Yeats : William Butler (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright, & nationalist politician
... "linguistic clutter". Does it satisfy your criterion of "nowness" if that criterion accepts only the manner of the three Yeats-lines quoted first? Perhaps you'll argue that the next three lines were written before your "now" appeared, belonging as they do to the volume Yeats published in 1899: The Wind among the Reeds. Well, Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death was written in 1899 too. If its style is... than the words: Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante. (Upon that day no further did we read.) Quite a contrast on the one hand to Early Yeats as well as to Keats of the nineteenth century and on the other to Later Yeats of the passage you admire so much for its touching directness. And yet all the various statements are poetry. Sparing language or rich utterance is equally valid... the "unsurpassable", for really the divine secrecy which is the Infinite and the Eternal is the ultimate Truth, Goodness and Beauty. But Yeats has to confess - Man is in love and loves what vanishes: What more is there to say? - and a greater than Yeats has concentrated his majestic sadness in a Latin line at once profound and pithy, whose poetry I have tried to convey with a dash of more ...
... it was when we were discussing Yeats. By the way, if you can lay your hands on an offprint I had sent you of my article "Yeats: Poet of Two Phases" I shall be thankful to have it posted back at your convenience. I am not sure you have read it. As it presents a somewhat unorthodox vision of Yeats's work I would like to have the opinion of so insightful a scholar of Yeats as you are. My friend Mrs... put on by the Yeats Society of India of the half-centenary of the death of W.B. Y., and I am staying on for a week or two. Anne Yeats came (his daughter) and his daughter-in-law Crania, a singer and harper of the traditional music of Ireland. It was a small but pleasant celebration. Prof. Bushoni of Lebanon (now Kahlil Gibran distinguished professor in Maryland University) gave the Yeats Memorial Lecture... those Minute Particulars, Yeats lights again the turmoil of the stars. But he is at his best when he catches a spark of the Yeatsian grey matter into which an intuitive flash has fallen and the result is verse that is simple and direct and yet profoundly cunning with "the artifice of eternity". I remember your writing to me that he is the finest heir of Yeats. I don't have Temenos 8 where ...
... voice from its deeper levels of word and rhythm. Nor is Yeats a glorious freak: he has a great compatriot in A. E. and a fine one in James Cousins, not to mention Seumas O'Sullivan and Dorothy Wellesley. Ireland whose native language was Gaelic has triumphantly "arrived" in English poetry. No Page 17 doubt, Yeats and his fellow-singers heard English at their mothers' knee... pre-Romantic Blake? Are his "embryo ideas" and "uninvolved images" and "vague mystic grandeurs" English? Is it English of Wordsworth to poetise the exaltations of pantheism? Is the early Yeats English—Yeats of the dim poignancies and the rich obscurities? Nobody can affirm that the average Englishman has the foggiest notion of what A.E. is singing about; yet A.E.'s poems are a living language... Evolving India Can Indians write English poetry? The Indian Mind and the English Language W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express ...
... a realisation could also be achieved through the creative act. W.B. Yeats is a unique instance of the creative-vital that constantly confronted the tragic situation of human's being. "Out of quarrel with the world," wrote Yeats, "we make rheto-ric, out of quarrel with ourselves, we create poetry." Old age for Yeats was a "tin-can tied to a dog's tail". In a tiny unique poem, "Politics", he... were young again And held her in my arms! Examples like this are too many in Yeats. His was a poetry of passion, of bodily and corporeal energies and their tensions. His poetry was an escape i nto personality, a sublimation of the vital, the ojas , as we would term it in Indian psychology. Yeats gave free access to the poetic mind and allowed the complete free play of the creative to... Kiran's readings. The idea of time, ageing and the creative tension had always been in some corner of my mind, and I was always intrigued by the manifestation of these in the poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats. So this felicitation volume proffered me the ideal context for problematising these issues in a new light. * * * The creative is of course more important than the creator or the created ...
... the form to its bare vulgarity devoid of all force and beauty of life. It reduces man's life to that which is most persistent in him—"the bone"! Yeats says: "the symbol itself is contradictory, it is the horror of life—horror of Death!" Apart from Yeats there are other modem critics who are quite critical of the modernist spirit in poetry. Here is what F. L. Lucas says, "Today, the high way of poetry... 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 may be said to... frank denunciation of metre as a hindrance by Walt Whitman who regards it at best as a petty ornament. After him, poetry dominated by thought-element came in vogue. And now today, in the words of W. B. Yeats, "younger men are in revolt against irrelevant description of Nature, scientific moral discursiveness, political eloquence" and what they call "psychological curiosity". Many poets are trying something ...
... plans a further book on Yeats and India which should also be an eye-opener to both Western and Indian scholars. There is no doubt of the direction in which Yeats moved, and to which he looked. She knows far more about this field than I. In fact it was she not I who first traced Yeats to Foucher. I had reached the same result, so to speak, from Binyon, who no doubt put Yeats on to Foucher, whose book... masterpieces: "Urvashi." I have not yet come across the Penguin book-. Now I'll search for it to get at this poem. Your "Yeats and Kabir" taught me several things. I had never realised Kabir's influence on Yeats. Now it is clear to me. Nor had I thought that Yeats had turned to the tradition of Indian spirituality resulting in his final unconcern with mediumship, magic and other secondary matters... general idea is that Yeats was a greater poet than AE. Some even believe AE was not a true poet. Yeats himself appears to have rated him rather low. No doubt he was not so creative a singer and Yeats in both his poetic phases, his earlier and later orientations, had more power, more richness of expressive art. But I think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes ...
... thought. Nor is it exactly Blakean, teeming with a private mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of the... dynamisms of the Overworld. In consequence, there is often a kind of "faery" spirituality, an affinity to something Yeatsian in sight without being Celtic. The inner worlds are not the magic mid-worlds of Yeats that have a certain exquisite self-sufficiency, a certain completeness of the Divine in a restricted fixed formula of creation. Nirodbaran's are planes washed indeed with the glint and gemmy tremulousness... fraught with heavenly treasures, Brimming with diamond peace, Page 120 Fill our yearning vastness with the measures Of your unhorizoned seas. A trait akin to Yeats is also a fluctuant imagery that is not self-consistent on the surface, varies suddenly and sometimes seems even conflicting in its aspects. This is no surrealistic confusion — feverish jerky disconnected ...
... is it exactly Blakean, teeming with a private mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of... the Overworld. In consequence, there is often a kind of "faery" spirituality, an affinity to something Yeatsian in sight without being Celtic. The inner worlds are not the magic mid-worlds of Yeats that have a certain exquisite self- sufficiency, a certain completeness of the Divine in a restricted fixed formula of creation. Nirodbaran's are planes washed indeed with the glint and gemmy... heavenly treasures, Brimming with diamond peace, Fill our yearning vastness with the measures Of your unhorizoned seas. Page 73 A trait akin to Yeats is also a fluctuant imagery that is not self-consistent on the surface, varies suddenly and sometimes seems even conflicting in its aspects. This is no surrealistic confusion - feverish jerky d ...
... makes even the gods more divine. 14 Sri Aurobindo wrote these articles before the work of Hopkins, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Auden and the later Yeats achieved publication, and even as regards the poetry of Meredith, Phillips, A.E. and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo had mainly to depend Page 615 on the quotations in Cousin's book. With all these limitations, however, Sri Aurobindo... es on the big three - Tennyson, 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... the next wave shouldn't carry poetry to higher points of achievement than even Shakespeare's. Sri Aurobindo finds in Meredith and Phillips vague hints of a new voice, and in the Irish poets, A.E. and Yeats, something more too: an intimation of the filiations between man's earthly life and the unseen psychical life; an intimation of an ideal eternal beauty beyond the real and the evanescent; and an insinuation ...
