spirituality that shines through Wordsworth and Shelley. Shelley had to deny the Christian God in order to reach the Divine. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, conformed to the Christian faith in later life, but at the crest of their poetic creativity they subscribed... the eighteenth century," writes Bowra, 1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things... They brought ...
... wideness, volume, just as Wordsworth and Shelley have. SRI AUROBINDO: Poetry can also have height, depth and intensity: It need not have "girth". Besides, nowadays people consider that mass, volume, is a heavy baggage that weighs poetry down. NIRODBARAN: Dilip says he does not know how to define greatness but one can say that Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley are great and one should reserve the... Is he equal to Browning? NIRODBARAN: Dilip says English critics don't think of Thompson as a great poet, certainly not as being on a level with Wordsworth and Shelley. SRI AUROBINDO: Who are these English critics? Wordsworth and Shelley have an established reputation. I consider Thompson a great poet because he has expressed an aspect of Truth with such force and richness as no other poet before ...
... will be no reason why Vyasa and Sophocles should remain unclassified by you. And "the others"—they intrigue me even more. Who are these others? Saintsbury as good as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetry—Spenser alone, to his mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser: the fellow has got nothing... too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line. Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or Page 369 if Wordsworth had ...
... would have done better to seek more often for self-formed movements. Shelley is the bright archangel of this dawn and he becomes greater to us as the light he foresaw and lived in returns and grows, but he sings half concealed in the too dense halo of his own ethereal beauty. As with Wordsworth and Byron, so too we find Shelley and Keats standing side by side, but with a certain antinomy. They are... him in the strangeness, supernatural lucidity, power and directness of vision of the beyond and the rhythmic clarity and beauty of his singing. A greater poet by nature than almost any of these, Shelley was alone of them all very nearly fitted to be a sovereign voice of the new spiritual force that was at the moment attempting to break into poetry and possess there its kingdom. He has on the one hand... its luminous ethereality, is yet with him. If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; Page 140 the very stumblings of his life came from the difficulty of such a nature moving in the ...
... literature. Not many critics who have undertaken to compare Shelley and Keats have been absolutely fair to both. Keats easily winning their sympathy and admiration for various reasons, Shelley would have to serve as the foil. In Leavis's uncharitable comparative Page 276 study, for example, Shelley appears to be a minor poetaster by the side of a major poet... “In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings, of course, a difference in the texture of their work. Shelley's work is... yet the eye and car of the one are more in love with the parts while those of the other are more enamoured of the ensemble." (p. 348-9) This is a far cry from Leavis's comparison of Shelley's Ode to a Skylark and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale in which he is all praise for the latter but fails to account for the enduring appeal of the former. Sethna can be as just and unerring ...
... 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 an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry, they may have been there without my knowledge. The one work of Keats that influenced me was Hyperion —I... original ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips, along with something of Shelley and Coleridge. I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view; I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you mention except from Phillips. I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades ...
... link with Shelley—but Shelley of a more mature mood. An obvious clue is Sri Aurobindo's "flowers / In a sweet garden fresh with vernal showers", which seems to hark back to the famous Skylark's "Sound of vernal showers" and "Rain-awakened flowers" and "all that ever was / Joyous and clear and fresh..." The Fear of Death might be taken in general as an attempt to give body to Shelley's surmise when... who is our home", the star-beaconed "abode where the Eternal are" of Shelley's Adonais. Page 98 However, while Sri Aurobindo's lines are maturer than the lyric Shelley wrote on ubiquitous Death, they do not rise in their more reflective strain to a full artistic result. Something of the less intense Shelley's romanticism gets here and there into the tone. And this is not unnatural... poetry instead of a fine upland. The quality is not negligible. To evaluate it we have only to pick up a lyric of Shelley's, whose starting-point is similar to our poem's: Death is here and death is there, Death is busy everywhere. Page 97 But Shelley goes more or less round and round in his four stanzas, ringing small changes on the theme of universal mortality, though ...
... Homer, you are Achilles living and moving and you feel you have become Achilles. That is what I mean by creativeness. On the other hand, in Shelley's "Skylark", there is no skylark at all. You don't feel you have become one with the skylark. Through that poem, Shelley has only expressed his ideas and feelings. Take that line of his: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts. It is... idea or a thought may be an experience; feeling is also 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 ...
... Shakespeare on release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by body-dissolution: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! See now Shelley utter a thought of reaching safety from life's ravage: From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. Page 79 Or mark the way Shakespeare expresses... all this unintelligible world. Then note how Shakespeare articulates the peace of death as an end to human fret: After life's fitful fever he sleeps well, and compare his speech with Shelley's about the transcendence of time's blind passage by Keats's soul: He has outsoared the shadow of our night. Or take Shakespeare's panegyric to the power of pleasing which Cleopatra's beauty... society. In Shakespeare at all times we have a quiver of the Life-force, a passion of the entrails, as it were, an impact on the sensational being, a most vivid vibrant word. In Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats we have a calmer fineness, the more conceptive intensity starting as if from the brain proper in imaginative action. Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out this difference while dwelling ...
... 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 more comparable to the last-named than to the others except that Ozymandias contains, as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early Keats, leaves us with only... thing seen — namely, skies — gets assimilated into the thing beheld here — namely, sea — and becomes part of the basic symbol. Another point of linkage is the peak in Darien, something that is — in Shelley's phrase elsewhere — "pinnacled high in the intense inane", a position in the sky. A less exacting view could be that the basic symbol is simply of searching and of witnessing wonders, with sea- and ...
... poetry to be great requires vitality and intensity of experience and 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 ...
... Wordsworth." Among the Romantics themselves there is a pointer to it in Page 159 the work of Keats. Sri Aurobindo has some interesting remarks on it. He considers Keats and Shelley as "perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus. Keats is the first entire artist... intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the too intellectually conscious eye on Nature and the cultured moralising of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languourous... L'Ouverture, in the day of his downfall: Thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. The same can be said in comparison with Shelley's passionately noble conclusion to his drama about Prometheus in revolt against all autocracy of the Magnified Ego whether by a human king or a priest-conceived God of wrath and terror: To suffer ...
... commit suicide: I thought of Chatterton, that marvellous boy, The sleepless soul which perished in its pride... Even Shelley, though he did not die of physical misery or poverty, lived scorned by his fellows to whom he sang of light and love and liberty. Shelley died young too, by a mishap in the gulf of Spezia: sightless Nature-forces swept his life away at a moment when he was reaching... Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos- Page 177 sible: Cor cordium — "Heart of hearts". Byron, the poet doubled with a man of the world, the dreamer crossed with a cynic, could not help saying about his dead friend: "I do not know any man who would not seem to be a beast by the side of Shelley." Yes, the world has not been very kind... expression. All who came into contact with him felt a radiant presence and yet he was reviled as atheist, corrupter of morals, enemy of mankind: he was denied even the custody of a child of his. No wonder Shelley never laughed: the load of a world of men blind to beauty lay too heavy on that heavenly heart — the heart which, when his body was burning on a pyre by the Italian sea that had drowned him, was plucked ...
... vein in Harin's poetry, but if everybody who has that is to be accounted a reincarnation of Shelley, we get into chaotic waters. In that case, Tagore must be a reincarnation of Shelley, and Harin, logically, must be a reincarnation of Tagore — who couldn't wait till Tagore walked off to Paradise or Shelley must have divided himself between the couple. It may be that after- wards I leaned at a time... There is an idea that Harin is a reincarnation of Shelley. It is supposed to be based on your own intuition or at least a practical certainty on your part. The character of Harin poetry seems to add colour to the idea. "I have never had any practical certainty or any certainty that Harin was Shelley. The question was often raised - I remember to have... time towards a hesitating acceptance, but I am certain that I was never certain about it. "Besides, I imagine Shelley was not an evolutionary being but a being of a higher plane assisting in the evolution." 19.7.1937 Page 24 Is it true that the same consciousness- that took the form of Leonardo da Vinci had previously manifested as ...
... movement here is different from Shakespeare's and Shelley's. It does not take place in the impassioned life-force or the impassioned mind-energy, though it has affinities with both of them — a word-design and rhythm-urge that have a concrete touch upon our nerves as in Shakespeare and at the same time an atmosphere of ideative height as in Shelley — but added to these is a draw inward, a pull deep... pathos that goes home to our vital nerves, as it were, making us feel and see poignantly through the sensitive life-force in Us: our guts seem to respond — like flames that are wind-shaken and go out. Shelley's He has outsoared the shadow of our night has an exaltation, a threnodic thrill, of the intellect — its words are plucked out of a passion of the mind-energy and not the life-force: ...
... Byron figures as the colossus and Titan of the age while the greater and more significant work of Wordsworth and Shelley is dismissed as an ineffective attempt to poetise a Germanic transcendentalism, Carlyle's ill-tempered and dyspeptic depreciation of Keats, Arnold's inability to see in Shelley anything but an unsubstantially beautiful poet of cloud and dawn and sunset, a born musician who had made a ...
... Preparing for the Miraculous Introductory Quotation It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed, Earth ...
... into terms of the outer mind rather than appearing with some hues and harmonies of its own — and Milton's work is at times even greater than Shelley's despite the outer mind because of this mind's accuracy in translating the inner stuff instead of mixing, as Shelley occasionally does, the inner hues and harmonies with thin echoes of them in the external intelligence. Moreover, the inner stuff itself has... presences — presences, of course, that are no less concrete for being elusive but that leave our outer mind incapable of enter-ing masterfully into the mood musicalised. It is quite different with Shelley. In him we get a more aerial than earthly melopoeia, either a quiet or a breathless intensity of it, luminous but rarefied. The quiet intensity we catch in a stanza like: Though the sound overpowers... singing, but, though an actual woman is the singer, the voice heard by the poet is not of the earth, and his own verse is also shot Page 137 with an inner rhythm. Often the sign of Shelley's inwardness is the sense he conveys of a light that merges many realities into oneness. Even when he is not ostensibly referring to some world far from ours, even when he talks of this very world he ...
... – though it is an object of deep love – that has made this love intense, sweet and poignant, moving and overflowing. Such a longing for the far-off Beloved made Shelley restless. His 'Skylark' is the living idol of this longing. Shelley's object of love also is a Deity dwelling in a distant world: The desire of the moth for the Star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something... something afar – From the sphere of our sorrow. This is equally the quintessence of Tagore's message. For this reason people brought up in European culture used to call Rabindranath the Shelley of Bengal. There is a close kinship between the two in this upward urge. This spiritual aspiration was called quest in the scriptures of the West. The quest .of the Knights for the Holy Grail Page 180... and self-declaration of the aspiration. All that I have not attained, All that I have not struck Are vibrating on the chords Of thy Lyre. Let us recollect in this connection Shelley's And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest. Tagore is known to us as music incarnate. The simple, natural form of his poetic soul has expressed itself through songs and lyrics ...
... apt and harmonious. She often leaves the ground fallow for a generation and the world is surprised when it sees spring from Sir Timothy Shelley, Baronet and orthodox, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and pioneer of free-thought, but learns in a little while that Percy Shelley had a grandfather, and marvels no longer. Could we trace the descent of Goethe and Shakespeare we should find the root of the Italian ...
... perhaps, but, still, if it is at all open to a meaning of this kind, then it says the very reverse of Shelley's intended significance. For in the English "what men call love" is strongly depreciatory, and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says, in substance, "Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I ... of the higher vital, not the lesser pleasure of the senses,—it is the volupté you do actually get when you rise, whether inwardly or outwardly like the aviators into the boundless heights. 2) Shelley. 3 Good poetry, but as a translation vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head because, it seems to me that your সে ধন and তা বলি lays or may lay itself open to the construction that human ...
