Prometheus : created humans from clay, stole fire from Olympus & taught men the use of it & various arts. Zeus chained him to a ledge high up in the Caucasus for vultures to feast daily on his liver. He bore this torment until Hercules set him free.
... where is Life in all this? 2 The Revolt of the Earth Has no one, then, ever found the key? There was Socrates: “Know thyself.” They murdered Socrates. There was Prometheus, who wanted to bring the Divine Fire to men. A myth? Symbolically, one could say that in 399 B.C., on the day of the hemlock, the West took a fatal turn. That day we were irremediably moving... as in planets, through which one can seize upon great vistas of the human march, and its impasses. Near the time Socrates was born, Buddha entered into Nirvana, and Aeschylus was writing his Prometheus . Three great human seeds of whom the last one remains mysterious and unknown. One could say that, with Buddha's Nirvana, Asia took a turn – not exactly “fatal,” like that of the West, because... Of course, one can still enjoy indoor meditations and individual “liberations,” which are even quite refreshing in the midst of our chaotic world. But meanwhile the Earth remains in chains, like Prometheus upon his Caucasus, and in due time the murky osmosis will not lease a single consciousness intact. Indeed, we must also face the fact that the oasis of beauty never survives the surrounding barbarism ...
... receptive mood. He shared with Shelley a spontaneous flow, a rapid inspiration, though one cannot put on an equal footing the rhetorical rush of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the visionary fire of Prometheus Unbound. Byron began Page 59 his poetic career by dictating oriental tales to his valet while dressing for dinners to which he had been invited: not in the least an irrational... wherein, assimilating new attributes, Shelley's growth might have proceeded. He had even psychological affinities — a fusion of the romantic attitude with Greek culture, the resurgent idealism of a Prometheus, a love of intellectual and political freedom, a revolt against conventional morality and religion, a sense of the universal Spirit's plastic press. With so much in common between him and the older... towards mysticism. Shelley had not the definite mystic experience, but the tendency for it was ingrained in him, as proved by various long rhythm-rolls and short song-snatches, ranging from Prometheus Unbound to the fugitive yet unforgettable "I can give not what men call love." Perhaps the most unexpected and implicitly beautiful summary of it is in the Skylark . Oppressed by a sense of mortal ...
... cosmic. In this respect Keats's Hyperion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are nearer to it. The idea Spirit, behold The glorious destiny nascent in Shelley's earlier work, Queen Mab, finds its fuller poetic expression in Prometheus Unbound. If this is a veritable cosmic lyric, Savitri is a cosmic epic. Prometheus, the man undergoing "pain, pain ever, for ever" for having... Asia rises up. steps into the "secret way", accosts Demagorgon, embodied as Jupiter's own son, in overthrows him to establish on earth the rule of a higher moral conscience, the rule of love. Prometheus is now unbound, joins Asia, the new day dawns, all things renovate: ... and when the dawn Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts, Could e'er be beautiful? Yet... the cosmic heart's throb, Sri Aurobindo felt and comprehended it fully. Yet if Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is epic poetry of the future, I wouldn't hesitate in venturing to state that Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a wonderfully revealing and prophetic poetic utterance as it is, lyric poetry of the future. As one enters comparatively the modern age one finds poets, including world-dramatists ...
... splendour of his vision and its hints and images, but the thought seems almost to disappear from the concrete grasp of the intelligence into a wonder of light and a music of marvellous sound. The Prometheus and Epipsychidion show this turn of his genius at its height; they are two of the three greatest things he has left to us on the larger scale. Here he does come near to something like the natural... that he uses the pure lyrical form for his greatest sight, for what would now be called his "message". When he turns to that, he attempts always a larger and more expansive form. The greatness of Prometheus Unbound which remains, when all is said, his supreme effort and one of the masterpieces of poetry, arises from the combination of this larger endeavour and profounder substance with the constant... discordant and shrill. He has not the symbols or the thought-forms through which he can make the spirit of Page 143 light, love and freedom intimate and near to men; he has, as in the Prometheus , to go for them to his imagination or to some remote luminous experience of ideal worlds and to combine these beautiful ideal images, too delicately profound in their significance, too veiled in ...