... A similar substance is charged by the later Yeats with a more philosophical and less spiritual passion, though the poetic upshot is no whit inferior: Whatever flares upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed. The artistry of the aged Yeats made the thinking mind grip and undrape mysteries; that of the young Yeats cunningly Page 27 surrendered to... Adventures in Criticism W.B. Yeats — Poet of Two Phases Throughout his life W.B. Yeats followed a star above contemporary standards of poetic brilliance. But he was a writer of two phases and in the one which came later his wagon often pulled the star to which it had been hitched into the roadways of day-to-day speech, and showed how a high purpose could... positive quality of vision. Only one contemporary poet can challenge comparison with Yeats in the art of indefinite suggestion by word and rhythm: Walter de la Mare. Their techniques overlap in several respects, mainly in a use of spondees to produce mournful and remote reverberations; but Yeats is a greater musician and his management of broad vowels and harmonious consonants adds a crystalline ...
... approaching Yeats). And in Yeats's poem Vacillation this is clearly stated. What after all would the Mahabharata have been without the Great Battle? Is it not the record rather of our quest than of its term that makes poetry? Again, I could be wrong - this, dear Dr. Sethna, is a possibility of which India makes me daily aware, and not only in the matter of poetry - but this is what Yeats wrote (I... clarity his poetry seems to me to lack. The fact still remains that but for a line here and there I don't respond to it at all. No, I have not read Thomas R. Whitaker's Yeats book. I have finished my work on Blake and Yeats and don't follow the field now - next year I shall be eighty. He appears to be an American and I find it hard to believe that any American can write a 'greatest hook on Yeats's... clear about priorities. Like Yeats I am setting my soul to study not what the professors write but what they write about. I did read an interesting book by John Drew on India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford) with many valuable things about Shelley's indebtedness to India. (After all he called the soul-figure of Prometheus Unbound 'Asia', did he not?) Yeats the Initiate was not a systematic ...
... Yeats and Shaw Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations." It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can... give us than Shaw. The two men are different and bring us different treasures. Shaw is the analyst mind and the ironic spirit taking art as their instrument; Yeats the mind of insight and the spirit of aristocracy, fused with the artist. Yeats is certainly more artistic and has in his work a closer touch with "inner" realities. Shaw does not know these realities intimately even when he champions some... for imaginative rhetoric. Yeats in his own sphere cannot be equalled by Shaw: there is much more food for our souls in a few "Celtic" or else "Byzantine" poems of Yeats's than in all the forceful argumentation set to drama in Man and Superman or Back to Methuselah. The same Page 75 holds good between Yeats's essays and Shaw's prefaces. But when Yeats impinges on the field of ...
... take for my purpose four of them whose names stand behind or are still with us and their station already among those whose work endures, Meredith and Phillips among recent English poets, A. E. and Yeats of the Irish singers. 1 There is a very great difference of the degree and power with which the spirit has opened to them its secret and a great difference too in the turn which they give to its... the sweetest way— hampered by the austerity of its wisdom or the excess of its sense and passion. But if it is rarely that this sweetest way is found—yet do we not get near to it sometimes in Yeats and Tagore?—at least this new turn of the poetic voice is characteristically an endeavour to see and to say our inmost in the inmost way. The natural turn of poetry, that which gives to it its soul... 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 spiritual ...
... kind; most of it is fine and decorative. NIRODBARAN: It is rather strange that X doesn't like Yeats, SRI AUROBINDO: He doesn't? NIRODBARAN: He says he can't find substance in him, or whatever substance there is can't be understood by him. He is referring here to the symbolic poems. SATYENDRA: Yeats has expressed his Irish mysticism. SRI AUROBINDO: Those are his early poems. He has expressed... expressed other things too. NIRODBARAN: To a man like X who appreciates and understands chhanda (rhythm) so much, Yeats has no appeal! It is strange. He likes Arjava's poems and yet Arjava told him that he was greatly indebted to Yeats, and so also is Amal. SRI AUROBINDO: Perhaps X doesn't understand English poetry sufficiently. NIRODBARAN: But he said that Chesterton has variety in metre ...
... depth, he says. SRI AUROBINDO: To move Dilip? (Laughter) But many people don't like him. NIRODBARAN: Satycndra also likes A.E. very much, more than Yeats because of his spiritual substance. SRI AUROBINDO: He is a spiritual poet while Yeats is occult. Of course, A.E. has a far richer mind and has more intellectual power. PURANI: Yes, I have read his essays on Irish national reconstruction... SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, his personality is many-sided and various. He has done more than anybody for Irish national reconstruction, while Yeats has only power of imagination. NIRODBARAN: A.E. is a better critic also. SRI AUROBINDO: I haven't read his criticism. Yeats is a bad critic. He is nothing else, only a good poet, a very great poet. His character doesn't seem up to very much; he is said to be ...
... A.E.—just as A.E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid- world of the vital antariksa [mid-world]—he has not penetrated beyond to spiritual-mental heights as A.E. did. But all the same when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give the most importance. What Yeats pressed, he expressed with great poetical beauty, perfection... poésie pure a proprement parler [there is something in pure poetry strictly speaking]. What a poem on A.E., the poet I loved best in the West. With all your enthusiasm for Page 82 Yeats Guru, Yeats has meant very little indeed to me, I have never been able to warm up to him, but A.E.—yes. I have often been more deeply moved by A.E. than I could account for—his note rang tome so [true ?]... groaned to him, for he is in ecstasies over Yeats. Please write on back—also a sonnet if you have time. If not some éclaircissement [clarification] at least. A letter from you has been long overdue to me in reward of my hermit-like dove-like purity anyway if not for my romantic speed in romance-writing. I do not think I was ever enthusiastic over Yeats, but I recognise his great artistry in language ...
... also which are very fine too in their quality and execution. November 1934 Yeats and A. E. I do not think I have been unduly enthusiastic over Yeats, but one must recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to A. E.—just as A. E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid-world of the vital antarikṣa , he has not penetrated... claim. What then is the difference between them and Homer, Milton etc.? Only that Homer is polysyllabic (he is not really) and Chesterton monosyllabic? 31 January 1935 Yeats and the Occult The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult is due to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered—it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, almost... give the most importance. What Yeats expressed, he expressed with great poetical beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a creative imagination. A. E. had an unequalled profundity of Page 416 vision and power and range in the spiritual and psychic field. A. E.'s thought and way of seeing and saying things is much more sympathetic to me than Yeats' who only touches a brilliant floating ...
... understand how Yeats could produce faultless poetry, astonishingly lyrical and sponta-neous, with so much labour. Yeats, on the other hand, disbelieved in any inspiration bringing to birth as by a divine afflatus a perfect piece of poetry. The layman would expect AE to have done the Page 143 greater work under the compulsion of an uninterrupted impulse from inside. But actually Yeats is the... Ashram, Norman Dowsett, is not so inhibited in this matter — maybe because the element on top in Dowsett is really Norman! More even than de la Mare, W. B. Yeats in his early phase calls for a bit of chanting tone. There are two phases of Yeats. The later shows him a poet of the athletic intelligence and will, he is taut and powerful and deals with ideas though the ideas have always an occult or mystical... the greater poet, even greater as a creative force despite the apparent constructiveness of his me-thod of composition. Both AE and Yeats had perfect results to offer at the end of their poetic experience — results unimpeach-able in spontaneity. But Yeats was more aware of the poetic possibilities of language, more responsive to the turns of rhythm as enrichers of substance, more varied in his musical ...
