Paradise Lost : Milton’s epic in blank verse. Published in 1667, its theme is the fall of man & it is dominated by the fallen archangel Lucifer.
... shadowy: "The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah... "It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss." 76 Here, in addition to the explicit acceptance of the "history" in Paradise Lost, the critical turn for us is: "was cast out... Tyger and the creation of the sun in Milton's Paradise Lost. In passing, we may mark also the Miltonic touches in the account of Los's sun-creation. Milton starts with Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure... 263 Blake starts with: Then Light first began: from the fires, 263. Paradise Lost. Bk. VII, 11. 243-244. Page 220 ... liberty of Supernature. The decisive question now is: Does Blake's supernatural mythology accept a bright-burning anger making war in Heaven against Heaven's enemies? Like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, are readers of Blake to prepare themselves to hear of things to their thought So unimaginable as hate in heav'n, And war so near the peace of God in bliss, With such confusion ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost II Milton, Macaulay and Sri Aurobindo I hope my introductory words have toned up the reader to an interest in Paradise Lost and in the difficult job I have taken on myself under the influence of the ardours and rigours of Milton's epic inspiration. But before I actually start, let me evoke two pictures in which... poetry a passage broadly comparing Lycidas and Paradise Lost. I may quote some lines: "If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies... than he had already done. In The Future Poetry 6 he had said: "Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem, one of the five great epical poems. of European literature, and in certain qualities it reaches heights which no other of them had attained, even though as a whole it comes a long way behind them... Paradise Lost commands admiration, but as a whole, apart from its opening, it has failed ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost III The Inner and Outer Process of Milton's Composition The usual picture of Milton composing Paradise Lost is constructed from the testimony of a number of contemporary biographers. 1 Milton frequently composed lying in bed in the morning. It is supposed that this was his practice during winter. At other times... verses at a time, which were written down by whatever hand was next available. And there is a curious fact of general import to be added: during each of the five years from 1658 to 1663 when Paradise Lost was composed, the poetic vein flowed happily from the Autumnal Equinox - about the close of September - to a little after the Vernal Equinox of March 21, but during the remaining months, however... early morning: it came even more at another and earlier time. And for this we have confirmation in some of the biographers themselves. Finally, we learn from him that the process of composing Paradise Lost was the exact opposite of what we should guess from the characteristics of his packed and polished, learned and Latinised style. In the invocation to Urania, the Heavenly Spirit, at the ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost X Why Paradise Lost Became What It Is We have seen how the manifold greatness of Paradise Lost was prepared by Milton through decades and how the growth towards it can be traced from youth along middle age to the poet's fifties. Nothing interfered with its evolution: even the twenty years of ecclesiastical, social... T. Prince in The Italian Element in Milton's Verse, has fully brought out what was hitherto a general suspicion that the Renaissance Italian idea of heroic poetry came to complete flower in Paradise Lost. Milton is indeed Greek and Roman and Hebrew and even Mediaeval Christian, but he is all these through a profound steeping of himself in the Italian response of the sixteenth and seventeenth... earth. However, he accepted the necessity of unremitting attention to Art, the call for a lofty poetic diction scrupulous in its cast of word, rhythm, syntax, sentence, paragraph. Thus we find Paradise Lost far removed from day-to-day speech. Also, it employs no more than about nine thousand different words, in contrast to Shakespeare's free handling of over twenty-three thousand. People imagine that ...
... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri POETRY OF THE THOUGHT-MIND AND "OVERHEAD POETRY" MILTON'S PARADISE LOST AND SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose... between their dealings with the creative intelligence and its native accent by juxtaposing the last stanza of Donne's "Prayer" from his Litany with the end of the exordium to Milton's Book I of Paradise Lost. Donne finely breathes into poetic diction a semi-colloquial tone and an argumentative urgency: O Holy Ghost, whose temple I Am, but of mud walls and condensed dust, And being ... overlapped with Donne's old age as well as much of Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost XI The Complex Theme of Paradise Lost At the very outset the problem of the theme of Paradise Lost is bedevilled by the figure of Satan. So mightily alive - indeed the sole living character in the poem - is the Arch-demon that all other concerns than his are from the dramatic viewpoint dwarfed. And, if by the... the theme is meant whatever grips us most out of a work, Paradise Lost has its burning centre in the fortunes of Satan. Whether Milton intended it or no, the Fall of Satan, his fight against God and Man, his heroism or villainy, his success or failure are the main interest of the epic. But Satan's doings have evidently to be seen with chief reference to the Fall of Man which he brings about: the title... If he opposed, and, with ambitious aim, Against the throne and monarchy of God, Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud, With vain attempt. 1 It is necessary to see Paradise Lost in a complex rather than in a simple manner if we are to cope with its full develop-ment. The poem is multi-mooded and we shall show scarce appreciation of its genius by overstressing either Satan ...
... his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, its limitation by his approach towards Paradise Lost. I think he would be naturally inclined... among the dozen greatest; it is Page 22 Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking... turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets "forbidden tree" and "mortal taste" are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost VI Derivative Originality and Artistic Puritanism The paradox of the immense mood-cultivation by Milton for the inspired effortless composition of Paradise Lost leads us to yet another curiosity connected with him. We have spoken of the poetry of the past in which he steeped himself. From the literary point of view... Caduto. Salandra's development of his theme is repeated by Milton in Book after Book of Paradise Page 70 Lost. Even the details tally in many places and there are passages in Milton running parallel to those in Salandra with close verbal similarity, so that we may speak of Paradise Lost translating several parts of Adamo Caduto. But these very passages are yet typically Milton's... what we have marked as part of the lyric impulse in his epic expression - the extreme personal pervasion by him of his poetry. Thirdly, on the epic proportions into which he grew before writing Paradise Lost, so that his singing was the direct echo, as it were, of his very being. Another statement of Sri Aurobindo's can be related in general to our conception about Milton's spontaneous derivativeness ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost XII The Metaphysics of Paradise Lost B. Rajan, in his important study, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, has observed that Paradise Lost was meant to be an epic of the Christian world and therefore aimed at the utmost general conformity to the body of universal Christian belief. The words "utmost... And sin? Adam's conclusion - "All of me, then, shall die" - is the same as Milton's in his doctrinal declaration. On the strength of it we should ascribe unqualified Mortalism to Milton of Paradise Lost. Critics like Rajan are not sure on this point. They refer us to another passage which they regard as the only one bearing on Adam's "doubt". It is a speech of Christ: On me let Death... of the critics denying explicit Mortal-ism in the epic have produced such a statement. And they have failed to note that there is another passage which leaves no doubt of Milton's Mortalism in Paradise Lost. It occurs in Book XI, where God speaks of His two gifts to man: I, at first, with two fair gifts Created him, endowed - with Happiness And Immortality; that fondly lost, The ...
