... truth, beauty and bliss. Of course, it cannot be affirmed that in the poetic creation there can be no illusory power of Ignorance. No doubt, there are poets who have either blurred their spirituality or their inner soul by resorting to poetry. But in that case we can safely affirm that it is the poet and not his poetic creation that is in fault. It is absolutely a personal affair. If things are to... In our country also Rabindranath Tagore's name needs no mention. A spiritual aspiration pervades his poetic inspiration. It is evident that this spiritual aspiration is the source of his poetic creation. But let us listen to Madhusudan, the so-called iconoclast: Where is the world of the Brahman? Where am I, a worthless creature of evil? How can I, a mere human, Enmeshed in the world's... truth has been uttered by Vishwanath Kaviraj. The real form or soul of poetry consists of delight. The delight one gets in the realisation of the Brahman and the delight one derives from one's poetic creation spring from the same source. Both have an indivisible consciousness of self-expressive delight. Indeed it is a serious matter that demands our special attention. Both of them have no relation with ...
... The Sources of Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Poetic Creation Three Elements of Poetic Creation Poetry, or at any rate a truly poetic poetry, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only. There are three elements in the production of poetry; there is the... channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-formed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human... vital planes into the physical—but there is often enough something more behind it than is expressed—it gets altered or diminished in the human physical transcription. 9 March 1933 Joy of Poetic Creation Poetry takes its start from any plane of the consciousness, but, like all art, one might even say all creation, it must be passed through the vital, the life-soul, gather from it a certain ...
... more intimate and directly intuitive speech which comes from the deeper Soul. It is not mind that is the creator of the highest poetry. It is imaginative intellect that is the general basis of poetic creation, but at its highest, creation comes out of inspiration from above the intellect. But very seldom the whole body of poetry is received direct from the original higher source. The mind, the brain... Soul can receive both the soul and the body, the spirt and the word, without ad- mixture in the transmission that we get "immortal tones of speech" and the highest creation. That is to say, the poetic creation has to rise from the imaginative intellect to the intuitive spirit, and even above it to what Sri Aurobindo calls, "the seeing mind" where the expression becomes illuminative speech, and if the... exaltation of the creative moment and in three brilliant images, each typifying a special process of poetic inspiration on a level higher than the mind, gives us almost the secret of the true poetic creation. First is "the moon's fitful sleep on a clouded bay"; second is "the maiden flight of white swans" coming down upon poet's mind, and third is the "ascent of the poet's consciousness to the height ...
... that Dryden pronounced "imaging is, in itself, the very height and life of poetry." All these comments seem to suggest that a conscious and deliberate indulgence in image making is at the core of poetic creation. Coleridge, however, slightly modifies these statements by saying that images "become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts... strange tangibilities there and not throughout aided by an interpretative glow from our experience of material objects." 10 So says K. D. Sethna. It is "a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such as... vision of the poet and the magnificent rhythmic movement of his poetic speech. At this moment it is difficult to resist the temptation to refer to one passage which is indeed a marvel of poetic creation. As in a mystic and dynamic dance A priestess of immaculate ecstasies Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods, 14 Ibid ...
... judgments, according to his own account of them, seem to be determined by a sensitive temperament finely balanced in its own poise but limited in its appreciations, clear and open to some kinds of poetic creation, reserved towards others, against yet others closed and cold or excessively depreciative. This sufficiently explains his very different reactions to the two poems, Descent and Flame-Wind... judgments may not be final and absolute and decide that the wastepaper-basket is not the proper place for Savitri. There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression... when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word "greater" may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation. The great bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual ...
... decline, the resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's Gitanjali. It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian manner can find a high place in the cultural achievement of the... poetry." It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that go to make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are also present in Savitri. In the words of Sethna: "The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power." We will close this section with an ...
... at the beginning. Your very next sentence after the estimate lays bare the connection and the reason why you term Ilion a Page 92 feat of strength or skill rather than a true poetic creation. For you ask: "but why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer?" And you continue: "Of course it can be done as an exercise - a piece of virtuosity (which Ilion ... crisscrossing men and women. You will be surprised to learn that Sri Aurobindo is not the poet only of the legend and symbol and philosophy that are Savitri. In addition to the different kind of poetic creation which Ilion represents, there are three long early narratives of greater "human" interest developed in another cast of blank verse: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou, the last-named a ...
... Aurobindo, when he joined his Ashram in 1927 at the age of twenty-three. It is a wonder how much time Sri Aurobindo graciously gave to his disciple in discussing all the minutiae of poetic creation and expression. Sethna received so much from his Guru, especially in insight into mystic poetry. Amal Kiran gratefully remembers how Sri Aurobindo was insistent on his disciple's writing always... sovereignty packed into a 'rest' which can be equated with 'force'. In comparison, your 'ineffable' is piffling." When we read such an inspired and efficient defence of Sri Aurobindo's poetic creation, we readily concur with D.K. Roy's prophecy that "when, in the not too-distant future, Sri Aurobindo will have been acknowledged by the whole world as by far the greatest of modern poets to whom ...