... n as an ideal? As regards AE and Yeats, I don't see what makes you think I do not find the former splendid. I like him very well; only, I cannot say he is a greater poet than Yeats. I surmise Sri Aurobindo will be much astonished if you tell him that Yeats is not a great poet. AE was by far the more luminously greater man and there were some traits in Yeats which were repellent - arrogance, po... not possessing this art in the large majority of his work that drew from Krishna-prem [Ronald Nixon] an unfavourable comparison of him with Yeats. Krishnaprem, like Arjava [J.A. Chadwick] and unlike you, is intoxicated with Yeats - and rightly so. Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the Page 11 spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes... in tune-spirit. Does he ever break into the Yeatsian charmed circle? (Of course I have mostly the early Yeats in mind.) AE's remaining outside it does not, I repeat, diminish his worth as a poet. He has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spell-binding by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what ...
... the overhead word-rhythm is the achievement par excellence of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go Page 128 ... tackle the Mantra, and. in general all overhead poetry, in the right receptive way will lay its contents, more than those of any other type of mystical verse, open to the accusation of being what Yeats called "Asiatic vague immensities". For in it Asia's difference from the European dealing with God is most prominent. Europe finds its natural element in definite philosophical ideas, it governs even... splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." Now hear what Yeats offers in his collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neither sun, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine. Everything in the world reflects His light ...
... the overhead word-rhythm is the achievement par excellence of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go beyond the heart's lyrical... tackle the Mantra, and in general all overhead poetry, in the right receptive way will lay its contents, more than those of any other type of mystical verse, open to the accusation of being what Yeats called 'Asiatic vague immensities". For in it Asia's difference from the European dealing with God is most prominent. Europe finds its natural element in definite philosophical ideas, it governs even... splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." Now hear what Yeats offers in his collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neither sun, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights Page 34 Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine. Everything in the ...
... in contact with that mystical source of in-spiration. "AE at his highest inspiration is," writes Amal, "as great as Yeats but he hasn't Yeats's subtly rich incantation-effect. ... AE has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spell-binding by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what he does not... not have as a rule is that verbal spell-binding - an art which to those who are sensitive to the soul of words is most precious....Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes of poetry and does not com-prise all the poetic modes." Amal the critic is in his glorious shades here. As a furious critic he can also ...
... here no mawkish sentimentalism nor camouflaged sex: it was an immediate vision of the Perfect irradiating the mortal. And when the early Yeats spoke of seeing In all poor broken things that live a day Eternal Beauty wandering on her way and the later Yeats, in spite of forsaking Celtic wizardries and incantations and taking to athletic hardness of thought and style, could still bring in the... The Thinking Corner "That Vulgar Squashy Word" It was the word "loveliness" recurring in a book of poems by Yeats that drew from a modernist reviewer this sneering phrase. To talk of loveliness seemed a sign of utter "low brow", a display of backboneless gush. We must be cerebral, cynical, psychoanalytic: we must not run after outmoded things like beauty... within that keeps a visionary fire burning in their hearts and minds in the midst of common, frivolous and even indecorous talking and living. But when a Spenser, a Shelley, a Keats, a Morris or a Yeats speaks of loveliness, we cannot dismiss it as a vulgar and squashy word. They mean something that is neither Page 87 facile nor cheap, weak nor watery. They are not avoiding clear ...
... its accomplished fullness; it is constantly repeated from the earth side in Meredith, comes down from the spiritual side in all A. E.'s work, moves between earth and the life of the worlds behind in Yeats' subtle rhythmic voices of vision and beauty, echoes with a large fullness in Carpenter. The poetry of Tagore owes its sudden and universal success to this advantage that he gives us more of this discovery... the finer subtleties of life. The objection has been made that this poetry is too subtle, too remote, goes too far away from the broad, near, present and vital actualities of terrestrial existence. Yeats is considered by some a poet of Celtic romance and nothing more, Tagore accused in his own country of an unsubstantial poetic philosophising, a lack of actuality, of reality of touch and force of vital ...
... important, in a learned language, however well-learnt, as in one's native or natural tongue. Unless of course one succeeds in making it natural, if not native. 5 December 1935 What do you think of Yeats' letter to Purohit Swami, in which he says: "Write in your mother tongues. Choose that smaller audience. You cannot have style and vigour in English. You did not learn it at your mother's knee.... It... Hindi, Bengali, Tamil.... " All very well for those who can write in some language of India and don't know English intimately. But what of those who think and write naturally in English? Why didn't Yeats write in Gaelic? 17 September 1936 It is not true in all cases that one can't write first-class things in a learned language. Both in French and English people to whom the language was not native ...
... survives from your early days,—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressiness of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian, Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach... poetic quality" and "many fine lines"—he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes 11 certainly deserve the praise he gives them, and they are moreover of the kind A. E. and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem I selected for especial praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from Page 515 the rest, just as in a Greek statue there ...
... more moving inmost appeal." As for subtlety charged with magic or mystery, there is perhaps one sole bit in Burns, presaging the true temper of the Romantic Revival -those two lines that enchanted Yeats with their symbolic colour: The wan moon is setting ayont the white wave, And time is setting with me, Oh!* Byron belonged to the great Romantic group with a more genuine right and is... prominent Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic ingredient of concrete earthiness either fresh and simple or robust and practical. Byron carries still a living shadow of the.eighteenth century: it is somewhat • Yeats slightly misquoted the lines when he praised them: The white moon is setting behind the white wave, And Time is setting with me, O ! Page 109 symptomatic that his favourite ...
... exuberance and power. Already in 1934, when he has joined Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, the bulk of his work is sure of a permanent place in English literature: he will hardly lie on a lower level than AE and Yeats; but they have come to the fading hour of life, all their triumphs lie behind them — Chattopadhyaya is still in mid-career and his future is big with a versatile fruition to which it is hard to assign... awakened to is the Divine as a person, an archetype of the human nature — face and lips and hands and feet that are perfect and at the same time like ours by a close warmth. ''Shelley and Yeats mix the ideal and the real in a manner that is mystic by imagination, not by experience: Emilia Viviani was in fact nothing save a fancied symbol of the Soul within Shelley's soul, and the woman with ...
... their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a recent broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value—particularly as he was himself one of the ...
... present. No greater praise in this 'genre' is possible than that one is reminded of Page 157 the new style W.B. Yeats fashioned for himself in mid-career after wearying of Celtic wizardries and incantations; but the besetting danger of the new Yeats was either a too intellectual or on the rebound an over-colloquial cast of phrase. Again and again in "An Old Mart's Songs" the genuine ...
... modes and their vibrant laws of existence. Thus, Arnold seems to lay bare the very spirit of wide waters in a certain wasteful aspect, when he writes: The unplumbed salt estranging sea, or Yeats in his equally empathic line: The murderous innocence of the sea. Now, this faculty of blending one's self with an object in an intimate revealing way, or with a psychological situation so as... Page 53 the poet not in its utter purity but in association with his own temperament and mood: Aeschylus, viewing the foam-flecked shine and leap of the Aegean, heard unlike Arnold and Yeats The innumerable laughter of the waves. All the same, the flash of knowledge and the shock of feeling by identity are there, a brief transcendence of outward limits in order to merge in some ...
... All I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a faraway manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now. Enough of what Yeats, unable to look further than his nose and yet hurting it up, dubbed "Asiatic vague immensities". Let me attend to the fine letter you wrote to me just before flying to England. 1 Your answers to the... surprises us (we know it is not ours by right) and enchants us with "the rhythmic sense of hidden things". For what, after all, is the object of all our "doing and undoing", as you, quoting Yeats, have put it in your letter? Isn't it to keep clear the channel by which inspiration entered? The inevitable word, when we find it, is transparent - the light behind shines through. When we reject a ...