... permuted elements of the anterior creation. Now for Paradise Lost and The Tyger. A general background influence is well expressed by Bateson. 3 He tells us that the Rossetti MS., in which many of the "Songs of Experience" including our poem were originally composed, was first used as a sketch-book for scenes in or suggested by Paradise Lost - "Satan exulting over Eve", "Satan defying God the Father... relevant to the Blake-Milton comparison. In all the lines we have culled from Paradise Lost, where God figures, there is no capital H except at the commencement of a line; and all the references to Christ have also a small h. Just as in the whole Bible and very nearly the whole of Blake's poetry, Paradise Lost - save at a few places for a special purpose - has no capital H for either God... part of the theological structure of Paradise Lost, Milton's Christ cannot in any sense inspire Blake's, and whatever need to "aspire" he may evince in the epic will be out of tune with the aspiration we have attributed to him in the lyric, for Blake never subscribed to Arianism. Maurice Kelley 156 has conclusively demonstrated that when Paradise Lost is collated with De Doctrina Christiana ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost V The Preparation for Paradise Lost When apropos of Milton we speak of the lyric inspiration and of spontaneity, we must remember that he is spontaneous in a particular way that lyric poets are not. And here I mean more than the epic character of his lyricism. I mean what I have called the power behind in addition to... it as beautiful as any waft on the ear in Paradise Lost. An effect Page 61 comparable to any there in rhythmic strength is also in a Sonnet of 1652: And rumours loud that daunt remotest kings. 22 About the sonnet of white rage, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655), three years before the commencement of Paradise Lost, Douglas Bush 23 well observes that in... yet to no obfuscation of sense in Horace's Odes, Book V, the first fifteen lines. To cut a long story short: Milton on the eve of Paradise Lost was quite ripe for the learnedly loaded, artistically complex and finished, Latinly cast poetry of Paradise Lost. Such poetry, rising to a grand manner reflective of the dynamic and dedicated structure which the poet had made of his own mind and life ...
... of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost . His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God , its limitation by his approach towards Paradise Lost . I think he would be naturally inclined to... poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost . The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking... the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets "forbidden tree" and "mortal taste" are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost IX Early Milton and What Paradise Lost Might Have Been ~ Clues from Early Sri Aurobindo Savitri is in many respects unMiltonic. However, Sri Aurobindo's early blank verse which assimilates several influences into a varied vigorous originality mingles Paradise Lost most with the chief immediate influence - Stephen... turning upon life from its own centre of reflective vision - the poetic level of Paradise Lost would have been more opulent in the bulk and more equally sustained in perfection of living speech. For, although Milton never fails as an artist, the art-intensity tends to be less inward in many parts as Paradise Lost progresses. In his early work, in spite of the fact that his substance is often slight... To illustrate the sort of fulfilment on a large scale which a continuity of development from the young to the old poet would have brought about, we may be tempted to look at some lines in Paradise Lost which Milton's nephew Edward Phillips has marked as written a number of years earlier when the poem was tentatively projected not as an epic but as a tragedy. Aubrey's Memoir of Milton gives ...
... play was considered, on the basis of certain documents, to be Sri Aurobindo's and included in the SABCL.] 53. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 26, p. 82 54. Ibid., p. 79 55. Paradise Lost, IX, 11., 1004-07 56. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 26, p. 84 57. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 5, p. 161 58. Purani, The Life, p. 291 59. Bulletin, August 1965, p. 108. (Translated... Mary, the Countess of Minto, quoted on p. 52 2. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 861 3. Quoted in P. C. Ray's Life and Times of C. R. Das (1927), fn p. 58. 4. Paradise Lost, Book II, 11. 796 ff. 5. Bande Mataram (Weekly Edition), 10 May 1908 6. N. K. Gupta, Reminiscences, pp. 22-23, 25 7. Ibid., p. 26 8. Bande Mataram ... p. 652 52. Ibid., p. 654 53. Ibid., pp. 637-38 54. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 5, pp. 101, 102 Chapter 18: The Supramental Manifesto 1. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, 11. 55765 2. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 22, p. 159 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. M. Heidegger, What is Philosophy? Translated by W. Kluback and J ...
... are two more, staring every reader of Paradise Lost in the face. In lyrical poetry, it is the person of the poet that gets expressed - the individual mind and heart come pulsing through the song. Lyrical poetry has for its main theme the author of it and his personal exultations and agonies. Now one of the things which strike us throughout Paradise Lost is the presence of Milton himself. Again... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost IV Milton's Epic Lyricism We have asserted the total effortlessness of Milton's complicated and deliberate-looking poetry. However, in asserting this, we must not imply that he did nothing to make such effortlessness possible. A hint of what he did is found in the mention in Book III of his mighty poetic outpouring... light on several matters. We shall first dwell upon its bearing on that effortlessness itself and, through the aspects disclosed by it in this connection, we shall proceed to the power behind Paradise Lost, as distinct from the power beyond the poem - what makes it, in spite of not being composed by Milton at all, so thoroughly Miltonic. After telling us of his blindness, he speaks of yet ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost VIII Poetry of the Thought-Mind and "Overhead Poetry" Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam: O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose, My glory, my perfection! 1 But in a poetic... between their dealings with the creative intelligence and its native accent by juxtaposing the last stanza of Donne's "Prayer" from his Litany with the end of the exordium to Milton's Book I of Paradise Lost. Donne finely breathes into poetic diction a semi-colloquial tone and an argumentative urgency: O Holy Ghost, whose temple I Am, but of mud walls and condensèd dust, And being... (1622-95) overlapped with Donne's old age as well as much of Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance ...
... some musical defect in sentence-formation, then his crowning achievement could have most naturally been a work with Satan as its principal character, the Paradise Lost refigured in a huge phantasmagoria of a play. For, what else is Paradise Lost save an epic nth degree of a grandiose egoism up in arms against the universal Law, a titan ambition warring disastrously with the inscrutable Divine -... spoken more grandly than Milton's and matched the eloquence of Satan instead of being, as in Paradise Lost , mostly a prosaic paragon, omnipotence distilled to never-ending dullness. What Marlowe could never have supplied was, apart from the masterful and many-mooded artistry of Paradise Lost, the nobility of soul which permeated its power and which derived from its author's unique in... resonances: Marlowe has not the identical kind of tone, but he has the identical pitch. Moreover, he is ruled by that rebellious mood of the hero of Paradise Lost , from which the poem's terrible beauty is born. There are, throughout Paradise Lost , thousands of lines far removed from Marlowe's style: in fact the whole scheme of this epic is alien to Marlowe's mentality; yet the underlying Satanic ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost I Milton's Spaciousness of Soul and Sound Paradise Lost - here we have an epic which would seem almost to make paradise worth losing, since without that loss Milton could not have sung so sublimely and almost regained Paradise for poetry-mad people like the present writer. But more than three hundred years after... This rhythmic largeness is unique to Milton among English Page 4 poets. Several attain it, but never all through. Almost from the first line to the last of many thousands in Paradise Lost we have - though at varying altitudes - a spaciousness of sound which seems to be the echo of the very soul of Milton. Writers on Milton have justifiably found certain sides of his personality... : If even a soul like Milton's could know death... When Sri Aurobindo wants to characterise the cause of the height at which move Milton's best outbursts - the opening Books of Paradise Lost - he points to "the greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and the greatness of its sight". 4 Even in those parts where the supreme poetic vitality ...
... readings (The Nonesuch Press, London), 1957. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford Paperbacks), 1960. McColley, C. "Milton's Battle in Heaven and Rupert of St. Herbert", Speculum, XVI, 1941. Paradise Lost (Chicago), 1940. Milton, John De Doctrina Christiana Paradise Lost Paradise Regained Monk, F. F. Representative English Poetry... (Gollancz, London), 1957. William Blake (Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans Green & Co., London, New York, Toronto), 1951. Rajan, B. Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London), 1947. Rosenthal, M. L., Smith, A. J. M. Exploring Poetry (The Macmillan Company, New York), 1957. St. John First Epistle ...
... The Inspiration of Paradise Lost VII Milton's Art ~ His Plane of Inspiration and Shakespeare's His "Plane" of Inspiration and Shakespeare's Now we may note a few examples of Milton's art. On the more obvious yet none the less genuinely expressive level we have the four rivers of Hell conjured up, each by the appropriate phrase elaborating... sorrow of Ceres grew the anguish of the whole earth for loss of Paradise. Have we not here the same accent of emotion and attitude as in the less beautiful but no less living lines that begin Paradise Lost - Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe - or in those deeply simple ones in Book... and its universal consequence, the anguish for the divine state forfeited by humanity. In a letter to his friend Charles Diodati on September 23, 1637 - more than twenty years before he started Paradise Lost- he wrote: "... for whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres ...
