Shakespeare : William (1564-1616), Ben Jonson had prophecised that he “was not of an age, but for all time”. The majority of scholars accept 38 plays, 154 sonnets, & 2 heroic narrative poems as the work of Shakespeare. “Around 1719, Alexander Pope was employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson to produce an opulent new edition of Shakespeare. The six-volume New Edition of the Collected Works of Shakespeare finally appeared in 1725. It had silently ‘regularised’ Shakespeare’s metre & rewritten his verse in a number of places, & demoted about 1560 lines of Shakespearean material to footnotes, arguing that they were so ‘excessively bad’ that Shakespeare could never have written them. Other lines were excluded from the edition altogether. In 1726, the lawyer, poet & pantomime deviser Lewis Theobald published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored (1726), revealing his superior knowledge of editorial technique, cataloguing the errors in Pope’s work, & suggesting a number of revisions to the text. This upset Pope, who then made Theobald the original hero of Dunciad. The second edition of Pope’s Shakespeare appeared in 1728, but aside from making some minor revisions to the preface, it seems that Pope had little to do with it. Most of later 18th-century editors of Shakespeare dismissed Pope’s creatively motivated approach to textual criticism. Pope’s preface, however, continued to be highly rated. It was suggested that Shakespeare’s texts were thoroughly contaminated by actors’ interpolations & they would influence editors for most of the 18th century.” [Internet]
... must have recognised in the two elements the face of Chaucer and the face of Shakespeare and realised that Shakespeare can take up Chaucer into himself and serve as the one sufficient face. The life-instinct can even lose itself in externalities as it does often enough in much of Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare. Shakespeare keeps the extravert disposition in its right place and sits in the life-core... engineer was hoist with his own petard. It is doubtful whether Ibsen and Strindberg will last as long as Shakespeare: it is certain that Shakespeare will outlast Shaw. But Shaw is perfectly correct in thinking himself superior to Shakespeare in intellectuality. And this is not because Shakespeare is a poet and intellectuality has no place in poetry. The point is whether he has an intellectuality to... an Englishman. Nobody has uttered a cross word about Old Shakespeare, our English Shakespeare. This Irish heretic is going too far!" We may smile at such a reaction as we may smile at Shaw's own exaggeration of Shakespeare's intellectual inferiority to him. But we must try to understand it no less than the provocative heresy. Shakespeare is both Godlike in his own self and Godlike in relation to ...
... between Shakespeare and Kalidasa and Shakespeare and Browning. He shows how, although Sri Aurobindo would set Kalidasa close to Shakespeare but at the same time a notch or two below him in view of his lack of the Shakespearian range and scope of creativity, he gives credit to Kalidasa in two respects, his portrayal of children and his delineation of mothers, in which he finds Shakespeare lacking in... practice by two major critics, Helen Vendler writing on the Sonnets of Shakespeare and Stephen Booth on the plays [Russ McDonald, ed. Shakespeare Reread : The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 25 and p. 43]. A suitable way to characterise K.D. Sethna's writings on Shakespeare is to call them the gathering of the harvest or fruit of his long-lived-with... when he goes on to aver that Shakespeare is 'not a poet of the thinking mind proper' (p. 28), he may be missing how much of the mind thinking (in the fashion of Emerson's 'man thinking'), which is to be preferred to 'the thinking mind', is there in Shakespeare. However, his main corroboration of the Aurobindonian perception of 'an unfailing divinity of power' in Shakespeare is Valuable. It is the kind ...
... Adventures in Criticism Shakespeare and "Things to Come" Up to now Shakespeare remains among English poets a "topless tower" — sole and inexplicable. Inexplicable in his inspired prolificity, and not, as the Baconians urge, by having masterpieces ascribed to his "ill-educated" mind. It is argued that what tells against his authorship of the plays is not... Shakespeare's. Shakespeare wrote on occasion like a book-worm, a lawyer, a commander-in-chief, a courtier, a politician; what he could never do was to introduce the genuine philosophical accent. The whole cast and vibration of his style is determined by a vital gusto, impetuousness or ingenuity and not intellectual contemplation; while, if Bacon was anything, he was an intellectual. Shakespeare dragged into... half philosophical half scientific thinking, the "Novum Organum" note? If a writer creates even in part out of himself, how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his essential nature out? Milton, Wordsworth, even Shelley had, unlike Shakespeare, an intellectual substance and their rhythm reflects it; Bacon too would have given his dramas some touch at least of an inspiration uttering in a dynamic ...
... didst not borrow of Vice her indirect Crooked and abject means. Shakespeare has: God knows, my son, By what bypaths and indirect crook'd ways I met this crown. Says Eliot: "Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare the particular image. 'Indirect crook'd' is forceful in Shakespeare, a mere pleonasm in Massinger. 'Crook'd ways' is a metaphor; Massinger's... TALK TWENTY-TWO A song of Shakespeare's from Measure for Measure closed our discussion of melopoeia. Well, Shakespeare is just the poet with whom to start our discussion of phanopoeia. For, Shakespeare is the superman of imagery. But let us first say a few prefatory words on our subject. Just as the music of melopoeia must come fused with significance,... and abysm of time... We may remark how Shakespeare gets his best effect frequently by a combination of the abstract with the concrete: "sere" with "yellow", "scorns" with "whips", "abysm of time" with "dark backward". Somehow the concreteness thus becomes both inten-sified and magnified. Of course, the line about the "dark backward" is Shakespeare at an unusual occupation, almost an occupation ...
... at work in the dramas of Shakespeare. Whether Shakespeare himself had any belief in them it is difficult to say. In one passage somewhere somebody says, I shall call spirits from the vasty deep. Another fellow retorts, "Yes, you may call but will they answer you?" It seems to reflect Shakespeare's own scepticism. But it is very difficult to know whether Shakespeare believes in any blessed thing... however vivid and particularised they may seem, as if they were reflections of real characters. All the dramas of Shakespeare are full of such reflections and he doesn't seem to have lived his life at all unless we regard his Sonnets as some sort of autobiography. So whether Shakespeare believed in Occultism or not we do not know and it is a question which is practically irrelevant, because actually... glow, that strange intensity which is sustained and comes out even in the poetic quality because here you might say that some occult force is behind Shakespeare, goading him on, intensifying even his capabilities so that he is all the more Shakespeare than he usually is. Hence the constant occurrence of his ne plus ultra of poetic effect in Macbeth, and many of the passages which reach the height ...
... Classical and Romantic 4 The climax of the first Romanticism: Elizabethan poetry -Shakespeare and Spenser As a poet of Romantic drama, Shakespeare is - to quote Sri Aurobindo's words 1 - "quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in exter-nals'; they have the same outward form and crude materials... To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance between the creative Life-force and the creative Intelligence we have only to juxtapose Shakespeare and Milton. Even a descriptive passage will serve: Shakespeare on wind and water apropos of Sleep's sealing up the eyes of the shipboy upon "the high and giddy mast" and rocking his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge... can recognise a poignant mellifluence of the same power that in Shakespeare is all a-tremble with passion: it is again as if not from the grey cells the poetry took off but from the guts though now with an imaginative rhythm sweetly lulling us into persuasion with a luxury of exquisite sensations posing as thoughts. Both in Shakespeare and Spenser the flowing over of the Life-force in colourful or ...
... comparison of poets like Blake and Shakespeare or Dante and Shakespeare by critics like Housman and Eliot? It seems to me that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not reach; but in essence... measure—for Shakespeare had not the mystic's vision; but as a poet of the play of life Shakespeare is everywhere and Blake nowhere. These are tricks of language and idiosyncrasies of preference. One has only to put each thing in its place, without confusing issues and one can see that Housman's praise of Blake may be justified but any exaltation of him by comparison with Shakespeare is not in accordance... narrow mould the infinite variety of the processes of Nature. Shakespeare may have so much vital force as to recommend himself to a large audience not so much for his poetry at first as for his dramatic vividness and power; it must be remembered that it was the German romantics two centuries later who brought about the apotheosis of Shakespeare—before that he had a much more limited circle of admirers ...
... which the Sonnets of Shakespeare, where this phrase for cock- sureness occurs, 1 are often considered to have provided the largest occasion and the smallest ground. W.H. Auden, 2 in his preamble to an acute literary estimate, sums up rather acidly the situation: "It so happens that we know almost nothing for certain about the historical circumstances in which Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets... cannot tell." A sheer outsider as "somebody else" could lend no clue, but the two people with whom the diarist Shakespeare was intimately connected and to whom the Sonnets were addressed were bound to be in the know. If we could see them in a "close- up", as it were, with Shakespeare, we should persumably be the wiser. So Auden's admission implies that "the discovery" might supply the illumining... been associated with both Shakespeare and his plays. 2. "The dark lady" is none of the candidates so far discussed but a woman most probably of Italian extraction with perhaps two Christian names, the chief and definite one being "Anastasia". She was a citizen of London who once figured characteristically though namelessly in association with Shakespeare in John Manningham's Diary ...
... concealed - Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses." 3 Quoting from Milton as well as Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo says: "Such lines... are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique... To tell my story. Perhaps the Shakespeare-line is the nearest to Milton in expression as well as technique. Here too we have spondees and long vowels and a slow obstructed motion: here too we have both the words "pain" and "world", the former in just the same metrical position as in Milton. The sole psycho-logical difference is that Shakespeare has a certain controlled vehemence most suitable... here that the Mantra which Milton attains by the austerely sublime is not a monopoly of poetic austerity. It can manifest in a style whose temper is one of vibrant exuberance, the style of Shakespeare. Shakespeare too captures the Mantric music on a few occasions: we listen to it, according to Sri Aurobindo, when we get: In the dark backward and abysm of Time. We may add: the prophetic ...
... Logopoeia in Shakespeare which will give me a chance to complete the roll of medicos I started during my discussion of Phanopoeia. Apropos of Eliot's simile of the etherised evening and Shakespeare's passage beginning "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" I brought in a number of Ashram surgeons and physicians. The name of one doctor got left out. I shall do it honour now. Shakespeare, as you know... reads: In a most hideous and dreadful manner. When Bernard Shaw once heard Mrs Patrick Campbell say this line he could not believe Shakespeare could have perpetrated anything so bad. He accused her of having improvised it to cover up a lapse of memory. Shakespeare is not such a terrible flop always. In fact, he has a few very successful Logopoeias. Many of his great speeches would be logopoeic by... possession of his senses and even looking into a mirror to see that the dentist catches hold of the right tooth. Dr. Patil and Shakespeare have led us into quite a digression. Let us return to Logopoeia, bidding adieu to our dentist but not to the poet. We have said that Shakespeare is constantly passing over from Logopoeia to Phanopoeia. But in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic ...
... William Himself, whether the dark woman whom Shakespeare loved against his better judgment was Mary Fitton or someone else or nobody at all, whether the language is that of hyperbolical compliment to a patron or that of an actual passionate affection; but to the lover of poetry in me these things do not matter at all. It may be a historical fact that Shakespeare when he sat down to write these poems intended... has provided for us; and the idea so formed will be the individuality of the man so far as we can assimilate him, the only part of him therefore that is of real value to us. The individuality of Shakespeare as expressed in his recorded actions & his relations to his contemporaries is a matter of history and has nothing to do with appreciation of his poetry. It may interest me as a study of human character... it was only the bodily and sensational case of that huge spirit which so intended,—the food-sheath and the life-sheath of him, to use Hindu phraseology; but the mind, the soul which was the real Shakespeare felt, as he wrote, every phase of the passion he was expressing to the very utmost, felt precisely those exultations, chills of jealousy and disappointment, noble affections, dark and unholy fires ...
... Great Poets of the World The World's Greatest Poets Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was ... e's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind's choice among its many high and... Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of the scope of their work as a whole, for there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from that point of view a far greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either spreads its strength and its achievement over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare; both are ...
... Guru, "Shakespeare at his best"? The very name of Shakespeare makes my breath shake with fear, and to talk of equalling him at his best, oh, people will call me mad, Sir. If someone else had told me that, I would have called him mad! But I don't know what to say to you! You stagger me so much! Well, but look at logic. G.B.S. declares himself the equal, if not superior, of Shakespeare. You write... poetry than Shaw ever did (which is easy because he never wrote any). So you are the equal (if not the superior) of Shakespeare. But, if I remember aright, some of my lines you have called "damn fine"! So? Did I indeed? Then, logically, it must have been equal to the best of Shakespeare, otherwise it couldn't have been so damned. This also is logic. Now about this poem, I fear to ask you about... Very fine, yes, and perfect in expression; but I don't know about damn fine, for that is a tremendous superlative. Such a solemn phrase should only be used when you write something equalling Shakespeare at his best. Yes, Sir, your alterations appear extremely easy, but the fact that they didn't come to me even after struggling breaths, proves them otherwise. Of course if I had been the Lord ...
... few lines, as it were carelessly dashed off, and yet they succeed in weighing Goethe against Shakespeare with an admirable percipience: Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself... phrased reply redolent of wisdom and learning and wit and humour. What a diversity of themes, and what a variety of approaches! The twelve great masters of style: Aeschylus and Dante: Dante and Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Blake: the poetry of the school of Dryden and Pope: Shelley's Skylark: Baudelaire's "vulgarity": Anatole France's "ironising": Walter de la Mare's Listeners: five kinds of poetic style:... e's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind's choice among its many high and effulgent ...
... fashion is that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford (isn't it?) so we have to start all over again. It seems to me that people can't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because it's almost impossible to believe that any human being could do so. It seems like a stream flowing from the cosmic ground itself of which Shakespeare was but the vehicle. So in a sense no-one wrote Shakespeare. Don't you like... his known landlady, Mrs. Mountjoy, did so." There is not the slightest logic here. Besides, Rowse believes that Emilia's affair with Shakespeare was over before she entered Forman's parlour in 1597: how then can she be connected with Mrs. Mountjoy with whom Shakespeare had lodged some time between 1602 and 1604? Finally there is the argument which Rowse considers very impressive. Emilia was a bit of... rather than tribal dark skins. I can't see Shakespeare expressing surprise that a lady who had invited a 'blind-date' with Burbage and had submitted willingly enough to the playwright instead of the actor proving false, since she was clearly promiscuous from the Page 283 start. A court musician is much more likely to have enchanted Shakespeare - and the aristocratic Mr. W.H. - than ...
... and the juggler on his rope. There is no Othello, no Iago, no Desdemona but all these are merely varieties Page 386 of name & form, not of Shakespeare, but in which Shakespeare is immanent and which still exist merely because Shakespeare is immanent in them. Nevertheless he who best succeeds in imaging forth these children of illusion, this strange harmonic Maya, is ever adjudged by us... was therefore a subtler and vaster world in Shakespeare than the world we know him to have bodied forth into tangible material of literature. Secondly we note that all these imaginations already existed in Shakespeare unmanifested Page 387 and unformed before they took shape and body; for certainly they did not come from outside. Shakespeare took his materials from this legend or that play... outlast it. Of the latter kind poetical creation is a salient example. At a certain time in a certain country one named Shakespeare created a new world by the force of his Avidya, his faculty of imagining what is not. That world is as real and unreal today as it was when Shakespeare created it or in more accurate Vedantic language asrijata , loosed it forth from the causal world within him. Within the ...
... by a gambolling fancy. 1 April 1932 Shakespeare From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this from Shakespeare?— the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come. Are they really from his usual plane—the vital? The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly... euphonious, and it is no wonder Belloc should feel as if the very harps of heaven were echoed by the Mantuan. He couples Shakespeare with Virgil as a master of (to put it in a phrase of Arjava's) "earth-transforming gramarye". The quotations he gives from Shakespeare struck me as rather peculiar in the context: I don't exactly remember them but something in the style of "Night's tapers are burnt... of little value. Take these lines from Shakespeare— Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven— they are plainly vital in their excited thrill, for only the vital can speak with that thrill and pulse of passion—the rhythm also has the vital undulation and surge so common in Shakespeare. I have given an instance elsewhere ...
... artist nothing is small; he bestows as much of his art within the narrow limit of his small Page 226 characters as within the wide compass of his greatest. Shakespeare lavishes life upon his minor characters, but in Shakespeare it is the result of an abounding creative energy; he makes living men, as God made the world, because he could not help it, because it was in his nature and must out... from that embarrassment which most poets feel in dealing dramatically with children. Even Shakespeare disappoints us. This great poet with his rich & complex mind usually finds it difficult to attune himself again to the simplicity, irresponsibility & naive charm of childhood. Arthur, whom the Shakespeare-worshipper would have us regard as a masterpiece, is no real child; he is too voulu , too... two; but from Shakespeare we expect something more, some perfect & passionate enshrining of the most engrossing & selfless of human affections. And to this there is not even an approach. In this one respect the Indian poet, perhaps from the superior depth and keenness of the domestic feelings peculiar to his nation, has outstripped his greater English compeer. Kalidasa like Shakespeare seems to have ...
... to injure them any more Page 136 than Shakespeare hated Iago for injuring Othello; do you think that Shakespeare shared the feelings of [Lodovico] when he condemned the successful villain to death & torture? If Shakespeare did hate Iago, you would at once say that it was illusion, Avidya, on the part of Shakespeare—since it is Shakespeare himself who set Iago there to injure Othello, since... of motion. The Purusha is really unmoving; he is the motionless & silent spectator of a drama of which He himself is the stage, the theatre, the scenery, the actors and the acting. He is the poet Shakespeare watching Desdemona & Othello, Hamlet & the murderous Uncle, Rosalind & Jacques & Viola and all the other hundred multiplicities of himself acting & talking & rejoicing & suffering, all Himself &... reflux of things; but all these are not God in Himself, but God in His shadows & appearances; they are, to repeat our figure, the shadows and figments of Shakespeare's Page 131 mind, Shakespeare is not only vaster than all his drama-world put together, he is not only both in it and outside it, but apart from it and other than it. THE STUDENT Do you mean that these are emanations from ...
... m was not of the creative Life-force but of the creative Intelligence can easily be marked if, just as we put Shakespeare face to face with Milton or Chaucer or Bacon, we compare certain lines from the supreme Elizabethan to those of the most outstanding later poets. Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life - a verse already cited in the earlier comparison - ... tomb. Page 79 Or mark the way Shakespeare expresses a sense of oppression and misfortune: Who would fardels bear. To grunt and sweat under a weary life? and compare it to Wordsworth's confrontation of universal mystery: The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world. Then note how Shakespeare articulates the peace of death as an end to human... the one highly charged with feeling, the other more tempered in its heart-cry as well as a little lower in poetic quality, we may take a pair of stanzas from each of two sonnets by Shakespeare. In these stanzas Shakespeare mixes reflection and emotion, but the basic life-plane declares itself in the response which "our nerves of mental sensation" at once return to the word-texture and the rhythm-movement: ...
... The great magician, Shakespeare, by his marvellous poetic rendering of life and the spell his poetry casts upon us, conceals this general inadequacy of the work of his time: the whole age which he embodies is magnified by his presence and the adjacent paler figures catch something of the light and kinship of his glory and appear in it more splendid than they are. But Shakespeare is an exception, a genius... The Future Poetry Chapter X The Course of English Poetry - II Elizabethan Drama Shakespeare and the Poetry of the Life-Spirit The Elizabethan age, perhaps the era of most opulent output in the long history of English poetic genius, is abundant, untrammelled and unbridled in its power, but not satisfying in its performance. Beautiful as are many of... deeper yield of the human spirit. The defect of this Elizabethan work is most characteristic and prominent in that part of it which has been vaunted as its chief title to greatness, its drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe can be looked at in their separate splendours; but the rest of Elizabethan dramatic work is a brilliantly smoky nebula, powerful in effort rather than sound and noble in performance. ...
... two deal with quite different spheres, can the comparison be valid? Or, if Blake really has more pure poetry, then can he be said to be greater than Shakespeare? Sri Aurobindo : Shakespeare is superior in one way, Blake in another. Shakespeare is greater because he has a greater poetic power and more creative force, while Blake is more expressive. Disciple : What is the difference... his own way. 18-1-1940 – Morning Disciple : We heard from you that some people consider Blake greater than Shakespeare – is it correct? Sri Aurobindo : I did not say that. What Housman says is that Blake has more pure poetry than Shakespeare. Disciple : What does he mean by that? Sri Aurobindo : He means that Blake’s poetry is not vital or mental,... form and no substance, is he greater than one who has substance and no form? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare, others say Euripides is greater. There are others, again, who say Euripides is nowhere near Sophocles. How can you say whether Dante is greater than Shakespeare? Disciple : It is better to ask what is the criterion of great poetry. Sri Aurobindo : Is there ...
... say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch, I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you... depend on the plane from which it comes; it depends on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense Page 25 vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if one could get a continuous inspiration from the overmind, that would... ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you." Shakespeare knew very well what he was doing; he saw the mixture as well as any critic could and he accepted it because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the ...
... as Milton, much less Shakespeare. Even Spenser he puts above them in a total view. Thus, relating them to the Elizabethan Age, he tells us: "They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser." 4 After... and Keats, on account of their supreme gifts, could have stood higher than Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser so far as "fullness of native utterance" and "perfect correspondence between substance and form" are concerned. Neither of them had the capacity to create living characters: so they could not have competed with Shakespeare in what may specifically be termed creative genius and perhaps even Milton's... explicit in their best work. If mystic explicitness were the sine qua non, Shakespeare who has little of it would not be so supreme. But a mystic implicitness is indispensable. For, without it ordinary things and themes and emotions and ideas of the human situation could not have reached the acme of expressive form that Shakespeare shows again and again and again. This acme is impossible unless one lives ...
... early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modem times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up... what mattered was my application of the principle, and he seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs. But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in question; the question... disparagement of the Shakespearean passage on "sleep" and the line on the sea considered by the greatest critics and not by myself only as ranking amongst the most admired and admirable things in Shakespeare is surprising and it seems to me to illustrate a serious limitation in his poetic perception and temperamental sympathies. Shakespeare's later terse and packed style with its more powerful dramatic ...
... mould the infinite variety of the processes of Nature. Shakespeare may have so much vital force as to recommend himself to large audience not so much for his poetry at first as for his dramatic vividness and power; it must be remembered that it was the German romantics two centuries later, who brought about the apotheosis of Shakespeare—before that he had a much more limited circle of admirers... have been difficult to live with himself. His photograph confirms that view. But a man at war with himself can write excellent poetry—if he is a poet; often better poetry than another, just as Shakespeare wrote his best tragedies when he was in a state of chaotic Page 119 upheaval, at least so his interpreters say. One needs a higher inspiration to write poems of harmony and divine... you'll find. So please read again and see if these read well. They seem all right. Page 182 I will stop writing English verses now and turn more to singing plus reading Shakespeare to enter more into the spirit of the English tongue and its own native atmosphere of words and poetic lilt. October 8,1936 On that evening when I prayed for both Jawaharlal ...
... that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not "each; but in essence they stand as mighty equals. As for Blake and Shakespeare, that opinion is more a personal fantasy than anything... Blake's may be pure poetry in Houseman's sense and Shakespeare is where and Blake nowhere. These are tricks of language and idiosyncrasies of preference. One has only to put each thing in its place without confusing issues and one can see that Houseman's praise page-135 of Blake may be justified but the exaltation of him above Shakespeare on the whole is not in accordance with the abiding... especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was "no great things" and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore?14 As ...
... existence of its own and is not utterly unreal. To take the suggestive human parallel, Shakespeare in himself is one and immutable, in his creations he is mutable and many; the personages of his dramas and their words and actions are not Shakespeare in the ultimate truth of himself, yet they are not other than Shakespeare; for they live in him, by him and are of his substance. It is easy to say they are... us and in the world, is really unmoving; He is the motionless and silent spectator of a drama of which He himself is the stage, the theatre, the scenery, the actors and the acting. He is the poet Shakespeare watching Desdemona and Othello, Hamlet and the murderous Uncle, Rosalind and Jacques and Viola, and all the other hundred multiplicities of himself acting and talking and rejoicing and suffering... this republic of animalculae, this Rome of protoplasms, been able to effect? It has analysed the elements; it has weighed the suns and measured the orbits of the stars; it has written the dramas of Shakespeare, the epics of Valmekie and Homer and Vyasa, the philosophies of Kant and Shankara; it has harnessed the forces of Nature to do its bidding; it has understood existence and grasped the conception ...
... take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' " Sri Aurobindo defends Shakespeare and argues that Shakespeare knowingly accepted the mixture because it Page 134 brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that... cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery -that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools - the afflatus of the elan vital and the inspiration... seeming mermaid steers - Page 130 and noting the occurrence of "mermaids" and "mermaid" with no more than a line and a half between, remarks on "mermaids": "I strongly suspect Shakespeare wrote either 'sea-queens' or rather 'sea-brides'". Alternatively he suggests "submarine graces". Well, I for one strongly suspect that Coleridge's judgment, when he wrote this, was a little misted ...
... take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' " Sri Aurobindo defends Shakespeare and argues that Shakespeare knowingly accepted the mixture because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out. The... cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools -the afflatus of the élan vital and the inspiration... adornings: at the helm A seeming mermaid steers– and noting the occurrence of "mermaids" and "mermaid" with no more than a line and a half between, remarks on "mermaids": "I strongly suspect Shakespeare wrote either 'sea-queens' or rather 'sea-brides' ". Alternatively he suggests "submarine graces". Well, I for one strongly suspect that Coleridge's judgment, when he wrote this, was a little misted ...
... type of-transformation. Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe and Kalidasa did a work of this category. It cannot be said that English was undeveloped or quite rustic before Shakespeare, although the image of the grandly real, something truly familiar and intimate that Shakespeare evokes in the heart of foreigners is not given by Spencer, Chaucer or even Marlowe. Shakespeare has revealed something of the universal... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 Tagore the Unique IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit.... are the creators, originators or the peerless presiding deities of Italian and Greek respectively. Properly speaking Tagore may not be classed Page 177 with them. But just as Shakespeare may be said to have led the English language across the border or as Tolstoy made the Russian language join hands with the wide world or as Virgil and Goethe imparted a fresh life and bloom, a fuller ...
... sonnets that "with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart". Browning wrote: "Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!" SATYENDRA: It was said that no such person as Shakespeare existed. SRI AUROBINDO: That idea has been given up—then they said there were two Shakespeares—both at Stratford. PURANI: Bacon also was bolstered up as the real Shakespeare. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Some... I should be immune so long as I am alive. (Laughter) SATYENDRA: They construct a biography out of the poems since they can't approach dead poets. But they can approach you. PURANI: About Shakespeare also they have built up many stories. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. They say his dramas are all experiences of his life. He deserted his wife, became an actor-manager, later abandoned that job. Now it is ...
... —a monotony, I would suggest, Shakespeare would have avoided. By the way, what is the meaning of "aus unseren Stall" in the poem "of lighter vein?" I could not quite equate it with your rendering. Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect that the English poe1 and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even... that he was an equal. He "rote out of his intelligence and his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice rather than by the very necessity of his being... poets. When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either reigns over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare—both are built on an almost cosmic greatness of plan and take all ...
... own message. One was astonished at his eloquence, but not taken absolute prisoner — sense and soul laid under a spell — as one is again and again by the speeches in Shakespeare. Shelley was a "born" poet, so much so that, after Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, nobody has been productive to such an extent and with such a sustained poetic quality as he, yet it was not because of his facility only that... medium was different, but Victor Hugo too was a creator in prose, though not so intense in emanation of character as Balzac, and even in prose he had what Shakespeare had in poetry, though naturally there not to such a heart-disturbing degree as Shakespeare — the gift of imaginative music. Passages in his novels, therefore, approximate often to great poetry, while Balzac for all his giant capacity of dramatic... that can occasionally catch the "sweet everlasting Voices." There are, of course, many poems the whole of which are bull's eyes scored at one shot: some of Shelley's have that look and Shakespeare in his best passages must have laid line after mighty line without needing to halt anywhere or amend anything: has he not the reputation of having never blotted a single word? If he really wrote ...