... still the truth, the realisation, the achievement of the inner soul that wanted to reveal themselves through that manifestation are our topic. Beauty is the chief and essential thing in the poetic creation of Rabindranath. He appreciates beauty and makes others do the same in a delightful manner. He has made his poetical work the embodiment of all beauties culled from all places little by little... supreme utterances. We notice that the greater stress of his fine art has been laid on movement than on static beauty and more on the gesture of limbs than on their limned outline. We find that his poetic creation has been more akin to the art of music and of the dance than that of sculpture and architecture. He has attained to sheer beauty through movement and not through immobility, not so much through ...
... Veda... stands out, apart from its interest as the world's first yet extant Scripture, its earliest interpretation of man and the Divine and the universe, as a remarkable, a sublime and powerful poetic creation. It is in its form and speech no barbaric production. The Vedic poets are masters of a consummate technique, their rhythms are carved like chariots of the gods and borne on divine and ample wings... Future poetry, how modern trends in poetry indicate the possibility in Eastern languages of a truer understanding of the vedic idea and practice of mantra and even of the discovery of a new poetic creation that would embody a new mantric poetry. He has also suggested that, that, considering the past evolution of English poetry and considering the trends that are visible in greater poets like ...
... magnificence of his diction. All Indian languages are indebted to him for inaugurating a new era in the world of fiction, even as they are indebted to Rabindranath Tagore for ushering in a new era in poetic creation. Bankim Chandra's novels have been translated into all the languages of India, and inspired and influenced a whole generation of novelists. 92. Bankim Chandra Chatterji by Sri Aurobindo.... says again: "After four years of Pranayama and other practices of my own, with no other result than increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.), mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest." 172 What Sri Aurobindo says regarding the subtle sight, referred ...
... resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities Page 23 is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's "Gitanjali". It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian manner, can find a high place in the cultural achievement of the... poetry." It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that go to make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are also present in Sāvitrī , In the words of Mr. Sethna "The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power". We will close this section with ...
... his own account of them, seem Page 332 to be determined by a sensitive temperament finely balanced in its own poise but limited in its appreciations, clear and open to some kinds of poetic creation, reserved towards others, against yet others closed and cold or excessively depreciative. This sufficiently explains his very different reactions to the two poems, Descent and Flame-Wind , which... judgments may not be final and absolute and decide that the waste-paper-basket is not the proper place for Savitri . There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a corner and a limited expression ...
... Secret of the Veda and Essays on the Gita, after The Mother and The Riddle of This World, — what was there to say? Those who came to know vaguely about Sri Aurobindo's new experiment in poetic creation were duly intrigued. One or two ventured to make inquiries. Was the new Savitri no more than a revision of the earlier draft? Sri Aurobindo wrote to a discipline in 1931: There is... elucidatory letters on the poem. It had been almost fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever-rising heights of Consciousness, — a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K. D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust. 1 When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but ...
... giving to mankind his great vision of the Supermind and by insisting that life must be related to the Divine if man wants to arrive at the true solution of his problems. Further, his mode of poetic creation is akin to that of the ancient seers. When he speaks of "a torrent of rapid lightnings" which represents the irresistible current of illuminating inspiration, he is not, as he himself explains... of poetry. It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are visibly present in Savitri. In the words of K. D. Sethna: "To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the ...
... completed his training and has himself mastered the art of writing. Thus the word "greater" is applied by Sri Aurobindo, "with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation." 17 As regards the Overmind power itself and the divers intermediate powers and the manner in which they express themselves in poetry, what happens is that these overhead or essentially spiritual... feelings, thoughts, the tremblings of one's sensibility are subjective whereas facts, actions, the vicissitudes of outer phenomena are objective. Aesthesis is the energising activity, artistic or poetic creation (and enjoyment) is the result: By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something ...
... trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing 1 Sri Aurobindo: Sasitri, Book II, Canto I. 2 Ibid., Book II, Canto IV. Page 304 in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit ha s in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle... modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when ...
... and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty. 5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indnyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving; 6 Rig Veda, X. 124. 7. 1The Secret of the Veda, by Sri Aurobindo. 3 Rig Veda, III. 38. 1. 3 Ibid., I. 4... which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names. 4 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation—the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth. 5 The form of beauty is the body of the Truth. The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality ...
... poetry. However natural or mundane may be the delight in poetic creation, it can never surpass the poetic greatness of the mantra. Neither the ancient poet Valmiki nor even Homer or Shakespeare are an exception. It is said that "the highest art is to conceal art". The famous poets of to-day cannot so easily conceal themselves in their poetic creation as did the poets of the Veda-Upanishad-Gita. When the ...
... capable also of poetic creation? The possibility has been discussed in a very lively and interesting manner in The Hibbert Journal (October, '49 and january, '50). The writer Sir Robert Watson-Watt thinks it is not impossible, indeed quite possible, for a machine to write, for example, a sonnet. Only the question will be with regard to the kind-the quality and standard--of the poetic creation. What will ...
... ing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book II, Canto I. ² Ibid., Book II, Canto IV. Page 76 in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle.... new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when ...
