Whitman : Walter (1819-92), American journalist, essayist, & poet; his Leaves of Grass made him a revolutionary figure in American literature.
... modern poet like Walt Whitman. Unlike his predecessors in America, Whitman had a giant individuality of his own and when he turned to the profession of poetry, he strove to find his bearings in the cosmos and to express himself and his new-found sense of freedom and power in a verse partaking of this freedom and this power. Sir Aurobindo refers to Whitman as, "this giant of poetic... with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity." 27 In an audacious phrase, Sri Aurobindo calls Whitman "the most Homeric voice since Homer", because "he has the nearness to something elemental" and he has, "the elemental Homeric power of sufficient straight-forward speech, the rush too of oceanic... there is mass and amplitude. Whitman's Song of Myself is an attempt to "embody a universe in the rough"; 29 in it the zero-self successfully grapples with and comprehends the infinite universe. Whitman is himself "a kosmos, of Manhattan the son", and at the height of his self-identification with his milieu and his ambience, he declares: I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four ...
... poetic expression, this has already been done, though mostly in an unconscious way. The sphere is that of so-called Free Verse, where Whitman is the most impressive figure. Looking at "the greatest effects" with the new instrument, Sri Aurobindo 1 comments on Whitman and other writers: "we find that consciously or unconsciously they arrive at the same secret principle, and that is the essential principle... created some kind of quantity along with quantitative combinations of the old type. We may see this by scanning two of the lines from Whitman: Out of the ninth-month midnight... I saw, I heard at intervals the remain ing one the he-bird... A third Whitman-line, from outside Sri Aurobindo's quota tions, may be adjoined for being a full unconscious hexameter Page 110 ... interest of being not only characteristically Aurobindonian but also recognisably Homeric in Homer's own metre. How it can be both we may understand by noting some remarks of Sri Aurobindo's on Whitman. Whitman is part of the modern movement in which the mind has become complex and subtle—setting comprehensively to work, opening to various possibilities of truth, admitting a crowded stream and mass ...
... instrument have to be judged by its greatest effects, and there are poems, lines, passages in which Whitman strikes out a harmony which has no kinship to nor any memory of the prose gravitation, but is as far above it as anything done in the great metrical cadences. And here, and not only in Whitman, but in all writers in this form who rise to that height, we find that consciously or unconsciously... execution; but it may be doubted whether the method used is the right method. At any rate it has not been fully justified even in the hands of its greatest or most skilful exponents. It is used, as in Whitman, to give the roll of the sea of life or the broad and varying movements of the spirit of humanity in its vigorous experience and aspiration, or, as in Carpenter, to arrive at the free and harmonious... can only survive in an arrested senility or fall into a refined decadence. The most considerable representatives of this new and free form of poetic rhythm are English and American, Carpenter and Whitman. Tagore's translations of his lyrics have come in as a powerful adventitious aid, but are not really to the point Page 163 in the question at issue; for these translations are nothing but ...
... scientific, utilitarian, externalised intellectualism, as if from bank to bank across morass or flood, over to the age now beginning to come in towards us. But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was the one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they are leading. He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth century... powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is made one with the pulse of life and the grave reflective pallor and want of blood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that vigorous union. Whitman writes with a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear self-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into speech,— One's-self I sing, a simple separate person Yet... is something else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards what is now opening to man around or above, towards a vision of new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence. 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 self in Page ...
... far as the output of the modem poetry is concerned the new age is not yet. It is with Sāvitrī that the new age may be said to have arrived. Among the precursors of this new age may be counted Whitman, Carpenter, Yeats, A. E. Meredith, Stephen Phillips, Tagore in whose works one can see clear indications of the new spirit and experiments with many forms of poetic expression. The nature of this change... I than has yet found expression in poetry is becoming dominant. The subjectivity of the nineteenth century was an individual subjectivity but what seems to be coming after the appearance of Whitman is a I universal subjectivity, that is to say, we see the rise of creators in the field of poetry who, as individuals seem to be striving to live in the universal soul and the universal mind... creation. A growing sense of a greater spirit in man and in Nature is one of the most fundamental tendencies of the coming age. It is that which breaks forth in one of those inspired out- bursts of Whitman wherein "he casts forward the ideal heart of this wider movement into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion": (Future Poetry) "0 Thou transcendent, Nameless, the fibre ...