... learner indeed. The "orient pearl" appears again in Paradise Lost: Now mom her rosy steps in the eastern clime Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl. 5 2 Antony and Cleopatra , I. v. 11: 61-62. 3 Pericles, Prince of Tyre , V.i. 11:111 -13. 4 As You Like lt, H.i.ll : 12-14. 5 Paradise Lost, Book V, 11:1-2. Page 488 Dawn "sows"... intoxicated. In Milton's Paradise Lost we see a related description: Tables are set, and on a sudden piled With angels' food, and rubied nectar flows. In pearl, in diamond and massy gold, Fruit of delicious vines, the growth of heaven. 97 93 Ibid ., p. 289. 94 Ibid ., p. 676. 95 Ibid ., p. 422. 96 Ibid ., pp. 698-99. 95 Paradise Lost . Book V, 11:632-35.... ribs of gold. Let none admire That riches grow in hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane. 6 This concept of gold as bane is highlighted in many other contexts in Paradise Lost . The heathens often worship brutes in the form of deities accompanied with gay rituals, fanfare and gold. 7 Even the chosen race of Israel succumbed to this temptation of paying homage to ...
... Dante's religious (mystical) intensity; Sri Aurobindo has in him both Milton and Dante. Belief in literal and metaphorical 14 Paradise Lost, II, 890-897. 15 Savitri, p. 98. 16 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 83. 17 Paradise Lost, HI, 60. Page 476 truth of the Bible apart, Milton embodies in his epic his own rational life-experience too: the... In fact Milton is great for the very qualities — the grandeur and the incantatory power of his verse, qualities which are Savitri's too — for which the detractors detract him. An epic like Paradise Lost or Savitri cannot be approached in any light or easy mood. One should have an ear for Milton's organ music and the hushed mind for Sri Aurobindo's superconscient voice. Even the opening lines... boundless space pregnant with unformed universes. The gate of Hell opens into Chaos and to the Angels of Hell in a sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie Deep, a dark 12 Paradise Lost, Book I, 663-669. 13 Savitri, pp. 79-80. Page 475 Illimitable Ocean without bound, dimension, where length, breadth and height, And time and place are lost: where ...
... too has been called Miltonic. But if we accept the term it must be with no thought-saving looseness. For, Milton who produced Paradise Lost in his old age produced also Comus in his twenty-seventh year: the styles of the two are not precisely the same. Indeed Paradise Lost is one of the world's greatest poetic achievements, yet Comus has a flexibility and a richness that are often missing in the... Milton, more impressively than any other eminent poet, carried the soul of past music mingled with a spirit that makes all things new. In fact, he had the avowed ambition to gather up in his Paradise Lost Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius and Dante into a mature mastery of style animated by his own genius and character. A consummate scholar in various literatures, deeply saturated with ...
... cannot ever be divorced from these qualities. And it is not from just the passage quoted that, side by side, 6. Paradise Lost (Chicago), 1940, p. 22. 7."Milton's Battle in Heaven and Rupert of St. Herbert", Speculum, XVI (941), pp. 230-235. 8. Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London), 1947, pp. 48, 146-147, Note 20. Page 45 the Lamb in Christ... Divine and the Diabolic in Heaven, it should send us scrutinizing the greatest literary portrayal of this drama, the most fully developed and explicit poetization of it - those portions of Milton's Paradise Lost that roll out in mighty verse the battle under God's seat, with Christ the clear-cut figure personally victorious over Satan's armies. Here was a vision immediately apt to Blake's purposes. If ...
... Old Testament, The, 47 Orc, 131,163,179,202-04 Original draft of The Tyger, 128-31 Paracelsus, 27,170 Paradise Lost, iii, 52,53,54,64,66,69,76,89,101,102,106,108, 111, 117, 157,158,185,187,220 221,230, 246,253,255,256,258,265 Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, 45 fn. 8 Page 273 Paradise Regained, 102,108 Persephone... 134,135 Poems and Prophecies by William Blake, 133 fn. 13 "Poetic Genius, the", 70,216 Porphyry, 134 Portable Blake, The, 22 fn. 5 "Preludium", 159 Preface to Paradise Lost, A, 102 fn. 162 Proclus, 134 Prophecy, 264 'Prospectus", 231 Proverbs of Hell, 138 Psalms of David. 49 fns. 19,20,21 Psychology, 4, 141,142,146 Puritan ...
... though sometimes there may come in an epic elevation. Will "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" help? And who are the other epic writers in English? Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages—it is good to know them, at least. "Paradise Lost", yes. In the other Milton's fire had dimmed. In English Paradise Lost and Keats' Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit ...
... sentence consists at most of five or six lines. The blank verse differs from Milton's. There are practically no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. Blank verse after Milton has not been very great. So if you write the kind that is in Paradise Lost, you imitate Milton's style and there can be only one Milton. Yeats has written some successful blank verse in the Tennysonian form on Irish... Rama. Isn't this striking? SRI AUROBINDO: But even then his Ravana is insignificant as compared to the tremendous personality in Valmiki's Ramayana. Or see the character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. And Rama's character too has been much degraded in Madhusudan. (Turning to Purani) Is there any epic in the Marathi language? PURANI: I don't know. I have heard about Moropant. SRI ...
... Sri Aurobindo's criticism is unexceptionable indeed. As with the Elizabethans, with Milton too - and notably with Paradise Lost - Sri Aurobindo merely holds the mirror up to the man and his work, and the high magnificent face is caught in it and so are the warts: Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem.... Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and... her sake would gladly spare Troy. There are hawks and doves both in Troy and in the Greek camp, and even Olympus is divided on the issue. Like the debate in Hell described in the second Book of Paradise Lost, the speeches in the Trojan Assembly, as also those of the Greek chieftains, present forcefully divergent attitudes that have a universal currency. In Troy, the elder statesman Antenor and his ...
... genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri . And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains... only on page 368? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Page 240 Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of historical prevision, he... at this place but with some bearing on the general argument: Page 241 "Milton's theme is the loss of Eden by man's disobedience. And yet the first three Books — the best of Paradise Lost — march majestically in utter indifference to the announced subject and we are whirled through events that form the backdrop, as it were, of the true plot. And even the whole Book connected with ...
... genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains... first occurs only on page 368 [p. 341]? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of historical prevision,... perhaps not quite relevantly at this place but with some bearing on the general argument: "Milton's theme is the loss of Eden by man's disobedience. And yet the first three Books - the best of Paradise Lost - march majestically in utter indifference to the announced subject and we are whirled through events that form the backdrop, as it were, of the true plot. And even the whole Book connected with ...
... it is by Paradise Lost that he occupies his high rank among the poets. That too imperfect grandiose epic is the one supreme fruit left by the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, achieve beauty of poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and forge a complete balance and measured perfection of architectonic form and structure. Paradise Lost is one of... rest of the epic had been equal to its opening books, there would have been no greater poem, few as great in literature. But here too the total performance failed and fell below the promise. Paradise Lost compels our admiration throughout by its greatness of style and rhythm, but as a whole, in spite of its mighty opening, its whole substance as distinct from its more magnificent or striking parts... supported very strongly by the quickening emotion or by the imaginative vision to which the idea opens. Milton's earlier work is suffused by his power of imaginative vision; the opening books of Paradise Lost are upborne by the greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and by the greatness of its sight. But in the later books and still more in the Samson Agonistes ...
