Swinburne : Algernon Charles (1837-1909), English poet & critic, symbol of mid-Victorian poetic revolt.
... Inspiration and Effort SHELLEY, SWINBURNE, HOUSMAN — AND MARY SHELLEY 1 The Times Literary Supplement of November 21, 1968 (pages 1318-19), discusses under the title, "Shelley, Swinburne and Housman", the famous eighth line — Fresh spring, and summer and winter hoar — of one of Shelley's most Shelleyan lyrics beginning... province of science". Not that Housman accepted Ros-setti's reading or denied the exquisiteness of the "inequality" Swinburne had spoken of. He declared: "I may say in passing that I do not think Mr. Rossetti's verse a good verse, not worthy of Shelley; and I suppose that when Mr. Swinburne in his Essays and Studies [1875] spoke of Mr. Rossetti's deaf and desperate daring, he was expressing, in nobler... perhaps she anticipated Swinburne in finding a special music in the assymmetrical line. Alternatively, the compositor in 1824 may have closed the gap wide though it is, without any warrant from the editor." Now our authors return to Housman and continue: "If the last hypothesis were the right one, it would exactly substantiate Housman's conclusion [apropos of Swinburne] ... But even if the ...
... diversity and artistic manipulation of sound-effects had contained a living seed of the Swinburnian harmony. In Swinburne this seed sprouted in a royal fulfilment. But Shelley was not just fluent and lyrical; he was in addition always inspired with regard to his meaning, while Swinburne diluted too often his own, thus checking the growth that might have happened. A serious technical difference... limitation, knowing life as a divine freedom and death a misfortune and a dreadful darkness to those alone who have not achieved this freedom. Where in Swinburne was to be found such a cry for spiritual insight? Page 74 Swinburne knew the subtle earth-soul, even more the sea-soul; but Shelley had a transcendental vein in him besides the pantheistic, an aching eye towards Plato's... strength. Thus Thompson failed as Swinburne did, though for different reasons. Nevertheless, a side of Shelley got developed in him too, despite accompanying defects. And I venture to prophesy that if ever some poet carries on the Shelleyan nisus , he would incarnate the poetic gains that nisus has acquired through Thompson no less than Swinburne. In trying to find a new lease of activity ...
... gives to "burns", while "gloom" would render the rhythm at the close too congestedly labial and sticky: one would have to press the lips together and pause twice without any perceptible interval. Swinburne would have preferred "murk" simply on the ground that it interwove an extra echo-effect with the general rhyme-scheme of the stanza from which the line is taken, and he would have considered the ... rhythmic. Keats, too, would seem pompous, romantic, colourfully emotional, and thus open to the charge of effusiveness in the eyes of the extremists of cold and dry light in poetry. My criticism of Swinburne is directed only at his failure sometimes to practise the art which naturalises art and not at his penchant for harmonic recurrences or rich proliferations of word and idea and sentiment. There is... reach a sheer glory of inspiration nowhere else to be found in Victorian times. Tennyson's art and music are a pale finicky dandyism compared to this masterful exuberance: the older poet surpassed Swinburne in sense of character and in narrative skill, but in the true furor poeticus the younger was with the very few masters of English verse, while Tennyson never fulfilled on a grand scale that subtle ...
... both the lines go to build it up. According to Swinburne, 8 "the very stars, and all the children of heaven, the 'helmed cherubim' that guide and the 'sworded seraphim' that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at the sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to men." May we ask where Swinburne gets the idea of "pity"? What is the sanction... pointer to the contrary we cannot go beyond these. If there is any pity here, it should be self-pity which is equivalent to the experience we have characterised. And who else is present to be pitied? Swinburne refers to "men" menaced by "a new force of monstrous matter". But Blake has no hint of the stars being related in any way to men. Even earth is not on the scene - unless we dogmatically deny to "the... on earth that Monk's "terrible" and Harding's "appalling" new thing is seen from above. But these interpreters go outside the terms of Blake's vision and physicalise the stars because, just like Swinburne with his "new force of monstrous matter", their eyes are upon a Tyger imaged to be terrestrial. They are right in confining themselves to the stars' dismay and refraining from ascription of pity to ...