... level: this will render his words incarnative of the causal body. Sri Aurobindo himself has instanced dialogue after dialogue from Shakespeare for a sovereign operation of the intuitive mind, creating the ne plus ultra of poetry. And yet, according to Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare is the poet of the plane of the life-force, the mind borne on a surge of sensation and emotion, throwing up Page 310 ... words that emerge from the very heart of the enthousiasmos. The terror and horror raised up by Shakespeare of the strange half-physical half-supraphysical states and places have a fascinating and compelling intimacy of vision and voice which Eliot as a whole falls short of. Throughout the nine verses Shakespeare has a revelatory music of the plane on which he functions. Eliot's two lines do not hold in... itself from the sensation-emotion and the latter is one with the energy and pattern of the words. Possibly, Shakespeare in such passages is the example par excellence of the words which Mallarme spoke of to Degas as constituting what ideas are incapable of producing: poetry. And Shakespeare in general too strikes us most by his largesse of words, his imperial way with words. Not only is his vocabulary ...
... —apart from all question of the force and genius of individual poets. Shakespeare is still—though need he be always?—immeasurably the largest name in English poetry; but still, however preeminent his genius, there remain greater things to be seen by the poet than Shakespeare saw and greater things to be said in poetry than Shakespeare said,—and here we have an indication of the way on which they lie and... Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic... could he have given a better account of his own working, and not by any mere mirroring of things in Nature, It was my hint to speak, such was the process. We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each ...
... than Shakespeare. SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say that. It is Housman who says Blake has more pure poetry than Shakespeare. NIRODBARAN: What does he mean by that? SRI AUROBINDO: He means that Blake's poetry is not vital or mental, it is not intellectual but comes from beyond the mind, expressing mystic or spiritual experiences. NIRODBARAN: Can one really compare Blake and Shakespeare? They... They have two quite different spheres. But if Blake has more pure poetry, is he greater? SRI AUROBINDO: Shakespeare is greater in some ways, Blake in other ways. Shakespeare is greater in that he has a larger poetic power and more creative force, while Blake is more expressive. NIRODBARAN: What difference do you intend to make between "creative" and "expressive"? SRI AUROBINDO: "Creative" is something... more sustained. NIRODBARAN: Then there is some standard? SRI AUROBINDO: What standard? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare. Others favour Euripides. Still others say Euripides is nowhere near Sophocles. How can one decide whether Dante is greater or Shakespeare? PURANI: It is better to ask what the criterion of great poetry is. NIRODBARAN: All right. What is the criterion? SRI ...
... expression; but I don't know about damn fine, for that is a tremendous superlative. Such a solemn phrase should only be used when you write something equalling Shakespeare at his best. NB: Guru, "Shakespeare at his best"? The very name of Shakespeare makes my breath shake with fear! And to talk of equalling him at his best, oh, people will call me mad, Sir. If someone else had told me that, I would have... not superior, of Shakespeare. Now, you write better poetry than Shaw ever did (which is easy because he never wrote any). So you are the equal (if not the superior) of Shakespeare! NB: But, if I remember aright, some of my lines you have called 'damn fine'! So? Sri Aurobindo: Did I indeed? Then, logically, it must have been equal to the best of Shakespeare, otherwise it couldn't have... there is a humorous dialogue between the Guru and the Shishya, centering round a particular poetical composition of the disciple NB. VII. Logical demonstration (!) of the equality of NB to Shakespeare; NB: This time, Sir, the poem looks to me damn fine. I know you will say, "Well, well!" - but we have very rarely agreed on any point! But does it really leave your plexus cold? Sri ...
... by side with it. And this I say on the same principle as the comparison between Shakespeare and Racine: according to the principle of art for art's sake Racine ought to be pronounced a poet superior to Shakespeare because of his consistent and impeccable flawlessness of word and rhythm, but on the contrary Shakespeare is universally considered greater, standing among the few who are supreme. Theocritus... sense of perfect mastery of technique, perfect expression in word and sound was not everything and greatness and beauty of the substance of the poetry entered into the reckoning. It might be said of Shakespeare that he was not predominantly an artist but rather a great creator, even though he has an art of his own, especially an art of dramatic architecture and copious ornament; but his work is far from... force and its still more poignant conclusion Who would not laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep if Atticus were he? be put on a same poetical level with the great lines of Shakespeare which I have admitted as having the overmind inspiration? The question is complicated by the fact that some lines or passages of what is classed as satirical verse are not strictly satirical but ...
... with what is musically elusive in verse. There are snatches of song in Shakespeare whose meaning cannot be caught in any sensible paraphrase but which produce no im-pression of being trivial or thin. On the contrary we are aware of an intensely significant emotion, but the emotion defies reason, so that to sober thought Shakespeare seems talking nonsense while actually there is a subtlety of mood seizable... lovers' meeting, Every wise man's son doth know. (By the way, why the wise man's son and not the wise man himself? Perhaps only the son would be interested in lovers' meeting?) Now hear Shakespeare beginning to have undertones: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Page 165 Again Shakespeare's Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your... wideness, delicacy rather than power: where wideness and power are there the overtones rule the rhythm. But it is not always easy to draw a line. Is intensity or delicacy lacking in the following from Shakespeare? Take, O, take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn; But my kisses bring again, Bring again; ...
... trouble him in the least if instead of writing the poem he intended he turned out something entirely dissimilar in mood or direction. In this he resembled Shakespeare who, among English poets, was the most protean genius we know of, though Shakespeare was not so keenly conscious a connoisseur of words and threw up his wondrous wealth of them out of a masterly multifarious vitality much more vibrant than... published The White Doe of Rylstone in quarto?" "No," replied Davy. Then Wordsworth said: "To show the world my opinion of it." One remembers too his statement to Lamb: "I believe I could write like Shakespeare if I had a mind to try it." We do not know what he said when Lamb's answer came, as swiftly as the stutter would allow: "Yes, n-nothing is w-wanting but the m-mind." There is a bit of odd... Borderers, a play of Wordsworth: "His drama is absolutely wonderful. There are those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in The Robbers of Schiller and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities." Yes, there is a lot of padding in many of Wordsworth's poems, but as he wrote a large amount of poetry the quantity of true gold is also huge ...
... e in the passage. Shakespeare could very well have stopped when his initial purpose had been served. Having accomplished what was psychologically required he could have done without the three-foot line which prolongs the sentence by a participial clause. Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet of the necessary pentameter, and Shakespeare by omitting the clause... their mention was thought to be something like a hydrogen bomb which would explode to bits the whole world of poetry. They had to be brought in by a detour as "the whiskered vermin race". Suppose Shakespeare had subscribed to this me-thod: how would he have written Lear's question over Cordelia's death? — Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Wordsworth swept... clause would have got an obvious climax. We know from Ben Jonson's famous dictum that Shakespeare never blotted a word he had once written. But he never blotted anything because mostly he wrote the perfect, the inevitable poetry which called for no correction or omission. And here too, after having penned the three-foot phrase, he failed to run his quill through it in the interests of a resounding climax ...
... of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery — that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls, as you once remarked, between two stools - the vital afflatus and the... "super-Aeschylean" in style, out-vedas the Veda in its reckless association of disparate images to figure supramaterial and occult entities and significances! The Hamlet-lines you quote from Shakespeare are a good instance of the liberty with images which romantic poetry takes — to the complete flabbergasting of the Johnsonian critic. I believe, 1. In his reply Sri Aurobindo admits... The sensory proper- ties remain a little hazy - not in individual picturisation but in collective effect: hence mixed, fused, changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, very rare in Milton for ...
... a dissimilar yet perhaps not quite unconnected universe of discourse we may note Sri Aurobindo's rating Shakespeare much higher than Racine in spite of the Frenchman's uniform perfection of art and the Englishman's repeated scoriae or, to put it more expressively, his sun-spots. Shakespeare has a height or a depth of vision, a magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful... Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton - just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the elite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, Page 205 power of expression, creative... beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals. Page 206 Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply permeated him, it was Kalidasa's ...
... writing we know of as Sri Aurobindo's was on Milton as well as Shakespeare - reminding us in one-half of it of Macaulay's first famous theme. There is the further curious coincidence that the earliest piece of writing by Milton himself, which the world came to know of, was a poem on Shakespeare, a tribute published in the Shakespeare Folio of 1632 though written a couple of years earlier. And it... scholarship examination). As Page 11 for your essay, it was wonderful.' " Then the letter to the fond father continues in a personal vein: "In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged my oriental tastes to the top of their bent, it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery, it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without... true quality of the poem is to come alive to our imagination. Page 16 Notes and References 1 .Bk. VII, 212-15. 2 . Ibid., 216-17. 3 . On Shakespeare, 9-10. 4 . Life - Literature - Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry (1952), p. 69. 5 . Ibid., p. 60. 6 . The Future Poetry, pp. 117, 118. 7 . Life - Literature ...
... of man's outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step further and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyas there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond the Ideals and Idea-Forces even there... starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using "a tangle of ganglia," can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet either made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a "King Lear" or a "Hamlet"... and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. In the artist's vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values. Shakespeare can get dramatic and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had ...
... The Shakespearean Word The Vedic rishi, says the poet, by his poetic power, brings out forms, beautiful forms in the high heaven. In this respect, Shakespeare is incomparable. He has through his words painted pictures, glowing living pictures of undying beauty. Indeed all poets do this, each in his own way. To create beautiful concrete images... But Shakespeare's are not fixed stable pictures but living and moving beings. They do not appear as pictures, even like moving pictures on a screen, a two-dimensional representation. Life in Shakespeare appears, as in life, exactly like a three-dimensional phenomenon. You seem to see forms and figures in 1 Now was the day departing, and the air, Imbrow'd with shadows, from their... artist. The magic of the articulate word, the mere sound depicts, not only depicts but carries you and puts you face to face with the living reality. I will give you three examples to show how Shakespeare wields his Prosperian wand. First I take the lines from Macbeth, that present before you the castle of Duncan, almost physically —perhaps even a little more than physically—with its characteristic ...
... The Shakespearean Word THE Vedic rishi, says the poet, by his poetic power, brings out forms, beautiful forms in the high heaven. In this respect, Shakespeare is incomparable. He has through his words painted pictures, glowing living pictures of undying beauty. Indeed all poets do this, each in his own way. To create beautiful concrete images that stand... statues. But Shakespeare's are not fixed stable pictures but living and moving beings. They do not appear as pictures, even like moving pictures on a screen, a two-dimensional representation. Life in Shakespeare appears, as in life, exactly like a three-dimensional phenomenon. You seem to see forms and figures in the round, not simply in a frontal view. A Shakespearean scene is not only a feast for the eye... artist. The magic of the articulate word, the mere sound depicts, not only depicts but carries you and puts you face to face with the living reality. I will give you three examples to show how Shakespeare wields his Prosperian wand. First I take the lines from Macbeth, that present before you the castle of Duncan, almost physically – perhaps even a little more than physically – with its characteristic ...
... no more than a few sentences are enough to fix Shakespeare and his lesser contemporaries in their proper relationships: The great magician, Shakespeare, by his marvellous poetic rendering of life and the spell his poetry casts upon us, conceals this general inadequacy; the whole age which he embodies is magnified by his presence.... Shakespeare is an exception, a miracle of poetic force; he... greatness and light and beauty. 15 English poetry has had its vicissitudes, a supreme crest of achievement in Shakespeare, then a decline and an undulating flow; but Sri Aurobindo sees in "more recent verse" an attempt at the recovery of a commanding power of speech. Shakespeare yet remains the out-topping name in English poetry, but there is still no reason why the next wave shouldn't carry ...
... Heminges and Henry Condell, the editors of the First Folio. * N.B.: In the first rank of poets Sri Aurobindo puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Shakespeare. The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 520-21. Page 473 his poetry with; while Shakespeare had no "self to express. The easily-come word was Shakespeare's; the word inevitable is Sri Aurobindo's : he had to blot out a thousand... which is mostly wanting, the touch of the absolute, the intensely inspired or revealing inevitability that is Sri Aurobindo's. " Goethe might have gone much deeper than Shakespeare, sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even;" but he never saw the light that Sri Aurobindo had seen, nor reached the height of realisation Sri Aurobindo had reached. Goethe's... is a world of Helen — a human passion; Sri Aurobindo's of Savitri -— a divine passion; and yet as creative geniuses both are supreme. Sri Aurobindo put Homer along with Valmiki and Shakespeare in the first row of the world's supreme poets. One thing, however, is strikingly similar in both the epics. Homer's Iliad is full "of images drawn from fire, the armies clash 'even as ...
... poets invented a metre—they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres... never dreamed of doing! I shall not be surprised or perturbed if one day I am reported to have declared, on the authority of "advanced" or even unadvanced Sadhaks, that Buddha was a poseur or that Shakespeare an overrated poetaster or Newton a third-rate college Don without any genius. In this world all is possible. Is it necessary for me to say that I have never thought and cannot have said anything... exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire [dead pan]; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance,— and Bernard Shaw could be neither. As to his position in literature ...
... everything that poets had said in Europe up to the end of the Page 229 nineteenth century could be found in some form or other anticipated by Shakespeare, Mallarme wrote a few things that Shakespeare never dreamt of. Shakespeare was the boldest poet in his handling of images as well as words. But Mallarme had a way with both images and words which, though not bolder than Shakespeare's... verse like Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystere d'un nom (For Rose and Lily the mystery of a name), we are almost putting, for all the apparent simplicity of the statement, Shakespeare on his head, for Shakespeare spoke of the poet's pen giving to airy nothing A local habitation and a name, Page 230 whereas Mallarme speaks of converting by means of a name a concrete... he does not shoot beyond the world of Shakespeare's imaginative lordship over language, but a curious turn is felt of matter and manner which takes us to the verge of some new poetic sense. Shakespeare could have thought and felt along such lines if his interests had lain in that direction — the direction and not quite the mode of feeling and visioning seems novel. However, when Mallarme comes ...
... I now feel about these things.I found that on the whole I do think as I did, only with perhaps greater pessimism about the future of all the world and English as the world]-language not of Shakespeare and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know not how many hundreds of words poorer than that used by Alfred the Great, not to name Marvell... contribution was made in the way it was meant to be. I like what you write about Blank Verse, and of course it is the essential poetic rhythm of the English language, and has been used both by Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Tennyson with great narrative beauty. But I have heard Page 28 Indian music (and Arabinda Basu used to expound its rhythms to me) and also heard Indian poetry... Indian readers familiarity with a whole philosophic language may give substance to these imageless abstractions - but not poetic substance. Poetry is what David Jones calls 'incarna-tional' or as Shakespeare says, 'gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name'. I don't find this in Sri Page 30 Aurobindo's writings, though I do richly in Tagore, in Kalidasa's wonderful Meghaduta ...
... Suppose we speak of the father of Shakespeare: we only make the old man responsible for a birth that is quite different in essential quality from himself. The father of Shakespeare could be a man like any of his son's creations but not at all like his son. He could be like Hamlet or Macbeth or Falstaff or Romeo — at least some sort of Romeo he must have been if Shakespeare was at all to get born — but we... we do not imagine that Shakespeare's father was like Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry he may be thought to be anything except English Poetry itself. This is declared to be an erroneous suggestion. If the usual designation has to be applied, then Chaucer was a part of what he made: the first... the born poet in him. In the eyes of some judges of literature, this first child is also the highest form reached by the English poetic genius except for just two who overpass the maker of it: Shakespeare and Milton. Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote The Future Poetry, did not hold Chaucer in very high regard: he was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high s ...
... note of style sounding through these very various passages, and one feels that there is in all the intimate & unmistakeable personality of Shakespeare. We turn next & take two passages from Marlowe, a poet whose influence counted for much in the making of Shakespeare, one from Faustus Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? and another from Edward... the untutored mind often wonders what difficulty there can be in writing poetry like that; yet when the attempt is made, it is found that so far as manner goes it is easier to write somewhat like Shakespeare or Homer or Valmekie than to write like these. Just because the style is so bare, has no seizable mannerism, no striking & imitable peculiarities, the failure of the imitation appears complete &... of a poem which we have not. If the alleged ballad epic was included bodily or in part in the Mahabharata, our analysis will find it there without fail. If it was merely used as material just as Shakespeare used Plutarch or Hall & Holinshed, it is no longer germane to the matter. Now the most essential part of a story is the point from which the catastrophe started; in the Mahabharata this is the m ...
... simply from facility. It is an inspiration-poem. Of course it is impossible. There must be inspiration. The value of the poem does not rise from the labour or difficulty felt in writing it. Shakespeare, it is said, wrote at full speed and never erased a line. 29 July 1936 Inspiration and Understanding Everything depends on the inspiration. But then I can't change any line or word since... splendidly original cosmos, and what do I find? Either they elude me or what comes is something commonplace. That's another matter. It's like dreams in which one gets splendid lines that put Shakespeare into the shade and one wakes up and enthusiastically jots them down, it turns out to be "O you damned goose, where are you going While the river is flowing, flowing, flowing" and things like that... things can be done. Because all that is not yet done, is not a ground for being dissatisfied with the present work done. I hold before myself the example of Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, Kalidasa, Shakespeare—of all the great poets. I am afraid this is all ambition. Ambition has to be outgrown, if one wants to succeed in sadhana. The will to use the energies for the best, not for ego but as a work ...
... 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 method — we can well imagine Shakespeare to have dashed off pages of Hamlet in the green room while some actor was tidying himself up and chatting to him over his shoulder. For inspiration acts according to the peculiarities of a writer... poet a certain curve of progress to trace: whether the curve comes full circle or not depends upon a large complex of circumstances. Among English poets, only two got to the end of their journey — Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser fell within eyeshot of his goal: nobody else did even so much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring... experience side by side with the lyric impulse and the symbolic vision. Shelley could never have stopped growing and in the right direction for his peculiar Page 62 genius: not since Shakespeare had a poet been so completely in rapport with his daimon — his inspired fluency Milton himself had never rivalled. From that point of view a wider gap was left in English verse by the squall in ...
... profundity. This was a mistake in artistic method. But behind it was also a psychological flaw in the poet. Hugo had a lot of self-conceit. To a youth who said to him that he had been reading Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe, Hugo said sharply: "Mais a quoi bon? Je les resume tous." 1 The colossal confidence with which he thought he summed up all the poetic giants of the past and with which he went on pronouncing... 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; but he could afford to do that without serious damage to his own quality be-cause he happened to be a poetic superman, a poetic avatar... criteria in a greater or smaller measure. Sri Aurobindo chooses eleven poets for the sheer first class, but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative ...
... publish it. I am prepared to act as your foil, for I have not your fire, I am old and tired and to see beauty is always better than (like myself) to fail to see it in a particular work. For as Shakespeare says, 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if but Imagination do amend them'. I cannot of course speak for Herbert Read or say what he thought or did not think; I can... highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller though not poetically inferior scale, Stephen Phillips conjuring up the story of Marpessa, Idas... English language was sufficiently developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant ...
... Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and· condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic... of the vision, the disposition of the word, the run of the rhythm. The distracted Oedipus of Sophocles may resemble the mad Lear of Shakespeare, but they are caught in poetry of two distinct orders and neither theme nor mood can make Sophocles Romantic or Shakespeare Classical. Similarly, Dante rests Classical for all his poignancy and sensitivity. Lucas 23 himself feels that though he has called... poetic listener in our own intuitive being." Sri Aurobindo takes Chaucer's line - Page 8 He was a verray parfit gentil knight - to which for completer comparison with Shakespeare we may add from Chaucer the three other lines of the same passage, about that knight's noble deeds: At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene And foughten for our faith at Tramissene ...
... the Page 308 legendary hero, Rustum, while Shakespeare has to write a speech appropriate to the mentality of an errant youth like Claudio; yet, while Arnold is almost flat, Shakespeare has given a glow even to Claudio's frenzied fear of death. It is easy to beg the question and say: Well, Shakespeare is, after all, the greater poet. But, then, how exactly has he touched... Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain; —Shakespeare Voyaging though strange seas of thought, alone; —Wordsworth Anityam asukham... of heaven is soft, And warm, and pleasant; but the grave is cold. Heaven's air is better than the cold dead grave. 11 This is good as far as it goes, but here is Shakespeare on the same theme, and now the illumination from above pours down in a flood: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; ...
... between Shakespeare and ourselves lies only in the power of inwardly forming an image, not in the power of externalising it? But there are many people who have the power of a rich inner imaging of things, but are quite unable to put them down on paper or utter them in speech or transfer them to canvas or into clay or bronze or stone. They are then as great creative artists as Shakespeare or Michael... of translating his image into visible form is at least an indispensable part of the art of expression, creation or image-making. I cannot conceive of a Shakespeare or Michael Angelo without that power—the one would be a mute inglorious Shakespeare and the other a rather helpless and ineffective Angelo. P.S. This is of course a comment on the statement as presented—I would have to read Croce myself ...
... pronounced and scanned them—as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare's line in the following way in order to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, " , strategems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same—though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse... poet's practice does not in itself prove anything definitely for English as it is spoken. And spoken English, very much more than written English, undergoes change; even the line you quote from Shakespeare was perhaps not scanned in his time as you would do it now, for "meditation"—as surely Page 631 "passion" and "fashion" also and most probably "vision" as well—was often if not always... for the full sound is not given, so that you cannot put it down as pronounced maid-en, you have to indicate the pronunciation as maid'n. But for that to dub maiden a monosyllable and assert that Shakespeare, Shelley and every other poet who scans maiden as a dissyllable was a born fool who did not know the "current" pronunciation or was indulging in a constant poetic licence whenever he used the words ...
... early poems of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modern times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up... but what mattered was my application of the principle, and he seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs. But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in question; the question... disparagement of the Shakespearean passage on "sleep" and the line on the sea considered by the greatest critics and not by myself only as ranking amongst the most admired and admirable things in Shakespeare is surprising and it seems to me to illustrate a serious limitation in his poetic perception and temperamental sympathies. Shakespeare's later terse and packed style with its more powerful dramatic ...
... what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare ?— ...the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Page 18 Are they really from what you have considered his usual plane—the vital ?) "The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by... the restricted subject of the rest." (Is there something definite in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane ? Take the quotations from Shakespeare I am sending you. The first, according to you, has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the... line inspired by Newton ? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae ?) "It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare— Page 19 Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven— is plainly vital in its excited thrill. ...
... Intelligence rather than from the creative Life-force as in Shakespeare, yet recovers and holds "as its central secret something akin to the older poet, a greater straight impact and natural body of intuitive intensity" 1 2 that Milton can command We may here quote some passages by Sri Aurobindo on the nature of poetry and on Shakespeare and this recovery at times by the later Romantics of the... sheer poetic quality is not affected, for this quality is determined not by overt mysticism but by the intuitiveness of expressive turn. And it is by being thus intuitive in superabundance that Shakespeare is well-nigh the most remarkable poet the world has seen: the secret of his pre-eminence is the intuitive seizing again and again of the word from the very heart of the thing seen. English poetry... include and take up life into the deeper self-vision." The new intensity has a thrill of imaginative sight and sound unlike that of even whatever mystical suggestion may occur accidentally in Shakespeare. Not only is the thrill different from the more obvious kind of suggestion like the lines with a hint analogous to the second Keats-quotation's - the question asked by Hamlet to his father's ghost ...
... Page 45 is too some affinity of interests and seekings with the Elizabethans, reminding us of J. Warten's reference to the Romantic as far back as 1753 in The Adventurer (No. 93): "Shakespeare has carried the romantic, the wonderful, the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance."* In all this we are pretty distant from Aucassin et Nicolette and other fictions of the Middle Ages.... revived in a less healthy form several centuries after. Adventitious elements appear to have biased Lucas's judgment in relation to the poetry of the Elizabethans. Even where he grants, as with Shakespeare, some play of the truly Romantic he yet makes reservations and talks of at most a successful compromise between Romanticism and Classicism. Shakespeare's allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, his... basically the life-soul, the soul which is much more than the Freudian "Id" or "Libido" but which more than anything else in our psycho-logical being has to do with impulse and passion. Indeed, Shakespeare is the greatest Romantic poet in the world or, to be more precise, the greatest poet of Romantic drama. The only figure that approaches him in the same genre in English literature is his own ...
... mirror will hold for thee, nor for her whom thou seekest. 146) I find in Shakespeare a far greater & more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creations are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo & his dog up to Lear & Hamlet. 147) The Greeks sought universality by omitting all finer individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details... details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity. Page 440 148) Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of ...
... moves among a diversity of things but communes with the beyond and experiences profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. While picturing the poet's activity, Shakespeare speaks of the poet's eye which, "in a fine frenzy rolling", glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, as his pen gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Sethna's contention... refers to as "Wordsworth's double poetic character" has been discussed by almost all major critics. Though Arnold expressed his firm belief that Wordsworth's achievement is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in English, he felt that if the romantic poet was to have general recognition the first necessity was to separate his best from the mass ... logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry." (p. 277) "Among European poets the most successful in chiselled logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante." (p. 277) "Shakespeare... is a king of phanopoeia, his very mind moves phanopoeiacally." (p. 282) Page 284 In Sethna's view, Wordsworth achieves phanopoeia of an extremely high order ...
... Aphorism - 146, 147, 148, 149, 150 146—I find in Shakespeare a far greater and more consistent universalist than the Greeks. All his creatures are universal types from Lancelot Gobbo and his dog up to Lear and Hamlet. 147—The Greeks sought universality by omitting all finer individual touches; Shakespeare sought it more successfully by universalising the rarest individual details... details of character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity. 148—Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either ...
... and Consequence (1951) 8. Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (1952, 1967) 9. The Indian Spirit and the World's Future (1953) 10. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (1965, 1991) 11. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (1968, 1992) 12. Sri Aurobindo - the Poet (1970) 13. "Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments (1972) ... Elizabethan Age was the Rival Poet or rather the chief among the writers of verse seeming to have been personally patronised by the Fair Friend? No identification of the first two enigmas - whom Shakespeare has called his "two loves of comfort and despair" - has carried complete conviction. Neither has any of the poets chosen as his main competitor - whom in humiliated moments he considered "a... and "close" textual reading. The chapter on the Dark Lady discovers her very name by the study of ingenious sexual suggestion vaguely suspected so far but never clearly caught even though Shakespeare has been known to be no poet for babes and sucklings. When the full shock of the unconventional poetry has been felt and understood, the fascinating brunette who made the poet her slave despite ...
... Shakespeare's historical plays, in the same manner the police had collected the material for this drama of a case. And Mr. Norton happened to be the Shakespeare of this play. I, however, noticed a difference between Shakespeare and Mr. Norton: Shakespeare would now and then leave out some of the available material, but Mr. Norton never allowed any material, true or false, cogent or irrelevant, from the... on top ,of it he could weave such a Page 283 wonderful plot by his self-created and abundant suggestion, inference and hypothesis that the great poets and writers of fiction like Shakespeare and Defoe would have to acknowledge defeat before this grand master of the art. The critic might say that just as Falstaff's tavern bill showed a pennyworth of bread and countless gallons of wine ...