... Savitri III Paradise Lost and Savitri When Milton, "long choosing and beginning late", decided at last to make the Tall of Man' the subject of his epic, he felt the need for an aggressive defence of his choice and so devoted the Exordium of Book IX to this purpose: Sad task! yet argument Not less but more... dominated by an idea." 19 It is not that the familiar paraphernalia of the old-time epics—elements like war councils, battles, single combats, domestic debates, scenes of temptation—are absent in Paradise Lost. They are memorably there, yet all these "are so transformed", says Bowra, "that their significance and even their aesthetic appeal are new...Before him the best literary epic had been predominantly... l ideal' is not seriously impaired, the credit goes, partly at least, to the poetic style, to the power of its unifying harmony. Highet's pointed emphasis on Milton's style in Paradise Lost is by no means misplaced. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the anustup of Vyasa and Valmiki, the terza rima of Dante, the symphonic blank verse of Milton, the crystalline iambic pentameter ...
... they are lyrical, though sometimes there may come in an epic elevation. Will reading Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained help? Paradise Lost , yes. In the other Milton's fire had dimmed. Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages—it is good to know, at least. In English Paradise Lost and Keats' Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharata, Ramayana ...
... which does not run after out-of-the way felicities or isolated gemlike phrases but has a broad current of energetic language aiming Page 38 at a total novel effect. You may open Paradise Lost anywhere to see what I mean: ...till then who knew The force of those dire arms? yet not for those Nor what the potent victor in his rage Can else inflict do I repent or change... the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets 'forbidden tree' and 'mortal taste' are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, Page 40 good descriptive adjectives and have no other... and on Sri Aurobindo's as well. You may conceive that Sri Aurobindo is trying in so post-Miltonic an era as the twentieth century to revive some sort of Miltonic epos in a style reminiscent of Paradise Lost in various traits. One cannot be farther from the truth. Milton does illustrate preeminently certain basic features of epic composition, 'but Miltonism as such is a matter of technique strictly ...
... honoured with the compliment: "original". Originality is apparent in your quotations from Lycidas. At nearly every step felicities meet us. Such striking, out-of-the-way gem-work is rarely found in Paradise Lost. There are profoundly moving passages where glimpses of Nature like Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill... Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose... are woven in... even the commonplace or the conventional into a charm, yet magic and music do not often merge as they do in the Lycidas- invocation to "Ye valleys", which you have quoted. It is as if in Paradise Lost Milton deliberately chose to be simpler, more natural, less outstanding in individual locutions and depended rather on the strength of his thought and the poignancy of his emotion and the splendour... energy directed towards a general novel totality. In composition of this sort we must not focus on individual phrases lest we should run the risk of making them look almost like cliches. In Paradise Lost, Milton's "welding or wielding of the very texture of language itself consists in something quite different from what you suggest. Outwardly it lies in a frequent Latinisation of English as in ...
... intelligence differs from the Aurobindonian expression which we may consider poetically integral can be concretely seen if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Milton's Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri : * First published in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. A Commemorative Symposium edited by Haridas Chaudhuri... By model, or by shading pencil drawn. 4 Now look at Savitri : The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, ¹. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 19-22. ². Ibid., Book III, lines 6, 9-12. ³ . Ibid., Book II, lines 1034-7. 4. Ibid., Book III, lines 505-9. Page 227 ... is likely to be deceived about the mostly intellectual-imaginative quality of Milton and it is with this possibility in view that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for the poetry of Paradise Lost, has warned a disciple-poet who wanted to write authentically of the supra-intellectual: "The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write ...
... episodes. That is the only epic in the French language. Disciple : Some maintain that as there is no story in Dante’s Divine Comedy it is not an epic. Sri Aurobindo : It is an epic. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few incidents, yet it is an epic. At present men demand something more than a great story from an epic. Disciple : Hyperion of Keats, – is it an epic? ... "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 characters... can stand by itself. Disciple : Is not X's poetry sufficiently characteristic? Sri Aurobindo : It is; but I mean quite another thing. For instance, if Milton had not written Paradise Lost he would have still been a great poet, but he could not have occupied so great a place as he does in English literature. Keats, some people say, would have been as great as Shakespeare, had ...
... insight, for preferring the Birth of the War God to Paradise Lost; he thought that both epics were indeed literary epics of the same type, largely-planned and sublime in subject, diction and thought, but that the Hindu poem if less grandiose in its pitch had in a high degree the humanism and sweetness of simple & usual feeling in which the Paradise Lost is more often than not deficient. But the humanism ...
... opposite, an anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, also the story-element which plays through La Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost is absent. Dante is distin-guished by a severe and concise and clear-cut force of intellect with a strong intuitive drive which affects us as much by what... have merely to pick anything representative out of Pope and set it beside a similar culling from Milton (not even necessarily from Milton at his best in Paradise Lost), in order to prove the crudeness of this Classicism. Next to the satiric, the reflective vein is most congenial to Pope, as in Know thy own point: ...
... in the earlier lines as well, though with less passion and more poignancy. The usual tendency of commentators — at least in India — is to bracket Savitri's blank verse with that of Paradise Lost. So far as quality is concerned, this is not such an off-the-centre remark, yet it still bespeaks an obtuseness, a non-particularity of the aesthetic sensorium in the matter of turn, rhythm-curve... dynamism, I have set forth in some detail in the course of a number of Notes published some years back. But I suppose that to an English scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's ...
... in the earlier lines as well, though with less passion and more poignancy. The usual tendency of commentators - at least in India - is to bracket Savitri's blank verse with that of Paradise Lost. So far as quality is concerned, this is not such an off-the-centre remark, yet it still bespeaks an obtuseness, a non-particularity of the aesthetic sensorium in the matter of turn, rhythm-curve... dynamism, I have set forth in some detail in the course of a number of Notes published some years back. But I suppose that to an English scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib Page 219 comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however ...
... a story has been there for long, but the story as a subject for an epic seems to be exhausted. It will have to be more subjective and the element of interpretation will have to be admitted. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few incidents, yet it is an epic. At present men demand something more than a great story from an epic." 11 That "something more" is the expectation and that is... have validity or acceptability in any absolute sense. Otherwise we shall simply prove ourselves to be like Newton's famous contemporary Richard Bentley, the classical scholar. He was five when Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Later Bentley rewrote the poem entirely to his taste, thinking that it was the printer who had made all those hundreds of blunders in it. But then, eventually, what he ...
... the answer in Beatrice and Love, "the love that moves the Sun and the other 15 Savitri, p. 2-9. Ibid., p. 724. Page 284 stars." In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both of the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit ... passage of time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante' sDivina Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps, to a cosmic ...
... Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1 Savitri and Paradise Lost-A Comparative Study in Method and Style Milton marks an august and robust departure from the past in poeticcai form, expression and diction. He marks a new era in poetical style, method, the use of the language with a new synthetical approach. All this is due to his genius, his masterful personality... method. It needs imagination and a strong living power of visualisation to conceive the sky as a sea and the stars as its foam. Also, such metaphors have no place in descriptive poetry like Paradise Lost where we find recounted event after event, action after action, one wave of deeds following another wave of deeds. In such poetry metaphors would not only be out of place but hamper the swift ...
... Illiad has not the elevation of Paradise Lost or the effulgence of The Divine Comedy but it has the clear detached vision whose lines suggest the absolute because they take rise in the illumined mind. In the Illiad we have the highest reach of the Hellenic mind. In The Divine Comedy we have the highest attainment of Christian mystical experience; in Paradise Lost we have the highest elevation ...