... the Gitanjali is not poetry proper: it has neither what you call "formal structures" such as Yeats clung to for all the modernity of his later phase nor the authentic swing of "free verse" such as Whitman and some followers of him practised triumphantly. It is poetic prose of a fine sensitive order and is not utterly cut off from Tagore's "prose books of great beauty" in English - evidently written... not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements; in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are Page 43 proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We... breakaway into a new dimension of inwardness. This innovation appeared to Sri Aurobindo as the promise of a plenary voice of supreme depths and heights made possible on one side by the oceanic roll of Whitman from America and on the other by whatever rarefication or intensification of sight and insight could come initially from Tagore and finally from the practitioners of 'overhead poetry' bearing India's ...
... ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: 'Thou, too belongest to the company of those who overcome."¹ The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience. "I believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat; Only the lull I like,... _______________________________________________ ¹. Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief. ². Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception: "There is," he writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity... time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface." Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174. ³. My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged. 4 Op. cit ...
... given there. All the quotations of the relevent passages just to help the student. (Question inaudible) Walt Whitman has given expression to it for the first time in Page 26 the last century. A hundred years ago, it was Whitman who said: "Why should we take the idiom of Europe? Why should we idealise the characters of Greek mythology or European history?... characters as can stand by the side of the characters created by the classical poets. That is a fact. Now a hundred years have passed and time has passed its judgement. It is not a personal opinion. Whitman has -not succeeded in creating one average man and average citizen raised to that height, because the average citizen has not risen to that height. How could he do that? He saw that the potentiality ...
... at the end of this appendix. There is one illustration of semi-free and one of free quantitative verse. An unconsciously quantitative free verse may be said to exist already in the writings of Whitman and contemporary modernist poets. In modern free verse the underlying impulse is to get away from the fixed limitations of accentual metre, its set forms and its traditional "poetic" language, and... it was not the conscious mind, but the creative ear that was active and compelled this result, helped no doubt by the will to outdo the beauty of accentual metrical rhythm in a freer poetry. In Whitman the attempt at perfection of rhythm is often present and, when he does his best as a rhythmist, it rises to a high-strung acuteness which gives a great beauty of movement to his finest lines; but what... but the free quantitative movement is there even then, though near now to the manner and quality of prose. The later practicians of free verse have not often the heightened rhythmic movement of Whitman at his best, but still they are striving towards the same kind of thing, and their work apparently and deliberately amorphous receives something like a shape, a balance, a reasoned meaning when scanned ...
... Browning and Arnold - and then follow four chapters on "Recent English Poetry", the focus of interest being on Whitman, Carpenter, Tagore, A.E., Phillips and W.B. Yeats, all of whom were "recent poets" enough over fifty years ago when these articles were contributed to the Arya. Whitman, not unreasonably, is given the largest amount of space, and Sri Aurobindo interprets his poetry and his art with... understandable gusto. One of the most eloquent and illuminating passages in the whole book is the one in which Sri Aurobindo elaborates an unexpected, but not unconvincing, comparison between Homer and Whitman: Whitman's aim is consciently, clearly, professedly to make a great revolution in the whole method of poetry, and if anybody could have succeeded, it ought to have been this giant of poetic... through the facade of material actualities. Having thus brilliantly surveyed the broad spans and the luminous crests in the course of English poetry from the Anglo-Saxons and Chaucer to Whitman and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo turns to the probabilities of the future. "We can see where we stand today," he says, "but we cannot tell where we shall stand a quarter of a century hence." 16 Sri Aurobindo ...
... S. Cosmic Problems : An Essay on Speculative Philosophy (Macmillan, London, 1931). Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance : Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford University Press, London, 1946). Mctaggart.J. McT. Ellis. Philosophical Studies (Edward Arnold, London, 1934). Page 488 Megroz, R.L. Francis Thompson... Walker, Kenneth. A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching (Jonathan Cape, London, 1957). Wellek, Rene, 8c Austin Warren. Theory of Literature (Jonathan Cape, London, 1953). Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (Everyman's Edition, Dent 8c Sons, London, 1949). Wilhelm, Richard. (Tr.) The Secret of the Golden Flower. A Chinese Book of Life. Translated & explained by Richard ...