... written in Sapphics, the only experiment in English comparable to those of Swinburne and John Addington Symonds. The classical Sapphic quatrain has in three lines a spondee and a dactyl between a single trochee at the beginning and two at the end, while the fourth line is a dactyl followed by either a spondee or a trochee. Swinburne uses often a trochaic instead of a spondaic foot and introduces a few other... other minor variations here and there; Symonds does likewise but he mostly keeps a spondaic close in the last line. Sri Aurobindo follows Swinburne rather than Symonds, adding however, the privilege of a more marked modulation anywhere of the dactyl in the first three lines by an anti-bacchius, cretic or molossus; at one place he substitutes their terminal trochee with a spondee and the dactyl of the... it by English prosody without sacrificing the basic spirit and rhythm-movement of the original. Over and above technical departures there is also one in the lyrical quality which demands notice. Swinburne and Symonds retain, almost throughout, Sappho's poignant picturing tone, at once simple in expression and rich in sound-texture. Sri Aurobindo, though preserving the gorgeous-sounding yet clear-phrased ...
... is no longer there. 18 November 1934 Page 400 Swinburne I want to make a short series of notes according to some responses to great poetry—and what I am sending tonight is meant to be the opening section: No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than these lines from Swinburne: Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these A... It is not new—but it is difficult to say anything new in these matters. It is well written. I don't know though that there is any "aching idealism" or "high ascetic transport" in these lines of Swinburne. An acceptance of suffering for oneself may have it—an infliction of suffering from one's own perversely passionate pleasure on another can hardly have it. 23 December 1934 I don't understand... What harm can there be in using such an illustrative device? I am unable to see what there is in the lines, whether taken separately or in the context or both that is anything more than what Swinburne meant to put it, a rhapsodic glorification and enthusiasmos of sadistic passion—just as the other passage 3 is a magnificent outburst of the magnified ego. But one is no more ascetic or ideal ...
... fact that some of the greatest melopoeics in verse have had very little ear for music — they were practically tone-deaf. Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hugo, Yeats, though they have written about music itself, were all tone-deafs in more or less degree. Swinburne was such an extreme case that if he had heard the tunes, without the words, of "God Save the Queen" and "Bandemataram" played in turn to an... melopoeic mania. Poets who are enamoured of sound run often the risk of trusting to the sound-effect to carry off a sense either trivial or thin or else prosaic. A chronic case of thinness of sense is Swinburne who in later life lost himself in complex eddies of sound with hardly perceptible mean-ing. Milton, on the other hand, had always substantial significance, but at times he permitted it to be prose ...
... me in eulogistic terms as a sort of combination of Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not... and Death. Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in ever the poems collected in Ahana, not to mention Baji Prabhou. I don't know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with Songs to Myrtilla. Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in Urvasie and Love and Death. But as I ...
... elevations of the first romantic, half spiritual outbreak is very marked, baffling and sudden. This is not in the nature of a revolt, an energetic audacity of some new thing,—except for a moment in Swinburne,—but a change of levels, a transition to other more varied but Page 148 less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats... successful poet of Page 154 the Victorian epoch. Others who have not the same limitations, either fall below him in art or have a less sustained and considerable bulk and variety of work. Swinburne brings in into the poetry of the time elements to which the rest are strangers. He has a fire and passion and vehemence of song which is foreign to their temperament. He brings in too the continental... Victorian poetry the expression of the most characteristic trains of thought expressing the contemporary mind and temperament at its highest and best. Tennyson voices the conventional English mind, Swinburne a high-pitched cry of revolt or a revolutionary passion for freedom or even for licence; Rossetti and Morris take refuge in mediaevalism as they saw it: Arnold strikes out the more serious notes of ...
... illustrate what piquancy should avoid being. I shall offer an example in which it runs riot, almost goes mad. Sidgwick has imagined what Swinburne with his complicated and musically repetitive style would have made of Wordsworth's straightforward paradox. Swinburne would have excitedly pro-duced a sort of rapturously ridiculous riddle: The manner of man by the boy begotten Is son to the child... child that he himself was is the father of the man that he now is. I hope I am not making the confusion worse confounded. It is much easier explaining what piquancy is than illustrating it a la Swinburne. Page 111 ...