... and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty. 5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving; 6 ¹ Rig Veda, X. 124. 7. ² The Secret of the Veda, by Sri Aurobindo. ³ Rig Veda, III. 38. 1. 4 Ibid... which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names. 4 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth. 5 The form of beauty is the body of the Truth. The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality ...
... Secret of the Veda and Essays on the Gita, after The Mother and The Riddle of This World, - what was there to say? Sadhaks who came to know vaguely about Sri Aurobindo's new experiment in poetic creation were duly intrigued. One or two ventured to make .'inquiries. Was the new Savitri no more than a revision of the earlier draft? Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple in 1931: There is a previous... s elucidatory letters on the poem. It had been almost fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever rising heights of Consciousness, - a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K.D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust. 14 When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but ...
... "enthousiasmos", the state of being in God.¹ In India, the idea that poetry and all ______________________ ¹ Mr. C. Day Lewis in his work "the Poetic Image" analyses the process of poetic creation and at last finds that it is something "mysterious". He advises the poets of the future to resort to "Concentration"—"a brooding concentration, the prayer of the intellect"—to be able to... the physical. It is thus clear that poetical creation can go on rising from level to level of consciousness and the difference in the origin would mark the difference in the different grades of poetic creation. On the highest level, the poet becomes the seer, who is the creator, Kavi or Rṣi. The ancients gave the name Kavi to the God,—whose poem is the cosmos. Rṣi is one who has the vision ...
... talent remains to keep it in continuance. In every province the local tongues arise here earlier, there a little later to the dignity of literature and become the vehicle of Page 376 poetic creation and the instrument of popular culture. Sanskrit, although not devoid of popular elements, is essentially and in the best sense an aristocratic speech developing and holding to the necessity of ...
... understood stands out, apart from its interest as the world's first yet extant Scripture, its earliest interpretation of man and the Divine and the universe, as a remarkable, a sublime and powerful poetic creation. It is in its form and speech no barbaric production. The Vedic poets are masters of a consummate technique, their rhythms are carved like chariots of the gods and borne on divine and ample wings ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and of the impression left by that afflatus on the sensitive reader. 3 When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along ...
... add to the description of the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of ...
... After four years of pr ā n ā y ā ma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without ...
... of the afflatus that creates Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and of the impression left by that afflatus on the sensitive reader. When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along ...
... connection tends to get cumulative 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 ...
... word "enthusiasm" has a Platonic air and should be appropriate in this context. I remember Sri Page 215 Aurobindo writing: "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentauty... That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken." Literally the term means: ...
... narratives, numerous lyrics and sonnets, half a dozen dramas, a substantial body of experiments in new metres and, to top everything, an epic of nearly 24,000 lines of blank verse, the longest poetic creation in English: Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol. This poem takes up the famous traditional story of a woman's love which manages to reclaim from the God of Death the life of her prematurely ...
... vision-bright and harmonious: its outflow brings a condition of mind cleansed of a too external and intellectual and deliberately constructive activity — hence the semi-trance, as it were, of poetic creation. But poetry does not always rush through the mind in an unbroken and perfect river of light. The fact that sometimes it makes a godlike rush proves its source to be other than the wide-awake labourer ...
... inspired use of that metre for a few hundred lines a major achievement. Further, its deliberate choice of Homer's theme in a metre that reached its acme in the Iliad challenges antiquity's loftiest poetic creation and leads us to dwell on quality and ignore bulk, since to Homerise for even a few hundred lines would be to sit among the utterly elect. 2 Can Ilion be called Homeric in ...
... action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word 'greater' may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualification, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation. "The greater bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual ...
... channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-tormed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human ...
... Aurobindo's Poetic Psychology and Metaphysics In his usurpassable critical study Sri Aurobindo — the Poet Amal Kiran has dealt with several aspects of the yogi-Seer's poetic creation, particularly at places touching upon the mantric utterance as the Voice of the Future given to us by him. Savitri is a rich storehouse for an aesthetician of the spirit, a composition ...
... therefore, for the time being at least, right for us in our attempt to get into union either with universal or transcendent Beauty through the revealing ideas and motives and suggestive forms of poetic creation. This is the individual aspect of the personal or time element. But there is also a larger movement to which we belong, ourselves and the poet and his poetry; or rather it is the same movement ...
... itself should be rejected. 15 November 1934 I see no earthly use in producing something that is just "all right" when I am obsessed with an intuition of some hitherto unrevealed miraculous poetic creation existing on a plane I absolutely despair of reaching.... I beg to be excused, again, Page 621 for this much ado about nothing but I am awfully disgusted with myself. You should ...
... 20 October 1936 The Aim of the Mystic Poet There are truths and there are transcriptions of truths; the transcriptions may be accurate or may be free and imaginative. The truth behind a poetic creation is there on some plane or other, supraphysical generally—and from there the suggestion of the image too originally comes; even the whole transcription itself can be contributed from there, but ...