... the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he will be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance, - and Bernard Shaw could be neither...." 2 Let us now taste some... s. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare's line in the following manner to please H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, In mai/den med/itation / fan/cy free, I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, "treasons, stratagems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and... for the full sound is not given, so that you cannot put it down as pronounced maid-en, you have to indicate the pronunciation as maid'n. But for that to dub maiden a monosyllable and assert that Shakespeare, Shelley and every other poet who scans maiden as a dissyllable was a born fool who did not know the 'current' pronunciation or was indulging in a constant poetic licence whenever he used the words ...
... say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer, for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. I appreciate the previous lines much more... lay down certain features of overhead poetry, e.g. greater depth and height of spiritual vision, inner life and experience and character of rhythm and expression. But it won't necessarily outshine Shakespeare in poetic excellence. Obviously if properly done it would have a deeper and rarer substance, but would not be necessarily greater in poetic excellence. You say also that for overhead poetry... usually by bits only, not in a mass. You may say that in overhead poetry expression of spiritual vision is more important. True, but why can't it be clothed in as fine poetry as in the case of Shakespeare? The highest source of Inspiration will surely bring in all the characteristics of highest poetry, no? It can, but it is more difficult to get. It can be as fine poetry as Shakespeare's if there ...
... Two Sonnets of Shakespeare On the occasion of the 400th birth anniversary of Shakespeare, I present to you today two of the great Shakespearean sonnets. The sonnets, as you know, are all about love. They are however characterised by an incredible intensity and perhaps an equally incredible complexity, for the Shakespearean feeling is of that category. Shakespeare has treated love... Even there shall come as a high crown of all The end of Death, the death of Ignorance. The words are perilously parallel. I say perilously because one might just think that Shakespeare was trying to be a disciple of Sri Aurobindo! Page 30 ...
... child-consciousness. It is by their encouragement that my love for knowledge increased and I could make so much progress so early. It was at that age that I started reading Shelley, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and other great poets." "Did you understand them?" asked Rahul. "Not everything, perhaps, and not very clearly. But then poetry is not always something one understands with the mind. Children... essays." "Essays on what?" asked Jones. "Literature, quite often. A schoolboy is hardly qualified to discuss politics! No, the purpose of the debates was to discuss the plays and poems of Shakespeare and others." "At that early age! Goodness! We have next to nothing to say about things like that!" "That is because you are not taught to do so. On the other hand look how well you sing and... thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours' - meaning my Classical papers, at the scholarship examination. 'As for your essay' - a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton - 'it was wonderful.' Later I wrote all this to my father describing the way my life at Cambridge had begun." Sri Aurobindo had almost finished speaking when the light failed and the ...
... pen in this context — that of Shakespeare. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me: "It is not every spear that shakes!" I would venture to say that Sri Aurobindo's spear shook even more than Shakespeare! I would go even further and say that Sri Aurobindo surpassed his own self, for it is my firm belief that Sri Aurobindo was Shakespeare. It has also been said of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line.... Nolinida couldn't read the words. Sri Aurobindo: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. Question: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional as regards my early success in English versification." But how are they exceptional ...
... In a dissimilar yet perhaps not quite unconnected universe of discourse we may note Sri Aurobindo's rating Shakespeare much higher than Racine in spite of the Frenchman's uniform perfection of art and the Englishman's repeated scoriae or, to put it more expressively, his sun-spots. Shakespeare has a height or a depth of vision, a magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful... Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, power of expression, creative genius, range of sub... beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals. Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply permeated him, it was Kalidasa's more than Dante's. ...
... consciousness, it does not necessarily follow that he will be a greater man of action or a greater creator. One may rise to spiritual planes of inspiration undreamed of by Shakespeare and yet not be as great a poetic creator as Shakespeare. "Greatness" is not the object of spiritual realisation any more than fame or success in the world—how are these things the standard of spiritual realisation? Of... As for Napoleon, Caesar and Shakespeare, not one of them was a virtuous man, but they were great men—and that was your contention, that only virtuous men are great men and those who have vices are not great, which is an absurd contention. All of them went after women—two were ambitious, unscrupulous. Napoleon was most arrogant and violent. Page 505 Shakespeare stole deer, Napoleon lied freely... freely, Caesar was without scruples. But do you really believe that men like Napoleon, Caesar, Shakespeare were not great men and did nothing for the world or for the cosmic purpose? that God was deterred from using them for His purpose because they had defects of character and vices? What a singular idea! Why should he [ the Divine ] care [ about the vices of great men ]? Is he a policeman ...
... guides and governs. He is then Isha, the Lord or Ruler. To use a human parallel, Shakespeare pouring himself out in a hundred names and forms, Desdemona, Othello, Iago, Viola, Rosalind, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Cymbeline is using his power of Avidya to become the lord and ruler of a wonderful imaginary world. Shakespeare putting aside his works and returning to his own single & sufficient existence is... Cause of the universe, and in one sense He is His Universe and His Universe is He, just as Shakespeare's creations are really Shakespeare himself, woven by him out of his own store of psychic material; and yet it would be obviously a mistake to identify, say, Iago with Shakespeare. This tree is evolved out of original ether, ether pervades it and surrounds it, but the tree cannot be described as ether... is using his power of Vidya to recover his own constant single reality. But there is one Shakespeare and not two. Now the Karmamargin has to deal with this great multifold phenomenal universe and when he seeks to feel the presence of the Eternal round every single thing it contains, it must necessarily be not in His unconditioned, unphenomenal aspect of Sacchidananda but in His conditioned, phenomenal ...
... it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus will remain deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also to stir to what is great and beautiful or strong and... scene with the high light it sheds on Cleopatra's character. For she was a remarkable woman, a great queen, a skilful ruler and politician, not merely the erotic détraquée people make of her. Shakespeare is not good at describing greatness, he poetised the homme moyen , but he has caught something here. The passage stands comparison with the words of Antony "I am dying, Egypt, dying" (down to "A... something constant,—self-gathered, grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will ...
... of mystical ecstasy had an extraordinary imagination open to spheres of reality which transcend the reach not only of the average man but also the average poet of the first rank — say, Homer or Shakespeare. For, in poetry the main factor is imagination: we should never forget this central truth if we are to gauge rightly the nature of inspired utterance. Emotion makes poetry throb: it is the animating... man's nature. The outward-going body-conscious Page 110 mind of Homer describes Apollo's descent from Olympus with an intense atmosphere of the god's subtle physicality of power. Shakespeare passes a sudden voice from spiritual heights through the life-force's peculiar thrill and colour and we get the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. ... le rest. In all these expressions the inspiration is absolutely unmarred. Sri Aurobindo has experienced the very state he poetises, while Homer never knew Apollo's deific puissance nor Shakespeare the world-soul's profound reverie; yet their language when filled with a mystic intuition has not suffered the least weakness in imparting a real-sense. For each has conveyed with an aesthetic finality ...
... is the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who reveals instead of the revealer who has seen. Shakespeare — the greatest poetic phenomenon in English history, poetry incarnate if ever such a thing has happened — bears out the Indian characterisation by the famous passage describing what the poet does... present or the past. As Landor says: Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Shakespeare in several places in his Sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. In one sonnet he asks: who or what can save you, my lover, from being destroyed... That in black ink my love may still shine bright. Of course, the black ink here is not any and every writing fluid of a dark colour but the content of the ink-horn in which the quill of Shakespeare got dipped in order to trace on paper the quiverings of his poetic imagination. Now to the rest of the quotation from Savitri. But before we proceed, let us hark back a little to observe an ...
... -set whose purpose is to impart news of a violent and ignorant world and to sell sell sell everything from cars and after-shave lotions to convenience foods and contraceptives. The England of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Shelley is barely remembered. Yet it seemed to me that Temenos, reaffirming a standard which at other times - or even now in France -might have seemed but a norm - might have... a thousand ways. And India's great gift is the knowledge of dharma, here lost for this time. Peter Brook gave a radio interview in which he said that the Mahabharata was like a work of Shakespeare; but a work in an earlier incarnation, not a later one. The persons of the epic and the things they do are certainly Shakespearean. And the Kauravas too are marvellously Shakespearean - the hy... hypocritical old father, Duryodhana himself, and Radheya, Kunti's abandoned son who- is so noble but thrown onto the side of adharma because of his mother's sin against dharma. And so with all. But Shakespeare never created a Lord Krishna nor could any Western poet have done so or included the divine within a human world. True, it is in the Gospels, and the story of the death of the Christ, but differently ...
... Aurobindo, in Shakespeare. The frequency of the intuitive word in Shakespeare is unsurpassed. Sri Aurobindo says there are only one or two poets who have this intuitive word in extreme abundance. He mentions Shakespeare but who the other one or two may be is anybody's guess. I do not know and I cannot think of anyone else who has written like Shakespeare. In Stella Kobrin's view, even Shakespeare would be ...
... Valmiki and that of Shakespeare in the field of literature. On Page 253 reading Shakespeare a stamp of characters that are human is left on our mind, and Valmiki impresses us with characters that are superhuman. Shakespeare has depicted men solely as human beings, while Valmiki read into men the symbol of some larger and higher truth. In the works of Shakespeare we feel the touch... the bounds of ordinary earthly life. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear are the highlights of Shakespearae's creation. Valmiki's heroes and heroine are Rama, Ravana and Sita. The characters depicted by Shakespeare are men as men are or would be. But even the human characters of Valmiki contain something of the super-human, they overflow the bounds of humanity. It is not so difficult for us to grasp the clashes ...
... While these lines of Shakespeare – The shard-bone beetle with his drowsy hum Hath rung night's yawning peal... bring before our mind the sportive dance of truth and beauty. The rhythmic swinging movement as described by Kalidasa more dearly reveals and fixes a static form; the picture that floats on the horizon of our mind through the lines of Shakespeare seems to fling far the waves... managed to usher in the epoch of inspiration. Dante was the harbinger of the spirit of this new age, while Shakespeare of the English and Ronsard of the French developed and exampled it in the comity of cultures. Again the glimpses of intuition that we come across in the inspiration of Dante, Shakespeare and Ronsard have further diminished in Shelley, Byron and Hugo. Finally, inspiration has become all in... the West; and yet currents of intuition are found there side by side with it. The genius of the Latin is replete with intuition and that of the Celtic, the Slav, the Teuton with inspiration. If Shakespeare, Ibsen and Dostoevsky belong to the latter category, Virgil, Petrarch and Racine represent the former. Intuition and inspiration do not limit themselves, however, to particular countries or races ...
... This is eminently true of great poets with a varied gift. A narrow though a high faculty works best on a single line and may show perfection at an early stage; but powerful and complex minds like Shakespeare or Kalidasa seldom find themselves before a more advanced period. Their previous work is certain to be full of power, promise and genius, but it will also be flawed, unequal and often imitative.... cast of description. Much of it is as yet in a half-developed state, crude consistence not yet fashioned with the masterly touch he soon manifested, but Kalidasa is there quite as evidently as Shakespeare in his earlier work, the Venus and Adonis or Lucrece. Defects which the riper Kalidasa avoids, are not uncommon in this poem,—repetition of ideas, use of more words than are absolutely required,... in so far as it is either a frame, setting or ornament to life or else a living presence to the spirit. Nature interpreted by Wordsworth as a part of his own and the universal consciousness, by Shakespeare as an accompaniment or note in the orchestral music of life, by more modern poets as an element of decoration in the living world-picture is possible in poetry; as an independent but dead existence ...
... loving knowledge of child nature. It seems to me that in two respects at least Kalidasa far surpasses Shakespeare, in knowledge of a mother's heart, in knowledge of the child. Shakespeare's mothers, and how few of them there are! are either null or intolerable. In only one of his plays does Shakespeare really attempt to give us a mother's heart and a child. But Arthur is not a success, he is too voulu... and can no longer be classed with the genus irritabile vatum; nor does he square any better with the popular idea that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity—except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality & strong character are in themselves madness... almost thankful to the crookback for mercifully putting them out of the way. Nor is Constance a sympathetic figure; her shrieking, her rant, her selfishness, her bold and bitter volubility, could Shakespeare give us no sweeter & truer picture of a mother? Urvasie seems at first sight to be deficient in feeling; she sends Ayus away from her at his birth & though there is an indication that she ...
... (From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare?— ... the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Are they really from what you have considered his usual plane—the vital?) "The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some... the restricted subject of the rest." (Is there something definite in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane? Take the quotations from Shakespeare I am sending you. The first, according to you, has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the... line inspired by Newton? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae?) "It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare— Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows bent, none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven— is plainly vital in its excited thrill. Only the vital can ...
... Milton, Corneille and Racine, is the art Ellis attributes to Ristori. The Elizabethans - in one mode Marlowe Page 183 and his fellow-dramatists, in the other Spenser and, in both, Shakespeare - practise what he sees as Salvini's art. The peak-point of the later Romanticism, the English poetry of the time of Wordsworth, carries the art that he conceives to be Cha-liapin's. For it passes... did not sustain itself at such length as did that of Classicism or what the old Romanticism had produced: therefore none of its poets can be taken cumulatively as the equal of Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or even Spenser. However, its best work is genuinely of the first order - and the significance of that work is paramount by reason of the very nature, as explained by Sri Aurobindo, of poetry... is from everlasting to everlasting, was fiery with love of liberty. If Wordsworth had not been a pantheist he would still have written: We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake... No amount of conservatism in his old age made him abjure the gospel of true liberty as distinguished from thoughtless license. Those who remained liberals to their dying day can be suspected ...
... the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire ; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance,—and Bernard Shaw could be neither. As to his position in literature... perception; but that does not make a man either a mystic or a philosopher or a great thought-creator. Shaw has a sufficiently high place in his own kind—why try to make him out more than he is? Shakespeare is a great poet and dramatist, but to try to make him out a great philosopher also would not increase but rather imperil his high repute. May 1932 I admit that in the real, experiential sense... contemporary thought, it was his power and forcefulness that made it so—it is no more to be counted against him than the deplorable fact that Hamlet is only "a string of quotations" is damaging to Shakespeare! I do not share your exasperation against Shavianism—I find in it a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different from other men that to read even an ordinary interview ...
... peak-moment, but I have an interesting set of logopoeic passages which would help us differentiate the ways in which the intellect can "dance" among words as it functions on different "planes". Shakespeare is the phanopoeic artist par excellence and that too in a supercharged packed fashion. He has very few elaborate comparisons. His mind is too active and darting for them. But images are the very... certainly not be called melopoeic. Yet its broken rhythms and its tendency to harshness of sound are themselves deemed by criticism the master-means of poetically bringing about the communication Shakespeare intended—the communication of desperate haste and breathless excitement. As Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren tell us, the lines give with their lack of ordinary melodious effects the impression of... explicit imagery is wanting except towards the close where we have "the bank and shoal of time". A shoal is a place of shallow water in which there is a submerged sand-bank. It would seem that Shakespeare is imaging death as a strip of land between two seas—the one being time, the other eternity. Personally I do not quite grasp the appositeness of the metaphor, but Shakes- Page 259 ...
... studies. He was a bright young man, and I used to like him very much because of his pleasing manners and his intellectual gifts. He used to tell me a great deal about English literature, - about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly and Tennyson. He himself was a poet and used to explain to me how to write poems. None in our family or in his family came to know of the developing relationship between... direction I should move. We speak of crime and punishment. But what is crime if not intention to commit a crime? And if intentions are to be counted, I feel that I am a criminal. I am a student of Shakespeare and his four tragedies have influenced me greatly: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Macbeth was a noble man but degenerated through selfish ambition into an unfaithful murderer; Hamlet was... is a good actor? And he has a remarkable mastery over the Shakespearean dramas?" "Is that so ?", I asked. "Uncle, why don't you give a recitation of one of the memorable passages from Shakespeare?" Alka pleaded. Balwant also liked the idea very much and said, "Yes, uncle. We have not heard your recitation since a long time. Let us hear from you that famous speech of Antony." Alka ...
... mighty pen in this context—that of Shakespeare. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me: "It is not every spear that shakes!" I would venture to say that Sri Aurobindo's spear shook even more than Shakespeare's! I would go even further and say that Sri Aurobindo surpassed his own self; for it is my firm belief that Sri Aurobindo was Shakespeare, It has also been said of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line... Nolinida could not read the words. SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. QUESTION: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional" as regards my early success in English versification. But how are they exceptional? ...
... versed in the formalised Page 161 philosophies. He has some notable resemblances to Shakespeare; among others his business was, like Shakespeare's, to sum up the immediate past in the terms of the present: at the same time he occasionally informed the present with hints of the future. Like Shakespeare also he seems not to have cared deeply for religion. In creed he was a Vedantist and in ceremony... represent and mirror their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante. It has been said, truly, that the Ramayana represents an ideal society and assumed, illogically, that it must therefore represent an altogether imaginary one. The argument ignores the ...
... It is reported that you were Kalidasa and Shakespeare. I suppose it is true, at least regarding Kalidasa—isn't it? As to the report, who is the reporter? and in what "Reincarnation Review" have these items been reported? 31 March 1932 We have various guesses about your previous lives. The other day I happened to ask X whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you... you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Good Heavens, all that! You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be ...
... up. When good blank verse comes one can analyse it and assign certain elements of technique, but these come in the course of the formation of the verse. Each poet finds his own technique—that of Shakespeare differs from Marlowe's, both from Milton's and all from Keats'. In English I can say that variations of rhythm, of lengths of syllable, of caesura, of the structure of lines help and neglect of them... variation of pauses is not indispensable to blank verse. There is much blank verse of the first quality in which it is eschewed or minimised, much also of the first quality in which it is freely used. Shakespeare has both kinds. 30 April 1937 The Alexandrine I suppose the Alexandrine has been condemned because no one has ever been able to make effective use of it as a staple metre. The difficulty... and lost? (5th) (2) Here we may reign secure, | and in my choice (6th) To reign is worth ambition | though in hell: (7th) Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven. Or from Shakespeare: (1) Sees Helen's beauty | in a brow of Egypt (5th) (2) To be or not to be, | that is the question (6th) But I don't know whether your prosodist would agree to all that. As for the ...
... regard to long established favourites from the classics few would make the same choice. Give ten good critics the task of selecting the best lines of Shakespeare, avoiding stock passages, and the ten will each make a different list—and probably Shakespeare himself would disagree with all the ten. That must be still more the case with a "contemporary" poet where all is new stuff with no indications except... notes in his criticism, (an essay he sent long ago on the "Ashram poets"—what a phrase!—made me aghast with horror at its Pindaric—or rather Swinburnean—tone, it gave me an impression that Homer and Shakespeare and Valmiki had all been beaten into an insignificant jelly by our magnificent creations.) He is also sometimes too elaborately ingenious in his hunt for detail significances. But what he says is ...
... poetry before Milton had not passed through any training of the poetic and artistic intelligence; it had abounding energy and Page 86 power, but no self-discipline of the idea. Except in Shakespeare it fails to construct; it at once loses and finds itself in a luxurious indulgence of its force, follows with a loose sweetness or a vehement buoyancy all its impulses good, bad or indifferent. Still... or trying to knock at the gates of the deeper subjective being. And in all the best work of the time it has already got there, not very deep, but still enough to be initially subjective. Whatever Shakespeare may suggest,—a poet's critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration,—there is not here any true or exact holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but instead a moved and excited... This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare. At another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets much farther away from the actuality of life; it takes the impressions of the surrounding physical world as hints only for a purely ...
... having been the ideal of national independence and unshackled individuality so dear, according to Wordsworth, to the English-speaking heart: We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake... And it is most meaningful that the choice of August 15, 1947, a birthday of Sri Aurobindo's, was made for India's Independence not by any Indian but by an Englishman, the last British... really new world towards which the finger of Sri Aurobindo is pointing will show the Divine directly shining through the human, a straight revelation of the One Face of many faces. Be sure that a Shakespeare of the future will vision not time's "dark backward and abysm" but its bright forward and empyrean. And a hint or glint of what is to be may be glimpsed in the dreams and desires of those whom even... fanciful figure of "wishful thinking". We have to cleave to these ideals as though without them we could not live, just as Wordsworth felt that We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. It makes me happy to know that you, my friend, have been carrying on Temenos for years against heavy odds and are at present launching ...
... period of World War I. To frown on this sort of writing as being "linguistic clutter" is to forget the Blakean beauty that is exuberance. Can there be a greater master of "linguistic clutter" than Shakespeare whenever it would suit an occasion? For instance, hear the ghost of Hamlet's father: I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, ... And by His will is perfected our peace. Pound cannot be identified with any such fetish as your emphasis on verbal economy. If he could be, he would have to turn his back on the multi-styled Shakespeare whom in my last letter to you I labelled as a master of what you, reacting adversely to one of the three passages I had culled from the early Sri Aurobindo, had misnamed "linguistic clutter". I gave... acknowledge it and to add one or two reflections. And to wish you a Happy New Year. One reflection is, that those who see beauty where others do not must always in that respect be right - as Shakespeare knew - he the great poet - 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse,if imagination amend them.' It is the invisible beauty behind the words that is the true poem, words ...
... yet achieving .poetic distinction because of a subtle power of rhythm and intensity of form which Page 90 convey an emotion or an idea in a manner beyond prose. There is the line Shakespeare has put into Hamlet's mouth — To be or not to be, that is the question — perhaps the most famous question asked in all poetry. There is also the query of Shakespeare's Lear, which we have... transition is made by imaginative logic to the idea of death and there the climax is worked out of the poem's central theme: triumph is all. This theme recalls a phrase like "ripeness is all" in Shakespeare, which too is joined with the death-idea: Page 95 Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all... But the death-idea in the present... I'm Adam. Here from the sheer beginning of human life you have poetry with not only reason in it but also rhyme. And there is even more to it. You may remember my pointing out to you that Shakespeare never lost a chance to be devilishly clever at the same time that he was godlike in greatness. Adam summed up in brief all the clever-ness to come in the tribe of poets. His small sentence is what ...
... of the only permanent world, the world of things": it is poetry containing no hint of subjectivity, poetry "unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", as the greatest of the phanopoeists, Shakespeare, would have put it if he had had something to do not only with Othello, the Moor of Venice, but also with George, the Moore of London. Typical instances would be Coleridge's lines on the "one... introducing any idea-content, whether we can have poetry independent of meaning and consequently unmingled and pure . His answer is Yes. And the very first example he offers is that song from Shakespeare: Take, O take, those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn, And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn; But my kisses bring again, bring again... any answer in the sound to the sense. A skilful writer would match sound to sense in a variety of ways and weave the meaning-units of his verse impressively together by phonetic effects — as does Shakespeare in the lines we have often quoted — If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity a while And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story ...
... verse-unit and in respect of the various ensembles the verse-units built up (blocks of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines). I question whether the early Elizabethans and the young Shakespeare had any crystallised art-idea when they "practised" a blank verse based on the unit of the single line. They followed a model that had somehow come into vogue and they had not yet realised the full... Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much more than the Life Force of the Late Renaissance complexly kindling up to self-sight... this individual instrument of intense passion and curious imagination. But to compare Tennyson's revival with Sri Aurobindo's and, much more, to compare the practice of Marlowe, Kyd and the young Shakespeare with it is to overlook the very heart of the Aurobindonian art: "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalida-sian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English", as Sri Aurobindo ...
... the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who discloses instead of the discloser who has seen. Shakespeare bears out the Indian characterisation, though he does not neglect the Greek and Latin, by the famous passage which describes what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the... seer, but we may remember that he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as in-sight: he sees through, behind, within: his fundamental glancing is, as Shakespeare puts it, "from heaven to earth" and, only after that, it is "from earth to heaven." The poet's "fine frenzy" transports his eye to some paradisal Yonder before bringing it into touch with the terrestrial... the past. As Landor says : Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth : 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Shakespeare in several places in his sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of Princes. In one sonnet he asks : who or what can save you, my lover, from being ...
... Jonson's expression "this side idolatry" is, as sometimes seen elsewhere too in modern literature, a misapplication of what the original context meant. Jonson, writing of Shakespeare, connoted by it that though he did honour Shakespeare he stopped short of making a god of him. Page 410 place that it is robbed of its own proper effect by a singular oversight by C.R.M. Can anyone make g... plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to the touch The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I. Matter insists and matter makes reply. Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned Page 441 And conquered by the cross; this only learned The secret of the suns that blaze afar; This was Napoleon's giant mind of war ...
... first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who discloses instead of the discloser who has seen. Shakespeare bears out the Indian characterisation, though he does not neglect the Greek and Latin, by the famous passage which describes what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the... seer, but we may remember that he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as in-sight: he sees through, behind, within: his fundamental glancing is, as Shakespeare puts it, "from heaven to earth" and, only after that, it is "from earth to heaven". The poet's "fine frenzy" transports his eye to some paradisal Yonder before bringing it into touch with the... past. As Landor says: Past ruin'd Ilion, Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Shakespeare in several places in his sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of Princes. In one sonnet he asks: Who or what can save you, my lover, from being ...
... verse-unit and in respect of the various ensembles the verse-units built up (blocks of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines). I question whether the early Elizabethans and the young Shakespeare had any crystallised art-idea when they "practised" a blank verse based on the unit of the single line. They followed a model that had somehow come into vogue and they had not yet realised the... Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much more than the Life Force of the Late Renaissance complexly kindling up to self-sight... this individual instrument of intense passion and curious imagination. But to compare Tennyson's revival with Sri Aurobindo's and, much more, to compare the practice of Marlowe, Kyd and the young Shakespeare with it is to overlook the very heart of the Aurobindonian art: "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian Page 216 movement, so far as that is a possibility ...
... first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who discloses instead of the discloser who has seen. Shakespeare bears out the Greek and Latin, by the famous passage which describes what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth... 33-34. Page 204 not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as in-sight: he sees through, behind, within: his fundamental glancing is, as Shakespeare puts it, "from heaven to earth" and, only after that, it is "from earth to heaven." The poet's "fine frenzy" transports his eye to some paradisal Yonder before bringing it into touch with the... past. As Landor says: Past ruin'd Ilion, Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids. Shakespeare in several places in his sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of Princes. In one sonnet he asks: Who or what can save you, my lover, from being ...
... soul-values that enter into Art... In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare..." Thus more appealing, even gripping, than the actual Page 570 death of Satyavan in the Shalwa wilderness is the grim prophecy of death made by Narad in Aswapati's palace at... Bliss. Monet's painting of his dead wife still in the bed also greatly belongs to this superior class. But the niṣkāmabhāva of Vyasa is altogether of a different quality than that of Shakespeare. He is a poet of men and empires and is seated in the midst of warring heroes and hears the loud deafening battle-cries; yet even in this rough-and-tumble his Rishihood remains rooted in the strength... Ideals supporting life and its movements. With that power he can become a Page 573 moulder of a society and of a nation, things which are unquestionably beyond the capacity of Shakespeare. To put it in other words: Vyasa's sense of detachment is a Rishi's whereas Shakespeare's aesthetic-vital; in the one niṣkāmabhāva has brought out soul-values and in the other, by a kind of ...
... other because he writes not from a sense of the incongruous but from an emotion, from a strong poetic 'indignation' against the things he sees around him. Aristophanes is a comic creator - like Shakespeare when he turns in that direction - the satire is only a strong line in his creation; that is a different kind of inspiration, not the ordinary satire. Pope attempted something creative in his Rape... literary philosopher-politician is the choicest work of God, — when he is not the most effective instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness. For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentleman as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentleman of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable. ... value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but ...