... of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised Page 101 for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, ādi-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of... culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhy ānī, tapasvī , indeed, Quiet as a nun Breathless in adoration... ...
... 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, without fatigue... so clair-audient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyrists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody, but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily ...
... Shakespeare's line in the following way in order to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, " , strategems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same—though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard... words cannot be accepted as a standard for current speech—can it? On your own showing, "treason" and "poison" which are monosyllables in prose or current speech are scanned as dissyllables in verse; Shelley makes "evening" three syllables and Harin has used even "realm" as a dissyllable, while the practice of taking "precious" and "conscious" to be three syllables is not even noticeable, I believe. All... am mentioning this disparity between poetic and current usages not because I wish "meditation" to be robbed of its full length or "vision" to lose half its effect but because it seems to me that Shelley's or Tennyson's or any poet's practice does not in itself prove anything definitely for English as it is spoken. And spoken English, very much more than written English, undergoes change; even the line ...
... for languages. He absorbed English automatically from his environment and made remarkable progress in Latin. Recently his first published poem, ‘ Light’, has been found; it was written inspired by Shelley’s ‘ The Cloud’, and published in a local magazine when he was ten years old. He was so advanced in Latin that he was allowed to skip the first class at St Paul’s secondary school in London. Along... Spanish to read Dante, Goethe and Cervantes in the original. As to English literature, he showed much interest in the Elizabethan theatre and for the great romantic poetry, particularly that of Keats, Shelley and Byron. He was also fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc, Mazzini and other heroes from history who had fought for the liberation of their motherland. As later told by him, he felt the urge to work for the ...
... Aurobindo 13 .says, their "voice of Tyrrhenian bronze" - just as Wordsworth marked the climax of this Romanticism's communion with Nature and Shelley the extreme of its unrestrained sympathy. But that passion and that insistence burned bright too in Wordsworth and Shelley, not to mention Blake. They mixed Page 110 with other motives, philosophical and emotional, yet it is noteworthy that... characters Of danger or desire: and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, Work like a sea?... Whitehead 5 continues: "Shelley is entirely at one with Words-worth as to the interfusing of the Presences in nature." Here is the opening stanza of his poem entitled Mont Blanc: The everlasting universe of Things Flows... Mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. Whitehead's comment 6 is: "Shelley has written these lines with explicit reference to some form of idealism, Kantian or Berk-leyan or Platonic. But however you construe him, he is here an . emphatic witness to a prehensive unification ...
... continued that Keats's early death by tuberculosis was caused by the psycho-logical wounds inflicted by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley's elegy on him, the celebrated Adonais, is written under the impres-sion that he fell a victim to the malevolence of critics. Shelley, himself one of the pioneer Romanticists in England, had been attacked too, for his high-flying lyricism as well as for his sup-posedly... his own resentment at the bitterness of non-Roman-ticists against the new poetry lent itself easily to the idea that Keats had been mortally hurt by the injustice and abuse of Jeffrey and his crew. Shelley also did not live long, but nobody could imagine he died of a heart broken by book-reviewers. The story of his drowning can, however, break our hearts and I shall not recount it to you lest you should ...
... stillness of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, a di-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of... culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhyani, tapasvi indeed, . . . quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration. . ...
... song, No smouldering word instinct with fire, No spell to chase triumphant wrong, No spirit-sweet desire. Mine is not Byron's lightning spear, Nor Wordsworth's lucid strain Nor Shelley's lyric pain, Nor Keats', the poet without peer. I by the Indian waters vast Did glimpse the magic of the past, And on the oaten pipe I play Warped echoes of an earlier day. To a Hero-Worshipper ...
... subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine,—for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an Englishman knows it, can get the full intuition of a poet like Shelley well enough. These variations must be allowed for; the human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions... himself has shown in his best work. But there my appreciation stops; I cannot rise to the heights of admiration of those who put them on a level with or on a higher level than Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley—I cannot escape from the feeling that their work, even though more consistently perfect within their limits and in their own manner (at least Pope's), was less great in poetic quality. These divergences... ever remain for Tagore mystic and mysterious and occupy a second place. That is another matter. It is a question of personal idiosyncrasy. There are people who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty. The clear precise intellectual meanings of Pope are to them the height of poetry—the emotional and romantic suggestions of the Skylark or the Ode to the Nightingale unsatisfactory ...
... shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely... straining beyond thought into mystical vision - Wordsworth's profound contemplative pantheistic peace - Blake's deeply delicate radiance -Coleridge's glimmering occultism or the weird and the haunting-Shelley's rainbowed rapture of some universal Light and Love -Keats's enchanted luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and myth, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - Patmore's pointed polished ...
... Ezra Pounds and keeping our senses sweet with the old sober ecstasies, may imagine ourselves independent of it since we do not require to worship him, having Shelley and Keats as our first guiding stars; but our independence is unreal — Shelley and Keats are the two poets whose affinity to Spenser is the deepest and in their own manner they have distilled anew his musical attar for us. His stamp on ...
... Elizabethan, so much as, in Sri Aurobindo's words, 1 "by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more properly be called, his eye for other nature,... for a featureless cosmos-annihilating "bright pink". Romantic mysticism gloried, on the contrary, in a million shades and even gave them the utmost prominence it could while sensing within them what Shelley termed "one harmonious soul of many a soul". To equate mysticism with "loss of nerve" is sheer prejudice. No doubt, Coleridge happened to be a man who produced the impression of suffering from... innate happiness, it was the poet who spoke of being again and again visited by "that serene and blessed mood" when We are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul... And as for Shelley, although he sometimes described himself as one who can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour, he has also indicated the true situation of a soul whose ardours were so ...
... suggestion and nearness,—Wordsworth's Her eyes as stars of twilight fair, Like twilight's too her dusky hair, But all things else about her drawn From Maytime and the cheerful dawn: Shelley's When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest, The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed; or Its passions will rock thee, As the... poetic speech comes suddenly and rarely, as in Dryden's And Paradise was opened in his face, breaking out of a surrounding merely effective poetical eloquence, or intervening at times as in Shelley's The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute, No song but sad dirges Like the wind through a ruined cell, where the effective force of image and feeling that makes... authentic identity of the experience. It comes in luminous phrases emerging from a fine and lucid adequacy and the justice or the delicacy makes place for a lustrous profundity of suggestion, as in Shelley's And now, alas! the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave, or it strikes across a movement of strong and effective poetical thinking, as in Wordsworth's ...
... new poetic fashion afterwards perfected by Wordsworth, (2) the reintroduction of the supernatural influencing all subsequent writers but mainly Coleridge, Shelley & Keats, (3) the introduction of Hellenism into poetry, carried out by Keats & Shelley & (4) the restoration of the lyric & especially the Ode form, which became a favourite one in the early nineteenth century & of the general subjects suited... of this school on future poetry are (1st) the habit of describing Nature for its own sake (2) the Thomsonian form of blank verse which was afterwards adopted by Cowper & Wordsworth and improved by Shelley (3) the use of the Spenserian stanza in narrative poetry (4) the sense for antiquity & for the picturesque as regards ruins (5) the habit of moralising on subjects of general human interest as opposed ...
... nightingale 'immortal Bird' and Shelley by calling the skylark 'blithe Spirit' have thrown a challenge to common sense. A bird is but a bird and must share the mortality of the world; how, then, can a bird either be a spirit or be immortal? "There are people", Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a correspondent, "who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty... What the hell... dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments; —P.B. Shelley Page 306 And Paradise was opened in his face. —John Dryden These are what Sri ...
... possessive impulse. In Shelley's experience of beauty there is an ethereal and mystic strain. Shelley and Keats are like caged birds trying to escape from the imprisonment of human limitations beating ineffectively their wings against the bars. But their perception has great truth and power; they stress the need for reaching out to the transcendent beauty. Shelley writes:— I can give not... above. And the Heavens reject not; The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow ? Shelley's experience differs from that of Byron; it is more subtle, more delicate, suffused with elements of psychic beauty. It moves on a different plane. The poet admits that he cannot give to his beloved... everything before it; there is no logical cause, no explanation. Beauty is Page 102 beyond the net of logic and explanation. Here there is no question, as there is in case of Shelley, about the acceptance of the pure offering of love. Here is the self-poised serene joy of attainment, a feeling of fulfilment of the experience of beauty. Beauty acts spontaneously and without ...
... As he was studying at home the little boy got plenty of time to indulge his own tastes in books. He read the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats and others. Young that he was he not only read poetry but composed verses for the Fox Family Magazine. Percy B. Shelley was a favorite of Sri Aurobindo's. "The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite with me even when I was quite young, and I used to ...
... little over a year and had when he came a thousand ties with the world. It is also something that a man already marked out by some of the greatest English writers of the day as an equal of Keats and Shelley should renounce all publication and all fame and write only for myself and the Mother and the sadhaks. I know how impossible such a renunciation would be to most poets and writers and it seems to me ...
... was due to his power of speech. Everything he said was said with force and energy and that appealed to the people. But he is not so successful in his sonnets. His dramas alone have that quality. Shelley has that gift only in rare places. Wordsworth also, and those are the things that become popular but not with the peasants. Shakespeare easy? And he was enjoyed by all? That is news. It is true ...
... Keats and Shelley As regards Keats and Shelley why attach so much importance to fluency? Keats besides produced enough in his few years of productivity and enough besides of a high excellence to rank him among the greater English poets. What might he not have done if he had lived to fifty? But I don't believe he had any dramatic genius in him. None of these poets had. Shelley's Cenci is a ... epical gift. Page 377 It can easily be seen from Keats' earlier work. And with ripeness he could do great things in the narrative form. His dramatic attempt is rubbish. All these poets—Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats had the gift which if sublimated leads to epic power—none had the dramatic gift. The ambition to do a thing is not a proof that he can do it—now and here. 8 February 1935 Tennyson ...
... we have the Shakespearian accent of the thrilled rapid life-force, the Miltonic tone of the majestically thinking mind, the deep or colourful cry of the idealistic imagination as in Wordsworth and Shelley and, recently, Yeats and A.E. Savitri, while taking into itself the whole past of English poetry, adds not only the Indian spirit: it adds also in ample measure the typical intonation, at once intense ...
... actively present and the joy grew mixed with a sense of awe and grandeur, Fujiwara may be considered as englished in the opening lines of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, at the same time that a touch of Pound's "apparition" enters through the word "ghosts" in the Shelley-passage: O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like... clarity and objectivity of the Greeks with the effective visual condensation of the Oriental miniature. The lines would be accepted by the Imagist as pure poetry. What, however, about the close of Shelley's Ode?— ...Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth; And, by the incantation ...
... take the mass of his work into account you may say he is not great. "Greatness" too can be variously defined. NIRODBARAN: I can only say that poets like Shakespeare are great. Also Wordsworth and Shelley can be called great poets. PURANI: Through "The Hound of Heaven" Thompson has expressed a whole life-experience and has achieved the summit of art while doing so. Considering these two points I ...
... Spenserian stanza to vivid effect in his travel-narrative in verse, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, three centuries after The Fairie Queene - or Shelley's resort to it at the same distance of time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare... turn to that greater poet Shelley's 'locks of the approaching storm' - Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the approaching storm.... Shelley was being exact - he knew... 'overhead poetry' I do grant you that this is an important element. I agree that there are many levels of poetry from the purely material (Auden who writes like an extremely gifted journalist) to Shelley, whom Sri Aurobindo discerns to be a poet with great translucence to the higher vision (and I deeply agree - in fact 1 find again and again Aurobindo's comments on the Romantics and other English ...