... founding element of poetic expression, and though most modern poets depend or at least lean more heavily on force of thought and substance than on the greater musical suggestions of rhythm,—Shelley, Swinburne, Yeats are exceptions,—there must always be a change in this basis of the poet's art when there is a substantial change of the constituting spirit and motive. Especially when there is this more subtle... has its limitations, from which different poets try to get release by different devices. Milton sought it in variations of pause and 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 ...
... to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser: the fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry... that Spenser's melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spenser's art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded ...
... of me in eulogistic terms as a sort of combination of Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at ...
... here is one of the most comprehensive and varied and that it is not * P. Lal, Modem Indo-Anglian Poetry, p. 11. Page 223 restricted to "poetic" words as in Tennyson, Swinburne and the Decadent poets. There is daring originality in such choice, as in: We must fill the immense lacuna we have made, Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant With the open... 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 transitions naturally and ...
... poem. He has a remarkable gift of music and language and of skilful weaving of sound and work. The comparison with Swinburne15 imposes itself and the resemblance is very striking—it is as if Swinburne had migrated into the Bengali language. The danger of such writing is a too great facility and an excess of sound and language over significance. In order to equal or surpass Tagore he has to develop... Nishikanta has indeed bloomed out, but with his great facility of diction and rhythm he must be careful to keep his substance up to the mark as he did in the sonnets. Facility was the [rule] of Swinburne and did much to diminish the possibility of sustained perfection in Shelley. I am glad to hear and see that you are maintaining the quiet of the mind and walking steadily and smoothly and finely ...
... like, do gymnastics too like Satyen Dutta, only I never do it. I never write poems, as you know, regularly, U] write only when I feel a kind of urge. But to resume my question: As I understand, Swinburne spent a lot of labour on conscious artistry and thereby spoilt the spontaneity of many poems! I don't fancy that. That is why I ask you— should I try such conscious artistry as I do in this poem ... hours when it was necessary. Now, of course, I don't have to— but can direct my concentration to artistry and chiselling of structure, etc. But my question still remains. I don't know that Swinburne really did that—before assenting to such a proposition about him I should like to know which were these poems he spoiled by too much artistry of technique. So far as I remember, his best poems are ...
... at the beginning of this causerie, let me wind up by quoting again the poet I commenced with -Robinson Jeffers. I shall put a passage by him side by side with one from Swinburne and another from Spenser. In a well-known poem Swinburne asks us to be thankful That no man lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, And even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. The verses ...
... who are unable to read behind the mental idea—that is what I have done in The Bird of Fire . It seems to me that both methods are legitimate. 16 December 1936 Heredia and Swinburne I don't think Heredia and Swinburne go very well together; one is a passionate and chaotic imperfection and the other is a passionless perfection, but it is a passion of the music of words only and a perfection of ...
... mere device or a rigid fetter. There are some arts that cannot be done well without some technical knowledge, e.g. painting, sculpture. 14 May 1936 Artistry of Technique I don't know that Swinburne failed for this reason—before assenting to such a dictum I should like to know which were these poems he spoiled by too much artistry of technique. So far as I remember, his best poems are those in... to sense, but I would find it difficult to find fault with his music or his rhythmical method. There is no reason why one should not use assonance and alliteration, if one knows how to use them as Swinburne did. Everybody cannot succeed like that and those who cannot must be careful and restrained in their use. 2 November 1934 Page 118 Art for Art's Sake Art for Art's sake? But what ...
... lengthen out and a richness of colour is employed, the cry of "Swinburne!" is raised. The temper of the poem is not even touched, the metrical design is not analysed. The fact that Sri Aurobindo has moulded novel metrical designs and royally filled them with inspiration adds, in the opinion of dilettante critics, a further resemblance to Swinburne Page 46 the arch-metricist. Never a thought ...