... a single vice, all virtues from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe. He is the type of the truly great man as you conceive him. But do you really believe that men like Napoleon, Caesar, Shakespeare were not great men and did nothing for the world or for the cosmic purpose? that God was deterred from using them for his purpose because they had defects of character and vices? What a singular... human consciousness and not with fulfilling limited human ideals; and I look at things from that standpoint. In defence of R you gave the examples of Napoleon, Caesar and Shakespeare. But they had no vices like his. Their ambition was not so small, petty and trivial but was rather great, heroic and dazzling — worth having by the great men of the world! Great or dazzling... men are great men and those who have vices are not great, which is an absurd contention. All of them went after women,— two were ambitious, unscrupulous. Napoleon was most arrogant and violent. Shakespeare stole deer. Napoleon lied freely, Caesar was without scruples. Page 251 ...
... the greatest 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... Even the experiences and realisations of this terrestrial world can reveal themselves through the mantras provided their fundamental truth is the truth of delight. Take the famous utterance of Shakespeare: And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, or Dante's: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate, (Abandon hope, all ye that enter here,) Page 109 or Valmiki'... I will have some from the womb of future, for time has no end and the earth too is boundless." From this point of view Milton and Virgil may be looked upon as mere poets. Those who consider Shakespeare, Homer and Valmiki superior to Milton, Virgil and Kalidasa come to such a conclusion from a subtler consideration. One group of poets makes use of vaikhari vak, while the other of pasyanti vak. ...
... creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret Page 83 consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording... his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poets – Shakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping... pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has ...
... generation will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare, "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that will shake the world to its very roots. If for no other... poetry and drawn out many intricate expositions on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length, he ...
... for food and sleep, 600-2; on susupti state, 602; on role of 'hostile' forces, 602ff; on predestination, 602-3; letters to disciples on literature, 604ff; on Goethe and Shakespeare, 605, 606; on Valmiki & Vyasa, Homer & Shakespeare, 605; on Donne's poetry, 606; on psycho-analysis, 607; "four Aurobindos", 607-8; question-answer duet, 608-9; The Future Poetry, 610ff; Ahana, 620ff; e... Sushil, 305, 307 Sethna, K. D. (Amal Kiran), 21,38,71,103, 112fn, 177, 576ff, 587, 589, 604, 638, 654, 655, 656, 662, 690, 705, 717, 721, 722,730, 779 Shah Jehan, 2, 20 Shakespeare, William, 21,30,140,152,177, 241,242,313,605,613 Shankakara, 9, 416,446,448,498 Shankara Chettiar, Calve, 375,380,382,391 Shankaragauda, 579 Shams-ul-Alam, Maulavi ...
... sort of Shakespeare: And Mr. Norton happened to be the Shakespeare of this play... (he) never allowed any material, true or false, cogent or irrelevant, from the smallest to the largest, to go unused; on top of it he could create such a wonderful plot by his self-created and abundant imagination, inference and hypothesis that the great poets and writers of fiction like Shakespeare and Defoe ...
... which with entire correctness and perfection of form, i.e. of metre and language and a careful observance of restraint, i.e. to say avoidance of that extravagance & excess which injure the work of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, unites a high imagination and deep emotion. This is the character of Milton's poetry, which is based upon Greek & Latin models. Pope and his school aimed at correctness & restraint... dignity. But the Augustan tradition of smooth & regular verse has also hampered the writers; the cadences are not managed with sufficient subtlety and the infinitely varied and flexible verse of Shakespeare & Milton has remained beyond their reach. Their verse at its best is on the second plane, not on the first; it shows however a great advance in freedom & variety on that of the Augustans. 2d in... Hellenists, lovers & followers of Greek literature; the English poet who influenced them most was Milton whom Johnson considers to be rough in his verse & language; Gray even declared the diction of Shakespeare to be the true poetic diction. Besides this they opened new fields of interest. Collins took an interest [in] late mediaeval history & literature & Gray was the first Englishman of eminence who studied ...
... prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, our mind loses its customary bearings and flounders in a strange element we can scarcely plumb. The phrase is a grand intrusion in Shakespeare, the rhythm and rapture of another world than his tense quivering sonorities of sensation and passion. Not that those sonorities are absent or that a mystical idea deeper than any he was otherwise... subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed Page 109 — summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses Such lines as In hideous ruin and combustion down [To bottomless perdition, there to... Aurobindo 32.Sri Aurobindo - The Poet 33.The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it 34.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 35.Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare 36.Our Light and Delight—Recollections of Life with the Mother 37.The Mother: Past-Present-Future 38.Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo 39.The Passing of Sri ...
... Questions and Answers , CWM, Vol. 6, p. 229. Shakespeare depicts Antony's immese love for Cleopatra through the gift of a single orient pearl and the Roman promises that at whose foot, To mend the petty present, I will piece Her opulent throne with kingdoms... 2 Later on in Act II Scene 3 Shakespeare describes Cleopatra's gold barge and silver oars. To stress... Prince of Tyre, the royal princess Marina is described thus: As wand-like straight, as silver-voiced; Her eyes as jewel-like and cased as richly; In pace another Juno. 3 Shakespeare focuses on the rareness, the preciousness and the peerless beauty of Cleopartra and Marina through the reference to gold and jewels. Had he heaped ornaments on their person this effect would not ...
... with often even more minute care and detailed perfection what he has revealed in a wide sweep. Herein perhaps lies the difference between a poet and a versifier, an artist and a craftsman — a Shakespeare and a Dryden. It would be, perhaps, more correct to say that the poet is a revealer of greater but hidden splendours than that he is a creator 1 Savitri, p. 242. Page 242... reveal to us invisible connections and relations existing between events of the inner world and material objects. All of us have passed long spells of anguish and, passed by a ringing bell but only Shakespeare could through, observe that Sorrow's like a heavy-hanging bell Once set on ringing with his own weight goes.... Hounds relentlessly chasing a quarry, unfoiled by its dodges, is... love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst. When Shakespeare tells us that Love's feeling is more soft and sensible Than are the tender homs of cockled snail, we are not only made aware of the delicate sensitivity of the lover's feeling ...
... soul-values that enter into Art... In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare..." Thus more appealing, even gripping, than the actual death of Satyavan in the Shalwa wilderness Page 119 is the grim prophecy of death made by Narad in Aswapati's palace at Madra... painting of his dead wife still in the bed also greatly belongs to this superior class. Page 123 But the niskāmabhāva of Vyasa is altogether of a different quality than that of Shakespeare. He is a poet of men and empires and is seated in the midst of warring heroes and hears the loud deafening battle-cries; yet even in this rough-and-tumble his Rishihood remains rooted in the strength... presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements. With that power he can become a moulder of a society and of a nation, things which are unquestionably beyond the capacity of Shakespeare. To put it in other words: Vyasa's sense of detachment is a Rishi's whereas Shakespeare's aesthetic vital; in the one niskāmabhāva has brought out soul values and in the other, by a kind of ...
... will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life-span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life-span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare: "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that will shake the world to its very roots. If for no... intricate movements on rhythm, overhead Page 80 poetry, etc., which is now a permanent treasure in English literature. Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified, were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length ...
... is really the trembling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an 'f'-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's Page 199 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. Shakespeare has a twofold rhythm — with sibilants accompanying the fricatives — because he wants to suggest not only the "evermore unrest" (as one of his Sonnets has it) of life but also the soothing end of... must have "sensational potency". But it would be illegitimate to confine it to the enjoyment of kisses or, as you say afterwards, having "hunger for a woman or for a pound of apricots". No doubt, Shakespeare Page 201 showed "sensational potency" in the exquisite intensity of love he portrayed in Romeo and Juliet and the tremendous immensity of passion he depicted in Antony and Cleopatra... Though women all above; But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends': There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit... Then take Shakespeare of the Sonnets. Has he forfeited "sensational potency" by penning the passages: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, or My love is as a fever ...
... on rare occasions, to achieve the quark-like evanescence of a timeless epiphany. It may have been after such a leap of vital intuition, which we find so liberally scattered in the works of Shakespeare, that caused him to make the dying Hotspur say (I Henry IV; V.iv): But thought's the slave of life, and life tune's fool, And time, that takes survey of all the world, ... monthly Ashram magazine Mother India of which he was, and is, the editor. As an Englishman, I was at once struck by his detailed familiarity not only with English poetry - especially that of Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics - but also with that of Europe. And he appeared familiar not only with the literature but with the best of Western criticism, too. As was Nolini Kanta Gupta... catholic range of interests. He has been able to develop the wide-ranging intellect and sympathy one may expect from a follower of the Integral Yoga. Thus, among other things, he has written on Shakespeare, Blake, Mallarme, on Indian history and philology, on the philosophy of the new physics, on Teilhard de Chardin and on Christian theology - and most abundantly and helpfully on Sri Aurobindo ...
... Tolstoy and the Russian novelists. The self of the creator very visibly overshadows the work, is seen everywhere like the conscious self of Vedanta both containing and inhabiting all his creations. Shakespeare succeeds, as far as a poet can, in veiling himself behind his creatures; he gives us at least the illusion of mirroring the world around him, a world universally represented rather than personally... of curious observation and its aim at a certain force of large and yet minute reality, who was eminently a poet of life observed and understood and of thought playing around the observation, as Shakespeare was the poet of life seen through an identity of feeling with it and of thought arising up out of the surge of life,—Browning, though he seems to have considered this self-concealment especially... has laid some hold too on poetry. Compared with its work all previous creation seems psychologically poor both in richness of material and in subtlety and the depth of its vision; half the work of Shakespeare in spite of its larger and greater treatment hardly contains as much on this side as a single volume of Browning. Realism has carried this new trend to the farthest limit possible to a professedly ...
... normal intelligence. The greatest poets have been those in whom these moments of a highest intensity of intuitive and inspired speech have been of a frequent occurrence and in one or two, as in Shakespeare, of a miraculous abundance. There is however this subtle farther variation that this kind of utterance, though essentially the same always, takes a different colour according to the kind of object... quite another hue and seems even of a very different texture of language. The characteristic distinction of its note from that of the more intellectualised intuition can best be illustrated from Shakespeare and by such a passage as the speech of Claudio, Ay, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod: and the... effectuate the complete change; an uncertain transition has yet to pass into a great transformation. The moulds or at least the spirit and manner of poetic expression have to be recast, very much as Shakespeare and his contemporaries recast the poetic speech of the English tongue so as to give shape and room to Page 300 the surge of self-seeing and self-feeling and self-thinking of the life ...
... out of man's outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step farther and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyasa there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond the Ideals and Idea-Forces even there are... and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. In the artist's vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values. Shakespeare can get dramatic and therefore aesthetic Page 121 values out of Dogberry and Malvolio, and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or ...
... question: is the artist appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasyā. The Gita... it as a mere artist. And what they do does not always reach the public. How many there are who have done great things and not published them to the world! Have Yogis done greater dramas than Shakespeare? Drama is not the highest of the arts. Someone has said that drama is greater than any other art and art is greater than life. But it is not quite like that. The mistake of the artist is to believe ...
... appointed by the Divine or self-appointed? Page 105 But if one does Yoga can he rise to such heights as Shakespeare or Shelley? There has been no such instance. Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasya, The Gita... as a mere artist. And what they do does not always reach the public. How many there are who have done great things and not published them to the world! Have Yogis done greater dramas than Shakespeare? Drama is not the highest of the arts. Someone has said that drama is greater than any other art and art is greater than life. But it is not quite like that. The mistake of the artist is ...
... nobody will ever outsing Valmiki and Homer and Shakespeare. But a new region of reality will be laid bare, untrodden expressive paths penetrated. While the former ages gave us something of the world's wonder as seized by the body-sense, the life-gusto, the mental aesthesis, there will be found in the future a poetic word equal to Homer and Shakespeare and Valmiki but packed with a superhuman awareness... knowledge: everything depends on what "plane" of being has found expression. Every plane has its own voice, its own spontaneous manner of utterance. A vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion is Shakespeare, the plane of the Life Force par excellence. Milton is a less vibrant play with our guts but a more resounding impact on our grey cells, the plane of the Mind Force raised to its climax. Beyond ...
... is a heavy baggage that weighs poetry down. NIRODBARAN: Dilip says he does not know how to define greatness but one can say that Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley are great and one should reserve the epithet for such men only. SRI AUROBINDO: Shakespeare and Dante are among the greatest. A poet like Browning has plenty of mass, volume, "girth" as you say, but he is a different case. Once... Once he used to be rated a great poet. NIRODBARAN: Browning? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Both Browning and Tennyson ranked as great—they were just below Shakespeare and Milton. But can Browning be taken to be a greater poet than Thompson? Has he any single poem as great as "The Hound of Heaven"? NIRODBARAN: Satyendra Dutt was also called a great poet once. SRI AUROBINDO : Is he equal to Browning ...
... this word. Let us attend to Amal Kiran's narration: "Some Baconians have traced in the works of Shakespeare various hidden messages, several declarations of Bacon's authorship put in the form of ciphers....The shortest of all cryptograms ... is evolved directly from a word occurring in Shakespeare. The word is "honorificabilitudinitatibus". In Love's Labour Lost, Act V, Scene 1, you will find... the ablative plural of the Latin original of the English term.... By the way, among polysyllabic English words, the longest is "honorificabilitudinity" - twenty-two letters. "The form used by Shakespeare has been pounced upon by the Baconians and they have juggled out of its twenty-seven letters a variety of Latin sentences, the most plausible of which is: "Hi ludi orbituiti F. Baconis nati." The ...
... in Ionia in Asia. Among the front ranking poets of the world we could include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than Homer in the Page 11 Iliad.... has a greater range than Homer in Odyssey. Both Vyasa and Valmiki, in their strength and in their achievement in regard to the largeness of the field are greater than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare. According to Sri Aurobindo, both the Mahabharta and the Ramayana are "built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharta ) all human thought as well in their ...
... feel like Shakespeare (that's why I started my lecture in imitation of Shakespeare) addressing, you know, the famous piece which goes something like: "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,/ Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ...?" 215 etc. Or I feel like sending an 213Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 11:1: 704. 214A well-known joke from Amrita-da, 215William Shakespeare, The Tragedy ...
... creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret Page 311 consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording... of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them, gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poets—Shakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping... pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently ...
... Two Sonnets of Shakespeare ON the occasion of the 400th birth anniversary of Shakespeare, I present to you today two of the great Shakespearean sonnets. The sonnets, as you know, are all about love. They are however characterised by an incredible intensity and perhaps an equally incredible complexity, for the Shakespearean feeling is of that category. Shakespeare has treated love in ...
... was years a-growing. Sri Aurobindo greatly admired Goethe and once wrote to a disciple: Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English Poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either... equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare... There is too a touch mostly wanting—the touch of an absolute, an intensely inspired or revealing inevitability... 123 Sri Aurobindo thus knew his Faust even as he knew the Commedia ...
... Rev. William H. Drewett, a cousin of Mr. Glazier, who lived in Manchester. Mr. Drewett was congregational minister of the Stockport Road Church – now known as the Octagonal Church. He lived at 84, Shakespeare Street, near the church. Aurobindo's two elder brothers were of school-going age and joined the Manchester Grammar School, while Aurobindo, who was only seven, and probably considered too young to... Page 5 etc. Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French. As he was studying at home he had plenty of time to read books according to his own taste, including the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats. He not only read poetry but wrote verses for Fox's Weekly, even at that early age. It 'seems he did not play any games, except cricket, which he tried once without much success... never during that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers, at the scholarship examination). As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without ...
... artists who produce works of art under that kind of restraint. But it is not always so. Take, for instance, Shakespeare. At first the idea was that in his work there is no measure and harmony. It was considered bizarre. Then they found that it was a work of great art. In a poet like Shakespeare the movement is not towards limitation but rather expression – a throwing himself out to cover everything... work would be uneven – very good at times but very bad at other times. Disciple : Tagore did a lot of work before he became established as a poet. . Sri Aurobindo : Shakespeare studied all the existing dramas before he wrote his own. One cannot play the violin without training. Page 255 Disciple : Would not the Higher Power develop even the physical ...
... Bhushan and Manomohan, and their sister, Sarojini, to England. The boys were entrusted to an English family, the Rev. William Drewett, a congregational minister, and Mrs. Drewett, who lived at 84, Shakespeare Street, Manchester. Mr. Drewett was a cousin of a magistrate at Rungpur, Mr. Glazier, with whom Dr. Krishnadhan was on friendly terms. Page 29 He left strict instructions with the... made him proficient in English, and taught him history, etc. While Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French, Sri Aurobindo found time at home to read on his own Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare and the Bible, and he even wrote some verse for the Fox's Weekly. While games did not appeal to him, he seems to have played cricket in Mr. Drewett's garden, though not at all well. An... examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours.... AS for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), Page 33 I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed ...
... of the Stockport (now Octagonal) Church, and lived nearby at 84 Shakespeare Street. Sri Aurobindo lived there from 1879 to 1884. It does strike me as rather symbolic that the first five years of his life in England should be spent at Shakespeare Street, N°84, and then that 4 Theatre Road, where he was born, should be renamed Shakespeare Sarani (Street) N°8! What whim prompted the Calcuttan authorities ...
... poetical speech, whether the poet has his eye like Homer on physical object and power of action and the externalised thought and emotion which they throw up into the surface roll of life, or else like Shakespeare on the surge of the life-spirit and its forms of character and passion and its waves of self-interpreting thought and reflection, or on the play of the detached or half-detached seeing intellect... the engulfing swell of periods of large and resonant harmony, Swinburne by the cymbal clang of his alliterations and a rush and surge of assonant lyrical sound, Browning by a calculated roughness. Shakespeare himself under a great stress of crowding life and thought suggestions simply broke the back and joints of his instrument and tortured it into shapes from which he got out masterfully irregular harmonies ...
... effects of the belated continental discovery of Shakespeare and the vehement and sudden wave of the Byronic influence, which did much to enforce the note of revolt and of a half sentimental, half sensual pessimism Page 48 which is even now one of the strongest shades in the literary tone of modern Europe,—to the present day Shakespeare and Byron are the only two great names of English ...
... reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser. This failure to grasp the conditions of a perfect intuitive and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the attempt itself has not been understood by the critical mind of... great ages of poetry, though there was never any possibility of contact between that earlier oriental and this later occidental work,—the dramas of Kalidasa and some of the dramatic romances of Shakespeare, plays like the Sanskrit Seal of Rakshasa and Toy-Cart and Elizabethan historic and melodramatic pieces, the poetry of the Cloud-Messenger and erotic Elizabethan poetry, the romantically vivid ...
... an unfelt compulsion, always rhythmic and always quantitative in its rhythm. If we take similarly passages from literary prose, we shall find the same law of rhythm lifted to a higher level. Shakespeare and the Bible will give us the best and most concentrated examples of this rhythm in prose. Our first quotation, from the New Testament, can indeed be arranged, omitting the superfluous word "even"... —even sometimes a free recurrence or dominance of certain measures, not laid down or fixed, but easy and natural,—which gives an underlying unity to the whole passage. In the instance taken from Shakespeare a remarkable persistence of four-foot measures, with occasional shorter ones intervening, builds up a grave and massive rhythmic feeling and imparts even a poetic motion to the unified whole. ...
... One can be faithful to history if one likes but even then one has to expand and deal creatively with characters and events, otherwise the work will come to nothing or little. In many of his dramas Shakespeare takes names from history or local tradition, but uses them as he chooses; he places his characters in known countries and surroundings, but their stories are either his own inventions, or the idea... successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is Page 512 not enough. For success in the former Arjava's Totalitarian ...
... research into this sense that takes one to the threshold of the mystical. And what a poor definition of religion we have in the formula: "not merely think thoughts, but feel them"! Is it because Shakespeare felt his thoughts that we have that passage over which Murry exults, the passage whose thought is the futility of human existence? — Tommorow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this... glory is shed? Can the thrilling of the poet's heart by the poet's mind shed it? No. It is because the lines have the gait as of a god. Perfection is somehow abroad. Shakespeare's heart-beats, when Shakespeare expressed his thought, became the footfalls of that Perfection: some haloed power walked out from the poet's depths into his poetry and stamped on it its unimpeachable faultlessness of form. And ...
... the absence of a typewriter! Well, this absence will help keep my presence actively remembered — if at all I am in danger of being swallowed up In the dark backward and abysm of Time, as Shakespeare puts it, though elsewhere than in his son-nets, my exploration of which you were kind enough to start typing for me in those luminous afternoons in the Ashram. Poverty in India is something... the right line — or lines — of one's nature, whether philanthropy or any of the others I have listed. There is no compulsion to give oneself exclusively to philanthropic activity. We can't wish a Shakespeare to stop writing plays or a Beethoven to cease composing symphonies and carry on social service any more than we can wish them to become doctors or engineers when their natural turn is towards drama ...
... metrical scheme of pyrrhic, spondee, spon-dee, iamb and iamb causes with two units of massed stresses on words carrying peculiar accumulations of consonants an actual difficulty to the vocal breath. Shakespeare has also three consecu-tive lines in Lear, thirty-two monosyllabic words in a row: And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou... spinning worms That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk. A most original surprise suggestive of exquisite industry springs at us here. Now take the word "digestion" and see what Shakespeare can make of it as compared to what it may be in the mouth of a Page 59 doctor. He turns it to vigorous and vivid use when he speaks of lives and fortunes consumed In hot digestion ...
... reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser." 12 With a critical grip Sri Aurobindo 13 sets in proper psychological relation to its immediate past and to the succeeding age the English Romantics' "brilliant and beautiful... essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives. It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn... Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a record of failures. "The"pure romanticism" of which Sri Aurobindo speaks is, as ...
... se, "echolalia" — a tendency capable of a fine haunting or else epigrammatic effect but not seldom an easy result of negligence and an instrument of perverse ingenuity or rhetorical barrenness. Shakespeare is notorious for his pun-mania and in his comic scenes one may excuse him provided he is neat and does not torture the language too much; but nobody can help jibbing at the immortal Will's becoming... usually to be found where a firm yet flexible tone and structure are requisite for success as in the Italian form, and Chattopadhyaya's penchant is for that: even when the sestet is English a la Shakespeare, the octave he generally builds with a Petrarchan punctiliousness of rhyme. The muscular energy other sonneteers employ is almost absent: instead, a nimble quickness executes the complexities — a ...
... His own unfettered but infallible fantasy. Out of His infinite personality He creates all these characters & their inevitable actions & destinies. So it is with every divine creator,—with Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa. It is perfectly true that each has his own style of language & creation, his own preferred system or harmony of the poetic Art, just as the creator of this universe has fashioned... necessary attributes. It is the infinite alone that can create; the finite can only manufacture, reproduce or at the most bring out a fine art & craftsmanship. Among all the Elizabethan dramatists Shakespeare alone has produced living men; the rest are only admirable, trivial or monstrous sketches, caricatures or images of men. There is, however, one exception to this rule; every man can at his best moments ...
... almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life,—that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare ....But...Whitman, by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater... time of intellectuality and spirituality like Sri Aurobindo, with his vibrant touch on life and his mastery of that language of fire and ether which the Elizabethan age carried to its climax in Shakespeare, prove Homeric, particularly in the Greek poet's own metrical mould, if we can show in him the qualities he reads in common between Homer and Whitman. First let us take the American vers ...
... as, say, Shakespeare. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well" moves us as art in the same essential way as anything from Blake, because in both cases the art-thrill is due to the fiery particle called intuition - the sole difference lying in the fact that through Blake the spark leaps from a level of consciousness other than the one from which it makes its saltus through Shakespeare. It seems ...
... poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth,... essence in two different objects. William Watson, interpreting a sea-scape - And I beheld the waters in their might Writhe as a serpent by some great spell curbed And foiled - or Shakespeare expressing how the mast-climbing shipboy's eyes are sealed up in a drowse and his brains rocked In cradle of the rude imperious surge conveys to us an extremely vivid perception of the hidden ...
... the wealth which that country was shipping home from its South American colonies. Elizabeth’s reign became England’s Golden Age. It was the age of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; of the poets John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Georges Chapman; of the musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; of the seafarers and explorers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh... weren’t perceived to threaten national security, she didn’t care what was done in the privacy of the subjects’ homes. Such tolerance was exceptional at the time.’ (John Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, Shakespeare alive! p. 23) [^101]: There is some evidence that Sri Aurobindo was, besides Leonardo da Vinci, also Pericles, Caesar Augustus and Louis XIV. He may have been King Solomon, for, after all, the ...
... queasy than Englishmen themselves. Of course there were special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. My view of your poetry is different... One can be faithful to history if one likes but even then one has to expand and deal creatively with characters and events, otherwise the work will come to nothing or little. In many of his dramas Shakespeare takes names from history or local tradition, but uses them as he chooses; he places his characters in known countries and surroundings but their stories are either his own inventions or the ...
... should be happy I increased your list. Three books of mine are still missing because these are out of print: Sri Aurobindo - the Poet, The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare. The last one has gone in for a second edition, with an added appendix giving two references I had somehow missed.* This book has been rather popular. I remember that on a visit to Bombay many years... "Editor's Note: The new edition was out in the middle of last April. Page 170 told me: "One of your books is creating a lot of interest." I asked: "Which one?" He answered: "Shakespeare on Sri Aurobindo." I exclaimed: "No wonder! It must surely be the most original book I could ever have written." He nodded with an innocent smile. I was glad to know of your love of flowers ...
... Latinised construction 245 linguistic adventurousness of 284 metrical and rhythmical effects 53, 109,169,215 monosyllables 111,188,349 technique of 6,244 Shāh-Nāmāh 60 Shakespeare, William 42,164,166, 188,205,230,237 Shelley 23,42,67,70,197,334,367 siddha 303,304 silence 87,228,265 of mind 344 Sophocles 205 soul description 115 ... 9.Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments 10.Problems of Ancient India 11.Some Talks at Pondicherry : Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran 12.Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare 13.Sri Aurobindo : The Poet 14.Talks on Poetry 15.The Adventure of the Apocalypse (Poems) 16.The Indian Spirit and the World's Future 17.The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its ...
... his vision in a language which had a world status. Let us note that the problem before Sri Aurobindo was not the construction of a dramatic diction, a diction like that of "myriad-minded" Shakespeare, but a diction suited to a substance that was epic, lyric and dramatic in its inspiration. He desired that his diction should have an Upanishadic charm and depth and a Kalidasian richness and... the first creator, I am the last. 8 Similarly, in passages which express subtle states of the soul, he hews his quarry from the Romantic tradition in poetry from the time of Spenser and Shakespeare to that of Swinburne and Yeats. But this does not mean that Savitri is a mosaic in its design and fragmentary in its execution. It has a flexible diction, a diction that manages these ...
... that prevents him from being recognised, by those who might be supposed best qualified to do so, as a supreme master of English poetic expression, and the greatest innovator in this language since Shakespeare. A first reason is undoubtedly connected with literary fashions. Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out how difficult it is to make any sure judgements about contemporary artistic achievement... perhaps even falsehoods; and to counterbalance this doubt, they have tended to anchor their images and their creations firmly to the 'realistic'. We are delighted with the infinite inventiveness of Shakespeare because he gives us 'real flesh-and-blood characters', whom we can imagine actually meeting and conversing with. So Sri Aurobindo, by fulfilling the Indian archetype of Kavi and Rishi, has ...
... Adamo Caduto. But these very passages are yet typically Milton's, full of what has been called his "grand style". Literary pilfering is an old profession. Virgil lifted chunks out of Homer, and Shakespeare took most of his plots from Bandello and versified Plutarch in many places. But Milton stands at the head of those who have made a pastiche or mosaic of pilferings. And his own attitude to this kind... , grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Page 76 Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides...." 15 "There can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his ...
... passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that ... Shakespeare's lines, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain have the overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling, but Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does with life, with vital emotions and reactions or the ...
... what Matthew Arnold had to say about Shakespeare, and I think, this would, mutatis-mutandis, apply to the writings of Kālidāsa too. Others abide our question — Thou art free! We ask and ask— thou smilest and art still Out-topping knowledge! Page 17 It is no wonder that Sir William Jones has referred to him as "the Shakespeare of India". Sri Aurobindo, the greatest ...
... most remarkable history that exists in any language; yet there are few people in the world who can say they have read it: in England and America it has hardly been heard of. Three hundred years ago Shakespeare did not know the true story of Joan of Arc; in his day it was unknown even in France. For four hundred years it existed rather as a vaguely defined romance than as definite and authentic history... upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the ...
... bag: (1)AK: We have various guesses about your previous lives. The other day I happened to ask Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other ...
... special interest for her and she wanted them by her side to show them to the sadhaks. One is happily surprised to find here not the Sri Aurobindo of Himalayan grandeur and aloofness, but the modern Shakespeare of spiritual sublimity and jollity. Discussion, argument leavened with a sweet temper, witty passages of arms, mental duels, banter, persiflage, rollicking laughter, repartees, swear-words, then... emeralds and lapis-lazulis of, rare value were the reward extracted from his supramental quarry, though at the cost of being dubbed a "wooden head" and many other complimentary epithets. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Napoleon, Virgil, Shaw, Joyce, Hitler, Mussolini, Negus, Spanish Civil War, General Miaja, romping in, oh, the world-theatre seen at a glance exhibiting many-coloured movements for ...
... hope you didn't intend to make me an April-fool mentioning Virgil and Nirod in the same pen-stroke! [ In pencil. ] What a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. Another letter from Jatin. He has asked for the reply to his previous letter. Please do write something tonight, Sir. I request you, I beseech you, I entreat you, I pray to... Absolutely unreadable! Not even by Nolini was it possible! I repeat then from memory. "What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other." 183 Tomorrow is 4th April! 184 We are commemorating it thus: 1) Nishikanta sends a big poem—splendid, exquisite. By Jove, what allow and what ...
... sustained delight of mental and spiritual creative effort. In the East? by whom? I don't believe it for a moment. To suppose that if sex-gratification were a more prolonged business, Shelley and Shakespeare would not have cared to write poetry—is blank brutal nonsense—They had something else in them besides the mere animal. Do you agree with all this, Guru, especially with Ouspenski's opinion? ... the poem. It is called a "hapax legomenon", "a once-spoken word" and that's all. তৃণাঞ্চিত for instance is a fine word and can adorn, not blot Tagore's poetry even if no one else uses it. I think Shakespeare has many words coined by him or at least some that do not occur elsewhere. Any opinion, Guru, and does your intuition say anything on প্রমীলা? I really can't say what প্রমীলা it is. I think ...
... consciousness, it does not necessarily follow that he will be a greater man of action or a greater creator. One may rise to spiritual planes of inspiration undreamed of by Shakespeare and yet not be as great a poetic creator as Shakespeare. "Greatness" is not the object of spiritual realisation any more than fame or success in the world—how are these things the standard of spiritual realisation? I find ...
... description of their past lives. There are also the well-known spirit communications through a medium at spirit sittings. Someone comes and tells you he was Napoleon, another was Shakespeare and so on. How many Shakespeare and Napoleons and Caesars have manifested in this way, there is no counting! There are spirits who are extremely talkative and bewitch you with extraordinary stories, many that ...
... often given us to clean the dishes and not engage in study. The great men with whom we studied had this gift in large Page 429 measure, at least many of them. Percival taught us Shakespeare. He never expounded in full the meaning of words and phrases. This was done in detail by Manomohan Ghose, although he too did this only during the first two years of college; for we were then just... best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even. Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet. Breaking the silence of the seas Beyond ...
... structure in man consists precisely in its wonderful elasticity – the 'infinite faculty' or multiple functioning referred to by Shakespeare. This is the very characteristic character of man both with regard to his physical and psychological make-up. The ¹ Shakespeare, Hamlet , Act 2, Sc. 2 Page 79 other species are, everyone of them, more or less, a specialised formation; we have ...
... of the rarest spectacles.¹ I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet – I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare 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... express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet Of imagination all compact.. . . The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling.¹ The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulses – it is these of which ...
... Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth, A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to each touch The secret lies of man... Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned And conquered by the cross; this only learned The secret of the suns that blaze afar; This was Napoleon's giant mind of war" 15 ... Djinn into utter obedience - and there is very little doubt that Sri Aurobindo had easy access to the mantra, and hence he could, since the early years at Baroda, command the Djinn's services. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, they all knew the secret, and they all could breathe into the seeming irregularity of blank verse the norm of iambic rhythm - a norm ...
... it is not "rooted in the soil", too Sanskritised and not written for the masses. English poetry, he says, is founded on the Anglo Saxon language. Sri Aurobindo : Not at all. The great Shakespeare and poets from Milton to Shelley did not write, consciously in the Anglo Saxon language – except William Morris, who used Anglo Saxon words. They have followed Latin and Greek vocabulary. And the... was never written for the mass. It is only a minority that read and appreciated poetry. The definition of modern poetry is what the poet himself and a few of his admirers around him understand. Shakespeare and Milton are not mass poets. Martin Tupper and Mrs. Hymans wrote for the mass – "He stood on the burning deck, when all but he had fled" – That sort of thing. Tupper sold more in his life than ...
... John Bull with the full equipment of tiger qualities"; he learned his politics from the Anglo-India press in India, his poetry from Rudyard Kipling, his history from records of oppression: Shakespeare and Milton did not illumine his imagination when he peered into the future of India. Mill, Carlyle or Herbert Spencer did not shed any light on his reasoning when he applied himself to the... of hand, the "Trial Scene" in The Merchant of Venice to a Calcutta Police Court. The editor of the Yugantar is Antonio, and the denizens of "Law and Order" constitute Shylock. It is all in Shakespeare; but the derogation is directly aimed at the repressive policy of the Government. A week later, the satirical poet turned his attention to the place-seekers an title-hunters who weakened ...
... Aravinda A. Ghose was able to win the Bedford Prize in History. In 1889 he was awarded the Second Prize in the Butterworth Prize Examination "for knowledge of English Literature, especially Shakespeare." Only Shakespeare? No, no! He participated with distinction in a debate on 'the inconsistency of Swift's political views.' This was on 5 November 1889 at the meeting of the School Literary Society. On ...
... Bankim, another Madhu Sudan comes not again. Some are pointing to this as a sign of intellectual barrenness; but it is not so. Shakespeare and Milton came within the limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton. Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there have been Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second ...
... the animal below him. It is doubtful whether in the pure human mould Nature can go much farther than she has gone at present; that she can for instance produce a higher mental type than Newton, Shakespeare, Caesar or Napoleon, a higher moral type than Buddha, Christ or St Francis, a higher physical type than the Greek athlete or to give modern examples, a Sandow or a Ramamurti. She may seek to bring... which lays its hand on the mould & sustains it, so that it does not break at all, nor is flawed; or if there is a disturbance, it is slight and negligible. Such an element there was in Caesar, in Shakespeare, in Goethe. Sometimes also a force appears to which we can no longer apply the description of genius without being hopelessly inadequate in our terminology. Then those who have eyes to see, bow down ...
... gestures, no dignity, no fine, just, rationally natural and beautiful classic movement and pose. But even the strictest Latin mind has now got over its objections to the "splendid barbarism" of Shakespeare and can understand that here is a fuller, less sparing and exiguous vision of life, a greater intuitive unity than the formal unities of the classic aesthesis. But the Indian vision of the world... express these things, cannot understand or put up with them when they are expressed in this Page 279 oriental art, speech and style and object to it as the Latin mind once objected to Shakespeare. Perhaps the day is not distant when it will see and understand and perhaps even itself try to express the same things in another language. The objection that the crowding detail allows no calm ...
... value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but... hacking of stone and an effeminate daubing of canvas; Vauban, Pestalozzi, Dr. Parr, Vatel and Beau Brummell are then the true heroes of artistic creation and not Da Vinci, Angelo, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Rodin. Whether Mr. Archer's epithets and his accusations against Indian spirituality stand in the comparison, let the judicious determine. But meanwhile we see the opposition of the standpoints ...
... lost? (5th) (2) Here we may reign secure;¦ and in my choice (6th) To reign is worth ambition,¦ though in hell; (7th) Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven. Or from Shakespeare: (1) Sees Helen's beautyا in a brow of Egypt (5th) (2) To be or not to be, ¦that is the question (6th) But I don't know whether your prosodist would agree... especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all of whose great achievements were done by others; that Shakespeare was 'no great shakes' and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore? But these ...
... Talks on Poetry TALK TWENTY-THREE We have brought Shakespeare and Eliot together apropos of the latter's lines on evening as an etherized patient. But Eliot and Sarojini Naidu would indeed be strange associates, the one a sophisticated modernist, the other a romantic traditionalist, the one intellectually inspired, the other emotionally beauty-swept. Yet... Yet there are some tracks in my mind along which I must bring them together: perhaps the very ingeniousness of Shakespeare and Eliot drives me in this matter. The lines we have quoted from Eliot I have considered the surgeon's delight. Well, the husband of the Indian poetess was a doctor and it is by marrying him that Sarojini Chattopadhyaya became Sarojini Naidu. Once an Indian admirer of hers ...
... We see your life's passage to be from "fine" to "finer" and we don't at all think we poured our love upon an undeserving uppish chap. It is your foe, masked as friend, whom the adjective-fluent Shakespeare would have called a "lecherous, treacherous, smiling villain" and who by digging your grave Page 105 in secret is accurately hit off in that magnificent impeachment in Measure for... "For my own interest I will try to analyse my 'intuitive' reaction to the examples you quote, and add some of my own: Page 106 Typical "The Everlasting" (Shakespeare) "The Slain" (ditto) Shelley's "where the Eternal are" "The Naked and the Dead" (used as a novel's title) Blake's "the eternals" Hots de categorie 'The Eternal" ...
... this vibration is within a larger vibration which characterises the living stuff of a plane of consciousness. For an example take the compactly emotioned descriptive line about wintry boughs in Shakespeare: Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, and put it beside Wordsworth's less compact but equally keen-emotioned description: Page 11 ...more desolate... to the language, but the language shapes itself on dissimilar planes in them, and the dissimilarity is felt even more in the movement and sonance of the words than in their turn and order. In the Shakespeare it is as if our bowels of pity were exquisitely stirred together with our heart, whereas in the Wordsworth the heart seems to set up with delicate piercingness a mournful tremor in our grey cells ...
... what is ahead from what has fallen - as Shakespeare would visionarily tell you - In the dark backward and abysm of time. The difficulty is that the "once-bright" is fused with the "not-yet-bright". Only the soul in you who, as the Katha Upani-shad implies, is today from yesterday and will be tomorrow from today can do on the individual scale what Shakespeare with another powerful vision, refers ...
... have thought of Shakespeare at his most Elizabethan, at his extreme of mercurial mood, metaphor-gorgedness, word-variety, protean syntax. More or less the same, I suspect, as what Voltaire did. The French have an intellect very much like that of the Greeks, though in other respects they are very different, and most probably Aristotle would have proclaimed like Voltaire that Shakespeare was a drunken ...
... The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo II Sri Aurobindo and the Hexameter 1 Blank verse, ever since Shakespeare and Milton gave it the shape of their genius, has been the mould par excellence of English poetry. Its unrhymed lines of five feet, variously modulating on the iambic base of a light unstressed syllable... however, have been haunted by the cadences of the ancient world and have often tried to transfer into their language the hexameter itself — the "heroic" blank verse of Greece and Rome. The mould which Shakespeare and Milton adopted and perfected is unlikely ever to fall into desuetude. It had its birth in the predominantly iambic nature of the English tongue and its span of five feet holds a poetic gesture ...
... poetry is replaced by an insistent pettiness and oddity, the beauty of vision which past poets sought gives way to a clever delight in the debased or the diseased. Thus "the multidinous seas" of Shakespeare are said to "yap like a Pekinese". "Epileptic larks", extremely unShelleyan, fill the sky. And the nightingales which, from Greek times onward, have inspired singers to their most sensitive apprehension... mucky and everything must be free of turns suggestive of the sublime or the exquisite. There must be no wingedness in the words, no gleam on them from sun or moon or star. What a silly old ranter Shakespeare seems to him when he makes Antony declare to Cleopatra about their days of love: Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor But was a race of ...
... edited Mother India , one of the best cultural monthlies of our country, known for its high standards and professionalism. Sethna has pioneered research in areas as diverse as Blake and Shakespeare Studies, Aryan Invasion Theory and Ancient Indian History, Overhead Poetry, Christology, Comparative Mythology, the Study of Hellenic Literature and Culture, Indian systems of Yoga, International... writing verses about a girl called Katie and he "resolved to outdo him". He outdid his cousin by writing five hundred lines. His cousin also introduced him to some of the major British poets like Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which ...
... rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Sug- Page 114 gestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian grandeur and Aeschylean sublimity... grand style from the Miltonic. Yet a very sensitive perception can feel that there passes through the Aurobindonian a faint quiver of beauty, a secret breath of sweetness, a touch part Virgil part Shakespeare and part Spenser, which the Miltonic with its austerer accent has all but lost to power and greatness. Not that Milton's passage is the least bit inferior in poetic quality, nor can we regret ...
... which might stand on a level with Virgil's Aeneid and Lucretius's De Natura Rerum. Besides, the whole of Europe would be his audience. Luckily for modern times which has, like the already modern Shakespeare, "small Latin and less Greek", he chose English and consented to limit his appeal. But, while choosing English, he made the language so Latinised that much of the poem could be followed by any ... preceding contests. A Latin poet speaks of Diana as "comitum pulcherrima", "the fairest of her own attendant girls". But we must not think of Milton as the sole perpetuator of this classic form. Shakespeare had already written in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 30 "the greatest error of all the rest." Likewise most of Milton's Latinisms have precedents elsewhere. Our lines illustrate also the Latin ...
... spirit of one who, blind and lonely in his old age, amidst a political regime hostile to him and his hopes, kept on fashioning the greatest poetic work by any Englishman, outside the dramas of Shakespeare. The quintessence of this spirit are the words put into the mouth of Satan while that Archangel admonishes one of his despairing followers: "Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable, ... real may be charged with different imaginative attitudes. The imaginative attitude may be oriented chiefly towards the multiform world-activity in which the ultimately real manifests itself. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of such an attitude and we rightly designate his genius as protean or myriad-minded. Dante exemplifies an attitude oriented in the main towards human life set in a wider ...
... guesses about your previous lives. The other day I happened to ask Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those forces that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let ...
... always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa, however much they may differ in everything else, are at one in having this as the fundamental character of their greatness. Their supremacy does not lie essentially in... way of expression of the born philosophic thinker hampered him in poetic expression. It was the constant outstreaming of form and thought and image from an abundant inner vision of life which made Shakespeare, whatever his other deficiencies, the sovereign dramatic poet. Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately ...
... modifications have put their strong impress upon the literature. It is the ostensible method of English fiction from Richardson to Dickens; it got into the Elizabethan drama and prevented it, except in Shakespeare, from equalling the nobler work of other great periods of dramatic poetry. It throws its limiting shade over English narrative poetry, which after its fresh start in the symbolism of the Faerie... of their autonomous steps, an exhilarating and stimulating licence. The beauty and colour of one was dominant in its pure poetry, the vigour of the other took the lead in its drama, but both in Shakespeare were welded into a supreme phenomenon of poetic and dramatic genius. It is on the whole the greatest age of utterance, though not Page 70 of highest spirit and aim, through which the ...
... taste, there should be a subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed— summa ars est celare artem . Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses. Such lines as In hideous ruin and combustion down or Page 282 Wilt thou... 14 ] deliberate? Yes, like Shakespeare's ... r ock his b r ains In c r adle of the r ude impe r ious surge. Mine has only three sonant r 's, the others being inaudible—Shakespeare pours himself 5 in a close space. 2 November 1936 Page 286 All in her pointed to a nobler kind. [ p. 14 ]* It is a "connecting" line which prepares for what follows. It is sometimes ...
... that looks too much all round and sees too many sides to have an effective will for action. He plans ingeniously without coming to anything decisive. And when he does act, it is on a vital impulse. Shakespeare suggests but does not bring out the idealist in him, the man of bright illusions. Donne Donne is very much in the limelight these days. How far can we regard the present high estimate of him... especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was "no great things" and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore? But these ...
... features of overhead poetry, e.g. greater depth and height of spiritual vision, inner life and experience Page 186 and character of rhythm and expression. But it won't necessarily outshine Shakespeare in poetic excellence. Obviously if properly done it would have a deeper and rarer substance, but would not be necessarily greater in poetic excellence. You say also that for overhead poetry... usually by bits only, not in a mass. You may say that in overhead poetry expression of spiritual vision is more important. True, but why can't it be clothed in as fine poetry as in the case of Shakespeare? The highest source of inspiration will surely bring in all the characteristics of highest poetry, no? It can, but it is more difficult to get. It can be as fine poetry as Shakespeare's if there ...
... the revelation and inspiration Page 28 reproduced by a secondary, diluted and uncertain process in the mind. But even this secondary and inferior action is so great that it can give us Shakespeare, Homer and Valmekie. There is also a tertiary and yet more common action of the inspiration. For of our three mental instruments of knowledge,—the heart or emotionally realising mind, the observing... another which is or seems to be more catching and boldly effective. Keats is Page 31 the principle exemplar of the first tendency, the Elizabethans of the second. The earlier work of Shakespeare abounds with classical instances. As distinguished from the Greek, English is a pronouncedly rajasic literature and, though there is much in it that is more splendid than almost anything done by ...
... in him which first forces itself on his introspection when he begins to go inward. Poetry too takes this turn, rises and deepens to a new kind of greatness; and at the summit in this kind we have Shakespeare. This way of seeing and creating, in which thought is involved in life and the view is that of the life-spirit feeling, thinking, imagining, carried forward in its own surge of self, cannot ... supernaturalism or, as it should more Page 208 properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a record of failures. Realism is a more native turn of this kind of intelligence, and ...
... poets invented a metre—they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres ...
... modulations of rhythm, variations of pause and caesura. The iambic metre itself was at first taxed with monotony in a drumming beat until it was used Page 141 in a more plastic way by Shakespeare and Milton. All depends on the skill which one brings to the work and the tool is quarrelled with only when the workman does not know how to use it. The English language is not naturally melodious... while in another language, however well-learned, the ear is not so clair-audient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyrists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody, but not inferior. Bengali ...
... passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that would... Shakespeare's lines, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain have the overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling, but Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does with life, with vital emotions and reactions or ...
... free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake... Well, when educated India adopted the Shakespearean tongue, the seeds of the country's freedom got sown and the grave of Page 68 British Imperialism began to be dug. India could say cheekily to her rulers: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue Your Shakespeare spake.... There could be no possible ...
... than awed. The pairing of an Anglo-Saxon word with a Latin gives Watson's original version its true grandeur. Some of the best English lines depend on this kind of pairing for their excellence. Shakespeare often uses even for the same sense two words, one Anglo-Saxon, the other Latin —as in: "the head and front of my offence." There have been enthusiasts of Latinity and there have been extremists... "tell" has a straight-forward heart-to-heart emphasis which could not be bettered. I may quote an instance in which the word "tale" rather than "story" is the inevitable expression. In Macbeth Shakespeare has some lines etching out a desperate pessimism. Towards the close of the passage Macbeth says about life: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. ...
... Q: Suggestiveness? Suggestiveness can come from both styles. If you take Shakespeare you most frequently find in him a wealth of words. Instead of saying one word he says five. Similarly in Milton you have a plethora of words, art which is enriched, art which is abundant. But sometimes even in Shakespeare you come across very bare lines which are just as effective as his wealth-burdened move- ...
... select circle may be understood or appreciated by another select circle or in the future like Blake's poetry. Nobody appreciated Blake in his own time—now he ranks as a great poet—more poetic than Shakespeare, says Housman. Tagore wrote he could not appreciate D's poetry because it is too "Yogic" for him. Is Tagore then unselect, one of the public at large? D says that your case is different, because... simply from facility. It is an inspiration-poem. Of course it is impossible. There must be inspiration. The value of the poem does not rise from the labour or difficulty felt in writing it. Shakespeare, it is said, wrote at full speed and never erased a line. I don't know about the fineness of the poem, but the chhanda and her originality in thought and expressions move me so much. The ...
... been if I were not a poet, and what if the poets, artists, musicians, and even the scientists had had no imagination - where would they have been, had there been no power of imagination, though Shakespeare confines imagination to the possession of a pack of poets, lovers and madmen! 142 I think some of you have read Bernard Shaw's St. Joan drama where her inquisitors accuse her, saying that the... Mrs. Wilde, who'd been listening quietly, knitting at the same time, pulled him up, "What is this ? What is all this nonsense 144 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene II. 145Pumpkins. 146Rasagollas and Pantuas are Indian sweets. 147 The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Page 98 you are saying?" Everybody was ...
... successful blank verse in England after Shakespeare and Milton. What about Shelley's Prometheus Unbound? SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say there is no successful blank verse. Plenty of people have written successfully, such as Byron, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustom and some others. But there are only three who have written great blank verse: Milton, Shakespeare and Keats. NIRODBARAN: What about Harin ...
... 1939 Talks with Sri Aurobindo 12 NOVEMBER 1939 SRI AUROBINDO (apropos of an article by a devotee named Buddhadev) : I have never heard that Shakespeare was popular among the peasants. His popularity was due to his power of speech. Everything he said was said with force and energy and that appealed to the people. But he is not so successful in his sonnets... sonnets. His dramas alone have that quality. Shelley has that gift only in rare places. Wordsworth also, and those are the things that become popular but not with the peasants. Shakespeare easy? And he was enjoyed by all? That is news. It is true that dhvani (rhythmic suggestion) is an important element of poetry but it is not everything. There must be something that appeals to the mind, man being mental ...
... variety and yet he is one of the greatest poets. Mirabai has no variety either and she is still great. PURANI: What about the Upanishads themselves? They have only one strain. SRI AUROBINDO: Shakespeare too has his limitations. PURANI: All these people are trying to make art and literature democratic. They want them to be available to the masses, the proletariat. NIRODBARAN: Tagore doesn't... greater poet than Milton? NIRODBARAN: No, but if a poet combines height, depth and variety, he reaches perfection. SRI AUROBINDO: That poet doesn't exist: and no poet is perfect. As I said, even Shakespeare has his limitations. NIRODBARAN: Amal says that Yeats is a greater poet than A.E. I think it is because of Yeats' variety. SRI AUROBINDO: No, it is because of his more perfect poetic style ...
... Page 119 Be that as it may, it is an undeniable fact that most men are inclined not to give the dentist's job the importance and respect it deserves. "But", to quote Amal Kiran, "Shakespeare has a dig at the savants, the wise men, who look down their noses at it — until something goes wrong with their wisdom-teeth: For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the... plucking a rooted sorrow, razing out brain-troubles and cleansing the stuffed bosom - procedures that appear to call for deep-going surgical operations! So, our friend thrilled and wondered, the great Shakespeare understood and appreciated the art and craft of the surgeons and the physicians! Three cheers for the Elizabethan marvel!! 6 Leaving our doctor friend to revel in the thrill of his new Sha ...
... Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together. MYSELF: (I couldn't read it) Absolutely unreadable, Sir, not even by Nolini! SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory. What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. MYSELF: ...
... variation of pauses is not indispensable to blank verse. There is much blank verse of the first quality in which it is eschewed or minimised, much also of the first quality in which it is freely used. Shakespeare has both kinds. Where is this poem different from a sonnet, except in rhymes lacking? That is because the sonnet turn or flow has been used without the rhyme which is an essential part of... up. When good blank verse comes one can analyse it and assign certain elements of technique, but these come in the course of the formation of the verse. Each poet finds his own technique—that of Shakespeare differs from Marlowe's, both from Milton's and all from Keats'. In English I can say that variations of rhythm, of lengths of syllable, of caesura, of the structure of lines help and neglect of them ...
... not your personal self that you find in another as if you grasp it as your own, exclusively your own possession. This Self is not the ego, it is beyond ego, it is not the kind of self-hood that Shakespeare Page 58 depicts in King Richard where the King, deprived of everything, left all alone in the whole world, exclaims: "Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I"¹, for it is not... that. If you realise this truth, you can love everyone equally, not merely love but be one with all, because you are all and all are you. That universal Self, your own true Self ¹ Shakespeare: Richard the Third, Act V, Scene 3. Page 59 you have to find, you have to know, you have to become. That is the golden rule as the ideal. How to attain, how ...
... LITERATURE World-Literature (I) ‘REAL poetry, the acme of poetical art,’ says Victor Hugo, ‘is characterised by immensity alone.’ That is why Aeschylus, Lucretius, Shakespeare and Corneille had conquered his heart. Had he been acquainted with Sanskrit literature he would have included Valmiki and the Vedic seers. As a matter of fact, what we want to derive from poetry... does not touch the core of poetry. Through all these or reaching beyond them what is required is a glimpse of the vast, the waves of delight pervading the universe. When we read these lines of Shakespeare, . . . and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge— Page 41 or these from Hugo himself, Le pâtre promontoire au chapeau des nuées S' accoude et ...
... Latin scholar". He taught Sri Aurobindo Latin and English, while Mrs. Drewett taught him history, geography, arithmetic and French. Besides these subjects, Sri Aurobindo read himself the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, etc. Mr. Drewett grounded Sri Aurobindo so well in Latin that when Sri Aurobindo went to St. Paul's School in London, the headmaster of that school "took him up to ground him... during that time seen such excellent papers as yours' (meaning my classical papers, at the scholarship examination). 'As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my oriental tastes to the top of their bent, it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery, it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without ...
... admirers give it the name of classic poetry, that is to say a poetry in which imagination and feeling are subordinated to correctness and elegance. Poetry as generally understood, the poetry of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, may be defined as a deeper and more imaginative perception of life and nature expressed in the language and rhythm of restrained emotion. In other words its subject-matter is an ...
... mightiest of vibhutis, one of the most dominant. There are some of them who hold themselves back, suppress the force in their personality in order to put it wholly into their work. Of such were Shakespeare, Washington, Victor Emmanuel. There are others like Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, who are as obviously superhuman in their personality as in the work they accomplish. Napoleon was the greatest ...
... apparently The Maid in the Mill by John Fletcher and William Rowley (1647). The Page 1004 two plays have many characters and situations in common. Certain plays of Shakespeare and Calderon may also have influenced the plot of Sri Aurobindo's play. The Prince of Edur. Editorial title. Sri Aurobindo wrote the three acts of this incomplete play between 28 January ...
... Here too it is difficult to follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind at least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as the personalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not less living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala and other feminine types not less Page 251 sweet, gracious and alive than Alcestis or Desdemona ...
... starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using "a tangle of ganglia", can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet, either, made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a King Lear or a ...
... never during that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours (meaning my classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay it was wonderful." In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without ...
... have never dreamed of doing! I shall not be surprised or perturbed if one day I am reported to have declared, on the authority of advanced or even unadvanced sadhaks, that Buddha was a poseur or Shakespeare an overrated poetaster or Newton a third-rate college Don without any genius. In this world all is possible. Is it necessary for me to say that I have never thought and cannot have said anything ...