... antithesis of poetry." 87 Again, "... the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol—there must be forms to contain the abstractions which are, without these containing vessels, what Yeats has called 'Asiatic vague immensities'. Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem... . Certainly Savitri is an ambitious and impressive... Perspectives of Savitri, p. 223. that was not his own,—which we also know that it is not true. He employed "words for uses they never were born for." Perhaps that was the tragedy of Tagore and Yeats too when they wrote in English. But then words are not frozen icebergs. They are capable of growing and acquiring newer warmer shades of meaning and newer powers of expression, newer associations ...
... Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, - not gran- Page 72 diose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry." 9 Rossetti stands next in subtle pictorial directness. Yeats is as masterly - ...
... poets" I meant those of the 20th century, i.e. writers who have made a name and are trying to do something new. I have very little familiarity with the names of modem poets subsequent to A.E. & Yeats and De La Mare, all of whom you know. There are about a hundred of them moderns, Spender + x y z p2 etc. Before that they were Hopkins and Fletcher and others and before that Meredith and Hardy and... indeed, precisely because they are so simple that the emotion and experience go straight through without a veil. You asked me to read Hardy, Spender, Meredith, Hopkins, besides De la Mare. A.E. and Yeats ... But how will Meredith and others help? Their poetry has nothing in common with ours, except the turn of expression, if that's what you mean. Please tell me whom I should take up first and how I ...
... 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 about the reality of Sri Aurobindo's intelligent interest in contemporary English... remain, on a first or second or even third reading, a maddening work. It is an important and immense poetic creation, a nodal point in contemporary English poetry. Crane and MacLeish, Eliot and Yeats, themselves considerable poets, have been influenced by the Cantos and the Poundian poetics and aesthetics. But there must be a clue to this labyrinth, however tenuous, however almost invisible; ...
... in answer to Yeats' poem "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart". SRI AUROBINDO (after reading the poem): These people write now and then very fine lines. Here's an example: "Embrace the malice in the dragon's fold." It is a really fine line. PURANI: Here are four lines of J's, as if in answer to R. SRI AUROBINDO (on reading them): There is a poetic competition between Yeats, R and J! When ...
... has no really successful poetry in hexametres and all the best critics have declared it to be impossible. Matthew Arnold's professor friend and others tried it but failed. NIRODBARAN: I thought Yeats also has written hexameters. SRI AUROBINDO: Where? I don't know about it. I think you mean alexandrines. NIRODBARAN: Yes, yes. SRI AUROBINDO: That is different. Plenty of people have written... enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. Blank verse after Milton has not been very great. So if you write the kind that is in Paradise Lost, you imitate Milton's style and there can be only one Milton. Yeats has written some successful blank verse in the Tennysonian form on Irish Celtic subjects. There is one long piece about a king, a queen and a divine lover: I forget the name. He has given his blank ...
... is another poet, Richard Church. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, these are all fads of different poets! NIRODBARAN: In the review Church says that Yeats was very enthusiastic over Turner's poetry. In his adventure through modern poetry he has made a discovery, Yeats says. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, in rhymed verse Turner writes very well at times. But his prose-poetry comes to nothing. NIRODBARAN: Turner seems ...
... speaks of in support of his scientific modernity is, I fear, pretty poor when compared to the work of Bridges, Masefield, Gordon Bottomley, Lascelles Abercrombie, AE and Yeats - none of them pledged whole-heartedly to science. Yeats is acknowledged universally as the greatest English poet of our age. What does his poetry consist of? In his youth, a good amount of the most exquisite love-lyricism woven... esoteric vision that regards all things here as a faint representation of some secret Spirit within us, of archetypes and archimages that are beyond the physical Page 49 universe. Yeats was a many-sided genius and in his poems he focussed all those sides, with an underlying mystical sense which was somewhat ivory-towerish in his young days but altogether life-gripping in the days of ...
... and the love of truth. The word "white" has been used by other poets also as part of memorable phanopoeia. Yeats has made a famous comment on some lines of Burns which he quotes as running: The white moon is setting behind the white wave, And Time is setting with me, O! Yeats says: "Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the Page 195 waves, whose relation to... them as quoted. David Daiches, in a broadcast 1 on the bicentenary of Burns's birth on January 5, 1959, refers to the Scots singer's "magical use of symbolic colour which so impressed the poet W. B. Yeats" but quotes the version of the lines in the original Scots dialect thus: The wan moon is setting ayont the white wave, And time is setting with me, oh! — a version which is indeed very ...
... On Poets and Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Comments on Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry W. B. Yeats DECTORA: No. Take this sword And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.... The sword is in the rope— The rope's in two—it falls into the sea, It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm, Dragon that loved the world... individual divine within him. It is certainly a very beautiful passage and has obviously a mystic significance; but I don't know whether we can put into it such precise meaning as you suggest. Yeats' contact, unlike A. E.'s, is not so much with the sheer spiritual Truth as with the hidden intermediate regions, from the faery worlds to certain worlds of larger mind and life. What he has seen there... his figures symbolise. If we could say it, it might take away something of that glowing air in which his symbols stand out with such a strange unphysical reality. The perception, feeling, sight of Yeats in this kind of poetry are remarkable, but his mental conception often veils itself in a shimmering light—it has then shining vistas but no strong contours. 1 September 1932 Edward Shanks ...
... with some flourish of the trumpets of renown, Thompson, Masefield, Hardy, do not occur at all or only in a passing allusion. But still the book deals among contemporary poets with Tagore, A. E. and Yeats, among recent poets with Stephen Phillips, Meredith, Carpenter, great names all of them, not to speak of lesser writers. This little book with its 135 short pages is almost too small a pedestal for... his Modern Love , and the perusal of Christ in Hades ,—some years before its publication,—the latter an unforgettable date. I had long heard, standing aloof in giant ignorance, the great name of Yeats, but with no more than a fragmentary and mostly indirect acquaintance with some of his work; A. E. only lives for me in Mr. Cousins' pages; other poets of the day are still represented in my mind by... of its creative impulse; a new spirit in poetry, even though primarily lyrical, is moved always to seize upon and do what it can with them,—as we see in the impulsion which has driven Maeterlinck, Yeats, Rabindranath to take hold of the dramatic form for self-expression as well as the lyrical in spite of their dominant subjectivity. We may perhaps think that this was not the proper form for their spirit ...
... Sri Aurobindo - The Poet THE WORLD OF SRI AUROBINDO'S POETRY* AN INTRODUCTORY EXPLORATION UP TO SAVITRI I Great Poets of Our Times Yeats, Rilke, Valéry, Bloc: these are the indisputable peaks of poetry the West has thrown up in our times. One may extend the roll by adding Jiménez who has been outshone in the public eye so far by that... often directly metrical though not many lines have the same number of feet and though there is a lot of modulation in those whose feet are equal. Among the poets of contemporary England, however, Yeats, while hardly so profound a seer as his friend AE, is the articulator par excellence of the suggestion and the feeling beyond prose. Even when in his later work he goes outside the wizard circle of... inspired and measured: Iqbal and Tagore. But there is a third that is coming more and more to the front—the sole Indian poet whom, as Francis Watson reported in a radio talk from England in 1951, Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. And this name is likely to be found, in a final assessment, to be in a class apart. Not that the purely poetic quality of those two or of the others ...
... Indian Spirit? It would start with the very first letter you wrote to me on receiving a copy of that book - at the beginning of last year. We went on to discuss Yeats and the subject became livelier with the arrival here of your remarkable Yeats the Initiate and brought in many other topics, including Tagore in Radice's translation, and in and out of the to-and-fro of our opinions and arguments the subject... fine engraving of a beech tree with a bold beautiful trunk (but no hole through it) and a fir and a rowan, growing together. You mention a second friend staying with me - I have had Santosh Pal, a Yeats scholar from Delhi, with her son, for several weeks - she went back this morning by the Air India morning flight. So although not so precise as your first sighting of me in your room, I consider that ...