... 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 meant. The other kind of power would not be prefaced by the epithet ...
... complexity of effect and symmetry to a language otherwise distinguished merely by facility, by directness and by simplicity of colour and charm. Sound is more essential to poetry than sense. Swinburne who often conveys no meaning to the intellect, yet fills his verse with lovely & suggestive melodies, can put more poetry into one such line than Pope into a hundred couplets of accurate sense and ...
... breaking out into new anarchic forms, a vindication of freedom of movement which unfortunately at its ordinary levels brings us nearer to the earth and not higher up towards a more illumined air; Swinburne, excited by the lyric fire within him, had too Page 241 often to lash himself into a strained violence of passion in order to make a way through the clogging thickness for its rush of ...
... in Love and Death. Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in even the poems collected in Ahana, not to mention Baji Prabhou. I don't know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with Songs to Myrtilla. Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in Urvasie and Love and Death. But as I have said ...
... 352, line 5, "verily evidently" is a misprint for "very evidently". These are, however, flaws of little importance. More serious is the claim, put forward on p. 321 that Spenser, Tennyson and Swinburne were great geniuses. It would be nearer the truth to say that they were poets whose technical ability was considerable. New and strange opinions! "My opinion" would be preferable to "the truth" ...
... easily evokes such an epithet in the minds of his translators or admirers. Thus Edna St.Vincent Millay elaborates his "de gigantesque naiades" into Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees and Swinburne, in his famous prematurely composed elegy on Baudelaire's death, Ave atque vale, has the lines: Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover. ...
... the present have longed and looked for the "Secret Splendour". The books that meant much to you were my own boon companions - Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, Wordsworth and Shelley and Swinburne and many others. I studied Roman Catholic thought with great interest, starting with St. Augustine and ending with Chesterton's Everlasting Man and Papini's book on Jesus. We were also in the ...
... countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive effects - the ...
... elevations of the first romantic, half spiritual outbreak is very marked, baffling and sudden. This is not in the nature of a revolt, an energetic audacity of some new thing, - except for a moment in Swinburne, - but a change of levels, a transition to other more varied but less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by ...
... most exalted flare of his religious aspiration couples Page 163 "fire" with "desire" twice, with less than a dozen lines in between and only the plural to make a variation, while Swinburne who had the ingenuity to overcome the supposed unrhymableness of "babe" by producing that neglected poetic gem "astrolabe" could yet allow his inventive power to suffer complete paralysis whenever ...
... word-design and pattern of rhythm a unique inevitable loveliness. No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than the closing lines of the quotation from Swinburne: ...Take thy limbs living and new-mould with these A lyre of many faultless agonies. Their excellence is wrought, on the side of rhythm, by a keen yet sublime movement disposing ...
... 118 Supernature,3,4,5,38,141,142,146, 151,153, 157,207,208,252 Symbol,Symbolism,Symbolization,2,127 symmetry, 9 Synecdoche,18, 85 Synesius, Bishop, 50 Swedenborg, 262 Swinburne, 23,24, 30 Taylor, Thomas, 134 Temenos, 50 fn. 23 That Night, 49 Tharmas, 4,141,142 Thompson, Francis, 73 Todd, 102 Traditions,Neoplatonic,Gnostic, Hermetic ...
... (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 Songs and Manuscripts (London), 1928. Williamson, George ...
... and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds to its peculiar charm. The same applies to Harindranath Chatto-padhyaya at his best. It applies a good deal to Swinburne also, but at Swinburne's best the repetition is not always unconscious: he is frequently a deliberate artist in sound, a maestro in orchestration, and echoes are developed into almost an art within ...
... St. John of the Cross 126 subtle-physical body 116 plane 209 Sufi 70 sukshma sharira 116 Sun of Truth 38,86 Supermind 51,58 Supernature 12,128,208,273,315 Swinburne 42,127 T Tagore, Rabindranath 34, 70 Tantra 273 Tennyson 66,216,259 Thibaudet 62 Thompson, Francis 20,22,27,108 transformation power of true 273 translation ...