... December 1934 Do you seriously want me to swallow this mountainous absurdity that any man can be made a Krishna or a Sri Aurobindo, any woman a Mother, any X a Tyagaraj, any Y a Tansen, any Z a Shakespeare, any A a Raphael, any B a Vyasa or a Valmiki? ... I have never said any or all of these things. These egoistic terms Page 280 are not those in which I think any more than these egoistic ...
... 137,235,249 Page 269 in ancient India. 137 in the Veda, 117 its limitation. 197 superstition of, 87. 99 see also education secular (nothing secular). 146, 149 Shakespeare, 77 Shakti, 13,15, 139 . 152 -153 se e also India. strength Shankaracharya, 29 . 87 , 92. 94-95, 97,112,204 Shastra, 69. 86-87, 89. 146 Shiva, 29. 98(fn). 123 Shivaji,46 Shudras, 29,119,120-121 ...
... literary philosopher-politician is the choicest work of God,—when he is not the most effective instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness. For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentleman as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentleman of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable. ...
... Citations . Articles known to be by Shyam Sunder Chakravarti and Hemendra Prasad Ghose often contain long quotations from or allusions to certain British prose writers (Mill, Macaulay) and poets (Shakespeare, Milton). Sri Aurobindo's articles contain few quotations but occasional allusions to a wide range of Biblical, classical, European and Indian literary works. Clichés . Writings known ...
... philosopher politician is the choicest work of Heaven, when he is not the most splendid instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness. For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentlemen, as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentlemen of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable. ...
... poetry has done great and interesting things; it has portrayed life with charm and poetic interest in Chaucer, made thought and character and action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed commonplace in Pope and Dryden, played with elegance and beauty on the lesser strings ...
... almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life,—that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare,—and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a broad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made subject and object and substance of a free and a powerful thinking, but ...
... heroes in god-moved battle Page 224 before Troy and of Odysseus wandering among the wonders of remote and magic isles with his heart always turned to his lost and far-off human hearth, Shakespeare riding in his surge of the manifold colour and music and passion of life, or Dante errant mid his terrible or beatific visions of Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, or Valmiki singing of the ideal ...
... the other because he writes not from a sense of the incongruous but from an emotion, from a strong poetic "indignation" against the things he sees around him. Aristophanes is a comic creator—like Shakespeare when he turns in that direction—the satiric is only a strong line in his creation; that is a different kind of inspiration, not the ordinary satire. Pope attempted something creative in his Rape ...
... were special circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don't find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. 1 October 1943 Indo-English Poetry ...
... Sanskrit and English verse had fused here together with an absolutely original ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips, along with something of Shelley and Coleridge. I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view; I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you ...
... except in so far as the politician can indulge in other things as hobbies for his leisure hours, but if he wants to succeed as a politician he must give his best energies to politics. Conversely if Shakespeare or Newton had spent part of their energies in politics they would not have been able to reach such heights in poetry and in science or even if they had they would have done much less. The main energies ...
... signify cattle and food or wealth. “A herded & fooded or wealthy fame” to express “a fame for wealth of cattle & food” is a forceful turn of expression we might expect to find in Aeschylus or in Shakespeare; but I should hesitate, except in case of clear necessity, to admit it in the Veda or in any Sanscrit style of composition; for such expressions have always been alien to the Indian intellect. Our ...
... from Latin reboans. Reboare in Latin means "to cry aloud again and again". 1931 What do you mean when you write of my poem, "It is very felicitous in expression and taking." I think Shakespeare wrote somewhere "Daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty." Charm or beauty that takes the mind like that, is taking. 26 September 1936 On Some Words ...
... scanning of the speech beginning "The lunatic, the lover and the poet" from A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the lines is quoted as And as imagination bodies forth. In all the editions of Shakespeare your reviewer has consulted, this line runs And, as imagination bodies forth. Page 753 In the second form, it is clear that And, followed by a comma, must be stressed: the line ...
... true that an artist can out of a thing that is ugly, repellent, distorted create a form of aesthetic power, intensity, revelatory force. The murder of Duncan is certainly not an act of beauty, but Shakespeare can use it to make a great artistic masterpiece. But we cannot go so far as to say that the intensity of an ugly thing makes it beautiful. It is the principle of a certain kind of modern caricature ...
... true that there has been a general belief of that kind [ that a man may be born as an animal in his next birth ] not only in India but wherever "transmigration" or "metempsychosis" was believed in. Shakespeare is referring to Pythagoras' belief in transmigration when he speaks of the passage of somebody's grandmother into an animal. But the soul, the psychic being, once having reached the human consciousness ...
... rules of ethical conduct. Others of course are just the opposite. There are others who use spiritual ideas without believing in them to give them a perverted twist and delude the sadhaka. It is what Shakespeare described as the Devil quoting Scripture for his own purpose. At present what they are most doing is to try to raise up the obscurity and weakness of the most physical mind, vital, material parts ...
... starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using a "tangle of ganglia", can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet, either, made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could Page 672 be produced ...
... Aurobindo, may be classified: subtle-physical mind (as in Homer and Chaucer, where the inner imaginative response is mostly to external gesture, movement and action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision ...
... n of the dead similar to what is envisaged in the Christian Bible. The general mind of the West in its religious outlook would have been the same as now. Would poetry have differed greatly? Shakespeare is little con-cerned with religion; so he could not have been unShakespearean in the essence of his poetry without Christianity. Dante's Divine Comedy would have changed in details but the broad ...
... will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language ...
... curious and happy self-regard of Montaigne, the artistic egotism of Benvenuto Cellini, the perplexed individualistic passion and powerful expanding enthusiasm of the half animal half god heroes of Shakespeare. The individualism of the second Romantic Movement was geared to an idealism fraught with religious and philosophical aspirations. In their effect on art-form, however, the two Romantic Movements ...
... one of his dramatis personae can be somebody who holds a diametrically opposite vision and this vision can be expressed also with poetic perfection in the course of the play. You don't suppose Shakespeare was a murderer or even in sympathy with murdering: still, the speech he puts into the mouth of Lady Macbeth invoking the powers of evil to aid her in killing Duncan is one of the peaks of the Sh ...
... which, casting about for a convenient description of themselves, selected the name as the only one covering in a word their temper and their gospel. For there is a great deal in a name in spite of Shakespeare. A name attached to a political party or school of thought not only serves to show the temper and point of view of the giver, but it helps greatly to colour contemporary ideas about the party it ...
... successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the ...
... plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to each touch The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I. Matter insists and matter makes reply. Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned And conquered by the cross; this only learned The secret of the suns that blaze afar; This was Napoleon's giant mind of war." I heard and ...
... rhythmical lift and intensity in phrase and metre. He may be straightforward and simple and even conversational provided he conjures up that subtle strangeness. Wordsworth did so at his best and Shakespeare almost always when he wanted to say anything worth saying in a swift and clear fashion which was less crowded with images than his usual style. But the important principle in poetry is not plainness ...
... great ring of pure and endless light All calm as it was bright, or in those lines that open up a sudden Vedantic depth in even the most secular of England's first-rate poets, Shakespeare: ... the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. In our own day we have several voices, both Irish and English, bringing the ache that we find in the Vedic ...
... D. iii, v Seturaman, V.S., i, iv fn. 1 Seurat, Denis, 246 Sewanee Review, The, 25 fn. 11,168 fn. 109 Shabda Brahman, 43 "Shadowy Female, The", 168,172, 180-81 Shakespeare, 40 Shelley, 14 "shoulder", 10,119,122 shoulder-art, 10,120 Signatura Rerum, 182 "skies", 12,13,14,16,77,88,92 Smart, Christopher, 42,43,256 Smith, A.J.M., 22,33-35 ...
... Colossians, I. Sampson, John Blake's Poetical Works (Oxford), 1904. Seturaman, V. (Editor) Critical Essays on English Literature (Orient Longman, Madras), 1965. Shakespeare, W. King Henry the Fifth, Act III, Scene 1. Swinburne, A. C. William Blake (Chatto & Windus). Wickstead, Joseph H. Blake's Innocence and Experience, A Study of the ...
... is to be haw-hawed to a certain extent — a bit of extra breath, a bit of special throat-work and a bit of stylishness in the enunciation add the last touch of Englishness to "the tongue that Shakespeare spake". Not that all Englishmen themselves know how to use their own tongue well. Bernard Shaw has remarked that no Englishman can open his mouth to speak his own language without your learning ...
... book. These talks were given for a whole year without consulting any book or even notes. We know of a similar phenomenon when he was invited by the Annamalai University to give talks on Shakespeare in the year of the Bard's quatercentenary. They are not learned dissertations but, combined with free distribution of humour they make poetry indeed a rasa. Amal Kiran as a Critic ...
... is divine with a Page 375 human mask; the mystical poet's work is the unmasking of the divine Spirit in that divine body." 41 Great poets like Kalidasa and Shakespeare have given poetry a body that is divine, but the substance of the experience-field is human. However the human is not the negation of the Divine; in the Vedantic vision all is divine, but in ...
... of them along with his uncollected work are available in his recent volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems 1 ) seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarmé and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, three volumes of research on Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms Kathleen ...
... equal ease on the Vedas and the Bible (the Pope may with difficulty find one amongst his cardinals who knows so much about Christianity); who can write a book about the Black Lady on William Shakespeare and who can with credit break lances with Kathleen Raine, the foremost authority of our times on William Blake; and who can write a book which makes an in-depth study of French poet Stephane ...
... authoritatively and thought-provokingly. The vision of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, mysticism, yoga, philosophy - both eastern and western - literature, especially his treatise on Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare and other English poets and authors, sociology, politics, Einstein, Teilhard de Chardin are all subjects in which he is completely at home. Moreover he made his presence strongly felt among ...
... t to the results: success we must try to achieve but if we do not get it there must be no inner upset. The failure itself has to be offered up to the Divine to make use of for His own purposes. Shakespeare has hit the mark with his phrase: There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we may. It could even happen that a depth-churning failure is of greater use ...
... Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Scots terms combine the God-like creative function with the function of formative labour - the rolling of the "eye in a fine frenzy" from earth to heaven and heaven to earth, as Shakespeare says, together with a skilful excitement of the hand giving the correct curve and line to the various visions so as to catch them with a measured precision, a moulded memorableness. As for the Gallic ...
... Nature-process, that a play of electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic ; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such material movements ...
... special circumstances, but in your case also there are special circumstances; I don’t find that you handle the English language like a foreigner. If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will begin to disappear. My view of your poetry is different ...
... Luc Ferry: L’Homme-Dieu , p. 136 (footnote). × Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland: Shakespeare alive!, p. 10. × Christiane Collange: Merci, mon siècle, p. 170. ...
... guise of devotionalism Page 251 and sudden-turn-ism. Humbug ! You have to send your blessings by wire to his brother who (for ought we know) maybe of the type described by Shakespeare in Macbeth, "Nothing became them in life so much as their leaving it." (I quote the idea from memory.) Even the Kasmandas didn't dare so much, what ? P.S. Whatever you may say. Guru, I ...
... Classics scholar at Oxford), taught him Latin and history, Mrs. Drewett French, geography and arithmetic. ‘As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions.’ 6 ‘Auro was a very quiet and gentle boy, but at times could be terribly obstinate,’ his elder brother would remember. Proof of his early ...
... super-sphere where dwell the idealities of all things, waiting to be embodied here. There is no hold on him of things as they are: he is in tune with that secret presence which "the poet's eye" in Shakespeare, behind the sight fixed on the interplay of outer motives and surface actions, conjures up - the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Page 115 ...
... "Collected Poems of K.D. Sethna", to which you look forward, is still a far cry. I seem to have imbibed something of the general South-Indian motto which may be said to have been anticipated by Shakespeare in its suggestion of a satisfied slow-goingness and a happy postponing tendency, though his line in its proper context has hardly the same mood. Detached from Macbeth's mouth, it is most apt with ...
... assertive or individualistic. At the other extreme of the face is the fairly high forehead which has become somewhat Shakespearian by a receding hair-line. However, I have escaped what Shakespeare des- Page 226 cribes as his lot in his sonnets which were surely written at the latest in his 'forties since he died at fifty-two: Against my love shall be as I am now. ...
... poetically visioned in those Lines in Butler's Hudibras: Indian widows gone to bed, In flaming curtains, with the dead. Then there are the great scenes of Antony and Cleopatra, as Shakespeare has intuited them. Hating the idea of being captured by the victorious Octavius Caesar and heart-broken on hearing the report, which later turned out to be false, of Cleopatra's death, Antony runs ...
... visited that place of pictures with my papa and mamma during our stay in Paris. The expression seemed to be sheer nectar in my mouth. I suppose all poets are enamoured of verbal music. I can imagine Shakespeare smacking his lips when he wrote - Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang - and Sri Aurobindo must have had a delicious moment in Baroda, composing the line in Love and Death ...
... breath of England with its conjuration of flowers from Sussex hills and woods on the music of a language which is part of my inmost being. There is a slight touch of early Milton and a half-hint of Shakespeare in the verbal turn here and there, but both are taken up most felicitously into the quintessential You, and this taking up is all the richer because of that faint waft of the past, which I love, ...
... griefless carmine that all roses lack, One ample azure brimming every thirst! Sri Aurobindo commented: "A very fine sonnet in all respects." But the next day I got it into my head to do what Shakespeare considered "wasteful and ridiculous excess" -namely, "to gild refined gold , to paint the lily... or add another hue to the rainbow." I wrote: "I am sorry to have sent that rather raw version of ...
... of the Supreme and the Divine even when nothing directly spiritual is uttered by a poet, for what he says conjures up a sheer perfection of verbal form, at once meaningful and musical, as when Shakespeare tells me of King Duncan lying in his grave - After life's fitful fever he sleeps well - or when the same poet makes Romeo exclaim at first sight of Juliet's beauty at a ball given by her ...
... theme is treated with the right rhythmic response of vision and feeling and thought, which gathers what I may call associative lights on the subject. The archetypal practitioner of such sincerity is Shakespeare the "myriad-minded" dramatist, the creator par excellence of varied character and mood and attitude and circumstance by an ever alert sensitive imagination, Sri Aurobindo himself has been an able ...
... collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that vision-thrill, for the simple reason ...
... collected. The rhythm in all its minute particularity has to be realised so that the special vowels or consonants on which the poet has doted may come endeared to us also and touch our heart. Shakespeare will have wasted his inspiration on us if we do not respond like a lover, with detailed attention, to the exquisite overtures to us by that stanza in one of his sonnets: That time of year thou ...
... take place in the impassioned life-force or the impassioned mind-energy, though it has affinities with both of them — a word-design and rhythm-urge that have a concrete touch upon our nerves as in Shakespeare and at the same time an atmosphere of ideative height as in Shelley — but added to these is a draw inward, a pull deep within that seeks to liberate us into some unknown yet intense and intimate ...
... let us believe, though very indirectly, that he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of a torrent for him ...
... run in typical Hopkinsian: Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded... You are right about the Shakespeare-reference, except that Page 379 it doesn't have the word "branches" but its synonym which is not in the Hopkins-phrase: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When ...
... referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life." Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really ...
... a means of ascensioa " Ibid ., p. 727. 147 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 198. 148 Savitri , p. 750. Page 473 English blank verse of such poets as Shakespeare, Milton or Wordsworth. It is a form that he has evolved as the most apt vehicle for his purpose. In a letter he speaks of some of the technical peculiarities as well as the two most important ...
... the Tragedy, making his immortal knowledge triumph in death, paying with his body's death his soul's vast light, I, I am God. It is possible that Sri Aurobindo, in the manner of Shakespeare and others of his Age, is punning upon the first "I" and the word "aye"(pronounced like I) meaning "Yes". That such a pun is intended is indicated by the answering "Yes" in the next line, ...
... higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind Page 106 touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from loweR planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch ...
... seriously want me to swallow this mountainous absurdity that any man can be made a Krishna or a Sri Aurobindo, any woman a Mother, any Venkataraman a Tyagaraj, any Harin a Tansen, any Manodhar a Shakespeare, any Sita91 a Raphael, any Radhananda 92 a Vyas or Valmiki. You really want me to swallow this [even?] if I suffocate? If you do I will try to but then you mustn't blame me if I do suffocate in ...
... . When I reached my desk, I. was horrified to see the state of my torn books. I lifted these books to put them in good order. These were my favourite books,—books of Tagore and Whitman, of Shakespeare and Kalidasa, Ramayana and Mahabharata. And beneath them all were a few torn pages of the Gita. As I took these pages in my hand, I tumbled and sat down in my chair. I felt exhausted and, in no time ...
... fact is variously expressed as "Wit can occur only in company" or "Wit is essentially the product of gregariousness". That wit and humour needs society for its production was also indicated by Shakespeare when he wrote that a jest's prosperity lies in the ears of those who hear it. Unfortunately, just as there are colour-blind people, so are there listeners and readers who prove themselves incapable ...
... impertinences? It is so and yet it cannot be. I begin to believe in the dogmas of the materialist. The gastric juice rises in my estimation. Genius is after all only a form of indigestion, a line of Shakespeare the apotheosis of a leg of mutton and the speculations of Plato an escape of diseased tissue arrested in the permanency of ink. What did I break my fast with this morning? Kippered herring? Bread ...
... have done something in poetry? People say that one can't take your remarks on poetry, painting, etc. too literally, because you want to encourage us. A very good beginning. Not yet Homer or Shakespeare, of course. Mother is giving us doctors a very good compliment, I hear! that we confine people to bed till they are really confined! Yes. Mother did pass on that epigram. Doctors were born ...
... never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay it was wonderful." In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without ...
... receive help from the Drewetts but at the same time it would be true to say that he was largely self-taught. As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions. Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam' pleased him a lot, although as he said later, much of it was then not intelligible to him but the vision of freedom ...
... to quote Amrita-da, 'ripe fruits,' but unfortunately two of the ripe fruits have fallen. Many questions arise, many doubts, but they're otiose if we know the underlying truth. I do not say like Shakespeare that 'ripeness is all'. No, it is not all: it is only a beginning. From here starts a new race. You may ask why then has this misfortune come? In a way, 25The monthly magazine of philosophy ...
... that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus remains deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world—to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also to stir to what is grand and beautiful, or strong and ...
... hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference ...
... throws out the spark and lustre of inner knowledge, there is in him a swift natural movement of a primal concentrated consciousness. He is therefore allotted a seat in the very first rank, with Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. Sophocles reminds one of the French dramatists with their restraint and measure, their skill in delineating subtle feeling. There is here nothing in excess, but there is a sense ...
... Kalidasa—have found in it almost an ideal, at least a wonderfully elastic, medium for poetic expression, inexhaustible in its potentialities, rather comparable to blank verse in the Age of Shakespeare or heroic verse (or the couplet) in the Age of Dryden and Pope. It is said that the Adi-Kavi (the 'first' poet), Valmiki, was walking on the shores of the Yamuna one morning when he perceived ...
... gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found possible for Sri Aurobindo to continue with his own studies or even to help us in ours. For, as I have already hinted, our mode of living, our life itself ...
... his yoga and his philosophy, his politics and his aesthetics, all find in Savitri their splendorous fulfilment. In this respect, what Wilson Page 454 Knight says about Shakespeare and The Tempest is far more, and more truly, applicable to Sri Aurobindo and Savitri: ...But poetry works to render fully objective the deepest 'I'- intuition.. .whether in plot ...
... Iliad and the Aeneas of Virgil's poem. Between Hamlet, father, the old-world heroic hero who smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and Horatio the self-poised humanist who is not passion's slave, Shakespeare places Hamlet, the Prince, who is both his father's son and the scholar from Wittenberg. 52 At the risk of oversimplification, it may be said that heroes like Achilles (and Turnus in the Aeneid) ...
... march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imagination—remember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisations—of whatever order or world they may be—expressed ...
... certains Tu livres Ton secret, , 2 In fact three notes blend together indissolubly and form what we call 'mantra'—even like the triple mystic syllable AUM. Once, in connection with Shakespeare, I said that a poet's language, which is in truth the poet himself, may be considered as consisting of unit vocables, syllables, that are as it were fundamental particles, even like the nuclear particles ...
... dogmatically. As a result, no matter what the topic is, whether it be the still-vexing problem of Hindu-Muslim unity in India, or the meaning of Indian culture, or Modernist poetry, or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot, or Sartrean Freedom, or the bypaths of the spiritual journey or the interpretation of the Veda or the Upanishads, I have never taken a dip into his writings without being able to come ...
... not your personal self that you find in another as if you grasp it as your own, exclusively your own possession. This Self is not the ego, it is beyond ego, it is not the kind of self-hood that Shakespeare depicts in King Richard where the King, deprived of everything, left all alone in the whole world, exclaims: "Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I"; for it is not a separative I-ness; the other ...
... Rishi Kushika 50 Romeo 25 Rousseau 39 S Sacrifice, Vedic I Sadhu 97 Sanskrit 32 Sat-chit-Ananda — (Satya-Tapas-Jnana) 14 Satan 16 Semele 34 Shakespeare 16, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 101, 103 Shakuntala 8 Shelley 104 Shitala 31 Shyama 80 Shyama 80 Siddhas 82 Siddhacharyas 11, 82, 83, 87 Soma 2, 12 Somadevata ...
... Sakuntala appeals to our heart, for she was an embodiment of beauty. We can appreciate Lady Macbeth for the intensity of her sombre soul. Kalidasa has excelled in depicting the beauties of form. Shakespeare sought not beauty but the wide surge of vital truths. Petrarch abounds in the beauty of form. He created more and yet more beauty of form. But Dante is to be appreciated rather through the poetic ...
... of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Page 100 Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet. Breaking the silence of the seas ...
... 56 St. Helena , 22 Saraha, 273, 278, 281-2 Sarama, 271 Saraswati, 138 Satyavan, 26-30 Savitri, 27-31, 112 Shabara,288 Shakespeare, 38n., 58, 59n. –Hamlet, 22 –Macbeth, 38n. –Ruhard the Third, 59n. Shankara, 195 Shanti, 274-5 Shantipada, 267 Shastri, Pandit Haraprasad ...
... out quite ordinary by your remarks. SRI AUROBINDO: One writes wonderful poems in dreams, surrealist poems; but when they are written down on paper they seem worthless. Even in a poet like Shakespeare, in whom I suppose, poetry always flowed, there are differences of inspiration. In the passage in Henry IV, invoking sleep, the three lines: With thou upon the high and giddy mist. Seal up the ...
... a poem of third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead Page 251 of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out in the end only a second class or ...
... favourite, had to see days when he could not even lift his own bow with which he once played havoc. And in our own days, a Ramakrishna, who could cure souls could not cure his own cancer. ¹ Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Act III, Sc. II Page 116 This is the "tears of things" – spoken of by a great poet – the tragedy that is lodged in the hearts of things. There runs a pessimistic ...
... best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.² Breaking the silence of the seas ...
... revised this poem, as I once told you, twelve times and I have finished only the first part of the first book. NIRODBARAN: In what form have you cast it? SRI AUROBINDO: I have gone back to Shakespeare and Marlowe. Each line stands by itself and each 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 ...
... The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, Of with any laborious or subtle ...
... man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic consciousness ...
... to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released. It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory ...
... march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imagination-remember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisations-of whatever order or world they may be-expressed ...
... great in a peculiar way. Of course, if you take the mass of his work into account you may say he is not great. "Greatness" too can be variously defined. NIRODBARAN: I can only say that poets like Shakespeare are great. Also Wordsworth and Shelley can be called great poets. PURANI: Through "The Hound of Heaven" Thompson has expressed a whole life-experience and has achieved the summit of art while ...
... rejoice in the suffering and think that it is a message of the Beloved. NIRODBARAN: God may have given you suffering in order to help the growth of your soul. SRI AUROBINDO: The commentators on Shakespeare say that when he was in trouble he wrote the great tragedies. DR. MANILAL: It is like Nero fiddling when Rome was burning. SRI AUROBINDO: That is different matter. God may smile and say, "Suffering ...
... Urvasie!.." ¹ This cry almost verges on King Lear's heart-rending frantic yell: "Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!"² relieved, one may say in Kalidasa, by his sheer poetry – but in Shakespeare also not less so, although in a different hue and tune. This tumult of the soul, the raging raving wild thing that man becomes – this seems to be, in Kalidasa, the price that mortality has to pay ...
... cruellest woman; well, she said about Duncan, "I would have killed him myself but he looked like my father" ¹ ― well, that is the feeling even she had. So let us not despair, even the ¹ Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2. Lady Macbeth: ... Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done't. Page 38 weakest ...
... 250 Ramakrishna, 85n, 379 Russia, 196 SAHARA, 141, 313 Sankhya, 182, 186, 279 Sarama, 330 Saraswati, 189 Sati, 184 Satyavan, 242-6 Savitri, 242-6, 252-3, 307 Shakespeare, 228, 386, 391 – Hamlet, 386n – Julius Caesar, 386n – King Lear, 391n Shankara, 104-5, 309, 344 Sindhus, 330 Shiva, 106, 182, 184, 207, 297 Socrates, 196,297, 379 ...
... the sole privilege of poets. In his vast correspondence on poetry and in his Future Poetry , Sri Aurobindo has given numerous instances of poetry issuing from the illumined mind. It is naturally Shakespeare who would give us the most abundant examples, provided we let go of the external meaning and listen to what vibrates behind the words; for poetry and all the arts are ultimately a means of capturing ...
... the company. The "work in progress", Savitri came up in the course of the talks more than once. On 3 January 1939, for example, Sri Aurobindo said that in his blank verse he had gone back from Shakespeare and Milton to Marlowe: Each line stands by itself and each sentence consists at most of five or six lines.... There are no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. 10 Again ...
... The Integral Man (1970) Sethna, K. D. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1947); Indian Spirit and the World's Future (1953); The Passing of Sri Aurobindo (1961); Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (1965); The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (1968) Sri Aurobindo — the Poet (1970) Shastri, A. V. Psychology of Indian Nationalism (1968) Singh, Karan. Prophet of Indian Nationalism ...
... influence of Abanindranath Tagore. It had become United India. In all fairness, it must be said that utilitarianism was not the sole commodity exported by Britain. She spread the language of Shakespeare, of Shelley and Keats. True, the general run of the officers, who practised the oppressive policies of their government, left much to be desired. Yet many from the British Isles, in their individual ...
... remarked that, although he had examined papers at thirteen examinations, he had never during that period seen such excellent papers as Sri Aurobindo's and his 'essay'—a comparative study of William Shakespeare and John Milton—was "wonderful". 11 Sri Aurobindo passed the Classical Tripos in the first division, and Page 7 also secured a prize for Greek and Latin iambics. Besides ...
... which is one of the best things written in English. Also his estimate of Blunden's descriptions of nature-photographic and true to Nature perhaps – but it is very doubtful if they will survive. "Shakespeare you can go back to for the hundredth time. That is the test. Only T. S. Elliot will live – but that as a minor poet only. The moderners all have got diction but it has no value without Rhythm. They ...
... under a hostile and disparaging review, dismiss the Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and primitive epos, Dante's great work as the nightmare of a cruel and superstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken barbarian of considerable genius with an epileptic imagination, the whole drama of Greece and Spain and England as a mass of bad ethics and violent horrors, French poetry as a succession ...
... painting, the European imagination seldom travels beyond an imaginative interpretation or variation of what the physical eye has seen. Imitation is the key-word of creation, according to Aristotle; Shakespeare advises the artist to hold up the mirror to Nature; and the Greek scientist and the English poet reflect accurately the mind of Europe. But the Indian artist has been taught by his philosophy ...