... an age of reason dominated by the critical, scientific or philosophic intelligence is ordinarily unfavourable and, even when it is most catholic and ample, cannot be quite favourable to great poetic creation. The pure intellect cannot create poetry. The inspired or the imaginative reason does indeed play an important, sometimes a leading part, but even that can only be a support or an influence; the ...
... aesthesis, disengage what is struggling untransformed in its outsides and make out of it by poetic sympathy material of spiritual truth and beauty. This is a strain that has been growing in recent poetic creation and it suffers as yet too often from an insufficient fineness of insight and a too crude handling, but, that immaturity once overcome, must hold a large and assured place among the great poetic ...
... touches the mind at different levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination. What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed ...
... even, if the creating mind takes up an incident of the life, a vital impression, emotion or reaction that had actually taken place, it need not be anything more than a starting point for the poetic creation. The "I" of a poem is more often than not a dramatic or representative I, nothing less and nothing more. But it does not help to fall back on the imagination and say that a man's poetry or art ...
... universe. And I said that as we embrace the whole of life in Yoga, so we accept the entire genuine self-expression of the spirit of life in poetry. We would range up and down the whole realm of poetic creation like free, unattached worshippers of the Divine Beauty and seekers of the divine Delight. Page 334 Later in the afternoon I was told by X that Y does not like love-poems and so he ...
... channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-formed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human ...
... the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work Page 149 The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of his ...
... when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word 'greater' may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualification, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation. "The greater bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual ...
... Legend and a Symbol, with its nearly twenty-four thousand lines, we cannot help feeling the enormous stature of Sri Aurobindo. But, even outside this performance, we have before us an abundance of poetic creation which is out of the ordinary in merit. To get him into proper focus we should mention also that his life covers a period of seventy-eight years: 1872-1950. Hence his contemporaneity is bound ...
... the word communicates also the singer's love of significant sound, his relish of the music of a rich-ringing important appellative. In crude quintessence we have, almost all the qualities of poetic creation. You will have noticed that I have dwelt considerably on the mode of utterance, the way things are put: in short, the form. Wherever there is poetry, be it primitive or highly progressed, the form ...
... was D'Annunzian he was achiev-ing beautiful and magnificent poetry played the deuce with him on numberless occasions. A poet can surely be conscious of his own greatness and let himself go in poetic creation without a critical back-look, when he happens to be what I may term an avatar of poetry rather than a vibhuti of poetry. Shakespeare is reported to have blotted not a single word of what he wrote; ...
... illuminative power." 13 One other citation from Sri Aurobindo may be made to indicate the general lines of his outlook on poetic inspiration. "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed ...
... artistic and satisfying structure in this manner, the succession of cantos a progression of definite movements building a total harmony. It is this carefully artistic and highly cultured type of poetic creation that reached its acme of perfection in the poetry of Kalidasa. This pre-eminence proceeds from two qualities possessed in a degree only to be paralleled in the work of the greatest world-poets ...
... knowledge of English metre is almost negligible and his familiarity with the English language is neither deep nor extensive… These poems have a value to those who are interested in the process of poetic creation in as much as whatever poetic merit they have is solely due to the poet’s innate sense of rhythm and word-music. The description—‘a born poet’—could hardly be applied to anyone with greater ap ...
... that it is the world's first yet extant Scripture, but Page 30 that it is the earliest interpretation of Man and the Divine and the Universe as also that it is a sublime and powerful poetic creation. The utterances of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas and many others touch the most extraordinary heights of mantric poetry. At the early stages of the Vedic tradition, the ...
... soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying-delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis ...
... freed the language from the unrefined touch and flavour of narrow rusticity and entered as it were the realm of a higher, nobler, more luminous and wider perception and brought it down into his poetic creation. In French poetry also this parochial influence pervades all its Romances, the Chansons de Gestes, and even the Chanson de Roland. Real poetry, which is noble and of permanent value, was first ...
... confined merely to the fact that it is the world's first yet extant Scripture, but that it is its earliest interpretation of Man and Divine and the Universe as also that it is a sublime and powerful poetic creation. The utterances of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas and many others touch the most extraordinary heights of mantric poetry. At the early stages of the Vedic tradition the ...
... is simply unbearable, nay, past correction. Verily the greatness of the poet is the greatness of the inner consciousness. And the expression of his inner consciousness is the essence of his poetic creation. So long as this inner consciousness is vigilant and active in the poet, his creations and activities never suffer in manners. His creations will not be vitiated by gross touches. He alone is a ...
... l few, and it implied, not a tasting of many subjects after the modern plan, but the thorough mastery of all. The original achievement of a Kalidasa accomplishing the highest in every line of poetic creation is so incredible to the European mind that it has been sought to cleave that mighty master of harmonies into a committee of three. Yet it is paralleled by the accomplishment in philosophy of Shankara ...
... good it might seem form a lower standard .until I got that which I felt to be absolutely right." VII "There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such ...
... terms: "After four years of prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest. ... "² During this period of the beginning of sadhana Sri Aurobindo ...