... can really say that his work is worthy of these heroic martyrs? Prometheus chained to the rock and gnawed by the vulture's beak endured in the strong hope of man's final deliverance from the tyrant powers of the middle-heaven who sought to keep him from his divine destiny; but the human race for whom he suffered forgot Prometheus, forgot the dazzling hope to which his life had pointed them and, involved ...
... with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason" . 22 This occurs in the more elevated Wordsworthian passages as well as in parts of Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line... idealism", and it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais , is considered by Sri Aurobindo 30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle ...
... Night the Fourth, 11.165-167). Page 172 not his own: aspiring to them and seizing them, he is a rebel and a thief. In thus stealing the fire he is like Prometheus. Blake must have been familiar with the Prometheus-theme: there is that daring aspirer, Satan or the false Messiah, who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell "formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss". 118 The Abyss ...
... unguessed And the Transcendent kept its secrecy." (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,p.271) Prometheus and Ganymede The human spirit has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals. Goethe has well characterised them as, on one side, the ideal symbolised by Prometheus, a passion for 'Vernunft und Wissenschaft des Menschen allerh ö chste Kraft' ('the Reason and Knowledge ...
... such as increased temperature.” Atoms too may undergo a change of organization under the action of that Fire, which does not burn you to a cinder any more than the new breathing asphyxiates you. Prometheus, too, wanted to bring the divine Fire to men, but who wants it? To change the properties of a body it is enough to change the organization of its atomic constituents, our Science tells us, but all... negativity of the Earth is supremely Positive, like the eruption of an unknown volcano that brings us an unknown Treasure: our new Means. An invasion of the divine Fire on the Earth, the hope of Prometheus unbound. The junction of heaven and earth through the walls of our grave. That Fire un-earths everything: good and evil, the beautiful and the hideous, truth and falsehood – life and death – as ...
... wings of a cloud. Here are all the materials for one of those intangible harmonies of woven & luminous mist with which Shelley allures & baffles us. The personages & scenery are those of Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound & the Witch of Atlas. But Kalidasa's city in the mists is no evanescent city of sunlit clouds; it is his own beautiful & luxurious Ujjayini idealised & exempted from mortal affection; like ...
... sovereign power by which man has become possessed of himself, student and master of his own forces, the godhead on which the other godheads in him have leaned for help in their ascent; it has been the Prometheus of the mythical parable, the helper, instructor, elevating friend, civiliser of mankind. Recently, however, there has been a very noticeable revolt of the human mind against this sovereignty of ...
... Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon Burns inextinguishably beautiful. Here again is Shelley describing, in the song of the Fourth Spirit in the First Act of his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the poet: Nor seeks or finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The ...
... about it, as also has in its high moments the not infrequent recourse by him to a semi-Miltonic diction without Milton's compactness. Shelley in sections of Adonais and in large tracts of Prometheus Unbound (minus the lyrics), Keats in Hyperion and even Byron in some of his rare forceful sincerities have to a marked degree the same source of inspiration. But there has entered into that ...
... Infinite pain. (K.D.S.) Equally magnificent in its expression of a similar motive in a more picturesque style is the voice of Aeschylus's Prometheus: Aether divine, and Winds of swiftest wing! Founts of all rivers! All the Deeps that know The innumerable laughter of the waves! ...
... allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. The same can be said in comparison with Shelley's passionately noble conclusion to his drama about Prometheus in revolt against all autocracy of the Magnified Ego whether by a human king or a priest-conceived God of wrath and terror: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs ...
... so lucidly to the mind, and it suffers also by an unsteady poetic fire in the various parts. If Chattopadhyaya makes something even less colossal yet large and poetic enough, if he fashions a new Prometheus Unbound, essays and finishes another Hyperion or rebuilds a Paradiso, in terms of a fresh and mature mystic originality, he will stand like a giant in the dawn of a new era, his masterpiece gathering ...