... orthodox, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and pioneer of free-thought, but learns in a little while that Percy Shelley had a grandfather, and marvels no longer. Could we trace the descent of Goethe and Shakespeare we should find the root of the Italian in the one and the Celt in the other—but the world did not then and Page 82 does not now appreciate the value of genealogies to philosophy. We are ...
... figures, Rebecca herself being no more than a highly coloured puppet; even in Thackeray the real women are only three or four. But the supreme dramatic genius has found out this secret of femineity. Shakespeare had it to any degree, and in our own century Meredith, and among ourselves Bankim. The social reformer, gazing, of course, through that admirable pair of spectacles given to him by the Calcutta ...
... ability may be said to contain all the others, and the more so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as the novelist's, which proceeds principally from criticism. Goethe in Germany, Shakespeare, Fielding and Matthew Arnold in England are notable instances. Even where practical abilities seem wanting, a close study will often reveal their existence rusting in a lumber-room of the man's mind ...
... increased strength of frenzy without its loss of self-control; and within this even is the spirit, that unanalysable thing behind metre, style & diction which makes us feel "This is Homer, this is Shakespeare, this is Dante." [All these are essential before really great verse can be produced; everyone knows that verse may scan well enough & yet be very poor verse; there may beyond this be skilful placings ...
... for Page 361 his optional subject, know of that literature? He has read a novel of Jane Austen or the Vicar of Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon's or Burke's full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other, & to crown this pretentious little heap a mass ...
... and atavists of this European evolution. For more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech ...
... which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne refounded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society, Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a Page 545 bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble! Europe boasts of her science and its marvels ...
... according to the flow of the argument. White spaces indicate that the passages above and below are not physically continuous in the manuscript. The passage published at the end containing examples from Shakespeare was written separately in another notebook. For the most part the editors have followed Sri Aurobindo's idiosyncratic transliterations of Sanskrit words in this as in other pieces. When, however ...
... birth, A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to each touch The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I. Matter insists and matter makes reply. Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned And conquered by the cross; this only learned The secret of the suns that blaze afar; This was Napoleon's giant mind of war." Page 205 I heard ...
... impertinences? It is so and yet it cannot be. I begin to believe in the dogmas of the materialist. The gastric juice rises in my estimation. Genius is after all only a form of indigestion, a line of Shakespeare the apotheosis of a leg of mutton and the peculations of Plato an escape of diseased tissue arrested in the permanency of ink. What did I break my fast with this morning? Kippered herring? bread ...
... truly inspiring word be uttered and it will breathe life into dry bones. Let the inspiring life be lived and it will produce workers by thousands. England draws her inspiration from the names of Shakespeare and Milton, Mill and Bacon, Nelson and Wellington. They did not visit the sickroom, they did not do philanthropic work in the parishes, they did not work spinning jennies in Manchester, they did ...
... Self Depreciation - Nov 16. 1906 Page 199 The New Spirit 1) The New Spirit - Nov 19. 1906 Miscellaneous 1) A Scotch Sneer and Some Reflections - Dec 3. 06 2) Swadeshi Shakespeare - Dec 8. 06 3) do - Dec 24. 06 4. 4) Welcome to Mr. Naoroji - Dec 24. 06. India's Mission 1) Mark of Low Civilisation - Dec 7. 1906 Swadeshi-Boycott 1) Swadeshi and Boycott ...
... deliberative body, so its constitution, rules and procedure must be entirely different. In fact our All-India body must be not a Congress or Conference even, but a Council, and since in spite of Shakespeare and Sj. Baikunthanath Sen, there is much in a name and it largely helps to determine our attitude towards the thing, let us call our body not the Nationalist Congress, Convention or Conference, but ...
... tapas-siddhi battle 13) after the battle is over (chitra) entirety of the ideality in the tapas siddhi (akasha) Page 466 Unintelligible lipis 1) Leo. Yorkshire. 2) Shakespeare —often repeated 3) any other elsewhere 4) Falstaff. Silhouettes occurred again on the wall (clear—or vague-clear),—a woman standing on a square carpet, a lady well-dressed with flounced ...
... Poet 33. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it 34. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 35. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare 36. Our Light and Delight — Recollections of Life with the Mother 37. The Mother: Past-Present-Future 38. Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo 39 ...
... poets are willing to pass through this experience. Hence so very few create each time a living form of the highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist, for unfortunately his sense of art ...
... Aurobindo 32.Sri Aurobindo - The Poet 33.The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it 34.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 35.Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare 36.Our Light and Delight— Recollections of Life with the Mother 37.The Mother: Past-Present-Future 38.Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo 39.The Passing of Sri ...
... inevitability with nothing cheap and vulgar and theatrical about it, though this does not preclude the grand pride or godlike confidence that inspiration has in itself through a Dante or a Milton or a Shakespeare sonneteering about his "powerful rhyme" and its ability to outlast monuments of brass and marble. Sometimes the sterling artist and the gaudy actor co-exist: but we must never mix them up and even ...
... through his villains no less than his heroes. Surely he cannot be believing all that his figures utter or even sympathising with all their feelings. If AE's dictum is correct, a dramatist like Shakespeare should never have penned quite a number of celebrated speeches such as Iago's or Lady Macbeth's, for he could never have answered satisfactorily to AE's "posers". We have to recognise that a poet's ...
... Ashram, second revised and enlarged edition 1967. 8. 1953 The Indian Spirit and the World's Future, Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 9. 1965 Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2nd ed. 1991. 10. 1968 The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, second revised and enlarged edition 1992. ...
... collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that vision-thrill, for the simple ...
... mechanism, a technique, a guiding principle of aesthetic creation which can be summoned by the writer to help him in this respect? And is not that demand as wrong as suggesting that Kalidasa or Shakespeare follow classroom texts for writing a poetic composition or drama? A poet with great art at his command has to be either a rich and ready instrument to receive genuine inspiration, or he must be ...
... greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its representative significance for the human condition, and the tragic though glorious setting of its action. ...
... can be faithful to history if one likes but even then one has to expand and deal creatively with characters and events, otherwise the work will come to nothing or little. In many of his dramas Shakespeare takes names from history or local tradition, but uses them as he chooses; he places his characters in known countries and surroundings, but their stories are either his own inventions, or the ...
... taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed - Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to ...
... prove adequate. Mallarme thus is not a poet of the shimmering Shelleyan wash: he is very precise, but bewildering in what he makes precise. And through that bewilderment he wants to give us, as Shakespeare would have said, "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls" — or, as Mallarme himself would have put it in less intelligible language, he wants to knock queer image against queer image until from ...
... as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the ...
... with the lights of heaven Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell; There he descends to edge eternal joy. Whereas the tone of Ariosto is not intense enough, the tone of Shakespeare is intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive ...
... than finest creations in world literature, Les Miserables of Victor Hugo. A contemporary of Hugo's, equally famous as he, was Balzac who is the most prolific creator of living characters after Shakespeare. So intense is the life-force in his characters that someone has said that even his scullions have genius. To my mind his masterpiece is not the popular Old Goriot or Eugenie Grandet but Cousin ...
... accepted the burden of embodiment. Your smiling photo has led me quite far a-field. Another one shows a rather Shakespearian forehead. I am sure it would have pleased our Master. He regarded Shakespeare as extraordinarily intuitive in his poetic expression. Perhaps he would have found your facial expression a pointer to an inner intuitiveness? I see from what you have written that the spiritual ...
... when he saw merit. Thus, after Sri Aurobindo had given extreme praise to the last eight lines of "This Errant Life", I remember Nolini saying to Amrita that Amal had written something equal to Shakespeare. I had marked that delicate, exquisite, finely suggestive poems appealed to him the most. Apart from "This Errant Life", I recall his happily appreciative response to the sonnet "Devotee" and the ...
... of all utterance of it, are here. The "unimaginable land" on which the poet has planted his feet is evoked by this two-footed concluding phrase as a sudden short-cut to the Ineffable Shakespeare in the famous Hamlet-soliloquy wrote of death as Page 19 The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns.... Arjava points to the Immortal Consciousness ...
... winter and the implicit autumn, as much as spring and summer, figure in our verse as if they could be a source of delight: instead, they bring grief. Were they to Shelley what those stanzas from Shakespeare make them, it would hardly be a wonder if his heart were moved to grief by them. He is moved so because his heart is "faint", not because they are less than delightful in themselves. Every season ...
... Aurobindo himself told her of the ceiling-report and informed her of its having been actually put in writing by someone. (By the way, Krishna Prem's quotation from Hamlet is slightly off the mark: Shakespeare uses the word "flesh" and not "earth" in the first part of it. Secondly, the phrase Krishna Prem employs and you endorse - "Those who have gone far enough on the Inner Path" - mixes up with ...
... plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to each touch The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I. Matter insists and matter makes reply. Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned And conquered by the cross; this only learned The secret of the suns that blaze afar; This was Napoleon's giant mind of war." I heard ...
... lights of heaven Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell; There he descends to edge eternal joy. [p. 592] Whereas the tone of Ariosto is not intense enough, the tone of Shakespeare is intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive ...
... that by their devotion to the mysteries of life the Romantics failed to appreciate life itself. It is of course true that they do not belong to the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who ...
... shineth. If one can catch even in a single short poem the full force of Page 27 this unmanifest grandeur, one would be more loyal to one's soul than if one out-Shakespeared Shakespeare and knocked Homer into a cocked hat. I'm sorry I have been somewhat carried away into a bit of highfalutin'. Old Bill of Stratford, from whatever heaven to which his "poet's eye in a fine frenzy ...
... sweetness that reside in our inmost soul. You have raised the question: "What is life?" Arthur Symons, with a dignified Stoic pessimism, says: Life is a long preparedness for death. Shakespeare, in the role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows; Life's but a poor player Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more... Page 18 ...
... grip on the medium must be most steady. Even a poet like Milton who was born with a blank-verse genius had to revise and polish in daytime what Urania had whispered to him in the still hours. With Shakespeare the art was immediate but because he was the most wide-awake, the most out-gazing and conscious of all poets, his nerves ever on the qui vive to respond to sense-stimuli. Yeats's blank verse can ...
... sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, no matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life-Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term - so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim ...
... much you re-write; all that is important is whether at the first blush or at the "umpteenth" trial you catch unsullied the shining spontaneity of the secret realms where inspiration has its throne. Shakespeare never "blotted" a word; Keats "blotted" a thousand, and yet Keats is looked upon as the most Shakespearean of modern poets in "natural magic". Even Shelley, to all appearance the most spontaneous ...
... The subject may be anything - the ruins of ancient Petra in the Near East as seen by Burgon - A rose-red city half as old as time -or Antony's impassioned final gesture to Cleopatra in Shakespeare - I am dying, Egypt, dying; only I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips - Page xxvii or the profound ...
... draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the 1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus: ...
... successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the stark ...
... sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, to matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term, so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim ...
... instance of Shakespeare's One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin. Held by itself, this line has passed into a proverb and has Page 93 served numberless occasions. Shakespeare, however, had no general application in view nor even the particular shade it carries on the lips of his lay admirers. Students of his work know that he did not mean any quality which wins all hearts ...
... is ever his quest and goal. But he seeks it and attains it ever through the phenomenal. The marble of Phidias and Ustad Isa, the pigments of Rembrandt and the Ajanta Buddhists, the word-stuff of Shakespeare and Sri Aurobindo - all these are phenomenal, even as the figures and designs and images that stand out from the work of those masters to convey its message are caught from the world of phenomena ...
... between the two dear friends runs into four thick volumes and the "scoop" - as Amal says - needs mere space than is possible here. —Editors PR: Has the author of "Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare" entered into nirvikalpa samadhi ? Page 320 And is it advisable for an integral Yogi ? And the physical frame! Is that steady and sound? AK: ...
... poetry (now all of them along with his uncollected works are available in his volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems), seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarme and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, four volumes of research in Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms. Kathleen Raine ...
... adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Page 98 Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life." Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really ...
... Genius of Sri Aurobindo 26. Sri Aurobindo - The Poet 27. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo 28. Aspects of Sri Aurobindo 29. Sri Aurobindo and Greece 30. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare 31. The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence 32. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it 33. The Secret ...
... The, i, iiifn., 133fn. Semi-Harappān, 101 Semitic Dynasty, 88 Serpent Goddess, 100 Sewell, 70, 71 Shah Tepe, 69, 71-2, 75, 77 Shahi Tump, 5, 6 Shakespeare, 91 Sharma, A.K., 100 Shaw, Bernard, 90 Shelley, i Shimalia, 67 Shiva, Śiva, 41, 43-5 Shubiluliuma, 31 Sialk, 4, 68, 69, 71, 76 Sigrus, 127 ...
... woman and half fish and their harmonious whole of fantasy which the sign of the Mermaid connotes. The capturing of immortality would sum up not only an achievement but also the means to it. Shakespeare becomes - in the words of Thorpe in that enigmatic dedication to the Sonnets - "Our ever-living poet" by catching in the language of life and death the thrill of some depth of being, where ...
... all these writers has hold of the substance of the work marked out for a poet of the age. And with all these gifts we might have had in him the great interpretative poet, one might almost say, the Shakespeare of his time. But by the singular fatality which so often pursues the English poetical genius, the one gift needed to complete him was denied. Power was there and the hold of his material; what was ...
... together into his high language and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power had been nourished by great classical influences. A touch of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise of Lucretian grandeur ...
... a hapax legomenon , "a once spoken Page 656 word" and that's all. তৃণাঞ্চিত for instance is a fine word and can adorn, not blot Tagore's poetry even if no one else uses it. I think Shakespeare has many words coined by him or at least some that do not occur elsewhere. 16 January 1937 A Language Grows and Is Not Made Will it be a narrowness on the part of the Calcutta University ...
... learning; in neither case is the genius or the excellence of the poetry due to culture, but there is a certain turn or colouring in Milton which would have not been there otherwise and is not there in Shakespeare. It does not give any superiority in poetic excellence to one over the other. 12 November 1936 Page 682 ...
... e height. The very best comes by intermittent drops, though sometimes three or four gleaming drops at a time. Even in the greatest poets, even in those with the most opulent flow of riches like Shakespeare, the very best is comparatively rare. 13 February 1936 Page 11 Aspiration, Opening, Recognition Impatience does not help—intensity of aspiration does. The use of keeping the co ...
... the thing of life" in Shakespeare's work, I feel that the distinction is not sound all through, that there is a truth behind it, but it is overstated. Or when still more vivaciously he dismisses Shakespeare the dramatist to "a dusty and reverent immortality in the libraries" or speaks of the "monstrous net of his life's work" which but for certain buoys of line and speech "might sink in the ocean of ...
... light and rapture. This intensity belongs to no particular style, depends on no conceivable formula of diction. It may be the height of the decorative imaged style as often we find it in Kalidasa or Shakespeare; it may be that height of bare and direct expression where language seems to be used as a scarcely felt vaulting board for a leap into the infinite; it may be the packed intensity of language which ...
... Poetry and Art The Poet and the Poem Power of Expression and Spiritual Experience All depends on the power of expression of the poet. A poet like Shakespeare or Shelley or Wordsworth though without spiritual experience may in an inspired moment become the medium of an expression of spiritual Truth which is beyond him and the expression, as it is not that ...
... which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne re founded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society. Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble! Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But an Indian ...
... turns of thought, one general and the other specifically Christian, one as long ago as Shakespeare's King Henry the Fifth, and the other in a poem of our own day: T. S. Eliot's Gerontion. Shakespeare has the lines, which begin with a mention of lamb-like attributes and whose concluding purport can easily be transferred from the human to the divine: Page 40 In peace there's ...
... say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you ...
... draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' ...
... feelings move. Then the poem repeats in you the act of its creation and what has happened to the writer happens to the reader. This is a wonderful experience and by it you can feel as if you were Shakespeare, you were Shelley, you were even Sri Aurobindo!" Thus all of you can indirectly be poets. And who knows that even in the direct sense you may not poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live ...
... world's literature will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there ...
... the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer ...
... mirror their age and humanity by their interpretative largeness and power that our three chief poets hold their supreme place and bear comparison with the greatest world-names, Homer, Shakespeare and Dante..." * * * "Many centuries after these poets [Valmiki and Vyasa], perhaps a thousand years or even more, came the third great embodiment of the national consciousness, Kalidasa ...
... poetry doesn't come by streams, except in periods of extraordinary inspiration. It usually comes by intermittent drops, though sometimes three or four drops at a time. Of course there are exceptions—Shakespeare etc.—but that kind of spear doesn't shake everywhere. Bengali people say that they like my English verses better than my Bengali ones, for they find there something new. Isn't that because ...
... easily. When you spoke of 'poetic power" in my poetry, what did you mean? I asked D. He says "poetic power" means a dynamism, a vigorous living force which we find in Madhusudan... But we find in Shakespeare both power and beauty, while Swinburne has hardly power predominant. No power in Swinburne? Did you mean by "poetic power" a power or capacity of expression? Of course that was what I ...
... trying to make it an economic war. (Addressing Purani) I have finished Selincourt's book on Blake, which he ends by saying that all art is spiritual, all art is mystical. PURANI: What would Shakespeare say to it? SRI AUROBINDO: No, he means only the art of painting. "Spiritual" he uses perhaps in the old foolish way, meaning something idealistic. NIRODBARAN: You have said in The Synthesis ...
... According to him, Shelley is not equal in range to Milton. SRI AUROBINDO: Range? What does he mean by range? If he means a certain largeness of vision, then Shelley does not have it. Homer, Shakespeare, the Ramayana and the Mahabhara have range. But neither Virgil nor Milton has range in the same measure. Their range is not so great. Dante's range too is partial. PURANI : Abercrombie says that ...
... only a few books were there, and most of them, I found out later, were presentation copies from Radhakrishnan and others. What He had of His own were a few volumes of H is Arya, and of Shelley, Shakespeare and one or two other poets, and His own works naturally, that's all. From that day, I took a resolution to give up reading ( Laughter) because if He has got so much knowledge without reading ( ...
... nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and art or man's creative ...
... is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind. It is enough if we others can understand and follow them – Mahajano yena gatah – let the ...
... ends of papers lying scattered on one of the tables; a big almirah containing a small number of books: on the top shelf, the bound volumes of the Arya . On the next one, the Collected Works of Shakespeare and Shelley and books presented by writers such as Radhakrishnan, James Cousins, etc. There were two paintings, one Chinese and the other of Amitabha Buddha with the lotus in his hand; a few wood ...
... greater poet than Homer? Sappho wrote only on love: is she not a great poet? Milton also has no variety and yet he is one of the greatest poets. Mirabai has no variety either and she is still great… Shakespeare too has his limitations… But why should a great poet write on everything—even on matters in which he is not interested? People who are leading a spiritual life naturally express truth and experience ...
... mode of being and living. And in the progressive gradient so pursued, there are certain stages or level-crossings that can be clearly marked out in view of their importance and significance. Shakespeare himself records, in two other of his major dramas, the mystery of two such stages preceding the one he deals with in Hamlet: one in Macbeth and the other in King Lear. Indeed these ...
... involved and lost to itself and in itself is Prakriti, consciousness evolved and looking out at itself is Purusha. I am aware of myself and I am myself are two ways of saying the same thing. We imagine Shakespeare expressed the experience graphically and poetically when he made his character say: Page 337 Richard loves Richard, that is I am I. In seeking to disvalue the principle of ...
... the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot up – like "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaks-through the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly. For ...
... 207 SANKHYA(S), 139, 222, 315, 327, 349 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 348, 351-2, 375-7 Satan, 267, 280 Sati, 268 Schweitzer, Albert, 359 Sedan, 106 Shakespeare, , 120, 160, 182, 194, 197, 251, 337 -Hamlet, 185, 188n., 386n -King Lear, 185 -Mm;beth, 185 Shankaracharya, 8, 215-16, 229, 276 Shaw, Bernard, 140 ...
... well-known but lovable side of the Master's personality revealed in ample measure. To our happy surprise we shall meet here "not the Sri Aurobindo of Himalayan grandeur and aloofness, but the modern Shakespeare of spiritual sublimity and jollity". This is a book on humour. But, as Prof. Stephen Leacock has pointed out, "Articles and books on humour are apt to resolve themselves into a series of jokes ...
... And Havelock Ellis, looking at Anatole France’s advice, has added his own comment of both agreement and disagreement: ‘Be clear. Be not too clear.’ “. Example 4 : “[My book Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare ] has been rather popular. I remember that on a visit to Bombay many years ago I had called at a bookshop to inquire how the sale of my productions stood. The owner told me: ‘One of your books is ...
... doesn't come by streams, except in periods of extraordinary inspiration. It usually comes by intermittent drops, though sometimes three or four drops at a time. Of course there are exceptions — Shakespeare etc. — but that kind of spear doesn't shake everywhere. 34 2.NB: S's same trouble continues or worse. Why are you silent on liver extract? Sri Aurobindo: Extract liver — no objection. ...
... are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer clear. This is what has happened with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Lucrece; so that Shakespeare cannot be called a great narrative poet. How did you find Monomohan Ghosh's poems on Love and Death? I don't remember anything about them and am not sure that I have read. S says that ...
... original cosmos, and what do I find? Either the elude me or what comes is something fictitious and corn monplace. That's another matter. It's like dreams in which one gets splendid lines that put Shakespeare into the shade and one wakes up am enthusiastically jots them down, it turns out to be "O you damned goose, where are you going While the river is flowing, flowing flowing?" and things like that ...
... 76 - Lamb was a wonderful man who consecrated or sacrificed all his life for the sake of his sister who was on the verge of insanity. Some of you must have heard about Charles Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, it was both the brother and the sister who had edited it. Here is the prayer: it is not exactly a prayer, he's writing to a friend of his in this vein. This friend had complained ...
... one or two instances of the impersonal aspect... but I am anticipating! What to do, my friends? When I start speaking of Our Lord, I forget myself. Memories, one after the other, surge up, as Shakespeare says, from "the dark backward and abysm of time" 283 like stars out of the gulf of the night. However, all that will come in its regular sequence and place. One evening, He told us all ...
... but the time sequence or the time relation depends on so many things. Particularly where the relationship is rather intimate, the period of separation seems long. That I suppose, you all know. Shakespeare has a beautiful expression which goes something like this: "And grew a twenty years removed thing/ While one would wink." There it is the separation between lovers. But here too, as I said, just ...
... certains Tu livres Ton secret." 2 In fact three notes blend together indissolubly and form what we call 'mantra'—even like the triple mystic syllable AUM. Once, in connection with Shakespeare, I said that a poet's language, which is in truth the poet himself, may be considered as consisting of unit vocables, syllables, that are as it were fundamental particles, even like the nuclear ...
... The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, or with any laborious or subtle ...
... is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind. It is enough if we others can understand and follow them— Mahajano yena gatah— let the great ...
... 196n Page 374 -"South Wind", 194n Semele, 182 Seneca, 70 Sethna, K. D., 68n., 74n -The Secret Splendour, 68n., 74n -"Deluge",68n -"The Errant Life", 74n Shakespeare, 6, 52, 57, 71, 83, 85, 93, 168, 170, 176, 178, 233-4, 266 -A Midsummer Night's Dream, 57n -Hamlet, 163, 173, 175n., 185n -King Lear, 171, 173n -Macbeth, 170, 171n -Romeo ...
... the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot up—like "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaks—through the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajriavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly. For ...
... Francis of Assisi, 243 St. (}enevieve, 199 St. Matthew, 186 St. Paul, 73 St. Vincent de Paul, 411 Sankhya,45,85 Satan, 46 Savitri, 163, 165 Second Empire, the, 418 Shakespeare, 79, 116n., 406 -Julius Caesar, 116n. -Hamlet, 72n. Shankara, 17, 21, 68, 71,403 Shelley, 209 Shiva, 129, 208, 339 Socrates, 116 Soma, 70, 208 Spanish Armada, the ...
... pourtant à certains Tu livres Ton secret.² In fact three notes blend together indissolubly and form what we call 'mantra' – even like the triple mystic syllable AUM Once, in connection with Shakespeare, I said that a poet's language, which is in truth the poet himself, may be considered as consisting of unit vocables, syllables, that are as it were fundamental particles, even like the nuclear particles ...
... I have said and as is well known, is a good-natured malleable material, but it is ignorant and inert: it can easily be worked upon by any kind of strong force, worked up to any kind of mischief. Shakespeare has made us very graphically familiar with the reaction of a mob and that remains true even today. Even if right direction is there at the top, at the higher governmental level, reflecting the mind ...
... Sri Aurobindo mentions him as one of the very greatest. He names three as the supreme poets of Europe, of the very first rank: Homer of ancient Greece, Dante in the Middle Ages, and nearer to us, Shakespeare. Along with these Sri Aurobindo mentions also Valmiki of India. However I shall speak of Dante not so much as a poet but as a seer: as such he was a Traveller of the Worlds in the path of the life ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4 The World Tragedy SHAKESPEARE in giving expression to a most poignant experience of human life says – we all know the most familiar and famous lines – in a most poignant manner: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! – ¹ The poignancy comes not ...
... express wonderfully this feeling I am trying to express here – this feeling of union and compassion in an exquisite beauty of expression: it has a tone of human frailty – the frailty with which Shakespeare condemns womanhood but a frailty which a divine being does not disdain to own or accept. It is the wonderful integrator of two, rather twin beats – not the subsumption, fusion or annihilation of ...
... cess, that a play of electrons, of atoms, and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic. But if we examine this kind of explanation, we fail to discover or ...
... systems of knowledge have been stored. The three greatest poets of India — Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa have written in Sanskrit, and just like no educated Englishman can be unread on the works of Shakespeare, no Indian should be unable to read the works of these great poets. In addition, provisions should be made to learn a fourth language, and that could be Hindi. A study of a language like French is ...
... aside all criticisms on it. For, men endowed with the power of true appreciation of poetry are rarely found in the present generation. We are more familiar with the commentaries on the works of Shakespeare and Kalidasa than with their originals. However, to be at home in the central theme of the Vedas, the method that we should follow is: to proceed from the Page 71 known to ...
... gradually, as is done in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bible. The other method is to start suddenly, from the middle of the story, a method largely preferred by Western artists, like Homer and Shakespeare for instance. But it was not found possible for Sri Aurobindo to continue with his own studies or even to help us in ours. For, as I have already hinted, our mode of living, our life itself took ...
... Truth, to a world beyond. Milton, Wordsworth and Dante need no introduction in this field, for they are undoubtedly spiritual. They seriously resorted to spirituality. But it is strange enough how Shakespeare, whose creation is replete with nature's scenes and the experiences of man's day-to-day life, says: With thoughts above the reaches of our souls, or, There's a divinity that shapes our ...
... is said that the subject-matter and the way of expressing it are nothing but the real Being in the poet. The outer manifestation of this Being is of course diverse and manifold. The inner soul of Shakespeare is wide and magnanimous. It has, as it were, the quality of water. It takes up the form of that very vessel in which it is put and assumes the colour thereof. Milton's inner Being represents height ...
... nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms Page 112 of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages ...
... Savitri as the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's life's work, 457-458; Savitri as a new revelation for a greater Dawn, 464. Schopenhauer 13 Sethna, K.D. 319,357,423,440 Shakespeare, William 7, 50, 309, 311, 312, 341,366,371,395,412,419,425,458 Page 496 Shankara 30 Shaw, Bernard 400, 436 ...