... line and that gave me the swing of the meter. There is really no successful hexameter in English. Matthew Arnold and his friends have attempted it but they have failed. Disciple : I thought Yeats has written it. Sri Aurobindo : Where? I did not know. I think you mean the Alexandrine. Disciple : Perhaps it is that. Sri Aurobindo : Plenty of people have written it. But this... it is true. Page 241 Disciple : But can we compare poets and decide who is greater? Sri Aurobindo : How can you? Disciple : But you said, for instance, that Yeats can be considered greater than A.E. because of greater style. Sri Aurobindo : "More sustained'' style. Disciple : Then, there is some standard – say, power of rhythm, expression... "body". I don't mean length. What I mean is the quality of massiveness. One can say his whole work has not got sufficient "body''. I have read his long poems also, but that element is not yet there. Yeats has not written long poems, but if you take his poems piece by piece you will see that he has sufficient "body" in his work. Tagore has added to the "body" of the world's literature. If you take ...
... magically floated out to him. The one poet who in our time was as haunted and as much made a mouthpiece by unseen presences as AE, though in a different style and from a different plane, was Yeats; yet Yeats was the very opposite in method of composition. His rhythmic enchantments from "dove-grey fairylands" and from the "odorous twilight" of the Celtic Gods were created bit by bit, by patient ...
... of modern Indian culture and society. After Rajaji we have not had a continuity of the profound form of conservatism he represented. A profound conservatism is radical, in the sense of being rooted. Yeats speaks of his ideal woman 'rooted in one dear perpetual place', and of radical Page 319 innocence, ideas only a profound conservative can appreciate. The conservatism I am speaking... which will provide leadership in society and s/he is likely to see the middle-class insular mind as an obstacle to the necessary link the clerisy must have with the people who are rooted to the soil. Yeats with great acuteness saw the unity of the aristocrat and the beggar and was opposed to bankers, priests and clerks, who only distorted the integrity of the individual and of society. To cut ...
... These hypothetical lines have at least some rhythm and completeness, unlike the fantastic free verse and violent excess of word-vision several contemporary poets are practising — rather poetasters, for Yeats and AE and, at their best, Abercrombie and Masefield are in the great tradition of English poetry. But the lines are spoiled none the less by their too patent intellectuality and striving after flamboyant... the voice not of that multi-coloured passion which filled the spacious Elizabethan days or that haloed subtlety of emotion which is Shelley's inimitable genius or that exquisite sensibility whereby Yeats conjures Page 67 up vistas of a twilight perfection — the voice which for a moment before returning to its home of fathomless awe lingers in a miraculous line like Wordsworth's ...
... effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a recent broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one ...
... "pas seul" meaning "not alone" no less than "solitary step". But, as you know, poetry — even if deliberate workmanship has gone into it - is much more than the poet's doing and re-doing his speech. Yeats has somewhere said that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent upon a poem the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists originally beyond the... What dwells on such thoughts is something within us which has an intuitive drive bypassing the usual activity of the mind. Here, by a different route, we hark back to "a moment's thought" a la Yeats. Now to my point about us as Aurobindonians. There is no single path for them to the goal, for the goal marks the convergence of all possible movements of human nature towards an all-fulfilling ...
... emphasis and impart a lesson; he did not quicken with insight, a perceiving of the inner conditions of that call, the subtle as distinguished from the gross harmony to be expressed. A Puzzle in Yeats This perhaps may look a somewhat strained application of the difference between sight and insight. But a general application of that difference should cover various cases -verbal and technical... below the immediately realisable. Sometimes, however, a puzzle is set us - we are unable easily to determine what is true insight verbally and technically. Thus in a poem of his early "dreamy" period Yeats had written: Then slowly answered he whose hand held hers. Later he corrected the line: Then slowly he whose hand held hers replied. Page 83 Here more appears to be done ...
... illusion as to the success of Love and Death in England. Love and Death dates,—it belongs to the time when Meredith and Phillips were still writing and Yeats and A.E. were only in bud if not in ovo . Since then the wind has changed and even Yeats and A.E. are already a little high and dry on the sands of the past, while the form, manner, characteristics of Love and Death are just the things that ...
... the Shakespearian kinship, though Yeats has often enough a different but corresponding manner, but most characteristically in a delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive entrance into the mystery of things, as in lines like A. E.'s Is thrilled by fires of hidden day And haunted by all mystery, or passages already quoted from Yeats, or, to give one other instance, ...
... any style can attain the extreme pitch of sincerity, of inevitableness, which marks out the masterpiece. Take these lines from Yeats where he says that he has seen In all poor foolish things that live a day Eternal Beauty wandering on her way. Yeats is a listener to occult footfalls, a singer haunted by unearthly presences, but not, like Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who has climbed ...
... own) to see the whole as a whole, and in context. I did my best, but in this match I must, as I said, concede you victory. A pity you can't add this to your appendix! Santosh Pal, by the way - a Yeats scholar - much admires your Shakespeare book which I have not read! Now also from your photograph I can glimpse a corner of your book-lined room, which you say I visited! Very warm and delighted... lived it all too much. Yes, the England of the Imagination is eternal and no poetry is greater than ours has been. It all seemed to end with the last war - before that war there were Eliot and Yeats and David Jones and Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and de la Mare and many fine poets of lesser stature. Now there is no-one; David Gascoyne stands alone. I do my best which is not good ...
... spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of ...
... 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 and expression. NIRODBARAN: Tagore means to say that everybody must have variety like ...
... life. NIRODBARAN: But can one compare two or more poets and decide who is greater? SRI AUROBINDO: How can one? NIRODBARAN: You have said that Yeats is considered greater than A.E. because of his greater poetic style. SRI AUROBINDO: Yeats is more sustained. NIRODBARAN: Then there is some standard? SRI AUROBINDO: What standard? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare. Others ...
... Roy, Pratap Chandra. The Mahabharata, Vol. II, Vana Parva, English Translation (Datta Bose & Co, Calcutta). Rudd, Margaret. Divided Image : A Study of William Blake and W. B. Yeats (Roudedge, London, 1953). Ruggiero, Guido de. Existentialism, translated from the original Italian by E. M. Cocks (Seeker 8c Warburg, London, 1946). Sansom, Clive. (Ed... Wilbur Marshall. Humanity and Deity (Allen & Unwin, London, 1951). Vivas, Elisco. Creation and Discovery: Essays in Criticism and Aesthetics (The Noonday Press, New York, 1955). Yeats, W.B. Essays (Macmillan, London, 1924). Yutang, Lin. The Wisdom of India (Michael Joseph, London, 1948). Wain, John. Preliminary Essays (Macmillan, London, 1957). ...
... word, the Mantra. Page 240 × In the sense in which a critic of some note, I am told, applies the epithet to Yeats' poetry. I have not read the criticism, but the expression itself is a sufficient condemnation not of the poet, but of the mind—and of its poetic theory—which can use such a word in such a connection ...
... of thought in the finer Celtic mind, a sustained and conscious idea of the thing that is most inwardly stirring them to utterance. That shapes into a singular light, delicacy and beauty the whole of Yeats' poetry. Here I must be content to note three of its more distinctive features, the remarkable interweaving into one, whether against a background of Irish tradition and legend or by a directer thought ...
... the time of Anami and the forces at play spoke through some literary coteries of Bengal and reached here through reviews, letters etc. There has been much inability to appreciate Arjava's poetry, Yeats observing that he had evidently something to say but struggled to say it with too much obscurity and roughness. Amal's work is less criticised, but A. E.'s attitude towards it was rather condescending ...