... will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. Not that Shelley is without fight: after all, he has written Prometheus Unbound and its grand close is as heroic, as loftily strong, in the midst of the world's wreckage as this apostrophe to Toussaint. The difference, however, is that Shelley is bravely defiant while ...
... 8. Long Skulls and Broad Skulls Hitler and his God The White Man’s Pride We have met the noble Aryan – the “Prometheus of mankind”, “standard-bearer of human progress” and “highest image of the Lord” – when leafing through Hitler’s Mein Kampf. We recall that the discovery of an Aryan root language was made around 1800, in that fecund period of literary ...
... significant that in these days — when anything spectacular is greeted with a fanfare as a godlike feat, a gentle colossus like Sri Aurobindo can still be acclaimed by aspirants of all climes as a modem Prometheus of the Soul's latent fire waiting its hour to out flash an Era of Light. When I .envision, his radiant face in my meditation I am constantly re- minded of Chesterton's memorable lines: To ...
... reformist. He yearned to liberate the world from the obscurantism of priests and the despotism of kings. Mind and body clear of shackles - such was the visionary drive behind his great lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. From that "something afar" where there is freedom from our sorrowful sphere he longed to bring a new light, love and liberty to that sphere. For what was initially seen at a distance was ...
... originally, of a tribe which settled in Phthia in the southeast of Thessaly; it later developed into the national name of the Greeks. The Hellenes traced their descent to Hellen, grandson of Prometheus. In Ilion, the word usually describes Achilles and his men, who came, from Phthia. Hellespont: Narrow strait dividing Europe from Asia at the final exit of the waters of the Black Sea and ...
... engrossed in his favorite occupation: Page 8 reading. Nothing seemed to escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude ...
... grace that Heaven allows to doomed institutions and forfeited powers. Like Kansa of old, it seeks to confirm its failing grip on the world by murderous guile and violence or like the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound gropes for safety through vain diplomacies and the martyrdom of the champions of suffering humanity. Poor in invention except in the cunning variation of savage tortures or petty brutalities ...
... all That colour kindled for the Eternal's eye In deep Ajanta fades; no rhythms recall The two grand plays the terrible chisel-stroke Of the titan mind of Aeschylus set beside Prometheus Bound : their power Time's brute hand broke. Heaven's light passes—divine Aurobindo died. But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room For dire eclipse of its eternity ...
... sovereign power by which man has become possessed of himself, student and master of his own forces, the godhead on which the other godheads in him have leaned for help in their ascent; it has been the Prometheus of the mythical parable, the helper, instructor, elevating friend, civiliser of mankind.” 17 Seldom has somebody written more highly (and more beautifully) about reason. And as we have tried to ...
... corner stone of the rather ramshackle ideological construction is the idea of the racial superiority of the Aryan-Nordic-Germanic people. Theoretically speaking, the Aryan was, in Hitler’s words, “the Prometheus of mankind”; practically speaking the Germans were the Herrenmenschen , a people above all others, worthy of lording it over them and being served by them. We have seen numerous examples of this ...
... That colour kindled for the Eternal's eye In deep Ajanta fades; no rhythms recall The two grand plays the terrible chisel-stroke Of the titan mind of Aeschylus set beside Prometheus Bound: their power Time's brute hand broke. Heaven's light passes - divine Aurobindo died. But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room For dire eclipse of its eternity ...
... 6. Mein Kampf Hitler and his God “Great Master of the Lie” If the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth”, his antagonist was the Jew. “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan”, wrote Hitler. “There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed ...
... “This very fact justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term MAN. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing ...
... culture, every product of art, science and technical skill which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power.” 451 For, as we know, the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind”. All the same, this is an intriguing statement by Hitler, the supreme racist: if one could not discuss what race or races were “the original standard-bearers of human culture”, how could ...
... Stannard, Russell: Science and Wonders , Faber and Faber, 1996 Staune, Jean, and others: L’Homme face à la science , Criterion, 1992 Stenger, Victor J.: God – The Failed Hypothesis , Prometheus Books, 2007 Stengers, Isabelle, and others: 100 mots pour commencer à penser les sciences , Le Seuil, 2003 Sterelny, Kim: Dawkins vs. Gould , Icon Books, 2007 Susskind, Leonard: The Cosmic ...