... life. His aesthetics chimes perfectly with his metaphysics and his psychology, and hence his theory of overhead aesthesis seems to come perhaps much nearer to an explanation of the mystery of poetic creation than almost any other theory that has been advanced hitherto. Being intimately related to his own integral view of Reality— Reality that is both Being and Becoming—the Aurobindonian theory of ...
... the poet, but it cannot be said that Sri Aurobindo overdoes these 'kennings' or rather curtal metaphors. The ultimate detraction is that Savitri is a tour-deforce, not a supreme poetic creation. "This sort of thing, well, impressive though it may be, once is enough!" At least, once is necessary! Of Tillyard's four criteria, two—'amplitude, breadth and inclusiveness' and 'the structural ...
... Yoga of King Aswapati, through the inner lands where Savitri adventures, Sri Aurobindo has expressed his own experiences of the uncharted inner worlds; over the years he cast and recast this poetic creation twelve times at least! Because he wished to express in the poem accurately "something seen, something felt or experienced . . . ." In it Sri Aurobindo opens for us a wide space of inner spiritual ...
... l few, and it implied, not a tasting of many subjects after the modern plan, but the thorough mastery of all. The original achievement of a Kalidasa accomplishing the highest in every line of poetic creation is so incredible to the European mind that it has been sought to cleave that mighty master of harmonies into a committee of three. Yet it is paralleled by the accomplishment Page 376 ...
... artistic and satisfying structure in this manner, the succession of cantos a progression of definite movements building a total harmony. It is this carefully artistic and highly cultured type of poetic creation that reached its acme of perfection in the poetry of Kalidasa. This preeminence proceeds from two qualities possessed in a degree only to be paralleled in the work of the greatest world-poets ...
... come by an accident". After four years of prāṇāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without ...
... been pointed to Shacuntala as the ideal Hindu woman. Sita, Draupadi, Savitri, Damayanti,—these are familiar to us as ideals, but Shacuntala is Mr. Risley's own addition. To us she is a beautiful poetic creation, not an exemplar of feminine conduct. We observe that the Bengalee is full of admiration for Mr. Risley's poetic rapture over Shacuntala. We do not know whom we should congratulate more, the ...
... of satisfaction and sets up as a canon and law its own manner of response; there is a multitude of counsels, and each has this common characteristic that it overstresses one side of the norm of poetic creation. For the spirit of poetry is many-sided and flexible in its processes, but firm and invariable in the central law of its nature. The poetic Truth of which I am speaking has nothing to do with ...
... new body for a quite new spirit the commanded discovery and labour. There must certainly take place in order to satisfy the changed vision a considerable departure in all the main provinces of poetic creation, the lyric, the drama, the narrative Page 276 or epic, and the question for solution is how far and in what way the technique of each kind will necessarily be affected or should with ...
... forms of external life, as if the enriching of that life were its principal artistic aim. The second is a great force of subjective individuality and personal temperament as a leading power of poetic creation. The third is a great intensity of speech and ordinarily of a certain kind of direct vision. But in the world's literature generally these are the tendencies that have been on the increase and ...
... there arise the possibility of its use as the mantra of the Real? Not that we need spend any energy in a vain effort to define anything so profound, elusive and indefinable as the breath of poetic creation; to take the myriad-stringed harp of Saraswati to pieces for the purpose of scientific analysis is a narrow and barren amusement. But we stand in need of some guiding intuitions, some helpful ...
... into being, and it may be that some of the old nations Page 304 that have been the leaders of the past and the old literatures that have been hitherto the chosen vehicles of strong poetic creation may prove incapable of holding the greater breath of the new spirit and be condemned to fall into decadence. It may be that we shall have to look for the future creation to new poetical literatures ...
... when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word "greater" may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation. The great bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual ...
... Analogously, with regard to Blake's Tyger, if in spite of knowing English we are inadequately conver-sant with Blake's visionary symbolic mind and method of expres-sion and with the bulk of his poetic creation in which his highly original mythopoeic and occult-spiritual form of Christianity finds vivid and profound though also at times fantastic play, we shall fail to gauge the inmost light and might ...
... brought to them, but they must be dealt with as if the postures and gestures of rhythmic expression were vital elements of what a Wordsworth would call 'the growth of the poet's mind'. In all poetic creation there is the heart and there is the art. The latter reveals the self-discovering develop-ment of the former. To neglect either is to miss the true organicity of a poem. To study a poem rightly ...
... saw") instead of by a faint far sense of it in the mind of the poet when the afflatus passes through him. Modern Romanticism knew a powerful palpable impact of the supernatural in the process of poetic creation. It created from an intense inwardness as if from a dimension of supra-terrestrial dream, though it never * Cf. "For Pater Romanticism was the addition of 'strangeness' to beauty" (Lucas, ...
... always to be Page 150 he whose soul hath risen Up to the height of feeling intellect. It is the "feeling intellect" to which, according to him, the master faculty of poetic creation becomes possible: Imagination, the visionary insight whose activity he believed with Coleridge to resemble the workings of the "Infinite Mind". To forget that the Romantic Movement was an ...
... returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole—and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creation. My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed horror of "miserable men who do not know—who have never even heard ...