... and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds to its peculiar charm. The same applies to Harindranath Chattopadhyaya at his best. It applies a good deal to Swinburne also, but at Swinburne's best the repetition is not always unconscious: he is frequently a deliberate artist in sound, a maestro in orchestration, and echoes are developed into almost an art within ...
... , but poetry cannot really be known except when it is read in the original language. "Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 148. 12 Perhaps Manmohan Ghose was thinking of the poems of Meredith, Swinburne and Stephen Phillips. Sri Aurobindo himself has recognised the influence of these poets on his early poetic formation. He even says that the after-effects of Meredith's Ascent to Earth of the Daughter ...
... Rajkot, 2004. Swami Maheshananda et al, Siva Samhita, Kaivalya Dhama, S.M.Y.M. Samiti, Lonavala, 1999. Swami Swahananda, Chhandogya Upanisad, Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras, 1965. Swinburne, R., The Evolution of the Soul, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986. Tagore, Rabindranath, The Religion of Man, George Alien Unwin Ltd., London, 3rd edition, 1949. PAGE–151 Tamini, I.K ...
... wider and deeper sense. So the poet sings: My own clime I find in every clime, And I shall win it from everywhere. Thus, for example, the ideas and movements that have taken shape in Swinburne and Maeterlinck have induced some echoing waves in the works of Tagore here and there. Some of the things, specially characteristic of the West, were fused into his inspiration, became his own and ...
... them. Page 47 His personal library thus came to include some of the latest books in English, French, German, Latin, Greek — and of course all the major English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne. A cousin of Sri Aurobindo's, Basanti Devi, has given us this amusing account of his addiction to books and his habit of carrying trunkloads of them wherever he went: Auro Dada used to arrive ...
... teaching, scholarship, political journalism, poetry, Yoga. He dieted on the poets of the West and India, and his library had all the great English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Algernon Charles Swinburne. His Bengali tutor, speaking of the 1898-9 period, has recorded that among the English poems on which Sri Aurobindo was then engaged there was one on Savitri also. And, referring to a later period ...
... singular & rare effects. A proper equivalent would only be found in some rhymed system and preferably I should fancy in some system of unusually related but intricate & closely recurring rhymes. Swinburne might have done it; for Swinburne's work, though with few exceptions poor work as poetry, is a marvellous repertory of successful metrical experiments. I have already indicated the appropriateness ...
... 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 Richards brings forth on the strength of his "science". Science ...
... is written at a high-pitch of feeling perfectly intelligible to anyone who had passed through the exaltation of the Swadeshi days, but not more high pitched than certain things in Milton, Shelley, Swinburne. In Govinda Das's lines,—let us translate them into English— Am I merely thine ? 0 Love, I am there clinging In every limb of thine—there ever in my creation and my dissolution ...
... out. Remember that in lyrical poetry this is a difficult process—one is apt to beat out the gold wire Page 65 too thin, to replace it where it fails by apparent gold only. Shelley, Swinburne and many others fail by diffusion, except in a very few long poems—and are at their best when they are more brief. So, if you go in for lyrical lengths, much care will be needed—the principle must ...
... Treasury, etc. He passed away in 1984. There is no exactly corresponding English word for Jshta Devata. We may express it as—a tutelary god, a personal deity. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet. George Duhamel (1844-1966), the eminent French author and critic, told Dilipda that Indian music was "indeed a novel but delightful experience with me. The music ...
... symbols chosen are old ones, verging on the well-worn, he can transmute everything into a masterpiece. Who has not heard of the shell that brings from its whorl the long boom of breakers? And has not Swinburne familiarised us to easy enthusiasms like "the sea, my mother", and "my mother the sea"? But take now Chadwick's: Out of an infinite ocean Time arose; By his shore with a thunderous ...
... Cat, is all over the place and drowns the ingeniousness when Wordsworth's straightforward paradox - The Child is father of the Man - is metagobrolised into the ridiculous riddle spun out by Swinburne: The manner of man by the boy begotten Is son to the child that his sire begets And sire to the child of his father's son. On a higher plane - the Chubbian plane, I might say where ...