... I did read an interesting book by John Drew on India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford) with many valuable things about Shelley's indebtedness to India. (After all he called the soul-figure of Prometheus Unbound 'Asia', did he not?) Yeats the Initiate was not a systematic book but papers written over the years. But I think WBY would have liked it. (4.11.1987) From K ...
... essayist and historian. 4. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900): German philosopher. One of the principles propounded in his philosophy is that the strong must rule over the weak. 5. Prometheus is a Titan of Greek mythology who stole fire from heaven for mankind and as a punishment was chained to a rock. Daily an eagle devoured his liver, which was made whole again at night. 6. Atlas ...
... about the Middle Ages and Romanticism, I suppose. NIRODBARAN: You said the other day there has not been any successful blank verse in England after Shakespeare and Milton. What about Shelley's Prometheus Unbound? SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say there is no successful blank verse. Plenty of people have written successfully, such as Byron, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustom and some others. But there ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: It depends on what you mean by experience. An idea or a thought may be an experience; feeling is also experience. PURANI: In comparing Shelley and Milton, Abercrombie says that Prometheus Unbound does not have as great a theme as Paradise Lost and so it couldn't equal the latter in greatness. SRI AUROBINDO: It is not as great because Shelley doesn't create anything there. But ...
... are his characteristics. Next came the Asura, the Titan, the egoistic mental man in his earlier avatar seeking to emerge out of the purely vital nature. Ambition and pride are his guiding spirit. Prometheus is his prototype. There are still two higher types which have been established in the human consciousness and in the world atmosphere as dynamic ideals, if not as common concrete facts of the material ...
... Plotinus, 150, 361 Poland, 72, 127 Pole, the, 304 Polonius, 187 Pope, 212 Pound, Ezra, 192 Pragmatism, 326 Prithwiraj, 90 Prometheus, 234 Proteus, 274 Prussia, 88 Puranas, the, 71 Pythagoras, 150,211,219 QUANTUM MECHANICS, 316 RACINE, 197 Raghus, the, 55 Ramayana, the ...
... superhuman delight? Even the poets who are most materialistic, who are averse to any Ideal, who are anti-divine, whatever may be their outer utterance – are they not the descendants of Lucifer or Prometheus? Let us recollect what Baudelaire wrote about them, about the pangs of their hearts: Une Idée, une Forme, un Être Parti de I' azur et tombè Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombé, Ou nul ...
... different from either symbolic or allegorical figures". Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. Arthurian legends may be the type of concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation. Prometheus Unbound of Shelley can be taken as a symbolic figure. With regard to the function of the symbol in expression Sri Aurobindo says in another letter: "A symbol expresses not the play Page ...
... number 'seven. On his return to Ithaca and after the destruction of the suibid.rs, the minstrel sings how at the birth of Odysseus he had been blessed (or cursed) by Tantalus with a ravenous heart, by Prometheus with "the seed of a great light", his razor-edged mind, and by Heracles with "the unsated blaze", his restless spirit. 70 Next night he tells his father, wife and son that, in the course of his ...
... Sri Aurobindo : It depends upon what you mean by "experience". An idea may be an experience, a feeling may be an experience. Disciple : In comparing Shelley and Milton he says that '' Prometheus Unbound " is not as great a theme as " Paradise Lost ". Sri Aurobindo : It is not great because Shelley does rot create anything there. But the theme is equally great. Disciple : ...
... terrestrial stage; a Kacha mastering an alien lore in England but rejecting the blandishments of Devayani; a young Augustus at Baroda, imposing his empire on the "realms of gold"; a Perseus or Prometheus of 'Bhavani Mandir'; an Arjuna surrendered to Krishna at Alipur; a Vyasa doing a neo-Mahabharata in the Arya, a neo-Vishvamitra giving us a new Gayatri in The Mother; a Yogishwara Krishna ...
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