... style in Savitri, 355-361; his preoccupation with the dawn idea, 361-368; his conception of Savitri's personality,368-371; Sri Aurobindo on epic poetry, 378-379; Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Whitman, 387; Sri Aurobindo compared to Kazantzakis, 404-405; Sri Aurobindo compared to Dante,414-415, 417-420; Sri Aurobindo's early narrative poems, 420-424; Sri Aurobindo on Goethe,425; Sri Aurobindo's... Bassora, The 47, 49, 318 Vyasa 135,137,209,257,258,261,262, Wadia,B.P.77 Walker, Dr. 7 Wallace, Alfred 252 Whitehead, A.N. 33, 34 Whitman, Walt 377,387-389 394 Willey, Basil 410 Williams, Charles 381, 448 Williams, Tennessee 268 Winternitz 254, 255 Wolff, Otto 37 Woodroffe, Sir John ...
... taking up the thought of the ages into a mightier arc of interpretation and realisation, it would be the crowning of one and the opening of a new and greater cycle. The poets of yesterday and today, Whitman, Carpenter, the Irish poets, Tagore, but also others in their degree are forerunners of this new spirit and way of seeing, prophets sometimes, but at others only illumined by occasional hints or by... in mind from Page 173 this past tradition, though something of it must cling perhaps to all who write in the English tongue, unless they start with the superb revolutionary defiance of Whitman,—are able to strike out with a less encumbered gait into new paths of thought and movement. They have too an original well of inspiration in the Celtic spirit, temperament and tradition from which... overstress of the intellectual and vital notes which in their English kindred and compeers take from the direct purity of utterance of their spirit. None of them has indeed the large and puissant voice of Whitman or his dominant force of poetic personality, though they have what he has not or did not care to evolve, the artistic faculty and genius, but each has a high peculiar power in his own way of light ...
... half vital, half psychic motive. There is a purer and more delicate psychic intuition with a spiritual issue, that which has been brought by the Irish poets into English literature. The poetry of Whitman and his successors has been that of life, but of life broadened, raised and illumined by a strong intellectual intuition of the self of man and the large soul of humanity. And at the subtlest elevation... higher spiritual mind and imagination of India. The countries beyond the seas, still absorbed in their material making, have yet to achieve spiritual independence, but once that comes, the poetry of Whitman shows what large and new elements they can bring to the increase of the spiritual potentialities of the now wide-spreading language. On the whole therefore it is here among European tongues that there... man and a closer relation too and unity of his mind with the life of Nature. It is the endeavour to make the expression of these things one with the expression of life that imparts to the poetry of Whitman so much more large and vital an air than the comparatively feeble refinement and careful art of most of the contemporary poetry of Europe—not that the art has to be omitted, but that it must be united ...
... fell, but not quite on Sant Ambrogio. 47 "The cosmos continues", that's the main thing. In Canto LXXXII, Pound openly merges with Whitman, feeling, "that he too is making the sort of cosmically penetrating poem towards which Whitman aspired." 48 The Pisan Cantos, in fact, more than the Cantos that preceded (except perhaps the first seven) or have so far succeeded them, seem... Savitri V The Cantos Apart from Whitman, whom Sri Aurobindo obviously admired, though with the necessary qualifications, he was doubtless also influenced as a practitioner of verse by the work of contemporaries like Yeats, Eliot and Ezra Pound. While the extent of the influence might not have been very appreciable, there can be no question ...
... movements, a level spirit of utility and prose. The few poets who strained towards a nearer hold upon life, had to struggle against this atmosphere which weighed upon their mind and clogged their breath. Whitman, striving by stress of thought towards a greater truth of the soul and life, found refuge in a revolutionary breaking out into new anarchic forms, a vindication of freedom of movement which unfortunately... and things and the insistence on life. All the most significant and vital work in recent poetry has borne this stamp; the rest is of the hour, but this is of the future. It is the highest note of Whitman; in him, as in one who seeks and sees much but has not fully found, it widens the sweep of a great pioneer poetry, but is an opening of a new view rather than a living in its accomplished fullness; ...