... helped in forming the turn of my earlier poetic expression. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A. E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God , and a poem or two of Gerard Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently ...
... end of the letter has been lost. Each letter or group of letters in volumes 9 and 26 of the SABCL had a heading. With one exception, these headings were the work of the editors. The exception, "Yeats and the Occult" (page 415 of the present volume) was written by Sri Aurobindo when he revised a typed copy of the letter in question. The text of each of the items has been checked against all its ...
... The song-impetuous mind... 1 The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer Hungry for lips of clay 2 — certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem [This Errant Life] I selected for special praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue ...
... being set to a tune. And it is a curious 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" ...
... 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 super-subtle phrase, the packed ...
... 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 were singers of a complex Pantheism, but his criticism proceeds from above ...
... There our lightnings flash not nor fire of these spaces is suffered, are a rendering of some famous phrases in the Mundaka Upanishad. The stanza, where these phrases occur, is translated thus by Yeats in collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neithersum, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine." Sri Aurobindo, less faithful to the letter but more ...
... masterful height of realised spiritual consciousness. When the clear is achieved, then, unlike as in "the heritage of Symbolism," the work of the post-Mallarmé poets like Valéry, Rilke and the later Yeats, the shades and shimmers of the Beyond are not caught into an intellectual chiaraoscuro but what looks such is rather the art-pattern of some lucid-languaged revelatory power other than the sharp-phrased ...
... which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own." Page 359 Ms Raine's comment sparked off the discussion ...
... even in ordinary conversation are often very concentrated and carry a great deal of significance. This is perhaps because of the purity and sweet sincerity of his nature. Borrowing from W.B. Yeats I would say about Amal: ...and sweetness flows from head to foot. His words therefore often linger in my heart and mind and gradually deepen the understanding. To be in touch ...
... But what did you care? Heaven was pleased with your prayer That if the next dawn's Light found you in safety You'd give the grey river Two perfect swans Years later, Yeats thrilled To see how the bare Liffey grew fair With your vow fulfilled— O Doctor Gogarty Who took new birth From a white-winged pair To free Irish earth! Page 709 ...
... survives from your early days - this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ormamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down ...
... poetry yields interesting insights into even the classics that have been exhaustively probed: "Milton has not only song-music, he has also symphony- music." (p. 133) "He (Yeats) stands supreme in modern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia." (p-144) "Phanopoeia rather than logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry ...
... metrical feet. I don't know whether your conscious mind intended this overtone of suggestion. But poetry, even if deliberate artistic workmanship has gone into it, is surely more than the poet's doing. Yeats has said somewhere that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent on a poem, the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists beyond the poet's conscious ...
... to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own. 8 Strong words! But for the fact that we know she was so totally ...
... (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 the state ...
... Barbault, or by John Dee, MacGregor Mathers, Alister Crowley (‘the wickedest man in the world’), Dion Fortune, Alice A. Bailey, Arthur Machen, etc. One of the foremost poets of the twentieth century, W.B. Yeats, was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Freemasonry, a collective name for a variety of occult sects, counts hundreds of prominent personalities among its members. Taking all this ...
... poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' — he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are more over of the kind, which A.E. (and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem, This Errant Life, selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would ...
... the great Panjandrum in this sphere made me feel like the war-horse in the Bible neighing "Ha-ha" at the smell of the Page 178 battlefield. "The fascination of what's difficult", as Yeats puts it in a poem, drove me on through months and months of close study to complete a book of 231 double-spaced typed pages. It has been lying among my 18 still-unpublished works for several years. ...
... Vishnu's Garuda 307 Vision, power of poet 162 vital 189 plane 209 vyakta 302 Vyasa 60,66,182,205,213 W Wordsworth 52,197,266,367 World Religion 272 Y Yeats, W.B. 30,33,34,125,197,367 yoga aesthetic 200 aim of 6 Integral 6,58 Kundalini 115 poetry and 77,342,347 Savitri holds the secrets of 60 siddhi in 303 ...
... helped in forming the turn of my earlier poetic expression. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A. E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, and a poem or two of Gerald Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently ...
... 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 with ease ...
... the Mother say of him that he never spoke ill of anybody. At a certain period he appeared to be not close enough even to Amrita. Once I quoted to the latter my designation of Nolini after a phrase of Yeats' with a punning play on the first half of his name: "A green knoll apart." Amrita said: "Yes, and it is partly because of some aloofness by him even from me that I am pressing closer to you. Nolini ...
... necessity somewhat artificial. Still I do feel a natural flow. Many others also feel it, even my enemy Girija as I wrote to you, started praising my poems now. But nevertheless I don't care to emulate Yeats whom you praise for his artistry but are indifferent to at bottom. My diffidence arises from my having acquired my technical mastery by a great deal of conscious determined study of technique and metrical ...
... wrote several books. He was the headmaster of the Ashram School. 111 Apple, in French. Page 76 cannot compare any beautiful face with the beauty of the moon." We cannot say like Yeats, "The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun." 112 Neither can we say what Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in a line of verse: "a wave of joy on heaven's moon-stoned floor". You know ...
... All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body— 1 This is not the utterance of a mere profane consciousness, such also is the experience of a 1 W. B. Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole Page 45 deeper spiritual truth. For the Divine in one of its essential aspects is Ardhanarishwara, the original transcendental Man-Woman. And we feel and ...
... which our adoration goes when we hear another mystic poet chant for us the mantra : Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.² ¹W. B. Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon", The Wild Swans at Cook ² Sri Aurobindo, "The Bird of Fire", Collected Poems & Ploys Page 84 ...
... and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few Page 194 poets have actually shown how or what that can be, – a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzas - such lines, for example, from Eliot Who are those hooded hordes swarming ...
... first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One: ¹ W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"-The Wind among the Reeds. Page 94 Une Idée, une Forme, Un Être Parti de l' azur et tombé Dans un Sryx bourbeux et plombé ...
... Woodrow, 413 Wingfield-Stratford, Esme, 13 Witch of Ilni. The, 119,152-53 Woodroffe, Sir John, 491 Wordsworth, William, 176,177,614-15 Yajnavalkya, 416,505 Yeats, W.B.,615ff Yogic Sadhan, 336,380,405 Younghusband, Sir Francis, 17,202 Yugantar (Jugantar), 199, 217-18, 219, 234, 242, 243ff, 247, 284, 288ff, 399 Zaehner, R. C., 446 ...
... Page 676 Sakuntala's Farewell "It is very good poetry and there are many fine lines. I don't know about influence — probably several have coalesced together. Perhaps Keats, Yeats, Love and Death and one or two others." (28.6.33) "Each line is a cut gem by itself and there is sufficient variation of movement or at east of rhythmic tone." (8.7.33) "Sero te ...
... The Secret Splendour (Yeats records that in old Irish legends the perfect woman was not merely beautiful in looks but also vigorous in her bodily functions, and that a special mark was the force with which she could empty her bladder. The poem voices the Irish king who picks out Emer for his wife.) Six queens in the chill air straddled And the ...
... The song-impetuous mind... 1 The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer Hungry for lips of clay 2 _____ certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem [This Errant Life] 1 selected for special praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there ...
... which I considered the most legitimate and pertinent in the field. My paper began to grow as I warmed up to the complex theme of Aryan origins. "The fascination of what's difficult", à la Yeats, drew me onward all the more, since I was putting forth ideas of an unconventional order elaborating a few conclusions of Sri Aurobindo's, arrived at from several sides. It is supposed to be ...
... Nature observed and experienced, now predominates over the spiritual idea in an attempt to return life to art. Though religious themes are often depicted and 12 Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, peme in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume ...