... burst from the one gigantic genius who cared apparently the least about religion and matters spiritual — Shakespeare. Yet, though Shakespeare will remain unsurpassed, a mare magnum in the poetic creation, he is not the last word spoken by the spirit of beauty. For he is not, save in a couple of brief moments, the Word that was in the Beginning; he did not purpose to identify himself increasingly ...
... mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them." 11 This can be a guideline for all poets. Sethna's poetic soul grew in close kinship with Sri Aurobindo's vision and poetic creation. Here we may wonder whether such closeness with a tremendous poetic personality as that of Sri Aurobindo is not detrimental to the free growth of other poetic personalities. The danger of imitating ...
... whatever degree and slowly and silently sip the nectar from each word, phrase and turn or expression. The same I do while reading Amal's poetry. One then becomes a co-poet and partakes of the poetic creation. In another dimension the time thus spent becomes itself a poem — a poem in time. This approach bears abundant fruit specially with mystic poetry. And Amal is a mystic poet par ...
... Mallarmé considers writing poetry as an adventurous mission. It is like a voyage on the seas in rough weather. Les Fleurs (Flowers) voices the wish of every artist. It is a narrative of the poetic creation of the universe. If Mallarmé wants very often to reach the Azure, seduced by exotic nature — if he chooses to enjoy the sea-breeze - it is because of his innate desire to break loose from ...
... body of significant sound which converts whatever it echoes of sublime or grotesque, blissful or tragic, into a shape of loveliness irreproachable. There is an extreme of beauty felt in each true poetic creation, as though some divine archetype were embodied. The poetic insight into the common world-soul throws up interpretative values which have to be caught in a speech-form of ideal beauty: the proof ...
... accident'. After four years of pranayam and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased , health and out flow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without ...
... success, I am referring to those who are not of the common run, people who carry in their bones the drive of some great mission. Milton, for instance, who knew he had been born for a worthwhile poetic creation. 1 believe Dante too had to wait for the Divine Comedy to emerge. After this poem's music had come to rest with I'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (The love that moves the ...
... returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole - and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creation. My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed horror of "miserable men who do not know - who have never even heard ...
... add to the description of the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of his ...
... Such an abundance of honey-thick sweetness can flow only when spiritual felicity drunk in the delight of existence finds its true native expression which is the essence or Rasa of poetic creation. In it one is sure that the poet has seen "a new divinity in things." There is a universality emerging from the very specificity of symbol and image. If the light that illumines everything ...
... single spirit's bare and infinite ground. 27 Here each vowel and consonant represent the inevitability of a mood, a phase, a condition. This inevitability gives delight, the delight of poetic creation, the delight to be amid the perfection of tones, the harmony of colour or picturisation, of music and self-existence. This perfection and this harmony can come only when the source is felicity ...
... returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole — and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creation. My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed horror of "miserable men who do not know — who have never even heard ...
... s sort out some trends of its texture. The task becomes easier and the conclusions surer when we have the poet's own testimony about the influences he has undergone and the process of his own poetic creation. Fortunately for us we have access to many utterances of Sri Aurobindo, in his letters as well as his other writings, in particular The Future Poetry, which is not just an objective study of ...
... when reflected in a puddle; but then even the three worlds prove to be too tiny and diminutive to use up its illumination. Rather this Marathi expression Page 113 of mine, this poetic creation, shall turn out to be an excellent wish-fulfilling tree or kalpavriksha that ever yields every kind of desirable fruit. Jnaneshwar speaks about Rasas or the subtle essentialities of a literary ...
... Truth, may it not be so? Page 374 There are truths and there are transcriptions of the truths. The transcriptions may be accurate or may be free and imaginative. The truth behind a poetic creation is there on some plane or other, supraphysical generally—and from there the image too comes. So there is a transcription partly contributed from there, partly by the external mind's faculty of ...
... failed.'4 'After four years of prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss.'5 In another letter, Sri Aurobindo has explained ...
... Process, Form and Substance of Poetry; Sources of Poetic Inspiration and Vision; Poetic Rhythm and Technique; Beauty and Art; Appreciation of Poetry and Art; Poets, Mystics and Intellectuals; Poetic Creation and Yoga; Modern Poetry; Translation of Poetry; The Movement of Modern Literature; etc., etc. Some of Sri Aurobindo's disciples have themselves been good poets and litterateurs. In answer ...
... ¹ After four years of Prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss.² In another letter, Sri Aurobindo has explained ...
... soared high to the experiences of the seers of the Upanishads or the Vaishnava devotees, and came down with them into the widely extended domain of universal experience. The modernism of his poetic creation, developed on the wings of these two aspects, and its keynote is the harmony and synthesis of the East and the West, the present Page 159 and the past. Thus the oriental and ...
... —with its own Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradise 40 Nevertheless, the Cantos remain, on a first or second or even third reading, a maddening work. It is an important and immense poetic creation, a nodal point in contemporary English poetry. Crane and MacLeish, Eliot and Yeats, themselves considerable poets, have been influenced by the Cantos and the Poundian poetics and aesthetics ...