... (even as Highet did): "The essential condition of philosophical poetry is that the poet should believe that there is a faculty of mind superior to the poetic; that was possible for Dante; but since Shakespeare lived and wrote it is not possible." 91 What is Murry driving at? Does he not mean to say that real philosophical poetry is superior to philosophy alone or poetry alone because it is the creation ...
... later sent to the Loreto Convent School, Darjeeling. 1878 February 21 Birth of the Mother in Paris. 1879 Taken to England. 1879-1884 In Manchester (84, Shakespeare Street) in the charge of the Drewett family. Tutored at home by the Drewetts. 1884 September Admitted to St. Paul's School, London . Takes lodgings at 49, St. Stephen's Avenue, ...
... I have given the titles of Books and cantos respectively in the poem itself: hence the single quotes. 3. ibid , p. 44. 4. ibid., p. 46. 5. ibid., p. 48. Cf. Shakespeare: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action. (Sonnet 129). 6. ibid., p. 50. 7. ibid., p. 51. 8. The Aryan Path, August 1959 ...
... She was very popular but nobody reads her stories now. There was one Victoria Cross who used to write erotic novels and she thought there were only two figures in literature : Victoria Cross and Shakespeare! (Laughter) Disciple : Is it possible to write a spiritual story? We know it is possible to write a story with a deep religious back-ground like Les Misèrables. Sri Aurobindo : ...
... intermittent glimpses of the supreme beauty; he seems to have his permanent station on those heights. 233 If Milton in his 'mighty-mouthed' moments is inspired by the Higher Mind, if Shakespeare in his great dazzling moments of supreme utterance is the poet with the Illumined Mind, if Dante's poetry is charged again and again with the marvellous revelatory power of the Intuitive Mind ...
... also used his influence with some well-known people in Madras on Amrita's behalf. Amrita was able to take his matriculation. Sri Aurobindo sometimes used to read to him from Browning, Kalidasa, Shakespeare and the Mahabharata. At times he read his own poem Savitri and his drama Eric . Moni, Nolini and Saurin went to Bengal in February 1914. They returned in September. On 29 March 1914 ...
... Bengal; later sent to the Loretto Convent School, Darjeeling. 1878 — February 21 Birth of the Mother in Paris. 1879 — Taken to England. 1879-1884 — In Manchester (84, Shakespeare Street) in the charge of the Drewett family. Tutored at home by the Drewetts. 1884 — September Admitted to St. Paul School, London. Takes lodgings at 49, St. Stephen's Avenue, Shepherd's ...
... generation have had the liberating experience of seeing him in person. They can but gaze at the published photographs (much as they look at the supposed portraits of Homer or of Sophocles or of Shakespeare), and make whatever conjectures or conclusions may seem valid or appropriate. There were, however, those who knew Sri Aurobindo in person, as pupils or as friends or as collaborators; and there ...
... never be seen by her: Hither a rapture she invisible Or he a mystic body and mystic soul. Reveal not then thy being naked to hers.... (Vol. 5, p. 206). Page 103 Not Shakespeare, nor Donne, nor Rossetti could have achieved a completer, a more uninhibited, a more passionate evocation of love's fierce storm and its aftermath of fulfilled calm than in these whirling and hotly ...
... art criticism, educational theory — everywhere there is the signature of the inner man, the light from the inner Sun, the tremor of the unique Sensibility. If it be true, as Keats said, that "Shakespeare led a life of allegory, his works are his comments on it", might it not be said of Sri Aurobindo that his was a life of progressive Divine manifestation, and his writings are but its radiations ...
... Satprem 719, 753, 772-4, 777, 794, 808-9, 816 Satwalekar, Sripad Damodar 683 Satyakama Jabala 730 Satyendra Thakore 276-7, 400, 490 Saurin Bose 153 Schuman, Maurice 571 Seyril Schochen 763 Shakespeare 312, 324 Shankar Chettiar (Chetty) 47, 131 Shanti Doshi 271-3 Shantimayi (Janet McPheeters) 255, 296-7, 321 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 596 Shyamsunder Jhunjhunwalla 817 Sisirkumar Ghose 234 ...
... Laurence Binyon, Stephen Phillips, Robert Bridges, Oscar Wilde, Manomohan Ghose, Bharati Sarabhai, the Hexameter, and the clue to it that a Cambridge friend, Ferrar, gave. Was Blake greater than Shakespeare? After Milton, what was the scope for the epic as a literary form? Of Hopkins, Sri Aurobindo said that he "becomes a great poet in his sonnets. He is not a mystic poet, but a religious one". 6 ...
... She had said the same thing thirty years earlier. As simple as that. But it is perhaps the most profound mystery we have yet to fathom. We do everything as usual—mathematics, boxing, reciting Shakespeare or brushing our teeth—with another attitude. This attitude has the power to change the circumstances—identical circumstances with totally different results. We go through a flu epidemic, or a page ...
... caricatures, or perhaps improved super-brains, that is, if they succeed, but these will be variations of the same thing and woven of the same substance. One can put the molecules of Napoleon, Dante and Shakespeare together—it would be amusing to behold—but it would still be of man all the same, perhaps even worse. What follows man will possibly (certainly) produce itself from man but with an element that is ...
... and overcome it. 1st May I left Boulangerie house; I was given accommodation in a room where the Mother before 1932 used to sit for meditation and pranam. In the same year I started reading Shakespeare with Nolini and writing small letters to the Mother. These letters were letters of a boy attempting to imitate the older persons who sent letters or notebooks to the Mother every day. Hence most ...
... Geography and Arithmetic. No Science; it was not in fashion at that time." As he was studying at home the little boy got plenty of time to indulge his own tastes in books. He read the Bible, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats and others. Young that he was he not only read poetry but composed verses for the Fox Family Magazine. Percy B. Shelley was a favorite of Sri Aurobindo's. "The Revolt of Islam ...
... forget his young brother: "Would you also mind giving my brother a copy, with your name and Cripps' inscribed on it in your own handwriting ?" Prolific reader that he was, Sri Aurobindo knew Shakespeare and Milton to the full. "I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry." Keats too, specially his Hyperion. Among the Victorian poets, Stephen Phillips ...
... never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers at the scholarship examination). As for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton), I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in anti-thesis and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without ...
... suddenly to have projected a fragment of itself into our little world of everyday things and humdrum studies, disturbing it with colour, mystery, romance. ... It must not be supposed that the words of Shakespeare were spoken out 'of the blue,' Page 131 deliberately challenging an interval of silence. They came with startling aptness, but they came in response to a question. The school was ...
... kind submitted before March 31. I am sending by air-mail book post to the promoters the typescript of my newly written book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Quoting words from the Sonnets themselves I’ve called the book: “Two Loves” and “A Worthier Pen”: The Enigmas of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. May I have your blessings? Blessings 13 March 1965 ...
... virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis, 2 or Milton's Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable. What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare's and makes them epic (Shakespeare's of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and... the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, ...
... passages from English literature which were written as prose but with some intensity of rhythm, its movement can be at once detected. E.g. or again, Page 566 or again, from Shakespeare's prose, and so on with a constant recurrence of the same quantitative movement all through; or, yet more strikingly, This last sentence can be read indeed as a very perfect hexameter... hexameter. The first of these passages could be easily presented as four lines of free quantitative verse, each independent in its arrangement of feet, but all swaying in a single rhythm. Shakespeare's is most wonderfully balanced in a series of differing four-syllabled, with occasional shorter, feet, as if of deliberate purpose, though it is no intention of the mind but the ear of the poet that has ...
... men who are sworn to die for this or that purpose. Page 141 As a matter of fact, the word sonar is an ordinary Bengali term of pride and affection, no more mystic or symbolic than Shakespeare's "golden lads and girls". The Englishman seems determined to supply the absence of a good comic paper in Calcutta. Apparently its descent to anna-price has not increased its circulation. Page ...
... their past lives. There are also the well-known sprit communications through a medium at spirit sitting. Someone comes and tells you he was Napoleon, another was Shakespeare and so on. How many Shakespeares and Napoleons and Caesars have manifested in this way, there is no counting! There are spirits who are extremely talkative and bewitch you with extraordinary stories, many that seem so true and ...
... utterance. That goes out of all classification and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ...
... the very fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with the whole tragedy of earthly existence such as Shakespeare's: And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain... or the Virgilian syllables ringing, as it were, with the crash of destiny and the doom of the world: feror ...
... really have as poetry, may or may not be correct. But, certainly, the significance and feeling suggested and borne home by the words and rhythm are in my view a capital part of the value of poetry. Shakespeare's lines Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, have a skilful and consummate rhythm and word combination, but this gets its full value as the ...
... for the expression of the Higher Thought, the Illumination, the pure Intuition giving great or brilliant results, but these cannot be classed as the very body of the higher consciousness.... Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links ...
... Nirodbaran) But you had a look of deep concentration on your face. Are appearances deceptive here? DR. MANILAL: No, Sir. As he is a poet he lives in higher regions. SRI AUROBINDO: What about Shakespeare's statement that poetry creates fictions, tells lies? DR. MANILAL: He is not a poet of that sort. How is it that some people lose at once their consciousness in meditation, and their body sways ...
... does not render it adjectival. I have marked only two earlier employments of the word in English poetry and, according to me, Sri Aurobindo's is in accord with them. The first occasion is in Shakespeare's Macbeth: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Page 3 Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the ...
... upon "this bank and shoal of time". Nevertheless, in the Commedia and Savitri alike, it is the heroine (the 'hero' in these two epics is about as positive or effective as the heroes in some of Shakespeare's great comedies) who takes the lead, who acts the role of sakti, who makes the divine transformation possible. Allen Tate truly says that, "what Dante achieved is an actual insight into the great ...
... SOME CRITICAL NOTES This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective ...
... intellect is lord over them. He seems to Yeats bloodless and to be insufficiently gripping the stuff of the world. The impression is not false if Shaw's dramatic characters are put by, say, Shakespeare's: it is wrong if meant to charge him everywhere with defective force and dispersed light. Shaw is one of the greatest breakers of Victorian hypocrisy and sentimentality: the nineteenth century's ...
... (K.D.S.) Page 136 What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare's and makes them epic (Shakespeare's of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the... or by some living significant symbol or expressive body of it. This dynamic sight is not the vision that comes by an intense reconstruction of physical seeing or through vital experience (e.g. Shakespeare's it is a kind of occult sight which sees the things behind the veil, the forms that are more intimate and expressive than any outward appearance, it is a very vivid sight and the expression that... the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would lot call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line— In cradle of the rude imperious surge— is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it ...
... or by some living significant symbol or expressive body of it. This dynamic sight is not the vision that comes by an intense reconstruction of physical seeing or through vital experience (e.g. Shakespeare's), it is a kind of occult sight which sees the things behind the veil, the forms that are more intimate and expressive than any outward appearance. It is a very vivid sight and the expression ...
... eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh'." What you have mistaken for writhing is really the trem-bling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an "f"-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's Page 76 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. ...Let me come now to your quarrel with my attitude and message. You refer to "a fribbling intervention of mind" in ...
... Page 90 from that of Samuel Johnson. The rate of change revealed by a comparison of the idioms emanating from the pens of these three writers does suggest an approximate date for Shakespeare's English, and the latter, in its turn, an approximate date for Chaucer's... It is now generally admitted by all that Pānini lived about 400 B.C., and the language described by Pānini is known to ...
... there are periods of blankness when nothing seems to be done or going on. Disciple : As he is a poet he may be living in higher regions. Sri Aurobindo : You must no forget Shakespeare's saying that "All poetry is telling lies." ( Laughter) Disciple : He is not a poet of that sort. Disciple : Perhaps you had a dose of meditation last week which you are now ...
... are the two poets whose affinity to Spenser is the deepest and in their own manner they have distilled anew his musical attar for us. His stamp on the language is as permanent and unmistakable as Shakespeare's and Milton's, and it is the surest test of critical judgment to find amidst contemporary excitements an impartial hour for appreciating the languid greatness of the "Faerie Queene". Page 13 ...
... cannot be bettered; so does "lost in a breath of sound" with less simplicity but with the same inevitability. I don't mean that highly coloured poetry cannot be absolutely inevitable, it can, e.g. Shakespeare's "In cradle of the rude imperious surge" and many others. But most often highly coloured poetry attracts too much attention to the colour and its brilliancy so that the thing in itself is less felt ...
... scholarship I could not but go. I remember he gave me a testimonial. "He used to attend social gatherings and dramatic performances. But mostly he remained silent. I remember how he appreciated Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, in which I took part as Portia. Barindra, his younger brother, was also there during those days. Later Sri Aurobindo left Baroda College and joined the National College ...
... spirits with the gods leaning Page 243 down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle. The outward form of Shakespeare's work is a surge of emotion and passion and thought and act and event arising out of character at ferment in the yeast of feeling and passion, but it is its living interpretation of the truth and... heroes and deeds before Troy in their actuality as they really were to the normal vision of men, but much rather as they were or might Page 248 have been to the vision of the gods. Shakespeare's greatness lies not in his reproduction of actual human events or men as they appear to us buttoned and cloaked in life,—others of his time could have done that as well, if with less radiant force ...
... until two or even three in the morning, only to rise again by six a.m. ready for more intensive work. Perhaps no one has described the anguish of the insomniac as vividly and poetically as Shakespeare's King Henry V O Sleep, O gentle Sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness? Why rather ...
... takes hold of word and rhythm: the sheer stuff of their sense comes alive in their movement and vibration, and Aswapati's experience is so expressed as if it could seize the reader himself. A super-Shakespeare's vitality and vividness are here, revealing and communicating with the Overmind's blend of the immense and the intense the Divine as at once a vast Puissance and an intimate Person, bringing "stupendous ...
... inspiration. That is not a difficult job so long as the planes are not above the mind or in the occult back-spaces - a little acquaintance with the vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion that is Shakespeare's is enough for noting the less vibrant play with one's guts and more resounding impact on one's grey cells which Milton offers. Other intensities, too, are within the reach of one's instinctive ...
... they show us, just when we are extremely puzzled, the way to the "fullness of that knowledge". In defence of the double adjective 'slow miraculous' in the second line above, Sri Aurobindo cited Shakespeare's: Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge; and as regards the line itself, with ...
... direct hint as to whether the Brahmin is the higher pole or the lower. At least in South India at present the Brahmin will certainly be regarded as lower than the dog. I for one would adapt Shakespeare's Brutus and say: "Not that I love the Brahmin less, but that I love the dog more." So I would choose to take the two as contrasts in kind rather than contrasts in quality. Finally, the opening ...
... good will. Aside from his learned studies on ancient India like The Problem of Aryan Origin and Karpāsa in Prehistoric India, his critical monographs on Sri Aurobindo's Poetry, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Blake's Tyger and Mallarmé's Symbolist Poetry, and collections of his own poems (for example, The Secret Splendour and the Adventure of the Apocalypse), Sethna's seminal sadhana ...
... Aurobindo has written something very amusing Page 34 about this, the number of Caesars one knew, the number of all the great beings, the Napoleons and all the important personages, the Shakespeares, all the people whose names have survived in history! How many are there! There are hundreds of them! And you hear their stories: "I was this, I was that, I did this", or in séances the so-called ...
... any dearth of good feeling and friendship. It was again during this period itself that we got permission to read books, and a few volumes reached our hands. My people sent me Bacon's Essays, Shakespeare's King John – I still remember these titles – and several other titles of the type used in my college as textbooks. Some works of Vivekananda came and also the Brahmavaivarta and the Vishnu Puranas ...
... its word-body, by the movement and sound of its words, it plays deeply and intimately upon us even though the meaning be elusive and seem as if almost absent. Richards cites as examples some of Shakespeare's Songs and, in a different way, much of the best of Swinburne. All this is admirable psychology and artistic observation; but it is thwarted from reaching down to bedrock by a set of postulates ...
... same distinction applies to the next two lines "In the lulled silver stream etc." and the four that follow. I don't mean that highly coloured poetry cannot be absolutely inevitable, it can e.g. Shakespeare's "In cradle of the rude imperious surge" and many others. But most often highly coloured poetry attracts too much attention to the colour and its brilliances so that the thing in itself is less felt ...
... only reminding me of a question in an early poem of mine - What visionary urge Has stolen from horizons watched alone? - but also bringing to my mind a great phrase from one of Shakespeare's sonnets: The prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. I feel in the life here the promise of a fabulous future on Page 163 this very earth if we ...
... outward success of the hour or even of the near future. The soul can grow against or even by a material destiny that is adverse. Finally, even if all is determined, why say that Life is, in Shakespeare's phrase or rather Macbeth's, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"? Life would rather be that if it were all chance and random incertitude. But if it is something ...
... us were discussing which was the best of Shakespeare's plays. Most of us were concerned in advancing arguments for unconventional opinions, but a clever young man, who, from the elementary schools, had lately risen to the university, informed us, as a fact of which we were unaccountably ignorant, Page 404 that Hamlet is the best of Shakespeare's plays. After this the subject was closed ...
... be found—there is a world struggling to be born and it is only from within that one can find and release it. 24 February 1935 All this insistence on grandeur and majesty makes me remember Shakespeare's remarks—the greatness that is thrust on one. I am unaware, as of grimness, so of any stiff majesty or pompous grandeur—the state of peace, wideness, universality I feel is perfectly easy, simple ...
... primrose" and don't associate the object with any gleam in our gaze, any stir of our pulse, any thrill in our brain, any figurative view of it as in the Porter's Page 360 expression in Shakespeare's Macbeth: . . . go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire" or else as in Ophelia's speech to her - : brother Laertes in Hamlet: Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me ...
... alternatives but concomitants. In literary language I may be said to be reminded of the poet Vaughan's line - Rapt above earth by power of one fair face - together with the dramatist Shakespeare's phrase: O brave new world That has such wondrous creatures in it! Page 274 Perhaps you will express surprise at this exclamation, for the actual world is rather a ...
... attention to predictions. You have to put a check on your mind. Otherwise you create a state of consciousness in which the things feared from the supposed action of so-called "inauspicious stars" (Shakespeare's phrase) assume a con-creteness and a power to affect you. Carlyle once wrote: "Close your Byron and open your Goethe." He meant the putting aside of the sheer vitalistic urge and the romantic melancholy ...
... only the central syllable stressed. Metrically it is like the last foot of the Shakespearean verse already quoted: The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling... Sri Aurobindo 1 has called Shakespeare's last foot "a spacious amphibrach like a long plunge of a wave" and remarked about the entire line's structure of four stressed intrinsically long vowels and one stressed vowel that is intrinsically ...
... wise/we grow, Our wis/er sons/no doubt/will call/us so. There is also the deep serious Miltonic voice: To reign/is worth/ambi/tion though/in hell, or the supreme tragic note as in Shakespeare's It is/the cause,/it is/the cause,/my soul. Sri Aurobindo makes use of this limpid metrical form in the opening lines of his Savitri: It was the hour before the gods awake. ...
... Directions, New York, 1951). Ker, W.P. (ed.) Essays and Studies, Vol. III (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1912). Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life : Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (Methuen, London, 1958). Laureate of Peace : on the Genius of Alexander Pope (Roudedge, London, 1954). Kurtz, Benjamin P. The Pursuit of Death (Oxford University ...
... others have been kept back, so I will reveal to you today some of those tales which have 296 "This was the most unkindest cut of all" - from Mark Antony's famous burial speech in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene ii, line 183. Page 251 been held back. You know, perhaps, that I worked in many departments of the Ashram before I found my true vocation ...
... its goals and trips up again and again on the way, a physical organism completely harmonious, shapely, secure in place of one seeking health and beauty and longevity but with a flesh which is, as Shakespeare's Hamlet saw, heir to a thousand ills and doomed finally to degenerate and die. In manifestation the Last Things can be as the First because "evolution" is only the gradual outbreak of a Supermind ...
... pages"? The life everlasting after death has been an accepted belief in many parts of the world for centuries. The Fear of Death gives tongue to the belief, as did verses by others before—from Shakespeare's And Death once dead there's no more dying then, through Donne's One short sleep past we wake eternally, And death shall be no more : Death, thou shalt die, Page ...
... the divine secrecies are disclosed through a crowd of colourful yet subtle images in a swift or slow design with thought as a subordinate element. One may say it is the plane active behind Shakespeare's leap and coruscation and felicitous ingenuity of the life-force but mostly translated into vivid passion and sensation and idea-impulse instead of being transmitted in its multi-toned seerhood ...
... opened at random, seemed a very chancy thing. People have found clues to conduct or timely solace or guidance in a moment of crisis by a sudden sampling of the Bible, the Guru Granth Sahib, Shakespeare's Complete Works or even Robinson Crusoe. In the Prosperity Room, the books thus sampled were the Arya volumes containing The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and other writings of Sri Aurobindo ...
... intuitions in art started from the same power, but the surrounding or subordinate mental operations were of a different character and colour. And in art itself there are different kinds of intuition. Shakespeare's seeing of life differs in its character and aims from Balzac's or Ibsen's, but the essential part of the process, that which makes it intuitive, is the same. The Buddhistic, the Vedantic seeing ...
... _________________ *Antony (to the dead body of Caesar): O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth.... Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 1 Page 52 looks at man and the world as they are, that it is almost completely convincing so far as it goes (Savitri VI.II): An idiot ...
... shushka jnāna : dry Knowledge. × An allusion to Dogberry's malapropism in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing , III.5: "Comparisons are odorous..." × shuddhā bhakti : pure bhakti ...
... piercing insight has probed not only profound issues of philosophy, such as the question of free-will or the spirituality of the future, but has investigated Einsteinian physics, detected Shakespeare's mysterious Dark Lady, Mr. W.H. and the Rival Poet, published 750 pages of poetry and followed the approach of Sri Aurobindo in plumbing the riches of European literature and the practice of ...
... any lurking philosophy. The language has a rich sensuousness that succeeds in vividly evoking the atmosphere of ancient Baghdad and Bassora. Nureddene reminds us of Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Almuene the bad Vizier is sinister like Heathcliff, and Fareed is a shadowy Linton. Doonya has maiden-fire, and Anice walks in beauty, literally an "emperor's portion". And Harkoos the ...
... Sir Geoffrey Keynes. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar spent some time cogitating upon the approaches of Amal Kiran and Kathleen Raine to Blake's poem and wrote to Amal Kiran: As in your study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in the present work too, you have mobilised to brilliant effect your seasoned and manifold faculties, now on the issue of a christological reading of Tyger . But a doubt per- Page ...
... 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 Milton's vocabulary was rather limited. But we have only to Page 135 look at his prose-works to see his enormous ...
... poem; what we have is some unmistakable felicity of wondrous sound lifting up mantrically substance and sight to its own world of rhythmic harmony. Thus there is nothing mystic or Upanishadic in Shakespeare's Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain and yet the lines do possess, explains Sri Aurobindo, "the Overhead touch in substance, the rhythm and the feeling" ...
... Is it poetic? Very. Don't know what it all means, but meaning is superfluous in such poems. The more mystifying the better. "Voyaging through strange seas of Thought"—highway robbery? Shakespeare's or Sri Aurobindo's? Wordsworth—one of his best known lines. Medical report—nothing—all old cases. A wants a tonic for his debility, Kaviraji if possible. Duraiswam has suggested to him ...
... others following suit. Nor was it merely the feeling of the sadhaks that the all-transmuting work of the Supermind would touch them, removing "the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to" in Shakespeare's tragic vision. A case may be cited in which the Master and the Mother themselves gave the promise in the most explicit terms. A sadhak had been riddled with a sense of unfitness for the immense ...
... diagnosis of a recurrent and universal disease. There is a conflict within, between the sadhak's sattwic nature aspiring towards the Light and his tamasic which pulls him downward to the Night; in Shakespeare's words: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom suffers then The nature of an insurrection. 20 The ...
... incapable of using rhyme or even a stanza form like Spenser's; his earlier poems are studies in metrical perfection; but he rejected rhyme because he found it unnecessary. Still, he did not follow Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse. Most probably, he had before him the verses of Homer and Virgil — these served as his models. But what is possible in Greek or Latin is impossible in English. The reasons... it is narrative and in yet another it is lyrical. Such is Sri Aurobindo's style that it can absorb all the main types of poetry. Pope's heroic couplet was suitable for mock-heroic poems only. Shakespeare's blank verse could embody dramatic poetry alone. Milton's blank verse could not be used either for romantic or lyrical poetry. But the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo can be used for any of these ...
... of learning is to grow from experience to experience, and to treat every encounter in life, with nature or creatures or people, as a field of experience and learning. It is thus that we find, in Shakespeare's words, "sermons in stones and books in running brooks ". The letters were obviously addressed to a good pupil. In 1973, in her introductory notes to Letters from a Father to His Daughter ...
... can lose himself in something larger than his ego. The introduction of the Eremite - who appears twice during Antiochus' campaigns - may appear a little puzzling at first. Like the Soothsayer in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the Eremite too tries to undermine Antiochus' overweening self-confidence. On the second occasion, when he tells the hero - Despise not proud defeat, scorn not high death... but fragmentary, piece is redolent of Elizabethan pastoral romance. The opening song - Under the darkling tree , Who danceth with thee, Sister, say? inevitably recalls Shakespeare's 'Under the greenwood tree', and in the Wood-lands of Ilni one can breathe the Forest of Arden atmosphere. It is a juvenile exercise, but already these foresters and forest damsels, Melander the ...
... A hymn of praise. × A fat, witty, good-humoured old knight in Shakespeare's play, Henry IV . × Pp. 33-35. ...
... under the mother's wings. 32 VIII For the seventh Conversation, the leading question related to the power of Thought, and to what extent one created one's own world. If, according to Shakespeare's Hotspur, "thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool", and according to Milton's Satan, The mind is its own place, and in itself Page 312 Can make a heav'n of hell, a ...
... The right rhythm bearing out the significance of the right words—there we have the double secret of this line in which a world-woe finds tongue, with an art equalling in its own way the art of Shakespeare's And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain and the art of Virgil's Page 286 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, which C. Day Lewis has Englished: ...
... tends to disbelieve them. But they are true enough and they are by no means mysterious or inexplicable to those who have the knowledge of occult science. You may recall Hamlet's words to Horatio in Shakespeare's play, apropos of the Ghost which appeared before them: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' From January 1, 1922, the Mother took full ...
... tones striking across it of pathos and passion. One's memory cannot help going back to that most wonderful of farewells in the presence of death, Romeo's last soliloquy, the top poetic reach of Shakespeare's youth: "Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe That insubstantial Death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be thy paramour? For ...
... the New Testament. The dynamic in the West leading to ever expanding freedom for individuals and groups is based on the idea that all are equal before God.. Although taken out of the context of Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, Portia's famous speech on Justice tempered by mercy exemplifies this ideal. PORTIA The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain ...
... capitulate, and hasn't he really expected this, really wanted this? He says simply: Heaven's joys Without thee now were beggarly and rude. A distantly parallel situation is Portia (in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) claiming and winning equality with her husband, Brutus, who is forced in the end to answer her defiance with disarming acquiescence, and exclaim prayerfully; "O ye gods, render ...
... sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective. "Devouring eye" is then a synecdoche — isolating and emphasizing Shakespeare's most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis ...
... only gains in significance with the 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 ...
... humanity & its results on the future life of the nation & the world would have been, comparatively, almost a zero. We can see this truth even with regard to slighter incidents. The fatality which in Shakespeare's drama wills the death of Romeo & Juliet as the result of a trivial and easily avoidable accident, receives all its value from the possibilities surrounding the actual event, the possibilities of ...
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