... of Marina and the experience of the still moment of interaction between Time and Eternity, would still, like a true Catholic, doubt if man could transcend the Original Sin before the Doom's Day. Yeats may be mystically deeper, but he too for all his attraction for the occult and his meddling with the Vision continues to be torn between Maud Gonne and Byzantium. A.E. rises higher — his soul venturing ...
... practised or even heard of Yoga; but in such cases it proves that there is some kind of occult vision there very near to the surface. I do not know why you and Amal find so much difficulty with Yeats' lines; they seem to me quite clear. "Wintry mould" is the clay of the field in the form it takes in winter. "Blossoms a rose" must mean "blossoms as a rose, in the form of a rose"; the other sense ...
... × Id., p. 195. × Translated by Shree Purohit Swami and W.B. Yeats. × Id., p. 74. × ...
... that takes a child as a hammer to hit at stony opponents. The savagery is not only blind and vehement: it is also naive, without preconceived malice. This last aspect comes out in a verse of W. B. Yeats: The murderous innocence of the sea. Here too is piquancy, almost an epigram, but it is mixed with a strong felicity, a packed beauty verging on magnificence. We have clear-cut magnificence ...
... s overlay The transparent glacier of flights unflown? Challenging mystery and revelatory violence are here: but can we deny that symbolism is splendidly active also in those lines of Yeats from Cool Park and Ballylee — lines which, unlike Mallarme's, have an intellectual atmosphere, an explicitness of reflection and meditation? At sudden thunder of the mounting swan I ...
... the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Page 243 Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...
... English language. Hardly any recent poet of the British Isles writing with a marked mystical penchant shows even a glimmer of it. AE has filled his verse with a wonderful simplicity of soul-vision; Yeats of the earlier phase brings a poignancy dipped in secret wells of faery colour and, when the later masterful will is at play, there is the "gold mosaic" of "God's holy fire" and the cry to be gathered ...
... last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception ...
... an accent of the thrilled rapid life-force, the Miltonic tone of the majestically thinking mind, the deep or colourful cry of the idealistic imagination as in Wordsworth and Shelley and, recently, Yeats and A.E. Savitri, while taking into itself the whole past of English poetry, adds not only the Indian spirit: it adds also in ample measure the typical intonation, at once intense and immense in its ...
... epic, Paradise Lost. And I think the garden-concept is rather appropriate because there is a natural sense of flower and fragrance in connection with the profound consciousness of the psychic being, Yeats has sung how all things uncomely and broken and cruel "wrong thy image, O Rose in the deeps of my heart". Especially the sense of a rose is spontaneous since the physical heart is Page 232 ...
... vive to respond to sense-stimuli. Yeats's blank verse can float in a half-light and seem a sudden birth from secret worlds — and yet is in fact the most deliberate perhaps of all recent poetry; for Yeats writes with an unsleeping vigilance over words — to such a degree that, occultist though he is, he does not incline to accept AE's description of how his own songs were snatches heard verbatim from ...
... the right end? And would they have relished the bold and colourful intricacy that is so Page 22 magnificent in certain portions of Francis Thompson? Would the Celtic twilight of Yeats with its labyrinths of vanishing iridescence have found any place in their subtle yet "sunny" consciousness? Intellectual criss-cross and sophisticated maziness are definitely objectionable in poetry ...
... an intimacy with the heart of a subject. It is not a product of the mere mind. But this mind may serve to dig a channel, by trying out various versions, for the inmost to spring forth on a sudden. Yeats, one of the most authentic poets of our day, speaks on behalf of the practitioners of his craft: A line will take us hours maybe: Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought. Our stitching ...
... that survives from your early days—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach ...
... we say ? - the Rose of God. Sethna repeatedly quotes Sri Aurobindo, especially on Mallarmé's poetry, and the spinal column of the argument is that past Mallarmé, past Valery, past Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens, there shines Sri Aurobindo the pole star, the laureate of Overhead Poetry and Savitri . In the second part, Sethna remarks that Mallarmé "is likely to suffer ...
... to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own." Ms. Raine's comment sparked off the discussion on whether Indians ...
... quality' and 'many fine lines' - he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind, which A.E. (and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem This Errant Life selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would ...
... so is Amal a treasure to all who know and love him - a dear treasure that cannot ever be taken away from us. Amal is one of the dearest persons in the Ashram. We may quote William Butler Yeats to describe him: And sweetness flows from head to foot. By his contact, may we too grow in divine sweetness! Page 17 ...
... 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 212 sign of decadence; they see in it a morbid brilliance, a ...
... violent condensations of language or too compressed thoughts always create a sense either of obscurity or, if not that, then of effort and artifice, even if a powerful and inspired artifice. It is why Yeats finds your sonnets stiff and laboured, I suppose. Yet very great poets and writers have used them, so great a poet as Aeschylus or so great a prose stylist as Tacitus. Then there are the famous "knots" ...
... events, an attempt to feel the pulse of the wider instincts, impulses, destinies, powers at work in the universe. In poetry this virtue has no indispensable affinity to the occult exquisiteness of Yeats or the mystic opulence that is Sri Aurobindo's. Occult or mystic it may be, yet its fundamental connotation is not thus limited: it can also be moral or philosophical, provided there is no dull morality ...
... survives from your early days—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or ...
... grots. Page 139 And in his most incantatory poem, Rose of God, an experiment in pure stress metre, where a symbol famous in mystical verse and steeped in exquisite associations by Yeats in our own day— ...Your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart... Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days... Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, ...
... Doubdess, all poetry has an inwarddrawing force, but there is a mood and a rhythm that have it in a special degree and render poetic lines spell-binding. Among modern poets, de la Mare and Yeats are the two that breathe the inner rhythm most audibly, though the former is only mysterious and the latter semi-mystical with what are known as "the middle worlds". For the full mystical Intonation ...
... 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 like these, the versatile ...
... one promises to do but doesn't do. If prophecies don't come true, that is not swindling. By the way, who is Purohit Swami? PURANI: I don't know. It is he who has translated the Upanishads with Yeats in the Belearic Islands and written some commentaries. In his writings he mentions some cases of levitation he has seen. SRI AUROBINDO: The only levitation I have heard of was of B, who insisted ...
... addressed as Durga. SRI AUROBINDO: At last I have found some fine modern poets. This anthology Recent Poetry is more characteristic and this woman Alida Monroe has a finer poetic sensibility than Yeats. But Auden I can't make out. He speaks of "two black rocks, someone dying there", "we two", etc. Who are these "we"? PURANI: Perhaps you will find some more good poets as you go on. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... vision - call it whatever you like. It seemed as if I had the glimpse of what the Vedas and the Upanishads call 'the golden beauty of a God' - the whole body bathed in golden light - golden Purusha. Yeats says in one of his poems: "World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras." However, that was only a moment's vision. Then we were busy trying to find out what had happened. Dr. Manilal set about ...
... 151 combat, physically, but would not lose her soul. And now she rises victorious at long last, her ancient spirit shines resplendent, the voice of the Irish Renaissance that speaks through Yeats and Russell * heralds a new dawn for her and who knows if not for Europe and the whole West? Is it meant that "Mediaeval obscurantism" was Europe's supreme ideal and that the cry should be: ...
... Whitehead, A. N., 345-6 Wordsworth, 183, 194 World Review, the, 353 World War I, 101, 373 YADUPATI,91 Yajnavalkya, 160, 167,200,259 Yama, 381 Yeats, 152, 195 Yudhisthira, 93 ZEUS, 24, 123,220,222 Zola, 145 ...