... sonitu quatit ungula campum, 1 and Virgilian too is Whitman's cadence — Silent, avoiding the moon-beams, blending myself with the shadows. The unaccented long is not at play in the Swinburne line, while in the Whitman it comes only in the final syllable but does not bring out any revolutionary principle. Here the classical structure-music and rhythm-soul are kept by means of the sheer ...
... worst Page 81 Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and fine literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the Elizabethan violences of the Cenci , Tennyson, Swinburne, even after Atalanta , following the same ignis fatuus, a very flame of fatuity and futility, are all victims of the same hypnotism. Recently a new turn is visible; but as yet it is doubtful whether ...
... which would turn the canter into a torrent rush or an oceanic sweep or surge. But the proper medium for the latter up till now has been a large dactylic movement like the Greek or Latin hexameter; Swinburne has tried to get it into the anapaest, but with only occasional success because of his excessive facility and looseness, which makes the sound empty owing to want of spiritual substance. But this ...
... literature as a new form perfectly accomplished and accepted. This may be perhaps because the attempt was always made as a sort of leisure exercise and no writer of great genius like Spenser, Tennyson or Swinburne has made it a main part of his work; but, more probably, there is a deeper cause inherent in the very principle and method of the endeavour. Two poets, Clough and Longfellow, have ventured on a ...
... is written at a high pitch of feeling perfectly intelligible to anyone who had passed through the exaltation of the Swadeshi days, but not more high pitched than certain things in Milton, Shelley, Swinburne. In Gobinda Das's lines,—let us translate them into English Page 177 Am I merely thine? O Love, I am there clinging In every limb of thee—there ever is my creation and my dissolution ...
... modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets ...
... preposition in the normal way as in the second line of those two occurring later in Savitri: A colloquy of the original Gods Meeting upon the borders of the unknown... 1 In the poems of Swinburne we have two interesting accent-inversions. Look at the couplet: And strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire For extreme loathing and supreme desire. The epithets "extreme" and "supreme" ...
... translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp.473.477, and vol. i. p. 27. 22 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310. 23 Op. cit. Strophe 10. 24 H.P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence. " SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in 'A Midsummer Vacation.' Page 151 Appendix VII At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest ...
... heaps of books on various subjects in different languages - French, German, Russian, English, Greek, Latin etc., about which I knew nothing. The poetical works of all English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne were also there. Countless English novels were stacked in his book-cases, littered in the comers of his rooms, and stuffed in his steel trunks. The Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy of Dante, our ...
... Stanford, W.B. 402 Stephen, J.K. 376 Stevens, Wallace 313, 314, 396 398 Stoudt, J.J. 20,21 Strachey, Lytton 346, 347 Strong, L.A.G. 294 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 9 Synthesis of Yoga, The 20, 24, 25, 210, 283, 293-295,347.359,400 Tagore, Rabindranath 3-5, 13, 17, 19, 47, Tasso 381,383 ...
... happiness or delight in it. D. K. found books coming by railway parcels. He saw French, German, Latin, Greek, even Russian books on Sri Aurobindo's shelf. He saw all the poets from Chaucer to Swinburne in his library. Page 46 But he was immensely surprised to find that in spite of his prolonged residence in England there was no trace of a deep European influence on him. D ...
... Aurobindo noted, "The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline it was, may have helped to mould my work ...
... fault attributed to them will disappear. Even as it is, the trochaic metre in the hands of great poets like Milton, Shelley, Keats does not pall—I do not get tired of the melody of the Skylark . Swinburne's anapaestic rhythms, as in Dolores , are kept up for pages without difficulty with the most royal ease, without fatigue either to the writer or the reader. Both trochee and anapaest are surely quite... 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 has a more melodious ...
... The form of the question reminds one of Epictetus' definition of man, "Thou art a little soul carrying about a corpse." Some of our readers may be familiar with Swinburne's adaptation of the saying, "A little soul for a little bears up the corpse which is man". × Sri ...