... afterwards, the poem would always be more touched with natural freshness and radiance. You believe Walt Whitman never revised or modified his first draft and thereby achieved a rare sincerity and simplicity which to what you term "sophisticated ears" sounds somewhat crude. That is not so. Whitman worked over his first draft as assiduously as any other poet: Of course, on several occasions he had no ...
... - the great Romantics especially - inspired him to attempt new forms of poetic expression and a variety of metres. From Walt Whitman, to whom probably Sri Aurobindo introduced Bharati, he learnt on the other hand a boldness, freedom and forthrightness of utterance. If Whitman was the prophet of American democracy, Bharati would be the prophet of the new Indian Republic to be, and he would sing its praises ...
... 511,610ff; the mantra, 610-1, 612; the poetic word, 611; the poet as seer, 611-2; on Chaucer, 613; on the Elizabethans, 613-4; on Paradise Lost, 614; on Byron and Wordsworth, 614-5; on Homer and Whitman, 615; five powers of poetry, 616; Sun of Poetic Truth, 617ff; form and verbal expression, 618; role of the future poetry, 619, 660 Gait, E. A., 311 Gandhi, Kishor H., 439fn, 471 ... 489; League of Nations, 489; retrospect and prospect, 489 Waste Land, The, 10, 114,294, 535 Wedgewood, Colonel, 530 Wells, H.G., 511 Whitehead, A. N., 441 Whitman, Walt, 78, 615 Who, 161 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 13 Wilson, Margaret Woodrow (Nishta), 577 Wilson, President Woodrow, 413 Wingfield-Stratford, Esme, 13 ...
... Mother. A real home will then have been found — an America beyond Columbus's discovery, a country even beyond the India Columbus dreamed of reaching when he stumbled upon America, a land towards which Whitman moved when he cried "Passage to India!" but which is truly seen when we hear his deeper cry: "Passage to more than India!" For, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are leaders, from an Indian starting-point ...
... mystical states, called them states of "cosmic consciousness", of which he gave fifty instances evidenced by personalities in different epochs, from the Buddha and Christ to Francis Bacon and Walt Whitman. 6 Since Bucke's classic publication, diverse types of mystical states have been more or less loosely described as states of cosmic consciousness. Sri Aurobindo uses the term "cosmic consciousness" ...
... he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style... "Evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what ...
... (sometimes I.e.) the spiritual aspect of a man; the group of attributes and qualities of mankind regarded as godly or godlike.' No quotations are given as examples, but 1 suspect writers like Emerson and Whitman can be drawn upon. At least in the American philosopher Josiah Royce's book, The World and the Individual, published in 1901,1 have chanced upon the phrase: "...in the world as a whole, the divine ...
... inspiration to dash off some perfect pieces of spiritual moods he would nowise stand condemned as hypocritical. It is not in the least beyond possibility that such a phenomenon should take place. As Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes, and a personality at once poetic and mystical can very well appear in brief flashes among the jostling crowd within us of egoist and altruist, fool and philosopher ...
... 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 quantity-building of stress ...
... coloured by an individual consciousness. Rhetoric for Sethna is a way of "beyonding". One has the impression that the poet is involved in a process of purification, and unlike Tagore and Whitman Sethna is singularly free from the sexual connotations in his quest for the beyond. There is a conscious effort at discovering a purer aesthetics based on Mother-cult. The poet is possibly ...
... of the "philosophy" of a poet, even the most inveterate beautifier of commonplaces being forcibly gifted by his admirers with a philosophy, or of his message,—the message of Tagore, the message of Whitman. We are asking then of the poet to be, not a supreme singer or an inspired seer of the worlds, but a philosopher, a prophet, a teacher, even something perhaps of a religious or ethical preacher. It ...
... of sound, mātrā , is not only the Page 19 traditional, but also surely the right physical basis for the poetic movement. A recent modern tendency—that which has given us the poetry of Whitman and Carpenter and the experimentalists in vers libre in France and Italy,—denies this tradition and sets aside metre as a limiting bondage, perhaps even a frivolous artificiality or a falsification ...
... the outer truth of things, but also of all that binds them together and a bringing of them into true relation and oneness. A first opening out to this new way of seeing is the sense of the work of Whitman and Carpenter and some of the recent French poets, of Tagore and Yeats and A. E., of Meredith and some others of the English poets. There are critics who regard this tendency as only another Page ...