... case of Dante, does not, of necessity, entail a story. It is, in reality, allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between the two senses in a poem, literal and allegorical. Even in Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. According to Lascelles Abercrombie: "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ." His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods... its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulating has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, 'a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops', disclosed the Divine's truth ...
... Page 447 Books in the Press: 1. Aspects of Sri Aurobindo 2. Life-Poetry-Yoga: Personal Letters, Vols 1 & II 3. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 4. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Expression 5. The Beginning of History for Israel Unpublished Books: 1. Problems of Early Christianity... whose ambience is conceived as "forests of the night" and who are themselves imaged as hostile "stars". A basis of this mysteriously projected confrontation is discerned in Book VI of Paradise Lost . A deep affinity, worked out with attention to what Blake would call "minute particulars", is disclosed with the action depicted by Milton and even with the language and imagery of the depiction ...
... voyage through Darkness, follow the peregrination motif as it found expression in the epics of later times, notably in the Divina Commedia, mark its variation in Satan's voyage across Chaos in Paradise Lost, and observe how the motif is treated in Savitri, first in the description of Aswapati's Yoga, apparently (though not really) an 'exteriorised' journey through the worlds, and secondly in Savitri's... apologetics. Still later, Blake, a genuine but undisciplined seer, attempted to recover the lost unity but lost his way in uncharted private worlds. 190 The Commedia and Paradise Lost are among the half a dozen great epics of the Western world; the criticism in the above passage is thus directed, not against the poems as poems, but against their insufficiency as cosmic poems ...
... is cleaning itself, throwing off its own scales, sloughing off its old skin and in course of time it will come out in a rejuvenated body and in a harmonious setting. The Paradise lost will one day be thus regained. Paradise Lost will have one day inevitably, as its sequel and consummation, Paradise Regained. Published November 1973 Page 40 ...
... gone back from Shakespeare and Milton to Marlowe: Each line stands by itself and each sentence consists at most of five or six lines.... There are no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. 10 Again, on 5 March, to a question from Nirod, whether Sri Aurobindo would have time to finish Savitri, the answer was: "Oh, Savitri will take a lone time, I have to go all over the... Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror - he finds the answer in Beatrice and Love, "the love that moves the Sun and the other stars". In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both to the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit ...
... Bamfylde, 204, 224, 248 Future Poetry, The, 404,448,511,610ff; the mantra, 610-1, 612; the poetic word, 611; the poet as seer, 611-2; on Chaucer, 613; on the Elizabethans, 613-4; on Paradise Lost, 614; on Byron and Wordsworth, 614-5; on Homer and Whitman, 615; five powers of poetry, 616; Sun of Poetic Truth, 617ff; form and verbal expression, 618; role of the future poetry, 619, 660 ... Bepin Chandra, 201, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223, 235, 237, 244, 245-46, 299, 301, 302, 334, 399 Pandit, M.P, 579, 690, 747 Panikkar, K. M., 722 Parabrahman, 158 Paradise Lost, 614, 664 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 42-3,191,281,328 Partition of Bengal, 201, 204ff, 282, 294 Patkar. R.N.,51,52,53,195 Patwardhan, Annasaheb, 276 Pavitra ...
... malaise, and would have liked India to be free from such aberrations. But repression and terrorism fed upon one another in a competitive craze, almost as in the parable of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost. hourly conceived And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me... then, bursting forth Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round, That rest or intermission none I... inference and suggestion".... If Norton was a creative genius, his epic needed a hero or villain - and Sri Aurobindo was cast for that role: Page 313 Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Mr. Norton's plot, at the centre of the mighty rebellion stood I, an extraordinarily sharp, intelligent and powerful, bold, bad man! Of the national movement I was the alpha and the omega ...
... of its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops", disclosed the Divine's truth... Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 15.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 16.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 17."A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India 18.The Thinking Comer: Causeries on Life and ...
... diminish the reading matter, but what else am I to do? He ends the letter with a sigh of relief that his Inspiration of " Paradise Lost " is complete: The bally thing is over at last, with a triumphant last chapter: The Metaphysics of "Paradise Lost" . I had been asked to set up a Directorate of Homeopathy for the Govt, of West Bengal in 1975 and must have mentioned this ...
... 1 The end-stopped line beginning the story is a marked departure from the traditional invocation. The opening is also a little too long, much longer than the 26 line invocation of Paradise Lost , which gives a clear clue to Milton's theme. Sri Aurobindo takes time to state the gist of the theme, which may be gathered from the following lines: Her self and all she was she had lent... implant That heaven might native grow on mortal soil. 1 This is just a hint. The full significance of the story may only be known reaching the end of the poem. Milton starts Paradise Lost with an intellectual synopsis, which is expository in nature. Sri Aurobindo starts like a story-teller with a powerful descriptive style. He begins with the pre-creation darkness. It is a cinematic ...
... fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice." Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ," — says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close... its projected fifty-thousand lines, about twelve-thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops," disclosed the Divine's truth ...
... Book VI of Paradise Lost. There the angel Michael, the leader of God's armies against Satan and his rebel hosts, is pictured fighting: the sword of Michael smote and felled Squadrons at once: with huge two-handed sway Page 198 Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down Wide-wasting... 1 Then there is another passage in the same Book of Paradise Lost, in which ...
... and clinched. This line, no less than the fifth — The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair — is a full pentameter and joins up with the bulk of Milton's poetic creation which is in Paradise Lost and both of them by being somewhat far from their rhyme-partners bear just a touch of the blank-verse constituting that epic. They suggest to us a transition from the kind of melopoeia here practised... Milton has not only song-music, he has also sym-phony-music and we should be doing injustice to the total con-notation of "melopoeia" if we failed to put under this term the symphonic splendour of Paradise Lost. In that epic, Milton hears in remarkable rhythm the grand events he visualises as happening in Heaven and Hell and Earth. Sound bearing out the sense, not with an obvious echo but with a power ...
... during the life of Cousins instead of having an established reputation for centuries, Cousins would have said of Paradise Lost and still more of Paradise Regained "This is not poetry, this is theology." Note that I don't mean to say that The Rishi is anywhere near Paradise Lost , but it is poetry as well as spiritual philosophy. 13 November 1936 Page 230 ...
... well as the most massive literary treatment in English of the subject we had discerned in The Tyger. We traced the poem's inspiration to a pregnant phrase - "devouring fire" - used in Milton's Paradise Lost for God's anger going out against Lucifer-Satan. And we set forth a close correspondence between Blake's composition and Mil- Page 256 ton's account of Christ's wrathfully burning... "Prophecy" Milton. We found the fundamentals of it indirectly elucidating the sense of The Tyger with a direct harking back, though in a new setting, to the account of Christ contra Satan in Paradise Lost. Thus our total reading of The Tyger is a complex one. We believe that the complexity is fully demanded by our research. But criticism of some matters in parts of our thesis would not affect ...
... Los, who 'kept the divine vision' is the Smith who dared 'seize the fire' - the agent of Jesus the Imagination. I am bound to admit that I did not give enough Page 269 place to Paradise Lost as a source - laziness, lack of thoroughness in tracing the symbols - and of course Blake's Jesus is not Milton's Son ('reason') but rather the 'first commander of the heavenly host' from whom... forests in a divine form is not the vision of the Gnostic-Hermetic or Swedenborgian Blake but of the Miltonic Blake, and their perversion preceding the Fall from Heaven echoes also Book VI of Paradise Lost. When you write: "You can't say the forests existed 'before' the tyger, they go together" you are not wrong, but their togetherness need not be taken exclusively in the Swedenborgian sense ...