... as well write "To be or not to be that is the question" and call it yours. Please read Surawardy's poems and give your opinion on the one about the "old man's" tears. Amal says that he is under Yeats' influence. Am obliged to postpone these tears—mine as well as the old man's. At places his poetry is very fine. If only he had left out the melancholic old man's tears it would have perhaps ...
... semi-trance. Her resplendent face, with an enchanting half-smile, would fill the whole hushed atmosphere with a supraphysical ambience. "Eternal beauty wandering on its way" - one could repeat with Yeats. The next ceremony of importance was the morning Pranam. Spiritually as significant, the atmosphere was Page 8 quite different. Here the Mother appeared nearer to our earth - "Near to ...
... -"Lucy Gray", 230n -"We Are Seven", 281n -Prelude, 234n World War, First, 228, 249 Wu Ch' ng- n, 133 YAJNAVALKYA, 5-6, 29-30, 126, 242, 299 Yama, 13, 19-20, 32-5, 157, 159-60 Yeats, W. B., 94n -The Wind among the Reeds, 94n - "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart", 94n ZEUS, 159, 182 Zhivago, 186-8 Page 376 ...
... the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One: 1 W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"— The Wind among the Reeds. Page 322 Une Idee, une Forme, Un Etre Parti de I'azur et tombe Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombe ...
... Intimations of Immortality, 119n. -Miscellaneous Poems, 132n. -"A slumber did my spirit seal", 132n. -"We are Seven", 195n. World War, 66-7, YAJNAVALKYA,21,134 Yama,44 Yeats,84n. -The Wild Swans at Coole, 84n. -"The Phases of the Moon", 84n. Yudhisthira, 76-7 ZEUS, 25, 98, 253 Page 434 ...
... the symbol but that many of the modem poets have used it effectively. Francis Thom- son's The Hound of Heaven is symbolic of the Divine Love pursuing insistently its victim, the human soul. W. B. Yeats and AE in their poems and dramas make profuse use of ancient Irish legends which are symbolic: Deirdre, Countess Catheleen, Unicorn from the Stars, Cuchulain. C. Day Lewis' Magnetic Mountain and ...
... of his brother, Barindra now turned his romantic mind to Planchette and automatic writing. In those days these spiritualistic séances were almost a universal hobby. We know that the great poet, Yeats, took keen interest in them, and Rabindranath tells us in his autobiography that he tried these experiments for some time. Barrister Chittaranjan Das 179 , we learn from a reliable source, received ...
... Williams, Charles 381, 448 Williams, Tennessee 268 Winternitz 254, 255 Wolff, Otto 37 Woodroffe, Sir John 330 Wordsworth, William 135, 309, 388 Yeats, W.B. 314,389,391,445 Younghusband, Sir Francis 5 Yutang, Lin 305 Page 497 ...
... —Stevens It is easy to dismiss some of the above lines at least as no more than verbal legerdemain; Tate, Robinson and Eliot, all three seem to make play with 'night' or 'dark; Yeats seems to charge 'ravening' and 'desolation' with a certain violence; 'quartz' and 'stone' in Emily Dickinson and 'holy hush' in Wallace Stevens seem verbal tricks at first. Yet, in the particular ...
... human history, the many failures and the few significant advances; and he penetrates the mystery of the cosmos to seek the clue both to man's past failures and to the possibility of future victory. Yeats says that, "our little memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world, and men's thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep." 157 Aswapati, however ...
... journal in 1921, reprinted as a book in 24 Love and Death had the "misfortune" to appear at a time when a different aesthetic atmosphere - conditioned by Prufrock, The Waste Land and the later Yeats - prevailed in England. But, perhaps, the fashion of anti-romanticism has passer already, and it should be possible now at least to recognise in Urvasie and Love and Death truly indubitable ...
... The Secret Splendour Waste (Suggested by a poem of Yeats's) If she had been a statue with last arms, We might have dreamed her soul a mystic fire Of ecstasy clasping invisible gods. But she has let her love gird like a crown Ablaze with planet prodigalities The sleepy head of a fool... O limbs of light Wasting the nectar ...
... catches them up into lovely and harmonious language. The whole haunting music of Yeats's early verse could be dismissed as jejune claptrap with the charge that it is chockful of mystic roses and dim dreams and pale stars. But the fact stands that no more beautiful poetry has been written in the last fifty yeas. Yeats's verse is lyricism of the highest order because he has conjured up his vision with ...
... yet we feel because of the life-throb in the style a sense of profundity and an emotion that has a grandeur in it. Another kind of effect is produced by the vivid vagueness, if I may so put it, of Yeats's Celtic insight: depths are awakened in us and a lovely mist begins to wash the being to a new quiver of delight. The mist is not penetrated everywhere by our eyes, but our eyes are given a keenly focussed ...
... but also, in a general sense, a manifestation or display as well as a phase. I can speak of somebody's business-avatar, meaning that personality of his which tackles business. One can also speak of Yeats's two avatars as a poet — his early phase and his later. There is then the word "bobbery" in English meaning "disturbance, row, fuss", from the Hindi "Bap-re" — "O father!" (an interjection of dismay) ...
... bridge than at home?" When we ask what is the kind of work Einstein did, a general indication is in the attraction he always felt towards root problems. "The fascination of the difficult," to use Yeats's phrase, dominated him. He had no love for measuring superficialities. He attacked always the deep heart of a science, the most resistant core of a theory. Even to make a difficulty just more acutely ...
... Mother say of him that he never spoke ill of anybody. At a certain period he appeared to be not close enough even to Amrita. Once 1 quoted to the latter my designation of Nolini after a phrase of Yeats's with a punning play on the first half of his name: "A green knoll apart." Amrita said: "Yes, and it is partly because of some aloofness by him now even from me that 1 am pressing closer to you. ...
... therefore is, to Hugo, really Truthfulness, "la verite". And yet, questions Lucas, what is grotesque in Wordsworth's Highland Maid or Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Musset' s Nuits or Yeats's Innisfree, poems which all critics have declared to breathe the utmost Romanticism? Or, still within the Hugoesque sphere, we may inquire in Lucas's own spirit, how the substance of these poems ...
... 245 The angels keep their ancient places; Turn but a stone, and start a wing! 'Tis ye,'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing. Thus in Yeats's vision, "the sudden thunder of the mounting swan" is Another emblem there! that stormy white But seems a concentration of the sky; And, like the soul, it sails into the sight ...
... know what was wrong with him; the chest was bare, well-developed and the finely pressed snow-white dhoti drawn up contrasted with the shining golden thighs, round and marble-smooth, reminiscent of Yeats's line, "World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras". A sudden fugitive vision of the Golden Purusha of the Vedas! Each gentle movement of the leg by the doctor made Sri Aurobindo let out a short "Ah ...
... Talks on Poetry TALK EIGHTEEN Sri Aurobindo — we closed last time with this name after talking of Yeats's two incantatory stanzas on the Rose in the deeps of his heart. Especially apt is this name in the Yeatsian context because Sri Aurobindo is not only the sovereign artist of incantation but has also given us a climax of the incantatory art in a poem on ...
... Savitri chose Satyavan to be her husband, Narada the divine sage descended from heaven, visited Aswapati and his Queen, and broke the dreadful news of Satyavan's impending death (in exactly one yeat's time). The Queen remonstrated and pleaded with Savitri to change her decision, but Savitri stood firm. Page 99 -You [the rest of the audience] may also have read it, please excuse ...
... heart the 19 Vyasa's Savitri, p. 32. Page 109 face of the World-Mother who alone will show her the way and lead her and give her the cherished victory. Then, to adapt Yeats's line, "At the stroke of midnight God shall win." It shall happen in the dim forest at the mid-day hour to bring the eternal noon. And what do we see in the Meditation's House of Savitri? The ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.