... founts of his own being and life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and with Nature and with all creatures. The note which has already begun and found many of its tones in Whitman and Carpenter and A. E. and Tagore will grow into a more full and near and intimate poetic knowledge and vision and feeling which will continue to embrace more and more, no longer only the more exceptional ...
... 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 like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive effects - the super-subtle phrase ...
... first, then he began to decry it. It is the same with some Europeans connected with Meher Baba. They praise him at first and then say, "He is inconsistent." In Yoga one can't always be consistent. Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes." When one is growing, one can't always have consistency. SRI AUROBINDO: Quite so. Emerson and Vivekananda said ...
... writing, or the mediumistic trance. 6 William James has provided in his book extremely Page 87 illuminating examples of mysticism. These include those of Malwida von Meysenbug, Walt Whitman, Dr. J. Trevor Dr. R.M. Bucke, of Raja Yoga as expounded by Swarai Vivekananda, AI-Ghazzali, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, and some others such as Sufi Gulshan-Raz and Plotinus ...
... Vishwamitra,162 Visva Bharati, 228 Vivekananda, 103-5, 241, 253-4, 299 -From Colombo to Almora, 103 Voltaire, 85, 286 Vyasa, 39, 58, 62, 73, 235 WARNER, REX, 192n., 194n Whitman, 150 Williams, Charles, 93n 'The Last Voyage" (A Little Book of Modern Verse), 93n Wordsworth, 68, 71, 83, 88, 168, 186, 230-1, 233-5, 281n -(Memorials of a Tour in Scotland) -"The ...
... that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating with the unspoilt green sap of life – something in the manner of Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land. Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light ...
... creation that would embody a new mantric poetry. He has also suggested that, that, considering the past evolution of English poetry and considering the trends that are visible in greater poets like Whitman, Meredith, Carpenter, A.E. and Tagore, that language, too, may turn to the discovery of mantric poetry and even the expression of that poetry through the vehicle of the English language. It is ...
... and thinking, which keep the surface layers of the mind in a chronic fever of activity and prevent the deeper layers, the deeper faculties from opening and developing. It is not without justice that Whitman characterises the modern mind as "dazed and darkened by reading". A sort of mental indigestion is a prevailing malady of the modern intelligentsia and accounts not only for the catalepsy of its intuitive ...
... 19 May 1951. 27. The Future Poetry, pp. 211-2. 28. ibid., p. 212. 29. Louis Untermeyer, Modern American Poetry. A Critical Anthology (1936), p. 36 30. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 76. 31. 'Towards an American Epic' (The Hudson Review, Autumn 1959) p. 366. 32. Quoted in Beevers, World Without Faith, p.12 . 33. Savitri ...
... but no longer limited or obscurantist religious mind. A glint of this change is already visible. And in poetry there is already the commencement of such a greater leading; the conscious effort of Whitman, the tone of Carpenter, the significance of the poetry of A. E., the rapid immediate fame of Tagore are its first signs. The idea of the poet who is also the Rishi has made again its appearance. Only ...
... other across the modern field or clash upon it. He is a reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature,—you will find in him perhaps a student of Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about beauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is the great ...
... not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the Page 343 old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have ...
... Such symbolism takes up somewhat feverishly the happy hold of Wordsworth on common things and Whitman's exultant embrace of even the malodorous and the clinical as part of an epiphany. Was it not Whitman who said something like: "The odour of my armpits is holier than any prayer"? Perhaps the most comprehensive formulation of this Symbolism comes from a French writer whose name eludes me at the moment: ...
... contemporary poetry which seems at last to be . approaching the secret of the utterance of profounder truth with its right magic of speech and rhythm."* * This was written in the middle of 1918, when Whitman, Meredith and Stephen Phillips were recent and Carpenter, AE and Yeats were contemporary. Page 148 Yes, Sri Aurobindo has eyes wide-open to the defects of the English Romantics who ...
... inspiration to dash off Shaper Shaped, The Shepherd and Mask they would nowise stand condemned as hypocritical. It is not in the least beyond possibility that such a phenomenon should take place. As Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes, and a personality at once poetic and mystical can very well appear in brief flashes among the jostling crowd within us of egotist and altruist, fool and philosopher ...