... Father as to a superior. No proof is required there. But the poet of Paradise Lost is not recognizably a follower of Arius and I never attempt to prove him to be one. Escaping any formulable charge of Arianism, his theology can easily be matched with Blake's. Whatever qualified sense of Jesus' aspiring can be read in Paradise Lost in a general Christian fashion will not go against the grain of Blake's ...
... written during the life of Cousins instead of having an established reputation for centuries, Cousins would have said of Paradise Lost and still more of Paradise Regained "This is not poetry, this is theology". Note that I don't mean to say that "Rishi" is anywhere near "Paradise Lost", but it is poetry as well as spiritual philosophy. November 13, 1936 You surprise me very much, Guru, by ...
... in his old age. It is entirely different from the first, just as Milton's Paradise Regained is different from his Paradise Lost . Keats also has two versions of his Hyperion : in the later version Hyperion tends to become an idea. PURANI: Abercrombie remarks about Paradise Lost that its Satan is a symbol of human will struggling against Fate. SRI AUROBINDO: Human will? I always thought it ...
... great a theme as Paradise Lost and so it couldn't equal the latter in greatness. SRI AUROBINDO: It is not as great because Shelley doesn't create anything there. But the theme is equally great. PURANI: Abercrombie says that Milton has created living pictures of Satan and Christ. SRI AUROBINDO: Satan is the only character he has created. The first four books of Paradise Lost are full of creative ...
... consciousness is cleaning itself, throwing off its own scales, shuffling its old skin and in course of time it will come out in a rejuvenated body and in a harmonious setting. The Paradise lost will one day be thus regained. Paradise Lost thus will have one day inevitably as its sequel and consummation Paradise Regained. Page 75 ...
... the fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice". Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ"—says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and... age. Out of its projected fifty thousand lines about twelve only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops" disclosed the Divine's truth ...
... about the size and structure of the poem. Savitri Page 441 is a poem running" into 23,813 lines, longer even than Browning's The Ring and the Book, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and more than one-half the size of the Ramayana. Even so, Sri Aurobindo left it 'incomplete'. Not only is the poem unconscionably long, it has also a lop-sided structure. Retrospective narration... is symbolic, the Double Twilight and the Everlasting Day are symbolic. What are we to make of such a poem? We have heard Page 444 this sort of criticism before, about- Paradise Lost, for example. Every time it is made, it sounds impressive, and must be answered. People say again: "I see nothing: there is nothing to hang on to. It is all too much in the air. The story has no ...
... already there in the symbolic legends of the Puranas and one of these is the subject of Kalidasa's greatest epic poem. The Birth of the War-God stands on the same height in classical Sanskrit as the Paradise Lost in English literature: it is the masterpiece and magnum opus of the age on the epic level. The central idea of this great unfinished poem, the marriage of Siva and Parvati, typified in its original ...
... best avoided. How would "the large gold throbbing in a silver hush" do? The second line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost ) some of the largeness and rhythm of the higher mind, but his substance except at certain heights is mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great ...
... creating and conceiving. We think immediately of Genesis 1:1f, where the Spirit hovers over the face of the primeval waters, and we are scarcely surprised at Milton's invocation in the opening of Paradise Lost to the Spirit: Page 230 Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast ...
... The pendant world. Keep the typical turns and vibrations of these two speeches in your mind and appreciate their difference from those in the oration of Belial, one of Satan's followers, in Paradise Lost: Our final hope Is flat despair; we must exasperate The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage, And that must end us; that must be our cure, To be no more. Sad cure! for ...
... close analysis of the poem's internal structure of idea, image, attitude and with a host of references to Blake's other works as well as to Christian reli-gious thought in general and Milton's Paradise Lost in particular, I shall prepare a special set of Talks which I may one day expand into a book for the scrutiny of Blake-experts. 1 Today we shall not go any further on a safari to hunt the ultimate ...
... from that power's characteristic play. Only, this poetic intelligence is still of the old type and not of the modem variety. All the more is its alignment with the Graeco-Roman spirit visible in Paradise Lost where in his own style of packed Latinised English Milton presents us with imaginative structures of the inspired reason and the chastened and enlightened aesthetic sense. To this spirit we ...
... spirituality the bounded nature of that flight is painfully obvious, no matter if the organic artistry of it be unimpeachable. Follow sensitively the beat of that celebrated apostrophe in Paradise Lost Hail, holy light, offspring of Heaven first-born!... Bright essence of bright effluence increate! and now trace the motion of mind and language in Wordsworth's line: The light ...
... their very quality and give us Page 58 immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill" of what is described and interpreted. Now bend the ear to the accents of Belial's speech in Paradise Lost to appreciate the poetic vision active and vibrant as if directly in the grey cells rather than as a reflex there from the guts: Our final hope Is flat despair; we must exasperate ...
... & character,—himself. Milton has produced several bold & beautiful or fine outlines or descriptions, but only one living being, the rebel Archangel Satan, and only so in the first four books of Paradise Lost does Satan really live. When Milton ceases to portray himself in his fallen state and thinks only of his plot & subject, Satan also ceases to live. But the great impersonal creators even in their ...
... the Overhead Aurobindonian may be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Page 376 Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit: Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dovelike satst brooding on the ...
... and Carlyle's? Carlyle often writes English with a German turn and tone. Some critics even condemn Milton for corrupting the genius of the English language by his Latinism of construction in Paradise Lost. Yet Milton is generally put in the frontline of English poets. Today neither Australia nor British Africa is innocent of slight peculiarities, whereas American peculiarities are not slight ...
... moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic moments, there is bound ...
... we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Page 147 Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe, ...
... The Thinking Corner Some Points about Poetry The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's ...
... explorations of love"? And what is pseudo-spiritual in Sri Aurobindo? This is neither to understand spirituality nor poetry. And what is Miltonic in him? Let us take just a few lines with which Paradise Lost opens and see the vast difference that exists between the two: Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World ...
... distress. All happiness, all satisfaction and all peace reside in the Lord. This hard fact is ignored and modern life is virtually in an open revolt against the Almighty as Milton's Satan did in Paradise Lost . It is small wonder therefore, that man has lost his paradise, his happiness, and finds himself groping in the pervading gloom without the slightest ray of hope. And in this human situation, if ...
... tongues in Restoration England, could not have cared much Page 129 whether his own "solitary way" went further on or not. I have no intuition of having to wind up some Paradiso or Paradise Lost. But you are right in believing that on the literary side the Amal of Sri Aurobindo has reached his goal essentially in the considerable mass of his poetic expression. I can't be sufficiently grateful ...
... almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's ...
... the "mental Miltonic" and the Overhead Aurobindonian may be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit: Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dovelike satst brooding ...
... Dorothy Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe, ...
... Teilhard De Chardin and our Time 23.The Beginning of History for Israel 24.The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it 25.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 26.The Mother: Past, Present, Future Page 380 27.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 28.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo ...
... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri Some Points about Poetry The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri ...
... implying that the composition was an attempt to provide in a poetic form a compacted argument of each canto of the epic. We have precedence available to us, albeit in prose, in Milton's Paradise Lost where the books have at the beginning the thematic substance of what is going to follow in the respective text. The advantage is that the reader is at once provided with a certain desirable ...
... strengthened in Milton. Savitri could be seen as a modern efflorescence of this trend, an inner epic of spiritual integrality and vastness. Romen's comparative study of Savitri and Milton's Paradise Lost is another outstanding work in this genre, noteworthy for its elucidation by contrast of the special qualities expressed by spiritual consciousness. V. K. Gokak's exposition of Savitri's ...
... Biography and a History. ROMEN: A poet, a musician and a painter combined in one; he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in his teens and received guidance from the Master. Savitri and Paradise lost-Method and Style (pages 314-53) was serialised in Mother India during 1965-66. RAJANIKANT MODY: Poetic Imagery in Savitri (pages 354-392) was one of the earliest works ...