... in the hands of the Supreme. Those lines of Shelley's, which you recall me as quoting to you - The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow - point you precisely to the state towards which I am asking Page 182 you to aspire. At first glance it may appear to strike a note of escapism, but actually Shelley was not only a fervent idealist but also an ardent... flashed on our eyes the ultimate result on earth of "the desire of the moth for the star" that is the Shelleyan cry: It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. We have to keep the sense of this waiting City and that emergent Age alive in our thoughts and feelings ...
... speech is employed to catch the light of thought or an emotional incandescence, there is of sensuousness either a controlled power as in Wordsworth or an intensity that rushes and recedes as in Shelley. Where, on the other hand, the motive-force is neither aspiring thought nor ecstatic emotion, it is inevitable that the sensuous nature of verse should hold the field almost altogether and act on... All authentic poetry goes beyond the crude data of life and if Sarojini touches a picturesque lucency behind the surface rather than a significant luminosity, she fails to be like Wordsworth or Shelley but she does not fail to be a genuine poet in her own way. In addition to her flair for the shiningly picturesque, Sarojini has a style in which simple feeling blends a graceful pity, a ...
... with his usual turn for rhetoric, expresses this spontaneity and power in a more impressive, almost threatening manner: "Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake." Shelley has a less psychoanalytic idea and prefers a philosophic statement when he is not making a highly poetic one: "Poetry is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and its birth and... imaginative creators, however slow and piecemeal their labours, but for intellectual constructors without that something elemental which is evidently the sum and substance of what Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley are also driving at. Now comes Housman, himself a fine poet, and says that if poetry is not intellectual Page 39 at its core and if its function is rather to transfuse emotion than ...
... same time it would be true to say that he was largely self-taught. As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions. Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam' pleased him a lot, although as he said later, much of it was then not intelligible to him but the vision of freedom from tyranny and injustice appealed ...
... mean that he has no inspiration? SRI AUROBINDO: No. He has inspiration and he has power too. Perhaps the word "derivative" is wrong. For it would mean imitation, though there is an influence of Shelley. What then shall I call his work? Perhaps I may say it is not authentic yet. It has everything else short of this, and he may achieve something. PURANI: He is afraid to come here lest he shouldn't ...
... working is profound and incalculable. Sri Aurobindo has written in Savitri: All was the working of an ancient plan, A way prepared by an unerring Guide. || 99.14 || These lines from Shelley flash to my mind: Mother of this unfathomable world, Favour my solemn song. I have loved Thee ever, and Thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, And the darkness of Thy steps And my heart ever ...
... cosmos, Lamettrie by his book L'homme machine did with the scientist himself. Against the atheism and materialism of Science many a poet and many a mystic protested. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley — these were witnesses to a greater truth than that of Science. But in the eyes of common sense what were the results of the activity of poetic mysticism? Nothing comparable to the steam-engine, the... great Page 233 speed, but the Morse code of dots and dashes was a better series of engimatic signs and a telegram sent in it went much quicker than Blake's pen tracing out poems. Shelley spun out a number of fine visions, but the Cotton Mills spun more durable stuff and at a faster rate. Wordsworth spoke sublimely of a single Being present everywhere, but most people could not get... tic Science, but they were rather unavailing in the opinion of intellectuals; and especially in France where the intellect was more at play than in the England of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, nobody with brains thought of doubting the pronouncements of Physics and Physiology. What those brains forgot was that man was the only creature who thought of asking whether he had a soul or ...
... still alive, the practice of yogic concentration was bound to be fruitful. No doubt, he also lives in iridescence and not in the full Spirit-sun; but the shimmering haze of Shelley differs from his diffuse illumination in that Shelley sees hazily from an aching distance while AE sees diffusely from very near. And it is the satisfied nearness which imparts to his verse the Spirit-appeal peculiar to it.... e of a wise child, not the remote, the ultimate, the transcendental gleam. Though Wordsworth catches a vastness as of the Spirit, the philosopher in him often preponderates over the mystic. Even Shelley's wizard tunes float in an ether different from AE's. The world of AE is not the rarefied mental with its abstractions and idealities come to life under the stress of a lyrical feeling, but an occult ...
... The Poet and the Poem Power of Expression and Spiritual Experience All depends on the power of expression of the poet. A poet like Shakespeare or Shelley or Wordsworth though without spiritual experience may in an inspired moment become the medium of an expression of spiritual Truth which is beyond him and the expression, as it is not that of his own... n, it is a powerful poetic imagination which expresses what would be the exact feeling in the real experience. It seems to me that that is quite enough. There are so many things in Wordsworth and Shelley which people say were only mental feelings and imaginations and yet they express the deeper Page 106 seeings or feelings of the seer. For poetry it seems to me the point is irrelevant ...
... not lived up to his own message. One was astonished at his 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... half Page 50 regret now is still discussed and praised for its vital frenzy and perverse intellectual zest. Luckily it was under the nom de plume of Maddalo, the name given by Shelley to Byron and hinting in my hands at a kind of Shelleyan idealism gone Byronically topsy-turvy in which Byron's healthy vulgarity became sicklied o'er with the pale cast of a gout d'infini lost in... together with his gift to me of a ear that can occasionally catch the "sweet everlasting Voices." There are, of course, many poems the whole of which are bull's eyes scored at one shot: some of Shelley's have that look and Shakespeare in his best passages must have laid line after mighty line without needing to halt anywhere or amend anything: has he not the reputation of having never blotted a single ...
... English poets, did not all the hoary-headed classicists find the result un-English in temper as well as style? How bewildered was even Matthew Arnold by the un-English ethereality that ran riot in Shelley's work! And what about that pre-Romantic Blake? Are his "embryo ideas" and "uninvolved images" and "vague mystic grandeurs" English? Is it English of Wordsworth to poetise the exaltations of pantheism... which conjures up the atmosphere and rhythm of the ancient Upanishads. A Rishi of old seems to Page 25 intone that ample and profound verse. A Rishi again comes to life with Shelley's Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity. Among earlier English poets, there is the true Upanishadic touch in Vaughan's 1 saw Eternity the ...
... indefinable. Plato's book, The Banquet, is said to be about Love and Beauty. Is it a kind of philosophy? Not much philosophy there, more poetry. Shelley has translated The Banquet into English. Could I read it? If you want to read it as a piece of literature, it is all right. I did not find so much of poetry in the ...
... Sacrifice, Vedic I Sadhu 97 Sanskrit 32 Sat-chit-Ananda — (Satya-Tapas-Jnana) 14 Satan 16 Semele 34 Shakespeare 16, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 101, 103 Shakuntala 8 Shelley 104 Shitala 31 Shyama 80 Shyama 80 Siddhas 82 Siddhacharyas 11, 82, 83, 87 Soma 2, 12 Somadevata 37 Sophocles 40, 43 South America 55 Spain 61 ...
... sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry does not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet." "When I say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher ...
... Corneille and Hugo, the English Spenser. While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering "Wordsworth". Well, Sri Aurobindo has said that Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats have been left out of consideration not because their best poetry falls short of the finest ever written but because they have failed to write anything on a larger scale which would place... "restatement".) If even Hugo with his wide scope and large scale has to be left with one foot across and one foot outside the threshold of the sheer first class how can we admit Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats? A Frenchman, of course, would not easily accept the non-inclusion of any French poet at all when India and Greece get three, Italy and England two, and even Germany One. Perhaps what keeps ...
... beauty he symbolises as "Tyger", he asks, In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? The occult is also as genuinely in Wordsworth as in any visionary sensation of Shelley's, though in a more formidable shape of vagueness than the Shelleyan Dreams and adorations, Winged persuasions and veiled Destinies, Splendours and glooms and glimmering Incarnations... weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun; Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller's journey is done - and the more magical felicities that haunted Shelley through-out his life as if he were an exile from them and that are poignantly evoked by him in the last lines of the lyric To Jane: Though the sound overpowers, Sing again, With thy ...
... Origins Preface to the First Edition This little book started to take shape in response to a suggestion by my friend Arabinda Basu who has a mind which - in Shelley's phrase - has grown "bright, gazing at many truths". The suggestion was that I contribute a paper to a Russian conference which was due to be held some time in October 1977. There was no definite ...
... At the heart of Existentialism there is a Buddhism manque, an unrecognised missing of Nirvana, just as at the heart of Romanticism one may discern a would-be Vedanta, the puzzled sense expressed by Shelley: Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere. Page 211 Not awakening to the truth by which they are moved, both mix with the basic spiritual source a lot of odd matter: ...
... things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines, I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star ...
... abstract as far as details go, but the removal of the state of Lady Geraldine's body from any this-world possibility to the possibilities of a world of nightmare confers extra effectiveness. When Shelley read the passage he fainted! This incident is one of the two on record in which lines of poetry produced a bodily effect more serious than the usual ones mentioned by Housman: the standing up of... solar plexus. Emily Dickinson speaks even of a feeling as if the top of the head were blown off. None of these effects, however marked, have caused any serious physical disturbance. What happened to Shelley is matched only by what happened to Page 281 Blake. Once the passage was read out to him, in which Words-worth claims that the theme he has chosen for his song is the profoundest — ...
... 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 have ideas thrown up by a seethe... out its most pronounced ideative phrases: Life's but a walking shadow;... ...it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Then he sets it beside Shelley's voicing of a kindred idea of transience: Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until... release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by a dissolution of the body: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Respond now to Shelley's utterance of the thought of reaching safety from life's ravage: From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. Perhaps we can mark the most sustained distinction ...
... Yoga his art will gain and not lose. But there is all the question: is the artist appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work... 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 the poets ...
... not lose. But there is always the question; is the artist appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? Page 105 But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work... 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 creators can ...
... thoroughly familiar with the tradition and cultures of the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their epics and lyrics, Homer and Shelley as well as Vyasa and Kalidasa. He admired Plato greatly and classical Greek culture as a whole – “where living itself was an education” – witness his essay on Heraclitus and the four thousand hexameters ...
... 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 mass is a ...
... with certitude into the mood musicalised. It is different with Virgil and, among past English poets, with Shelley. But Virgil and Shelley themselves differ. Both make their sweetest songs out of saddest thought; but the elusive element in Virgil leaps out of an earthly poignancy whereas in Shelley it plays within an ethereal one. A single instance may suffice: Though the sound overpowers, ... term—"the esemplastic imagination" in the poetic experience is to the mystic a direct realisation—in his being's very stuff rather than in an imaginative mirror—of "the one Spirit's plastic press", as Shelley puts it. Hence we may regard the poetic experience at once as an initiator of mysticism and as a phenomenon incomplete without the life spiritual lived for its own sake. This experience, for Sri Aurobindo ...
... you mean by "experience". An idea may be an experience, a feeling may be an 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... you give an instance of psychic poetry? Is there a psychic element in Vidyapati? Sri Aurobindo : I think there is some, though it is rare even in Chandidas. As for psychic poetry, take Shelley's lines : The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow. There the feeling and the expression are... his Earthly Paradise which is exceedingly fine. There is a tendency to run down Morris, because he derived his inspiration from the Middle Ages as the Victorian age did not give him any subject. Shelley and Keats both tried to bring in the epic with the subjective element, but they failed because they tried to put it in the old forms. Disciple : Toru Dutt has written poetry in English and ...
... the French developed and exampled it in the comity of cultures. Again the glimpses of intuition that we come across in the inspiration of Dante, Shakespeare and Ronsard have further diminished in Shelley, Byron and Hugo. Finally, inspiration has become all in all among the modern and the ultra-modern artists including the Symbolists and the Impressionists of whom Paul Verlaine at one time was a leader ...