... (Alcaics is a Greek metre invented by the poet Alcaeus): In the Latin it is: But in English, variations (modulations) are allowed, only one has to keep to the general plan. Swinburne's Sapphics are to be scanned thus: Two trochees at the beginning, two trochees at the end, a dactyl Page 139 separating the two trochaic parts of the line—that is the Sapphics ...
... equal poetic excellence: still, the cast of vision, mould of utterance and movement of music are dissimilar. On one plane you may have a lot of attitudes — secular or sacred, sensual or spiritual; Swinburne's frenzy of the flesh in Anactoria and his part-Greek part-Norse part-Indian pantheism in Hertha function on an identical plane as regards essential qualities of sight, speech and rhythm. On one plane ...
... you describe; only they came down that way instead of going up." Another letter from Hastings, Sussex, 1887, is full of news. "I was going to write to you at once, when your letter came (also Swinburne's Byron, for which many thanks). I have just had a letter from my father, and I wanted to tell you the joyful news that he has willingly consented to my staying in England, and working at literature ...
... vibrant play with one's guts and more resounding impact on one's grey cells which Milton offers. Other intensities, too, are within the reach of one's instinctive recognition. Shelley's or Keats's or Swinburne's, since we have plenty of them. Not that the plenty renders them cheap but it has been possible to the poet and perceptible in its peculiarity to the reader because the centres of consciousness from ...
... sense of hidden things". Not words as such but a meaningful rhythm which can be communicated in the form of words in any language has to be part of the original inspiration. To turn a phrase of Swinburne's to my use, I should speak of "very sound of very light". And this sound is both of particular significances and of overall suggestions. When caught in language, the inspiration is not only in ...
... then close the eyes and try to visualise utter darkness. Feel yourself floating in a silent void, and deliberately empty the mind of every thought and feeling by imagining such a condition as Swinburne's "Only a sleep eternal in an eternal night." 2 And the author concludes that, once the proper knack is acquired, even a short duration of this exercise will produce an abundance of fresh energy ...
... crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth 's Lyrical Ballads as sheer prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do". Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, Page 65 these were no small and narrow critics on the whole. If they could have a blind ...
... constructions on what I write, otherwise it is easy to misunderstand its real significance. I said that there was no reason why poetry of a spiritual character (not any poetry like Verlaine's or Swinburne's or Baudelaire's) should bring no realisation at all . This did not mean that poetry was a major means of realisation of the Divine. I did not say that it would lead us to the Divine or that anyone ...
... of the sea: there is, therefore, something in it which leaves the most exalted rhetoric of Byron far behind as pallid and superficial just as much as it makes the most grandiose and colourful of Swinburne's alliterative chants mere sound and fury, incomplete in genuine vision and unsatisfying to the divine deeps of the soul. It is the physical natural sea that is apostrophised at the start but the ...
... unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics. If they could have Page 127 a blind spot in ...
... unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them Page 415 ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics on the whole. If they could have a blind ...
... iamb by the elision of the e in "the") and a medial anapaest of this kind are, it seems to me, permissible even in fairly regular pentameters. And what of Shakespeare's freedoms in blank verse or Swinburne's or Webster's famous line I only read A. E.'s poetry once and had no time to form a reliable impression; but I seem to remember a too regular and obvious rhythm, not sufficiently plastic ...
... Hour of God, SABCL Vol. 17 * The form of the question reminds one of Epictetus'definition of man, 'Thou art a little soul carrying about a corpse." Some of our readers may be familiar with Swinburne's adaptation of the saying, "A little soul for a little bears up the corpse which is man." Page 164 Nammalwar's Hymn of the Golden Age 1.Tis glory, glory, gloryl For Life's hard ...
... language, however well- learned, the ear is not so clairaudient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyricists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior. Bengali has a more melodious... sweeping constructions on what I write, otherwise it is easy to mi sunders Land its sense. ¦ I said there was no reason why poetry of a spiritual character (not any poetry like Verlaine's or Swinburne's or Baudelaire's) should bring no realisation at all. That did not mean that poetry is a major means of realisation of the Divine. I did not say that it would lead us to the Divine or that anyone ...
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