... detractors are bound to praise the elegance and construction of the plot. "It gave me great happiness that Mr. Norton had chosen me as the protagonist of this play. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Mr. Norton's plot at the centre of the mighty rebellion stood I, an extraordinarily sharp, intelligent and powerful, bold, bad man! Of the National Movement I was the alpha and the omega, its ...
... misreads my corrections, Page 315 attributes to me opinions I am quite innocent of! A few weeks back he coolly told me that I had definitely declared that Milton had written his "Paradise Lost" from the Overmind! Meher-cule! what's to be done with that fellow? Sri Aurobindo: He ought to be sentenced to penal servitude - let us say, condemned to produce at least 14 lines of overhead ...
... bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost. Are all D's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and bhakta. April 14, 1938 N.P. showed me Sri Aurobindo's letter to him regarding ...
... lacking in a firm architectural design. The poem begins, as Western epics often do, at a critical point; it plunges into the middle of things— in medias res. Retrospective narration follows (as in Paradise Lost): the thread of the story is taken up again, and now we follow it without any further interruption, till the unfolding of the triumphant conclusion. If we leave aside the period covered by the ...
... Page 104 N Naiad 32 Neapolitans 50 Nikumbha 17 Nobel Prize 47 Norway 25 O Olympian 4, 32 Ormuz 16 P Pan 32 Paradise Lost 9 Parasara 8 Polacks 25 Pondicherry 92 Prabhat Mukberji 97 Proteus 17 Purushottama 14 Q Queen Eleanor 49 R Rakshasas 5 Ramayana 103 Ramprasad ...
... neither artificial nor unnatural. Rather, the reverse is the truth. Matthew Arnold has given proof of the grand style in poetry. For example, Milton's Fall'n cherub! to be weak is miserable (Paradise Lost, Book I, 1. 157) Or Dante's E'n La sua volontade è nostra pace...¹ (La Divina Commedia 'Paradiso', III. 85) What could be easier or more natural, more common and colloquial ...
... that bad eminence;. .¹ Or take this image drawn by a more delicate and subtle hand – it is Wordsworth – I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, ¹ Paradise Lost, Bk. II. 1-6. Page 168 When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.¹ Or that ...
... and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they are now familiar even to the common man. They are ...
... do". This fascinating speculation on the origin of "sin" - Sin the charmer who delights all the hosts of heaven and earth - is a far more attractive version than Milton's in the Second Book of Paradise Lost where, when Satan confronts his daughter Sin and their son Death and feels repelled, she reminds him of her origin: Hast thou forgotten me then, and do I seem Now in thine eye so ...
... sentence is written between the lines in the manuscript: This unanalysable quantity is as sure × Paradise Lost 1.105. This sentence and the next were written in the margins of the manuscript. Sri Aurobindo apparently intended to cite longer passages.—Ed. ...
... suggestion ছিল ৷ কিন্তু নিন্দুকও plot-এর পারিপাট্য ও রচনাকৌশল প্রশংসা করিতে বাধ্য ৷ নর্টন সাহেব এই নাটকের নায়করূপে আমাকেই পছন্দ করিয়াছিলেন দেখিয়া আমি সমধিক প্রীতিলাভ করিয়াছিলাম ৷ যেমন মিল্টনের Paradise Lost-এর সয়তান, আমিও তেমনি নর্টন সাহেবের plot-এর কল্পনাপ্রসূত মহাবিদ্রোহের কেন্দ্রস্বরূপ অসাধারণ তীক্ষ্ণবুদ্ধিসম্পন্ন ক্ষমতাবান ও প্রতাপশালী bold bad man ৷ আমিই জাতীয় আন্দোলনের আদি ও অন্ত, স্রষ্টা, ...
... Sethna 13. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 15. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 16. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 17. "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India 18. The Thinking ...
... Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 15.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 16.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 17."A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India 18.The Thinking Corner: Causeries on Life and ...
... ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy. Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great ...
... patterns of human experience as embodied in myth, folklore, pre-verbal artifacts and in the written word everywhere in the world are a testimony to this human experience of loss, desire and recovery. 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained' remain central metaphors of the human experience. At another level, culture is an external thing, a communal (using the term in its positive sense and divesting ...
... Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 31. 1994 Life-Poetry-Yoga: Personal Letters , Vol. I, Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation. 32. 1994 The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost" , Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation. 33. 1995 "A Slumber Did My Sprit Seal": An Interpretation from India, Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation. ...
... only by the stylistic considerations, we at once see that Savitri makes a marked departure from the traditional invocation having the story's beginning with the end-stopped line. In Milton's Paradise Lost we have just 26 lines to get going; but in Savitri Sri Aurobindo takes time to state the gist of the theme. The theme itself looks into the fundamental issue as to why Paradise should have been ...
... other validity or acceptability in an absolute sense. Otherwise we shall simply prove ourselves to be like Newton’s famous contemporary Richard Bentley, the classical scholar. He was five when Paradise Lost was published, in 1667. Later Bentley rewrote the poem entirely to his taste, thinking that it was the printer who had made all those hundred blunders in it. But, eventually, what he rewrote also ...
... genuine. There is in it an occult element which puts us directly in contact with the source of inspiration itself. This we can perhaps better appreciate if we compare Jnaneshwari with, say, Paradise Lost . The Celestial Patroness used to visit Milton in the night, or when “Morn purples the East”, and it is she who gave him the easy “unpremeditated Verse”; she made him see and tell “Of things invisible ...
... longer realize that it is an occult device carrying the spirit of the writer and communicating it to the reader to the degree of his intelligence and receptivity. What we experience by reading Paradise Lost, Of Mice and Men or Ulysses is not caused by the printed configurations we call characters, but by the vibrations communicated by means of those configurations which enable us to enter into contact ...
... of its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops", disclosed the Divine's truth ...
... Savitri, edited by K.D. Sethna, 2000 Sri Aurobindo - The Poet 2 nd ed. 1999 Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, 1995 The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", 1994 The Sun and the Rainbow: Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light, 2 nd ed. 2008 Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2 nd ed. 2000 Our Light and Delight: Recollections ...
... the same somewhat unusual usage: "darkling". While Milton applied the adjective meaning "in the dark" to the bird, Keats refers to himself: "Darkling I listen." (14.6.1992) 1. Paradise Lost, Book III lines 38-40. Page 53 As always, I was very glad to hear from you. But the news you give of yourself is hardly comforting. What is of comfort is that you are holding ...
... less than in my drawer. Never to forget that it had been set aside for a less crowded time is really not to have set it aside at all in the true sense of the word. If, as Milton often says in Paradise Lost, small things may be compared to big ones, this morning when I have pulled your letter out I am reminded of what the Mother once told me after her son Andre's first visit to the Ashram. She said ...
... Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1995, The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385, U.S.A. The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1994, The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385, U.S.A. The Sun and the Rainbow: Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light (Essays, Letters ...
... their sublime, creative of essential Beauty... The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth." "Adam's dream" is, of course, a reference to Milton's story in Paradise Lost of how when Eve was created Adam saw Eve's existence in a dream and this existence continued, as it were, from dream into reality, as if the dream were itself creative of what was true, what ...
... 'Paradise' is a Persian word and means "garden", particularly a royal one. We always talk of the Garden of Eden, don't we? - and the term "paradise" is used for Eden as in the title of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. And I think the garden-concept is rather appropriate because there is a natural sense of flower and fragrance in connection with the profound consciousness of the psychic being, Yeats has sung ...