... night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of... weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Page 66 Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life: Before thy memory, I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died. The insufficiency of the mere ...
... potent, founding element of poetic expression, and though most modern poets depend or at least lean more heavily on force of thought and substance than on the greater musical suggestions of rhythm,—Shelley, Swinburne, Yeats are exceptions,—there must always be a change in this basis of the poet's art when there is a substantial change of the constituting spirit and motive. Especially when there is this... chained themselves up in a monotony of pointed metrical effect. The succeeding poets got back to the greater freedoms of tone and used them in a new way, but the principle remains the same,—as in Shelley's Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight, or Wordsworth's For old unhappy far-off things And battles long ago,— both of them examples of the ordinary base used ...
... Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden. Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the spirit. The Victorian period did not deny their influences; it felt them in the first form of its work, and we might have expected it to have... with them on the external life and tries to subject them to its mould and use them for its purpose. This turn is not universal,—Blake escapes from it; nor is it the single dominant power,—Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have their hearts elsewhere: but it is a constant power; it attracts even the poets who have not a real genius for it and vitiates their work by the immixture of an alien motive. ...
... development" could certainly retain his vital-mental being, the carrying-over is possible also to "one like Shelley or like Plato for instance" who has a developed mental Page 11 personality centred around the psychic individual. 9 Here Plato represents the philosopher, just as Shelley represents the poet, who has lived intensely in the light of his inmost being which is ever open to divine ...
... poets and mystics. They do not belong just to one age or another. They belong to the subtle eternity that runs through all time - and equally valid today as at any moment in the past is that cry from Shelley's heart: Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere. In far Germany you must still be asleep - unless my intense remembrance of you has momentarily pulled you outward or else more... description of the sea-bottom: ...nor bright nor sombre wholly But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy, A dusky empire and its diadems, One faint eternal eventide of gems - Shelley for his subtle suggestions and haunting rhythmical patterns, like airs caught from another world: A tone Of some world far from ours Where music and moonlight and feeling Are ...
... attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman. Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity is as good poetry as Hail to thee ...
... 161 nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of... comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life: Before thy memory, I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died. The insufficiency of the mere ...
... There are some words which either for their visual suggestion or for their sound-evocation keep recurring in the works of particular poets. "Ethereal", "pavilion" and "crystalline" are three of Shelley's favourites and you may note that he stresses "crystalline" rather unusually in the second syllable, instead of the first as your Dictionary does. For example, Greece and her foundations are ... But "coil" in both the above quotations means nothing of the sort. It is an archaic and poetic term signifying "disturbance, noise, turmoil". Shakespeare's "mortal coil" means "turmoil of life" and Shelley's "coil of crystalline streams" means the insistent sound of limpid moving waters. Mallarme was preoccupied with words more than any other poet and he was not just attached to a few special words ...
... Typical "The Everlasting" (Shakespeare) "The Slain" (ditto) Shelley's "where the Eternal are" "The Naked and the Dead" (used as a novel's title) Blake's "the eternals" Hots de categorie 'The Eternal" "The Supreme" (used by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) Shelley's "The One". "The Many" "The flight of the alone o the Alone" (after ...
... went so far. The poetry of the time of Wordsworth and Shelley is sometimes called romantic poetry, but it was not so in its essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives. It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty ...
... 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. Such men come ...
... Sankhya,45,85 Satan, 46 Savitri, 163, 165 Second Empire, the, 418 Shakespeare, 79, 116n., 406 -Julius Caesar, 116n. -Hamlet, 72n. Shankara, 17, 21, 68, 71,403 Shelley, 209 Shiva, 129, 208, 339 Socrates, 116 Soma, 70, 208 Spanish Armada, the, 198 Sri Aurobindo, 3-4, 7-10, 17-19, 22, 25, 27, 29, 34, 36, 44, 59-60, 71, 84n., 85-6,89-91, 95, 109n. ...
... 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, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an ...
... supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius". These factors should include what I would call "quantity of quality", the abundance of the work. Thus Sri Aurobindo has said about Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth: "their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri... Divine Comedy: L'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle. Translated into English - The love that moves the sun and the other stars - it sounds like a medieval anticipation of Shelley's insight into the universal movement while poring over the death of Keats and feeling the dead young poet to have been "made one with Nature": He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness ...
... 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 impression on him. "I ...
... backward like a receding wave. After Bankim came the Epigoni, Hemchandra Banerji, Nobin Sen, Robindranath Tagore, men of surprising talent, nay, of unmistakable genius, but too obviously influenced by Shelley and the English poets. And last of all came the generation formed in the schools of Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, with its religious shallowness, its literary sterility and its madness in ...
... strong spiritual development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic - of the vital the same can hardly be said. Napoleon had a strong vital, but not one organised round ...
... ia need not always lend itself to being set to a tune. And it is a curious fact that some of the greatest melopoeics in verse have had very little ear for music — they were practically tone-deaf. Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hugo, Yeats, though they have written about music itself, were all tone-deafs in more or less degree. Swinburne was such an extreme case that if he had heard the tunes, without ...
... It is not simply a description. And in Nishikanto's poem, "Gorurgadi" ("Bullock Cart"), the cart is real and the man in it is real, yet the cart is both a personal one and a world-cart. Take Shelley's "Skylark" and Keats' "Nightingale". The birds in either poem are nothing. It is the thoughts and feelings of the poets that have found expression and the birds tansmit those thoughts and feelings ...
... Savitri is epical both in tone and conception and its involvement is cosmic. In this respect Keats's Hyperion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are nearer to it. The idea Spirit, behold The glorious destiny nascent in Shelley's earlier work, Queen Mab, finds its fuller poetic expression in Prometheus Unbound. If this is a veritable cosmic lyric, Savitri... apprehension of the cosmic heart's throb, Sri Aurobindo felt and comprehended it fully. Yet if Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is epic poetry of the future, I wouldn't hesitate in venturing to state that Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a wonderfully revealing and prophetic poetic utterance as it is, lyric poetry of the future. As one enters comparatively the modern age one finds poets, including ...
... night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects... comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life: Before thy memory, I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died. The insufficiency of the mere ...
... sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry does not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet. 19 October 1936 Higher Mind and Inner Mind When I say that the inner Mind can... 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 exactly the same. On the other hand, take Shelley's stanza— Page 35 We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought... is of the same character, a direct, straightforward, lucid and lucent movement welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry: I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And ...
... and lips and hands and feet that are perfect and at the same time like ours by a close warmth. ''Shelley and Yeats mix the ideal and the real in a manner that is mystic by imagination, not by experience: Emilia Viviani was in fact nothing save a fancied symbol of the Soul within Shelley's soul, and the woman with odorous twilight about her tresses and about her mouth is a mere shadow hinting... noir de la grande marmite — and its less hectic counterpart in Fitzgerald's Omar, And that inverted bowl we call the sky Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die — Shelley has an unforgettable image in speaking of Byron, The Pilgrim of Eternity whose fame Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument. Page 171 ... vibrating with imagery of truth — but the personal emotion-cry of a lyric directness is not often heard. Lyricism is present, yet rarely direct and Page 177 personal as for instance in Shelley, and when the peculiar mood is felt it is not with the mystic touch discoverable in all places. Chattopadhyaya has responded to the Divine as a presence suffusing Nature, haunting the kingdom of thought ...
... great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In ...
... 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 Gobinda Das's lines,—let us translate them into English Page 177 Am I merely thine? O Love, I am there clinging In every limb of thee—there ever is my creation and my... —self-gathered, grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express... to clothe the attributes of the Brahman! But that does not mean that there can be no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman. "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass" is as good poetry as "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!". There are flights of unsurpassable poetry ...
... same view about very great poets like Shelley or Spenser at one time, so that does not seriously touch my feeling that this is poetry of beauty and value. Also I do not make comparisons—I take it by itself as a thing apart in its own province. I know of course that my old schoolfellow Binyon and others in England have spoken in this connection of Keats and Shelley; but I do not myself feel the need of ...
... sculpture, the stability of the hill. This is the difference between .the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and, Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, a di-kavi. In the Mahabharata we find not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge... moral and spiritual discipline. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhyani, tapasvi,– indeed ...quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration. Page ...
... seerhood was absolutely authentic. Yeats's Celtic verse was both true and new. The Marvellous Might-have-been Blake had walked with spirits, Coleridge had known an eerie darkness, Shelley had been touched by "nurselings of immortality", but none had opened the door of which Yeats discovered the key; they had won no access to the heart whose pulse followed the footfall of wizard presences... his vision an assured extension of the human consciousness. By one-pointed and organic consistency of aim Wordsworth stamped, on his own time and the generations after, a new perception of Nature, Shelley's amazing productiveness blended inextricably by the same means a new idealistic glow with the emotions to which the human race had been accustomed. Yeats, however, bifurcated his never too prolific ...
... along that shallow and vehement current, they vary one idea or harp on the same imagination without any final success in expressing it inevitably. Examples of the rajasic stimulus are commonest in Shelley and Spenser, but few English poets are free from it. This is the rajasic fault in expression. But the fiery stimulus also perverts or hampers the substance. An absence of self-restraint, an unwillingness ...
... please H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, In mai/den med/itation / fan/cy free, I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, "treasons, stratagems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I Page 191 lived in both northern and southern England... cannot be accepted as a standard for current speech -can it? On your own showing, "treason" and "poison" which are monosyllables in prose or current speech can be scanned as dissyllables in verse; Shelley makes "evening" three syllables and Harin has used even "realm" as a dissyllable... All the same, current speech, if your favourite Chambers' Dictionary and as well as my dear Oxford Concise is to... full sound is not given, so that you cannot put it down as pronounced maid-en, you have to indicate the pronunciation as maid'n. But for that to dub maiden a monosyllable and assert that Shakespeare, Shelley and every other poet who scans maiden as a dissyllable was a born fool who did not know the 'current' pronunciation or was indulging in a constant poetic licence whenever he used the words garden, ...
... arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to dub "Who killed Cock Robin?" the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or to seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the café chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset or Verlaine ...
... one and shall be realised at length, Love, Wisdom, Justice, Joy and utter Strength Gather into a pure felicity. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations ...
... Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1970, what do we read? " 'The Book of Love' (the fifth Book of Savitri) combines the freshness and lyric bloom of Romeo and Juliet with the idealism and platonism of Shelley and Page 334 fuses them with a philosophical and mystical profundity all his own (p. xxxi)... His Savitri is an epic which sets forth with great precision and fidelity some of ...
... realms where inspiration has its throne. Shakespeare never "blotted" a word; Keats "blotted" a thousand, and yet Keats is looked upon as the most Shakespearean of modern poets in "natural magic". Even Shelley, to all appearance the most spontaneous of singers, was scrupulous in his revisions. What still kept him spontaneous was that each time it was not intellectual hacking and hewing, but a re-vision, ...
... obedience to some master-urge within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living. But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither Page 87 facile nor cheap, weak nor watery ...
... , and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton's early poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ordinarily in this mould. But this too is not that highest intensity of the revelatory poetic word from which the Mantra starts. It has a certain power of revelation in ...
... Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1970, what do we read? " 'The Book of Love' (the fifth Book of Savitri) combines the freshness and lyric bloom of Romeo and Juliet with the idealism and platonism of Shelley and fuses them with a philosophical and mystical profundity all his own (p. xxxi)... His Savitri is an epic which sets forth with great precision and fidelity some of the highest states of mystical ...
... he wrote about the Middle Ages and Romanticism, I suppose. NIRODBARAN: You said the other day there has not been any 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 ...