... beauty of the formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the soul of beauty—that is what suffuses, with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm, the realisation and poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms that are scattered abroad in their myriad manifest beauty hold within themselves a secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name ...
... particle or wave of life-power. Modem science posits as the basis of the material creation, as its ultimate constituents, these energy-particles. Even so it seems to me that at the basis of all poetic creation there lie what may be called word-particles, and each poet has a characteristic quality or energy of the word-unit. The Shakespearean word, I have said, is a life-energy packet; and therefore ...
... particle or wave of life-power. Modern science posits as the basis of the material creation, as its ultimate constituents, these energy-particles. Even so it seems to me that at the basis of all poetic creation there lie what may be called word-particles, and each poet has a characteristic quality or energy of the word-unit. The Shakespearean word, I have said, is a life-energy packet; and therefore in ...
... like the education of Nature: the poet said of the child that “grew in sun and shower” – And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. Even so the beauty of poetic creation, when we contemplate it Page 183 and live in it, automatically and inevitably steals into our consciousness, works a subtle change in our nature and by elevating and refining it makes ...
... nor Homer had anything ¹ James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet." Page 52 like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his ...
... soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis ...
... beauty of the formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the soul of beauty – that is what suffuses, with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm, the realisation and poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms that are scattered abroad in their myriad manifest beauty hold within themselves a secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name ...
... verse that is pleasing and faultless or poetry that just misses its name and vocation. As Sri Aurobindo pithily put it, without bhāva - without the creative vital itself participating in the poetic creation - all metrical melody can only be a "melodious corpse". 46 But whereas the breeze of inspiration bloweth where it listeth, metrical mastery can generally be acquired and pressed into the service ...
... accident'. After four years of prānāyama and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without ...
... instrumentation, the highest being Supermind. As Supermind is too high for the human being to attain at one bound efforts have to be made to stabilise the stages, the gradations that lead to it. Poetic creation coming down from these higher planes would give rise to a new Overhead aesthesis. It may appear as if these levels of consciousness above Mind are "mystical", because they have been so regarded ...
... England have not as yet come to realise the value of Sri Aurobindo's contribution, I believe that time will come when that will happen. "Savitri" is a great epic which ushers in a new age in poetic creation. Being a masterpiece of the greatest mystic of our times it does not lend itself easily to mere intellectual understanding. Its meaning, rather its Reality, is to be felt. One has to allow the ...
... be worth making on such a mass of absurdities... . 39 Having thus exorcised the comic ghost of Archer, Sri Aurobindo turns to the Veda, which is "a remarkable, a sublime and powerful poetic creation" by Rishis (a Vishvamitra, a Vamadeva, a Dhirghatamas) touching "the most extraordinary heights and amplitudes of a sublime and mystic poetry". 40 The constant feeling of the presence of the Infinite ...
... through pranayama. "After four years of pranayama and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss." It was at this juncture that he met the Maha-rashtrian ...
... or deep grass, - Startling the wide-browed dreamer Dawn arose. A finely descriptive and subtly imaginative recounting of a famous traditional episode is promised, something like the poetic creations of Sri Aurobindo's middle and late twenties - Urvasie and Love and Death. But, as we perceive when we read further, we have more mental power of insight than in those narrative masterpieces... frequently elsewhere occur lines that have travelled intact to the ultimate recension - poetic surprises that could never be bettered. So in many ways there is a vivid continuity. At the same time we encounter a number of differences. Most of them are admirable in their particular roles. Some appear less happy: e.g., a poetic conventionalism of language on occasion, an overworking of romantic epithets like... lift the general level, higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry." In the same letter we read: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening." Since the time of Nirodbaran's discovery other drafts of the same version have ...
... returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole - and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creations. My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed hor- Page 37 ror of "miserable men who do not know — who... Sri Aurobindo elucidates as "seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word". 1 The inspired sound is implicit in the poetic act — and, just as the poet's vision must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal eye, the poet's word must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal ear. The ultimate home of the poetic process is the spiritual Akash, the Self-space of the... eternity. Further, you may notice that the whole event described here is so much like the essential poetic experience itself. An airy colour-fulness drops with a winged burst of revelatory light into a hidden depth in order to bring up from this depth some life-nourishing secret. We have the poetic intuition falling into the poet's inner being and capturing its contents for the poet's self-expression ...
... Supermind, whereas the latter may be conceived as admitting a new influx from the Supermind in the process of its own transformation into the Supreme Truth. At a later stage we shall exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating. Now we are presenting only the broad prospect. You may ask: "Why is not the Supermind listed among the planes of poetry... terms of more wisdom, less wisdom, no wisdom. Thought is our main characteristic, and when we speak of poetic planes we may broadly speak of poetic thinking from this plane or that, from the brain-level or the heart-level or the belly-level, etc. But we should specify one thing: the multi-levelled poetic thinking occurs from inside the levels and not from their surface. This specification takes us... "pure" and the purity is determined by the distance from prose— distance in terms of intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm and not in terms of what is popularly thought of as poetic — namely, a special vocabulary and an unfamiliar theme. Pure poetry thus becomes co-extensive with life itself, but life in its inner nature: as Nirodbaran has put it in a line which is poetry at its ...