... whose inspiration used to flow most in the six months after the autumnal equinox. Somehow the chill of the grey months without used to stir the blind poet and evoke the heat within to generate Paradise Lost. Then there was the arch-symbolist Mallarme who wrote of L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide (Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter) with the sheet of snow mutely suggesting ...
... passionate sweep, Webster's quivering outbreak. But beside Milton, however, they all seem kin and offer a contrast to the no less powerful yet more purely reflective or ideative voice heard in Paradise Lost. A contrast by plane can be drawn even between the several portions of one and the same writer's work: occasionally the lines of the very same passage belong to different planes. Page 4 ...
... Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna 14. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry 15. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation 16. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost 17. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression 18. "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India 19. The Thinking Comer: Causeries on Life ...
... stood a house screened by palms and pale green banana trees. At times there would come, from behind these trees, a vibrant voice raised in recitation. This was the voice of K.D. Sethna reading Paradise Lost or Savitri. Every morning a boy with a neat single-seater rickshaw would transport him to Balcony Darshan. Sometimes he would pass me as I went that way on foot, and sometimes he would ...
... bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost . Are all Dilip's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and bhakta. 14 April 1938 Poetry, Peace and Ananda I seek for Ananda, it eludes ...
... of the stars - extension to whatever participation in the supernatural principle of the anti-divine might occur anywhere, in any state of existence including the inner being of man. 20. Paradise Lost, Bk. I, 11.546-547. Page 32 To return to our discussion. If the stars can be put in relation to the forests of the night and if the Tyger is set upon the stars, the animal cannot ...
... by a minute study of the lyric in itself and (2) the analogy of this pattern, both imaginatively and verbally, to certain phases of the Chris-tological drama unfolded in the course of Milton's Paradise Lost. Miss Raine's charge of diffuseness against the original draft of the essay referred principally to the setting forth of the Miltonic analogy. But she was not altogether critical when she wrote ...
... almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's—and ...
... spiritual mantra which arrests and satisfies us more than any accidental aspect of it in splendid isolation like Page 44 Those thoughts that wander through Eternity from Paradise Lost or that sudden Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone— which is itself a very lonely voyager through much watery verse in The Prelude. The mantra ! Whether scattered ...
... charmed anguish and wisdom in his English version: Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Dante also is no mean master of the same art; and Milton of Paradise Lost can match the poets of both the Aeneid and La Divina Commedia. Indeed Milton demonstrates most Page 244 impressively how Melopoeia could be not only lyrical but also epical, a ...
... ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy. Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the ...
... Miltonic moment. But Page 16 Sri Aurobindo is not only able to command the grand style at will; he can also bring to his work a quality which the great Puritan in the days of his Paradise Lost as good as allowed to atrophy, a subtle yet puissant interfusion of fantasy with strength and grandeur, a touch half Coleridgean half Shelleyan in the midst of Miltonic energy. Milton himself would ...
... moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still Page 69 remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic ...
... going so far, in this hard, matter-of-fact world of ours, 141"The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." Spoken by Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Book 1, lines 254-5. 142"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact." Spoken by Theseus in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene ...
... for subjectivity and the epic too will have to answer it. PURANI: Some maintain that as there is no story in the Divine Comedy, it is not an epic. SRI AUROBINDO: It is certainly an epic. Paradise Lost has very little story in it and very few incidents. Yet it is an epic. PURANI: Some think that Keats' Hyperion would have been as great as Milton's poem if he had finished it. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... Mazzini, 253 Mephistopheles, 250 Metaphysicals, the, 57, 71,286 Michael Angelo, 170 Milton, 52-3, 85, 93, 125, 147, 163, 168,245 --Camus, 245n Page 373 -Paradise Lost, 163, 168n Minerva, 284 Mitra, 45, 157, 159-60, 180, 294 Modern Review, the, 229n Mohammedanism, 276 Montaigne, 108 Montevideo, 198 Moses, 9-10, 108 Mother, The (La ...
... Mahavira, 44, 207 Maheshwari, 44, 207, 209-10, 225 Manicheism, 127 Mary, 82 Matariswan, 44 Michael Angelo, 210 Middle Ages, the, 134, 139, 149, 421 Milton, 156n. – Paradise Lost, 156n Mimansakas,137 Mitra, 207 Morgan, 56-7 Mother, The, 63, 65-6, 270, 282-3n., 285n., 289n., 29In., 319 Page 432 -Prayers and Meditations, 266 ...
... levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For ¹ Milton: Paradise Lost. Bk. 1. 253 Page 156 it is only one among a million contending forces and its effect will depend upon the allies it can count on its side. Similar is the case with a vital will ...
... stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic-poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they Page 9 are now familiar even to ...
... Aurobindo's inspiration in, 359-360; need for patience in reading, 360-361; theme of Dawn in, 361-368; personality of Savitri as envisaged in, 468-471; claims of Savitri as a cosmic epic, 473-474; Paradise Lost compared to, 385; possible influence of other poets in, 386-387; Song of Myself 'and, 388-389; Cantos and, 389-394; The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel compared to, 403-408; the Mother's role in ...
... Iliad and the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf and the Asiatic Gilgamesh; and among the latter, the Aeneid, the Divina Commedia (if it could be called an epic), Camoens' Os Lusiadas, Paradise Lost, and Mah ā k ā vyas in Sanskrit like the Raghuvamsa of Kalidasa. Something is lost, and something is gained. The change is significant, but no more significant than the change from the Heroic ...
... Song of Myself and Savitri While it is natural to see Savitri as a sort of continuation and fulfilment of the two earlier 'cosmic' epic narratives— the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost —there were other formative influences as well, and some of these too deserve mention and even some scrutiny. The primary inspiration flowed no doubt from the fount of his own Yogic experiences ...
... 18. ibid., p. 177 . 19. Collected Essays in Criticism, p. 59. 20. From Virgil to Milton, p. 176. 21. The Classical Tradition, p. 159. 22. Paradise Lost, V, II. 571-4. 23. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry ofEzraPound,p.279. 24. The Future Poetry, pp. 117-9. 25. Savitri, pp. 821-2. 26. Mother India ...
... BOOK OF DEATH' I The Two Missing Cantos In the two opening cantos of Savitri, the action of the epic begins, as in Western epics like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, at a critical point even the most critical; the action plunges in medias res, into the middle of things: it is the dawn of the day when Satyavan is fated to die according to Sage Narad's reading ...
... a succinct or quintessential form the meaning and message of the whole poem. Milton's "Of man's first disobedience", the marvellous opening phrase of his epic, at once projects the theme of Paradise Lost, so does the reference to the "wrath of Achilles" at the very beginning of Iliad. In Savitri, too, the opening line carries Page 359 in itself, as a seed does the ...
... together. That was a time when people were primitive, now we are very much advanced so we need not have that kind of epic - a story. But epic as a story has ceased to be long ago. Milton's Paradise Lost is not a story in the strict sense of the term, it is what you call a religious myth. Even though it puts forth characters that are human characters, it doesn't Page 4 ...
... senators is called—"this last of Ilion's sessions"—and Antenor the aged statesman counsels a policy of lying low and secret preparation. Laocon and Paris, however, counsel defiance as Moloch does in Paradise Lost, and so the die is cast. There are partings on the eve of the battle—Anchises and Aeneas, Antenor and Halamus, Paris and Helen, Paris and Cassandra. Meanwhile Achilles has learned of the rejection ...
... was how Lucifer became Satan. And that was how Paradise was lost. But the story of Paradise Regained is yet more marvellous. When the Divine Mother, Page 267 the creative infinite Consciousness found herself parcelled out and scattered (even like the body of Sati borne about by Shiva, in the well-known Indian legend) and lost in unconsciousness, something shot down from the Highest ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.