... higher and higher, it assumes the nature of intuitive and inspirational enlightenment. Love is that indefinable but powerful force of delight that ultimately brings about harmony in all relations. As Shelley pointed out, "This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only men with men but everything which exists." Transcending selfishness and self-centredness, love opens its portals to the inner ...
... great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In the ...
... " he said. His portrayal of the present and the future is both luminous and crystalline. Page 77 "It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations ...
... can be great love-poetry without the evident soul-touch. But when the soul-touch transmutes and sublimates human love, then words that embody that love vibrate deeper in the reader's soul. Take Shelley's lines: I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heaven's reject not, -The desire of the moth for the star, Of the... And he adds that they possess "the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence." 5 5. Ibid . Page 348 The starting point of Shelley's poem is human love but the love is interiorised and sublimated. The last traces of vital love are wiped away and what was desire becomes a worship and a yearning of the heart for the unattainable ...
... poem. If it is a leap at top speed from thought to thought, image to image, feeling to feeling in a series of loosely developing coruscations, one hardly notices the minute details of language. In Shelley, repetitions of words happen in an easy natural quickly flowering manner which does not clash with the general ease and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds ...
... poem. If it is a leap at top speed from thought to thought, image to image, feeling to feeling in a series of loosely developing coruscations, one hardly notices the minute details of language. In Shelley repetitions of words happen in an easy natural quickly flowering manner which does not clash with the general ease and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds ...
... where Aravinda received an excellent private education. “I knew nothing of India and her culture”, he would write later. In the young boy, a precocious poet, a very strong feeling arose when he read Shelley’s Revolt of Islam . “I used to read it again and again – of course without understanding everything. Evidently it appealed to some part of the being … I had a thought that I would dedicate my life ...
... Ettayapuram. For the next eighteen months Bharati again became the companion of the Raja and lived comfortably. In his spare time, he soaked himself at the founts of English and Tamil poetry, Shelley, Kamban, and others. But the almost useless life at the court was too stifling for a poet like him. Came a day when he could no longer bear it. He left. His first stop was Madurai. He took a job as ...
... aspects of Sri Aurobindo seem to call for some comment from me. First, the mixing up of the romantic with the sentimental. Surely, sentimentalism and romanticism are not synonymous? Highly romantic is Shelley's Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower. Our modern taste for... make a face at verbal turns like "love-laden" and "music sweet as love". But there is nothing intrinsically unpoetic about them and everything is caught up in a magical rhythm which is peculiar to Shelley. I would hesitate to dub the stanza sentimental stuff. To sentimentalise is to indulge in emotional weakness, mawkish tenderness. The phrases you pick out from the Priyumvada-passage are certainly... to our subject, this shows that "primarily", in the connotation you read in the adverb, Sri Aurobindo had the poetic urge and the political drive. Your remarks on that line of your own and on Shelley's West-Wind passage interested me. Exact imagery contributes to their poetic quality. The Vedic hymn to the wind has a certain vividness but except for the ending very little poetic-mystic significance ...
... 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 dynamic or moved or illuminative... cast into a beautiful turn of phrase but lacking the Shakespearean life-quiver. Or compare O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew with Shelley's From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb, and the result is the same: the one has an impact upon what Sri Aurobindo would call the nerves of mental ...
... of classical sturdiness and unflawed and mature intuition of proportion and measure. It is another sort of kemal , very desirable in its daring and in its joy of profound creativity. If for Shelley a skylark coming from nature provides an occasion to pour out unpremeditated melodies, his inmost and intense most feelings and thoughts, in the manner of the nazul - aspect, in the case of... or else as a whole in rare moments of total inspiration, but you are moving towards mastery in it.” The Two Birds belongs to this period and has these merits and manners. According to Shelley there is "an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities". Amal Kiran has graduated well himself by attending the ...
... 12 Kathleen Raine must have smiled to herself as she read through this letter, dated 11th October 1961, that she had a Worthy opponent here. Yes, Amal Kiran cannot be denied. wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman and AE had brought about a union of the English language and the Indian spirit. The devoted student of Sri Aurobindo's The Future Poetry marshalls his arguments and there comes a moment... exclusively to a particular territory? Haven't innumerable "creative eccentrics" enriched the English language by bringing a foreign idiom, like the Germanisms of Carlyle and un-English ethereality of Shelley? Amal Kiran is typing so fast that the rapier seems still, it is moving with such incredible skill. Raine steps back and opens another front. Ah, not to use one's mother tongue is a kind of betrayal ...
... is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper, Breaking the silence... Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely meta-physical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardy—indeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the ...
... there is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper, Breaking the silence... manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardy-indeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole ...
... the wise, who soar, but never roam — True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home! If he lives only in the visionary world and has no contact with the earth, he will be like Arnold's Shelley beating his wings in the void. And if he is of the earth earthy, then he will not be able to add the gleam, The Light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's... delicately woven web and they also see the universal spirit of love and beauty that animates and informs even those creatures and objects which appear grotesque and bizarre to the ordinary sight. Shelley the pantheist saw everywhere that sustaining love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors ...
... vein in Harin's poetry, but if everybody who has that is to be accounted a reincarnation of Shelley, we get into chaotic waters. In that case, Tagore must be a reincarnation of Shelley, and Harin, logically, must be a reincarnation of Tagore - who couldn't wait till Tagore walked off to Paradise or Shelley must have divided himself between the couple. It may be that afterwards I leaned at a time towards... There is an idea that Harin is a reincarnation of Shelley. It is supposed to be based on your own intuition and the Mother's or least a practical certainty on your part as well as on here. The character of H's poetry seems to add colour to the idea. . Sri Aurobindo: I have never had any practical certainty or any certainty that Harin was Shelley - what by the way is this practical certainty? The ...
... Seturaman, V.S., i, iv fn. 1 Seurat, Denis, 246 Sewanee Review, The, 25 fn. 11,168 fn. 109 Shabda Brahman, 43 "Shadowy Female, The", 168,172, 180-81 Shakespeare, 40 Shelley, 14 "shoulder", 10,119,122 shoulder-art, 10,120 Signatura Rerum, 182 "skies", 12,13,14,16,77,88,92 Smart, Christopher, 42,43,256 Smith, A.J.M., 22,33-35,41 snakes ...
... s by means of "sight" (spiritual vision) and coming to them by "inference". After writing that he was never certain that a poet-friend of the disciple and, for some time, a fellow-sadhak had been Shelley in a past life, Sri Aurobindo added: "as I am for instance about Dilip having been Horace. I am certain because that was 'seen' [by the Mother] and I myself can remember very well (psychically, not ...
... verse, but the result is merely artificially elegant & skilful technique; if emotion movement is super-added, the result is melody, lyric sweetness or elegiac grace or flowing & sensuous beauty, as in Shelley, Keats, Gray, but the poet is not yet a master of great harmonies; for this intellect is necessary, a great mind seizing, manipulating & moulding all these by some higher law of harmony, the law of... representation in harmony with the accentual law of the English language, can be naturalised in English. If it has not yet been done, we must attribute it to some initial error of conception. Byron & Shelley failed because they wanted to create the same effect with this instrument as Dante had done; but terza rima in English can never have the same effect as in Italian. In the one it is a metre of woven... a long & noble epic of the soul & mind like the Divina Commedia. But it is not true that it cannot be made in English a perfectly natural, effective & musical form. It is certainly surprising that Shelley with his instinct for melody, did not perceive the conditions of the problem. His lyric metres & within certain limitations his blank verse are always fine, so fine that if the matter & manner were ...
... Infinite" - is creatively bestirred into no more than forms ignorantly obscuring the soul which is born within them. Aswapati escapes from this world of living Death - "Death and his brother Sleep", as Shelley's phrase sums up. The terms in which Sri Aurobindo expresses Aswapati's breakthrough interest me very much because of the line - A ray returning to its parent sun - 1. I am using in the third ...
... 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 it has been possible to the poet and perceptible in its peculiarity to the reader because the centres ...
... speech seems to have irrecoverably changed and its more tenuous spirit and make impose on the searching audacities of the intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative intelligence. Shelley's Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought, Keats' A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, or his To that large utterance of the early Gods, or Wordsworth's ...
... and in it beauty, power, perfection, why not? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist—as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsmanship and not by its contents; it is not Page ...
... it would be met by an order to X "Go and manage" or else an intimation to Durvasa not to be unreasonable. 4 September 1936 Page 39 What about my planning to read Meredith, Hardy, Shelley, Keats and the Continental and Russian writers? Lord, Sir, I wish I had time to follow out a programme as massive as yours. I have none even to dilate upon yours. 22 September 1936 Reading ...
... the combination of the two has not been 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... cited in favour of this highly suggestive character of Kālidāsa's poetry from his epics, lyrics, and dramas, for they all abound in this quality unlike the writings of any other poet. In the words of Shelley, addressed as they were to a skylark in another context, one may perhaps significantly address this poet of unparalleled brilliance as follows: What thou art We know not; what is most ...
... 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 free-verse giant, Whitman. In ... contemplative pantheistic peace - Blake's deeply delicate radiance or his mighty mythology of events in Eternity - Coleridge's glimmering occultism of the weird, the haunting or the honey-dewed - Shelley's rainbowed rapture of some universal Light and Love and Liberty - Keat's enchanted artistic luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and legend, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - ...
... 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 of ...
... 284 metrical and rhythmical effects 53, 109,169,215 monosyllables 111,188,349 technique of 6,244 Shāh-Nāmāh 60 Shakespeare, William 42,164,166, 188,205,230,237 Shelley 23,42,67,70,197,334,367 siddha 303,304 silence 87,228,265 of mind 344 Sophocles 205 soul description 115 evolving 81 in ancient scriptures 3,5 liberating ...
... 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. Similarly, Shelley' Revolt of Islam, Keats' s incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they too do not succeed much. Victor Hugo's La Legende des Siecles, Robert Browning's The Ring and ...
... it?" Page 1 Realisation: that is the keyword in India. A man realises what love is by actually falling in love with a woman and taking her to himself — not by emotionally reading Shelley or intellectually studying Havelock Ellis. So too by a psychological process within him, which brings him into actual touch with a divine reality, and not by mere religious belief or philosophical ...
... Godhead on a dangerous road, Open not thy doorways to nameless Power, Climb not to Godhead by the Titan's road. 17 4 The dialogue is a scope for the majestic future tense. Shelley had been in the borderline of a great truth. He had used the future tense with a blank foreknowledge of a supreme truth-consciousness. Sri Aurobindo uses the "shall" with more authenticity. The ...
... regard as of lasting worth was the ordinary sense of calm and repose which is got often from Nature and at other times from a temporary feeling of self-fulfilment through "what men call love", as Shelley puts it, or through some fine work accomplished. This sense can be a preparation for higher things, but one can't put a crown on its head and bend down at its feet, as certain poets and idealists do ...
... role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows; Life's but a poor player Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more... Page 18 Shelley, idealistic visionary that he was, declares as also most people are aware: Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until death tramples it to ...
... the former. Homer certainly does not start a train of imaginative argument on life's why and whence and whither, as Lucretius often does, Dante in several places, Milton not seldom, Goethe at times, Shelley on occasion, Wordsworth repeatedly, Lascelles Abercrombie in a notable measure, Hardy to a certain extent, Sri Aurobindo in a good part of his middle-period work. Neither does Homer pause at scattered ...
... and emotion of the life-spirit in us and out of this arose an intellectual and aesthetic sense of hidden finer and subtler things and, more profound, in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Keats and Shelley an attempt at communion with a universal presence in Nature and a living principle of peace or light and love or universal power or conscious delight and beauty. A more deeply seeing and intimate poetry ...