... It has been conceived with an affinity to the ancient Indian temperament which not only rejoiced in massive structures but took all human life and human thought into the spacious scope of its poetic creations and blended the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multicoloured carving... something about Sri Aurobindo's poetic masterpiece, Savitri? Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol is a poem over which Sri Aurobindo worked for almost half his life-time. The first version dates back to his early forties; the last was on the anvil in even his seventy-eighth year when he passed away. There were almost twelve recasts, not exactly to add to the purely poetic merit but essentially to lift... poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 lines to the place of runner-up. Among the world's epics which can in general be compared with it in sustained poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh of Firdausi, the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Mahabharata of Vyasa exceed it in length — three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Page ...
... first and foremost, he was a poet, and a passionate lover of poetry - a seer-poet in the making, whose full-orbed splendour dazzles our eyes and thrills and illumines our soul in his later poetic creations, and particularly in his monumental epic, Savitri. Mrs. Drewett, Mr. Drewett's mother, wished to convert the three brothers to Christianity, but Mr. Drewett, who was a man of strong... thought, and delighted in the epic grandeur of its poetry. He had enjoyed and admired the splendour and beauty of English poetry, the grace and charm of French literature, the sublimity of Dante's creation, and the giant sweep of Goethe's mind. He had studied the historical development of Western religion, thought and civilisation. He had been impressed by the intrepid spirit of adventure and inquiry ...
... here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition." (p. 275) Though he can exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating, he makes it clear that further research has to be done to find out if the levels of style correspond to the levels... in Wordsworth's poetic powers a little past his middle age, he rejects the reason given by Herbert Read for this catastrophe. Read's psychoanalytic reading of the phenomenon leads him to conclude that Wordsworth's love-affair with the French girl Annette Vallon created in his personality a split that deprived him of the emotional spontaneity which is essential for poetic health. Read feels... casualness of the lecturer should not blind us to the fact that many seminal ideas and splendid insights are to be found in Sethna's criticism. It is true that Sri Aurobindo was a great regard to poetic theory and critical practice. But this, in no way, minimises the importance and value of his contribution as a critic. His ability to read the poem before him methodically and sensitively is evident ...
... prevailed in England. But, perhaps, the fashion of anti-romanticism has passer already, and it should be possible now at least to recognise in Urvasie and Love and Death truly indubitable poetic creations in the epic genre. III If Urvasie and Love and Death are romances or romantic epics, Baji Prabhou is quite obvious a heroic poem. Like Vidula, Baji Prabhou also was written... of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (... I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power.. 29 Although Kama confesses to a certain helplessness in dealing with Death, he nevertheless gives Ruru a magic flower which is "half fire" and offers him a ray of hope:... of Sri Aurobindo's first years in India, on his return after a long sojourn in England. When the poem was offered to an English publisher, it was referred to Lionel Johnson who "acknowledged some poetic merit but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold"; and Sri Aurobindo adds: "But Lionel Johnson, I was told like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere". 1 ...
... could gain in mankind without anybody to organise it ? Sri Aurobindo : That is not impossible. Disciple : Do poetic creations also live in the same way ? Sri Aurobindo ; Not in the same way. Disciple : Did Rama live, or is he merely the creation of Valmiki ? Sri Aurobindo : There is no ground to believe that Rama is a historical figure. Disciple : But the... Disciple : To what plane does aesthetic creation belong? Sri Aurobindo : It depends upon different people. Generally it belongs to the vital plane. But there are differences. For instance, style for its own sake, I mean, – the beauty of style, beauty of language, rhythm, etc., all that belongs to the vital plane. But aesthetic creation can be on every plane. Originally, all that comes... community may live. Disciple : Only, they do it without delivering lectures! ( Laughter ) Sri Aurobindo : Yes, and without proclaiming aloud that they are the highest in the scale of creation because they do it. It is the same animal nature; what happens in man's case is that he raises it up to the mental being and there weaves all kinds of things around it – thoughts, emotions, ideals ...
... eternal and unapproached, and, when this "bright effluence" comes down, the Tyger-sun gets framed to rout the denizens of night, the stars. Such a scheme would render it the most natural process of poetic re-creation that Blake should catch fire from Milton's making of the sun for his own making of the Tyger. (d) The third stanza is our next problem of comparative study. Its opening phrase - ... Energy that to Blake is Eternal Delight and for the Exuberance that to him is Beauty. This fullness is "the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord", 58 or - as he puts it in his long prophetic poem Milton (1804-1808) where he makes the older poet return to correct some of his errors - the Poetic Genius, Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity. 59 Blake also terms it in the same poem... rearranged and new-married and yet others undergo intuitive development or intuitive alteration. On the whole a creation de novo results, which includes old motifs recognizable in a modified psychological light and original motifs appearing out of combined and permuted elements of the anterior creation. Now for Paradise Lost and The Tyger. A general background influence is well expressed by Bateson ...
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