... resorting to ugly phraseology, clotting one's consonants and loading the back of one's metre to a breaking point. Sandberg and his free-versifying tribe produce better work than the cacophonists, but Whitman whose elemental enthousiasmos none of the recent free-versifiers have matched revealed the high-water mark possible to the new medium and at the same time the sure though subtle loss it involved ...
... Kathleen Raine must have smiled to herself as she read through this letter, dated 11th October 1961, that she had a Worthy opponent here. Yes, Amal Kiran cannot be denied. wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman and AE had brought about a union of the English language and the Indian spirit. The devoted student of Sri Aurobindo's The Future Poetry marshalls his arguments and there comes a moment when ...
... argument. Similarly in the later chapters, Sethna presents as good examples of Sri Aurobindo's delicately poised and nuanced judgment as literary critic his contrastive comparison between Shakespeare and Whitman and his rejection of the view of A.E. Housman who claimed superiority for Blake over Shakespeare as a pure poet. Along the way, Sethna brings forward several acute incidental observations ...
... (outwardly) daily routine as if nothing was the matter. He still wanted to write on modern poetry and a search was on to provide him with volumes of such poetry to read. (He appreciated Mallarmé, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot.) He also dictated, at the Mother’s request, the important series of articles published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth . In these articles he expounded ...
... be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who wrote: ‘We all return; it is this certainty that ...
... not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what ...
... across the modern field or clash upon it. He is a reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature, — you will find in him perhaps a student of Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about beauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is the ...
... lived, but not defined. 1 Next, a redoubtable response from Emily Dickinson, one of the great foursome of classical American-English literature (the other three being Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.) Asked how she would define poetry, Miss Dickinson replied: "If I read a book, and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of ...
... some praise. Page 278 Raihana unborn. Bhababhuti? Didn't know he was a tonic against cell! As for Niren's poems, well, you know my opinion about free verse; I consider that even Whitman and Carpenter have failed to justify the departure. Niren's achievements do not alter my opinion. But the first two lines or so hare the modern epic quality—they transport us to celestial regions. ...
... higher states of Yoga is called realisation. Page 5 William James has provided in his book extremely illuminating examples of mysticism. These include those of Malwida von Meysenbug, Walt Whitman, Dr. J. Trevor, Dr. R.M. Bucke, of Raja Yoga as expounded by Swami Vivekananda, Al-Ghazzali, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, and some others such as Sufi Gulshan-Raz and Plotinus ...
... and recompensed. 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 ...
... is a great creation. PURANI: Yes. I wonder how Tagore could take it up. SRI AUROBINDO: To keep up with the times. Nobody has really succeeded in prose-poetry except to some extent in France. Whitman has succeeded in one or two instances—but only when he has approached nearer poetic rhythm. I read somewhere that modern poets are giving up prose-poetry now and going more towards irregular free verse ...
... profuse display of fancy and sentiment... 27 The very next year (1948), St. John Perse's Amers was published in French, in which the poet celebrated the sea and himself in the sea, even as Whitman had celebrated himself and the universe in himself. If we sought a parallel, then, Sagar-Sangit should be paired, not with Byron's apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold, but rather with Perse's ...
... 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 of modern Europe. If poetical genius appears, it is at once taken prisoner by the applauding coterie or the expectant ...
... quality. There have been other, though less successful, attempts too during the last one hundred and fifty years; and, besides, long poems like The Prelude, Don Juan, The Ring and the Book, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Bridges's The Testament of Beauty have also been sometimes loosely called 'epics', though epics with a substantial difference. And works of fiction like War and Peace, A ...
... but also in the fields of poetry, painting and music. On the one hand Sri Aurobindo was either creating poets out of non-poets or inspiring inborn poets to greater endeavour, to 'faather sail' in Whitman's words; on the other, the Mother was doing the same for the painters. It was a wonder Page 201 of wonders to find so many class poets like Amal Kiran, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya ...
... Circles and Squares, and I do not cry ‘Fiddle-sticks’ to every Circle that is not St.Augustine’s sacred symbol with centre everywhere and circumference nowhere, nor do I cock a snook at what is not Whitman’s ‘Square Deific’ of multiple and even baffling co-existent aspects.” 8.K,D.S. as a Debater One of the most characteristic traits of Amal-da’s genius is its comprehensive vision, its capacity ...
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