... intuitive act which has a myriad manifestations not only dealing with a diversity of objects and states but also displaying a many-sidedness of approach and manner, quality and source of inspiration. Shelley has spoken of understanding that grows bright, Gazing at many truths. I want your understanding, which I may take as bright already, to grow yet brighter by coming into contact with more truths ...
... 185, 188n., 386n -King Lear, 185 -Mm;beth, 185 Shankaracharya, 8, 215-16, 229, 276 Shaw, Bernard, 140, 145, 254 -Back to Methuselah, 140 Shelley, 194 Shiva, 268 Shivaji,93, 394, 396 Shylock, 100 Sisupala, 80 Socrates, 16, 150,219-20,222,229,273 Solon, 219 Spain, 72 Sparta, 25 ...
... William 7, 50, 309, 311, 312, 341,366,371,395,412,419,425,458 Page 496 Shankara 30 Shaw, Bernard 400, 436 Shelley, P.B. 309,315 Somadeva 48 Spengler, Oswald 400 Spiegelberg, Frederic 53 Stacc.W.T. 272 Stambler, Bernard 272, 380 Stanford, W.B. 402 Stephen ...
... sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry toes not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet. "When 1 say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher... things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines, Page 68 I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire ...
... things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines, I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star, ... is something behind it which supplies the Truth in its images, and to get the transcription also direct from that something or somewhere behind should be the aim of mystic or spiritual poetry. When Shelley made the spirits of Nature speak, he was using his imagination, but there was something behind in him which felt and knew and believed in the truth of the thing he was expressing— Page 88 ...
... imagination, an intellectual symbol which conveys his import to other people by a figure of symbol which represents rather than is the experience. Kalidas can use the "Cloud" as a "messenger" and Shelley convey the poet's Truth through the "Skylark". The question how these symbols arise has been a great puzzle to poets, critics and even psychologists. The explanation of the creative activity of... symbolic or allegorical figures". Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. Arthurian legends may be the type of concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation. Prometheus Unbound of Shelley can be taken as a symbolic figure. With regard to the function of the symbol in expression Sri Aurobindo says in another letter: "A symbol expresses not the play Page 11 of abstract ...
... perhaps, but, as your lines are open to a meaning of this kind, it tends to convey the very reverse of Shelley's intended significance. For in English 'What men call love' is strongly depreciatory and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance: "Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot... "Your name is fading music upon my worship's mouth;" as it made me realise in a new way what Sri Aurobindo termed "psychic inspiration" in a letter to me in 1931 when I tried to translate Shelley's famous lines: I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the heavens reject not: The desire of the moth for the star, Of the... English poetry must read his poems on Lealia and Moon inspired by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Page 302 bestowed such lavish praise on Chadwick's poems. "Your translation of Shelley's poem is vulnerable in the head and the tail. In the head, because it seems to me that your words are open to the construction that human love is a rich and precious thing which the poet in question ...
... form Tennyson does not come near to these three poets. Here is Shelley: Mother of this unfathomable world! Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. Shelley comes nearest to Sri Aurobindo and is farthest from Milton. His... beauty. Both are great; but the greatness of both are poles apart. But while Milton's verse has the breath of a true epic, the poetry of Keats is essentially lyrical. This comment holds true for Shelley and Wordsworth as well. Length does not determine the real characteristic of an epic. It is the approach and the style, the subject treated and the way of treating it. Wordsworth's poems are long... narrative quality is too narrow in scope (dealing with English heroes only) and this debars us from calling his Idylls of the King an epic. His verse seems undignified and lacking in self-restraint. Shelley and Keats are too romantic and purely lyrical; they never had the ambition to write an epic. Their approach and method were not suited for this purpose. Matthew Arnold has written admirable long ...
... of his age, which, as regards poetry, was an age of transition. What is meant by the Augustan or eighteenth-century style? In what sense is it less poetical than the poetry of Wordsworth & Shelley? The poetry of the eighteenth century differs entirely from that of another period in English literature. It differs alike in subject-matter, in spirit and in form. Many modern critics have denied ...
... least as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does not stop with Byron and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of some of the contemporary poets; their readers are hardly enough to make a number. In this matter of culture this huge peninsula, once one of the greatest ...
... up to see if there is anything really there, but you see nothing. The world you see, the cosmos you see, but here is something not contained within them. It is something supreme but invisible. As Shelley says, Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere. You look up and there is nothing there except the world you know, which lis a very grand world no doubt and has to be a very active force in ...
... 57n -Hamlet, 163, 173, 175n., 185n -King Lear, 171, 173n -Macbeth, 170, 171n -Romeo & .Juliet, 176n -Sonnets, 178-9 -The Winter's Tale, 233n Shankara, 246, 277, 282 Shelley, 68, 71, 98, 235 Shita1a, 180 Siddhacharyas, 164, 221-2, 225 Siddhas, 221 Siva, 31, 278 Socrates, 12, 58, 73, 98, 239, 281 Soma, 23, 28-9, 44-5, 165, 167, 184 Song if ...
... exaggerate perhaps, but, still if it is at all open to a meaning of this kind, then it says the very reverse of Shelley's intended significance. For in English "What men call love" is strongly depreciatory, and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance, "Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot... yourself out. Remember that in lyrical poetry this is a difficult process—one is apt to beat out the gold wire Page 65 too thin, to replace it where it fails by apparent gold only. Shelley, Swinburne and many others fail by diffusion, except in a very few long poems—and are at their best when they are more brief. So, if you go in for lyrical lengths, much care will be needed—the principle... promise, there is a sweetness in the rhythm and a sincerity of poetic style which, if developed, may come to something of very real value. I shall comment on your translations (Baudelaire and Shelley) tomorrow; as it is already 2.30 a.m., I have no time just now. 2 I hope the undesirable feeling of which you speak will have disappeared by tomorrow—you ought certainly not to give it a full ...
... and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Page 76 Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides...." 15 "There can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his poems gives ...
... I am tempted to say like Monodhar—"I beg to differ with you in this respect." Not at all; quite serious. If you take the short lyrics and sonnets (not longer poems) of great poets like Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, how many are there of the first class written in a whole lifetime? Thirty or forty perhaps at the outside. And you have written 15 in 6 months. October 18, 1938 Ah, here ...
... ess affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, Love – Mahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship Page 209 of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and ...
... and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature, stretching from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and taking on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, which forms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of yesterday. Much of it we can now see to have been ill-grasped ...
... its scenes and peoples, in Byron's rare forceful sincerities, in the luminous simplicities of Blake, in the faery melodies of Coleridge, most of all perhaps in the lyrical cry and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are comparatively rare moments, the mass of their work is less certain and unequal in expression and significance. Finally we get in Keats a turning away to a rich, artistic and sensuous ...
... But here only a few books were there, and most of them, I found out later, were presentation copies from Radhakrishnan and others. What He had of His own were a few volumes of H is Arya, and of Shelley, Shakespeare and one or two other poets, and His own works naturally, that's all. From that day, I took a resolution to give up reading ( Laughter) because if He has got so much knowledge without ...
... consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheswari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, Love—Mahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and our Kalidasa. Michael ...
... I came later on to give them mere water. This critic made a distinction between great poets and good poets and said that I belonged to the second and not to the first category, but as he classed Shelley and others of the same calibre as examples of the good poets, his praise was sufficiently "nectarous" for anybody to swallow with pleasure! Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon), Moore and others have also... 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 exactly the same. On the other hand, take Shelley's stanza — 8 Le Ricordanze, 71-72. Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of two lines: I'acerbo indegno Mistero delle cose... "The... of the same character, a direct, straightforward, lucid and lucent movement welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry: I can give not what men call love; But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above ...
... descriptive matter: there is much more poetic information. Only one is laxly built: "Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find". Hood's style does not so "load every rift with ore" (Keats's advice to Shelley): he is occasionally content with more or less conventional language. Compare "The sweets of summer in their luscious cells" with "For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells", or "Shaking ...
... found it, not put it together. But all poems cannot be said to pre-exist in the very form they take through that consciousness. There are works which are of one consistent shining tissue: e.g., Shelley's "Skylark". But some poems seem to vary in the texture of their parts. All the parts may be of equal artistic excellence and yet they may derive from different "planes" and cohere only in what I ...
... the Divine in terms of an aesthetics which is not purely based on Indian tradition. In trying to find a purer aesthetics, Tagore sometimes depends too largely on the western romantics like Shelley and Keats, and he seems to have been neglecting a vital point relating to the Tantric cult. Nor that he was unaware of the thrill of Mother-worship. In fact, some of his lines clearly indicate ...
... shall be realised at length; Love, Wisdom, Justice, Joy and utter Strength Gather into a pure felicity. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,... The Iron Age is ended, the Age of Gold must begin - Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations.... 31 When the strife and pain... 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 a hundred and ...
... respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash of bright and colourful vision. Second, the emotion does not so much rise upward to echo something of the wide overhead power as plunges inward to touch the profound delicacy of the psychic. All that is indirect in Shelley and Benson grows... with mysticism are all we have from them Page 22 in the midst of a general diffused suggestion of goodness or else of religious zeal. There is also the imaginative picture drawn by Shelley from brief glimpses of Emilia Viviani in a convent, no nun herself but kept as a charge of the nuns by a tyrannical parent. Who among us, in the days of youthful dreaming, has not been intoxicated ...
... beckoned to Aurobindo in his late teens during his stay in that Cambridge-room. His expression of them is surprisingly mature with a distinct originality in a genre that is part Wordsworth, part Shelley and part Keats: Page 330 When earth is full of whispers, when No daily voice is heard of men, But higher audience brings The footsteps of invisible things. When o'er ...
... Dynasty, 88 Serpent Goddess, 100 Sewell, 70, 71 Shah Tepe, 69, 71-2, 75, 77 Shahi Tump, 5, 6 Shakespeare, 91 Sharma, A.K., 100 Shaw, Bernard, 90 Shelley, i Shimalia, 67 Shiva, Śiva, 41, 43-5 Shubiluliuma, 31 Sialk, 4, 68, 69, 71, 76 Sigrus, 127 Sind, 65, 62, 97 Sistan, 5 Snoy, Peter, 87fn. ...
... his elemental energy in bad blank verse and worse dramatic construction, Keats turning from his unfinished Hyperion to wild schoolboy imitations of the worst Page 81 Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and fine literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the Elizabethan violences of the Cenci , Tennyson, Swinburne, even after Atalanta , following the same ...
... much of its inspiration, but gives an impression of great inferiority when compared with the work of the Victorians and one is tempted to say that a little of the work of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley has immeasurably more poetic value than all this silver and tin and copper and the less precious metals of these workers whose superficiality of workmanship was a pride of this age. But although ...
... it comes as if by a wide sweeping descent from an ether of superhuman being, high above our mind's centre in the brain. It has not been absent from English literature: Vaughan, Wordsworth, Shelley, Francis Thompson and AE have it perhaps morefrequendy, but no English poet has proved continually a channel of its peculiar intensity. For that matter it is no more than sporadic in all languages ...
... tomorrow his translation of Shelley. But I don't mean, mind you, that this translation is as indifferent as the former: only I had expected a better achievement at the hands of Tagore. But please send me back this letter of mine with Tagore's translation I will show it to Harin. If possible send me your verdict. Of course I won't tell it to Tagore. Tagore's translation of Shelley was not liked by Nolini... true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or ____________________ 1. "Never does anyone who practises good come to woe" (Gita, 6.40). Page 307 Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the cafe chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset or Verlaine. ... in it beauty, power, perfection, why not? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist—as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsman ship and not by its contents; it is not made ...
... 211 touches becomes the inhabitant of a moonlit world of romance and yet—there is the unique gift, the consummate poetry—remains perfectly natural, perfectly near to us, perfectly human. Shelley's Witch of Atlas & Keats' Cynthia are certainly lovely creations, but they do not live; misty, shimmering, uncertain beings seen in some half dream when the moon is full and strange indefinable figures... living on the plane of humanity. Perhaps the most exquisite masterpiece in this kind is the Cloud Messenger. The Page 214 actors in that beautiful love-elegy might have been chosen by Shelley himself; they are two lovers of Faeryland, a cloud, rivers, mountains, the gods & demigods of air & hill & sky; the goal of the cloud's journey is the ethereal city of Ullaca upon the golden hill crowned... God. The earth is seen mainly as a wonderful panorama by one travelling on the wings of a cloud. Here are all the materials for one of those intangible harmonies of woven & luminous mist with which Shelley allures & baffles us. The personages & scenery are those of Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound & the Witch of Atlas. But Kalidasa's city in the mists is no evanescent city of sunlit clouds; it is his own ...
... We have in the second "me" with its cumulative power, an example where to be ungrammatical is better than being ineffective in sense or intolerable in rhythm with the more correct and literary "I". Shelley too knew this when in his Ode to the West Wind he said : "Be thou me...." Finally, we may cite as word-originality of another type the suggestive effect of consonantal sounds in the line mentioning ...
... Savitri has a mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine. The latter deals with every aspect of spiritual philosophy in prolific detail and is comprehensively illustrative of what Shelley has termed "a mind grown bright, gazing at many truths". In Savitri as in The Life Divine, "length", as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me, "is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and ...
... nineteenth century saw the birth of a group of poets whose body of work was so astounding as to perpetuate the notion that "Romantic" refers directly, even solely, to their poetry. These were Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. William Wordsworth's "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads is considered the manifesto of the Romantic movement from a poet's viewpoint. The following extracts are ...
... think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes to fulfil more consciously, more directly the particular mystic strain in it which gleams out in Coleridge and Shelley and most in Wordsworth and which is best designated as a secret Indianness of inner and outer perception, then AE will surely come into his own in the world's judgment as a profound pioneer of a... assertive self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from antiquity and the great Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - from the near past. A new turn came only when I had on a few rare occasions the direct contact of India's still lived spirituality, and glimpses were dimly caught of the light treasured... mythically mighty explorations, Wordsworth's semi-Vedantic widenesses of thought and emotion or else his penetrating lyrical simplicities, Coleridge's occasional seizures of magic lights and shadows, Shelley's wingings in strange ethers, AE's quiet or intense echoes of God-haunted in-worlds, Yeats's early dream-drenched incantations or his later wide-awake gripping of secret significances, Mallarme's complex ...
... scholar at Oxford), taught him Latin and history, Mrs. Drewett French, geography and arithmetic. ‘As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions.’ 6 ‘Auro was a very quiet and gentle boy, but at times could be terribly obstinate,’ his elder brother would remember. Proof of his early talent is... poem entitled ‘Light,’ recently discovered, written by Aravinda when he was ten years old and sent to an obscure and short-lived journal, Fox’s Weekly. It is an imitation of ‘The Cloud’ by P.B. Shelley. We quote the last stanza of eight: I waken the [flowers] in their dew-spangled bowers, The birds in their chambers of green, And mountain and plain glow with beauty again, As they bask in their... three young Indians of whom he was the guardian. ‘I never became a Christian,’ Sri Aurobindo would say, ‘and never used to go to church.’ However, a very strong feeling arose in the boy when he read Shelley. ‘ The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite with me even when I was quite young and I used to read it again and again – of course, without understanding everything. Evidently it appealed to some ...
... with a distinct and intellectually seizable corres-pondence in Nature by describing the moon as "wan": "wan" means "pallid" and suggests waning or dying. "White" is an absolutely vital term in Shelley's celebrated simile — Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of eternity — but plays its role in a context of clear-cut spiritual thought-vision: the lines are ...
... the intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the too intellectually conscious eye on Nature and the cultured moralising of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languorous ...
... the poem repeats in you the act of its creation and what has happened to the writer happens to the reader. This is a wonderful experience and by it you can feel as if you were Shakespeare, you were Shelley, you were even Sri Aurobindo!" Thus all of you can indirectly be poets. And who knows that even in the direct sense you may not poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live the expression ...
... 21. Ibid., p. 460. 22. Ibid.. p. 594. . Page 234 Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life: Before thy memory, I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.²³ The insufficiency of the ...
... scholar". He taught Sri Aurobindo Latin and English, while Mrs. Drewett taught him history, geography, arithmetic and French. Besides these subjects, Sri Aurobindo read himself the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, etc. Mr. Drewett grounded Sri Aurobindo so well in Latin that when Sri Aurobindo went to St. Paul's School in London, the headmaster of that school "took him up to ground him in Greek and ...
... with the Victorians or cast out here and there a profounder strain of thought or more passionate and aspiring voice, and if the most spiritual strains have been few, yet it has dreamed in light in Shelley or drawn close in Wordsworth to the soul in Nature. And it may seem hard to say in the face of all this splendour and vigour and glow and beauty and of the undeniable cultural influence, that something ...
... other are both disqualified. And he stresses for "pure poetry" not any particular purity of language but the unimpeded play of the faculty we know as Imagination. Like Blake, Words-worth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, he considers Imagination as constituting poetry and as the queen of all the faculties. Imagina- Page 338 tion to him is no wild instinctive force: it is a conscious power ...
... Latin and made him proficient in English, and taught him history, etc. While Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French, Sri Aurobindo found time at home to read on his own Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare and the Bible, and he even wrote some verse for the Fox's Weekly. While games did not appeal to him, he seems to have played cricket in Mr. Drewett's garden, though not at all well... winter in London. But there were other compensations. Reading poetry, and even writing poetry, and going out of London during the vacations. One of his boyhood enthusiasm seems to have been Shelley's The Revolt of Islam. He read it often "without Page 31 understanding everything"; and perhaps it struck a chord within, and he had a thought that he too would dedicate his life to ...
... been unable or unwilling to sacrifice such Indianisms as Rishi; Naga, for the snake-gods who inhabit the nether-world; Uswuttha, for the sacred fig-tree; chompuc (but this has been made familiar by Shelley's exquisite lyric); coil or Kokil, for the Indian cuckoo; and names like Dhurma (Law, Religion, Rule of Nature) and Critanta, the ender, for Yama, the Indian Hades. These, I think, are not more than ...
... its insistence on crude raw life but the utilitarian habit of mipd of a Bentham. "Romanticism," he writes, "is withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate on inner experience", as in Blake or Shelley or "Cubist painting". But Lucas points out how it was Classicism which raised a clamour against outer experience if it happened to be of a Page 1 familiar kind. The Classicists even ...
... Wordsworth, Keats are the greatest sonnet writers in English. You can find the best sonnets in the Golden Treasury . There are others also who have written sonnets of the highest quality e.g. Sidney, Shelley—you will find there these also. 17 April 1936 Has it struck you that these sonnets are rather simple as regards their rhythm? Should not there be variations in pauses and overflows, different... forms, I believe. 20 December 1936 The Ode What is meant by an ode? Is it another name for an invocation? No. It is a lyrical poem of some length on a single subject e.g. the Skylark (Shelley), Autumn (Keats), the Nativity (Birth of Christ) (Milton) working out a description or central idea on the subject. 14 June 1937 Lyric, Narrative, Epic I am having much difficulty with the... 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 given is the only possible definition. Apart from that, each epic poet ...
... flexible universality behind or below its Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Page 243 Beddoes and others of their kind to ...
... flexible universality behind or below its Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would ...
... papers lying scattered on one of the tables; a big almirah containing a small number of books: on the top shelf, the bound volumes of the Arya . On the next one, the Collected Works of Shakespeare and Shelley and books presented by writers such as Radhakrishnan, James Cousins, etc. There were two paintings, one Chinese and the other of Amitabha Buddha with the lotus in his hand; a few wood carvings; a couch ...
... Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt or sensed; but what separates him from Shakespeare and puts him with poets like Lucretius and Dante and Wordsworth and even Shelley whose style differs so much from his own is that the mind of thought works directly in him. He is a poet who puts into his poetry the passion of thought. He is an intellectual who is also an intense ...
... shall be obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth 's Lyrical Ballads as sheer prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do". Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, Page 65 ...
... 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 peace and with the example of ...
... higher and higher, it assumes the nature of intuitive and inspirational enlightenment. Love is that indefinable but powerful force of delight that ultimately brings about harmony in all relations. As Shelley pointed out, "this is the bond and the sanction which connects not only men with men but everything which exists." Transcending selfishness and self-centredness, love opens its portals to the inner ...
... 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 criteria are certainly ...
... medal with tears running down her cheeks. Anyone present could have dismissed her tears as understandable emotion. But those were not ordinary tears. Page 311 They were tears of disbelief. Shelley Mann, tall and beautiful, could never have dreamt of such a day after polio struck her at the age of five. Doctors asked her to get into the swimming pool as an exercise, simply to restore some strength ...
... hexameter we have quoted should prove suggestive of her is in the fitness of things for me to whom ancient Hellas is still alive despite the sweep of destructive ages over her history. To me, as to Shelley, Greece and her foundations are, Sunk beneath the tides of war, In Thought and its eternity. Why the Greece-ward turn was so strong from my boyhood became intelligible when both ...
... 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 science though we used its name daily ...
... time -intense in thought and sensuousness passing often into an artistic sensuality edged with a topsy-turvy ideal-ism. Much of it was published under the soubriquet of "Maddalo", the name given by Shelley as "Julian" to Byron. (My identity had to be concealed to save my grandfather from jumping out of his orthodox seventy-year-old skin.) Before I came to the Ashram I destroyed all the copies I could ...
... dying past Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed, Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. 26 × ...
... In serried columns with a straggling rear Led by its nomad vanguard's signal fires, Marches the army of the waylost god. 5 Far from being an ineffectual angel in the void, which Shelley was supposed to be, Sri Aurobindo resembles Browning in his assimilation of unusual words, as in the following: The tree of evolution I have sketched, Each branch and twig and leaf in ...
... respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash of bright and colourful vision. Second, the emotion does not so much rise upward to echo something of the wide overhead power as plunges inward to touch the profound delicacy of the psychic. All that is indirect in Shelley and Benson grows... mysticism are all we have from them in the midst of a general diffused suggestion of good- Page 118 ness or else of religious zeal. There is also the imaginative picture drawn by Shelley from brief glimpses of Emilia Viviani in a convent, no nun herself but kept as a charge of the nuns by a tyrannical parent. Who among us, in the days of youthful dreaming, has not been intoxicated ...
... strong spiritual development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic—of the vital the same can hardly be said. Napoleon had a strong vital but not one organised round ...
... only one or two of the most relevant points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who ...
... the more sustained delight of mental and spiritual creative effort. In the East? by whom? I don't believe it for a moment. To suppose that if sex-gratification were a more prolonged business, Shelley and Shakespeare would not have cared to write poetry—is blank brutal nonsense—They had something else in them besides the mere animal. Do you agree with all this, Guru, especially with Ouspenski's ...
... E INSPIRATION Ruskin could not follow Browning's bold leap from crag to distant crag of poetic thought, even as Arnold "came a cropper" with the sky-arches of 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 ...
... 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 ringing rhythm, which makes ...
... think I can put as much value on Krishnaprem's literary judgments as on his comments on Yoga etc. Some of his criticisms astonished me. For instance he found fault with Harin for using rhymes which Shelley uses freely in his best poems. You must remember also that Harin's poetry has been appreciated by some of the finest English writers like Binyon and De la Mare. But anyway all growing writers (unless... quite different tone and speech from the close; for that is either grave and deep or of a high elevation and illumined power, but this opening is all imitative intellect stuff—romantic pseudo colour, Shelley-Byronic, fairly well done in its own kind of stuff, but not the thing at all. I have suggested some alterations—supposing you want to give to this opening too the same tone or nearly the same—grave ...
... n, it is a powerful poetic imagination which expresses what would be the exact feeling in the real experience. It seems to me that that is quite enough. There are so many things in Wordsworth and Shelley which people say were only mental feelings and imaginations and yet they express the deeper seeings or feelings of the seer. For poetry it seems to me the point is irrelevant. X argues, "E said ...
... imperfection with which I had to start and feel all the difficulties before embodying the divine Consciousness. Disciple : Moti Babu told us that you caught the revolutionary spirit from Shelley's Revolt of Islam . Sri Aurobindo : That is not quite true. The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite with me even when I was quite young and I used to read it again and again – of course ...
... attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman. Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity is as good poetry as Hail ...
... about a girl called Katie and he "resolved to outdo him". He outdid his cousin by writing five hundred lines. His cousin also introduced him to some of the major British poets like Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which he was strictly ...
... the best literatures of the world? Not indispensable,—even by being steeped in one literature, one can arrive. But useful of course. What do you say about my plans to read Meredith, Hardy, Shelley, Keats and the French and Russian writers? Lord, Sir, I wish I had time to follow out a programme as massive as yours. I have none even to dilate upon yours. You know I have hardly any experience ...
... one learns a great deal. Q : One of our English poets said, "We look before and after and pine for what is not. Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught." A : Yes, that is Shelley. How do you get Delight from the tragic ? The enjoyment of the tragic, for instance, is the instance in point to show that the universal Delight is felt even in sorrow, in the tragic. One does not ...
... first verses were published in "the Fox family magazine". The poem's stanza is an imitation of the one used by P. B. Shelley in the well-known lyric "The Cloud". Sri Aurobindo remarked in 1926 that as a child in Manchester, he went through the works of Shelley again and again. He also wrote that he read the Bible "assiduously" while living in the house of his guardian, William ...
... or should assume that part at all, the price is too high, to ourselves or to others or both. But perhaps the price of beauty and poetry is always high, Shakespeare suffered and Blake was alone, and Shelley, and Mozart, Milton too. Donne, whom Page 289 you cite? All I fear have paid the price of suffering, or others have. The two worlds obey different laws. But I've just been rereading ...
... 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 given is the only possible definition. Apart from that each epic poet has ...
... will ever remain for him misty and mysterious and occupy a second place. That is another matter. It is a question of personal idiosyncrasy. There are people who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty. The clear precise intellectual meanings of Pope are to them the height of poetry—the emotional and romantic suggestions of the Skylark or the Ode to a Nightingale unsatisfactory. How ...
... this triumph which springs from a heart of spiritual feeling attuned to an inmost Presence never so permanent and piercing in any English poet and approached in intensity by perhaps none else than Shelley and AE, is not a matter of a few isolated poems. In piece after piece that Presence makes Chadwick an expert discloser of mystical songscapes. We should hardly exaggerate in saying that it leads his ...
... in itself but different in their kind and source of inspiration is a different matter. Here it is a question of the perfection of the poetry, not of its greatness. In the valuation of whole poems Shelley's Skylark may be described as a greater poem than his brief and exquisite lyric—"I can give not what men call love"—because of its Page 69 greater range and power and constant flow of ...
... long I came later on to give them mere water. This critic made a distinction between great poets and good poets and said that I belonged to the second and not to the first category, but as he classed Shelley and others of the same calibre as examples of the good poets, his praise was sufficiently "nectarous" for anybody to swallow with pleasure! Krishnaprem, Moore and others have also had a contrary opinion ...
... impart news of a violent and ignorant world and to sell sell sell everything from cars and after-shave lotions to convenience foods and contraceptives. The England of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Shelley is barely remembered. Yet it seemed to me that Temenos, reaffirming a standard which at other times - or even now in France -might have seemed but a norm - might have drawn to our standard those... virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old ...
... Mother physically disembodied like Sri Aurobindo. The two of them were together in one and the same sense—a joint presence on a plane other than the earth, though about it one could always say in Shelley's words: Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere. The leap which Champaklal instantly essayed showed the distance of that plane from our earthly stance. I failed to make it and consequently ...
... 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, lax, voluptuous, artificial, all outward glitter and colour, but inwardly poor of spirit and wanting in... imagery of Kalidasa's numbers and Page 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many "educated" young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old ...
... waterfalls. 112 And still another: ... imagination's comet trail of dream. 113 The following is an image partly drawn from Nature and partly human life, and somewhat reminiscent of Shelley and Francis Thompson: The nude God-children in their play-fields ran Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed; Of storm and sun they made companions, Sported with the ...
... France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoi, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than ...
... obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and ...
... view this expression would be inaccurate. 2 July 1936 Plato's book The Banquet is said to be about Love and Beauty. Is it a kind of philosophy? Not much philosophy there, more poetry. Shelley has translated The Banquet into English. Could I read it? Page 521 If you want to read it as a piece of literature, it is all right. 2 January 1937 I did not find so much poetry ...
... change in the history of mankind. To understand Socrates better, it would be useful to Page 11 dwell on the historical atmosphere that existed at the time of his life. In the words of Shelley, "The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle 4 is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effect which it produced upon the subsequent ...
... subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine, for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an English- man knows it, can get the full estimation of a poet like Shelley all right. These variations must be allowed for; the human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions... same view about very great poets like Shelley or Spenser at one time, so that does not seriously touch my feeling that this is poetry of beauty and value- Also I do no make comparisons—I take it by itself as nothing apart on it own province- I know of course that my old school-fellow Binyon and others in England have spoken in this connection of Keats and Shelley; but! do not myself feel the need... so clairaudient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyricists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily ...
... case, but even otherwise the word is neutral enough to receive a variety of shades. And it is in consonance with the legitimate employment of it on a par with "skies" to designate the ethereal that Shelley says to his Skylark: The blue deep thou wingest... Both the words make a single description in our poem, showing two aspects of the same thing, just as the earlier phrase "immortal hand or ...
... obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them Page 415 ruthlessly. And, mind you, ...
... fire, what ? Still see—just see : all these heavy thoughts sublimated into a curious radiance through rhythm and fire and austerity—isn't it ? I have been reading Andre Maurois's famous Ariel (Shelley's life) and his idealism stirred me deeply—fascinating. That may explain this maybe ? Anyhow I am delighted our language can express Page 249 so much thought-stuff, with so much ...
... Page 11 subjects - philosophical, cultural, literary, historical, political, sociological, and even archaeological. He is a versatile genius of wide and profound scholarship. A phrase of Shelley very much favourite with K.D.S. applies fittingly his own case: his mind has grown “bright, gazing at many truths.” A great thinker, Amal da has almost a fascination for all that is intellectually ...
... etc. Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French. As he was studying at home he had plenty of time to read books according to his own taste, including the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats. He not only read poetry but wrote verses for Fox's Weekly, even at that early age. It 'seems he did not play any games, except cricket, which he tried once without much success. During ...
... formation of their bodies will be moulded by the existence of the Mother’s supramental body, the prototype of the new species. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations, and when that ...
... epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats's incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siécles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy' ...
... the epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats' incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siècles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy's Dynasts— ...
... I don't think I can put as much value on K's literary judgments as on his comments on Yoga etc. Some of his criticisms astonished me. For instance he found fault with Harin for using rhymes which Shelley uses freely in his best poems. You must remember also that Harin's poetry has been appreciated by some of the finest English writers like Binyon and De la Mare. But anyway all growing writers (unless ...
... 43. ibid., p. 115. 44. ibid. , p. 117. 45. ibid., p. 120. 46. ibid., p. 123. 47. ibid. , p. 127. 48. ibid. , p. 127. 49. Cf. Shelley: Thou lovest—but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. ibid. a Skylark). Page 467 50. Savitri, p. 128. 51. ibid ...
... diversity of themes, and what a variety of approaches! The twelve great masters of style: Aeschylus and Dante: Dante and Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Blake: the poetry of the school of Dryden and Pope: Shelley's Skylark: Baudelaire's "vulgarity": Anatole France's "ironising": Walter de la Mare's Listeners: five kinds of poetic style: austerity in poetry: architectonics in poetic composition: "great" poetry ...
... those in French and other European literature. Naturally, my school studies suffered somewhat. I remember reading Shelley's long poem The Revolt of Islam several times, I enjoyed it so much. Not that I understood all of it clearly, but the idealism it put forth attracted me. Like Shelley, I also began to dream of a new age which would manifest on earth. Don't you read books, children?" "We do, but... fine impression on our child-consciousness. It is by their encouragement that my love for knowledge increased and I could make so much progress so early. It was at that age that I started reading Shelley, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and other great poets." "Did you understand them?" asked Rahul. "Not everything, perhaps, and not very clearly. But then poetry is not always something one understands... mother-tongue." "What exactly do you mean?" "They are rather difficult." (Laughter) "Oh, then it means that your English is weak." "But I find no difficulty in understanding the poetry of Shelley or Keats." "That's because they are Romantics and so are primarily emotional poets. Some of my early writings were often compact and had a greater thought content, rather in the classical style ...
... t to which we aspire. If the goal of evolution is merely to produce more Beethovens and Shelleys, and perhaps even a few super Platos, one cannot help thinking that this is really a paltry culmination for so many millions of years and so many billions of individuals expended along the way. Beethoven or Shelley, or even St. John, cannot be evolutionary goals, or else life has no true meaning – for who... his time engrossed in his favorite occupation: Page 8 reading. Nothing seemed to escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original... its place, for not everyone has the necessary development to feel the intensity of love contained in a simple little golden light without form. Still more remarkably, if a poet, such as Rimbaud or Shelley, came in contact with these Page 170 same planes of consciousness, he would see something completely different again, yet still the same thing; obviously, neither Durga nor the Virgin ...
... 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 and my d... 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 that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express ...
... responsible for Sri Aurobindo's greatness. This also is wrong and unconvincing. In this case genius seems to be drawn from the skies, otherwise how would Girija explain Ramakrishna Paramahansa or Shelley or Keats whose greatness could not be attributed to heredity. 3. His explanation of Sri Aurobindo's failure in the riding test is probably based on Sarojini's memory. But this is not a reliable ...
... Abanindranath Tagore. It had become United India. In all fairness, it must be said that utilitarianism was not the sole commodity exported by Britain. She spread the language of Shakespeare, of Shelley and Keats. True, the general run of the officers, who practised the oppressive policies of their government, left much to be desired. Yet many from the British Isles, in their individual capacities ...
... and rhythm he must be careful to keep his substance up to the mark as he did in the sonnets. Facility was the [rule] of Swinburne and did much to diminish the possibility of sustained perfection in Shelley. I am glad to hear and see that you are maintaining the quiet of the mind and walking steadily and smoothly and finely... [Incomplete] March 2,1936 This poem of Nishikanta he asks ...
... the past or in the present have longed and looked for the "Secret Splendour". The books that meant much to you were my own boon companions - Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, Wordsworth and Shelley and Swinburne and many others. I studied Roman Catholic thought with great interest, starting with St. Augustine and ending with Chesterton's Everlasting Man and Papini's book on Jesus. We were ...
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