Chapter IV   Style and Substance   RHYTHM is the premier necessity of poetical expression because it is the sound-movement which carries on its wave the thought-movement in the word; and it is the musical sound-image which most helps to fill in, to extend, subtilise and deepen the thought impression or the emotional or vital impression and to carry the sense beyond itself into an expression of the intellectually inexpressible, — always the peculiar power of music. This truth was better understood on the whole or at least more consistently felt by the ancients than by the modern mind and ear, perhaps because they were more in the habit of sing

Chapter II    The Sun of Poetic Truth   WHAT IS the kind of Truth which we can demand from the spirit of poetry, from the lips of the inspired singer, or what do we mean when we speak of Truth as one of the high powers and godheads of his work and of its light as a diviner sunlight in which he must see and shape from its burning rays within and around him the flame-stuff of his creation? We have all our own notions of the Truth and that gives an ambiguous character to the word and brings in often a narrow and limited sense of it into our idea of poetry. But first there is the primary objection, plausible enough if we look only at the glowing robe

Chapter XVI    The Poets of the Dawn ­ 1   THE SUPERIORITY of the English poets who lead the way into the modern age is that sudden almost unaccountable spiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but limited in one or two, splendid and supreme in its rare moments of vision and clarity, which breaks out from their normal poetic mentality and strives constantly to lift their thought and imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does not seem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the contemporary poets of continental Europe. But they have no clearly seen or no firmly based constant idea of the greater work which

    Poems    in Quantitative Metres    Ocean Oneness1   Silence is round me, wideness ineffable; White birds on the ocean diving and wandering; A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven, Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.   Identified with silence and boundlessness My spirit widens clasping the universe Till all that seemed becomes the Real, One in a mighty and single vastness.   Someone broods there nameless and bodiless, Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite, And, sole in a still eternal rapture, Gathers all t

Chapter IX    The Course of English Poetry ­ 1    Chaucer and the Poetry of External Life   THE SPIRIT and temper that have stood behind the creative force and come to the front in a literature are the one essential thing that we must discern, for it is these that predestine the course the poetry of a people will take and the turn it gives to its forms. For if the field which poetry covers is common ground and its large general lines the same everywhere, yet each nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative quality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its

Chapter XIX    The Victorian Poets   THE EPOCH associated in England with the name of Victoria was in poetry, like that of Pope and Dryden, an age of dominant intellectualism; but, unlike that hard and sterile period, it has been an imaginative, artistic intellectualism, touched with the greater and freer breath of modern thought and its wide interest and fullness of matter, not brass-bound in furbished and narrow bands of social ease and polite refinement, but alive, astir, capable of personal energy and inspiration, aesthetical in its refinements, above all not entirely satisfied with itself, but opened up to some mountain-top prospects, str

Chapter XXIV    New Birth or Decadence?   AT THIS point we stand in the evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a common evolution, and I have singled it out to follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve of the human spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and, again, because of all the modern European languages it has the largest freest poetic energy and natural power, it responds on the whole most directly of all of them — in spite of certain serious limitations of the English mind — to the foun

    Appendixes to The Future Poetry   The three fragmentary pieces that follow, all written at different times, are each connected in some way with the text of The Future Poetry. Appendix I is an incomplete review of James Cousins' book New Ways in English Literature. Written in November 1917, the review was abandoned when Sri Aurobindo decided to make his consideration of Cousins' book the starting-point for a presentation of his own ideas on poetry. The two paragraphs of the review were rewritten as the first two paragraphs of the first chapter of The Future Poetry, Appendix II consists of a fragment found in a notebook used by Sri Au

Chapter XVII    The Poets of the Dawn ­ 2    Byron and Wordsworth   A POETRY whose task is to render truth of the Spirit by passing behind the appearances of the sense and the intellect to their spiritual reality, is in fact attempting a work for which no characteristic power of language has been discovered, — except the symbolic, but the old once established symbols will no longer entirely serve, and the method itself is not now sufficient for the need, — no traditional form of presentation native to the substance, no recognised method of treatment or approach, or none at once sufficiently wide and subtle, personal and universal f

The Aitereya Upanishad   Chapter I     1. In the beginning the Spirit was One and all this (universe) was the Spirit; there was nought else that saw. The Spirit thought, "Lo, I will make me worlds from out my being."     2. These were the worlds he made; Ambhah, of the ethereal waters, Marichih of light, Mara, of death and mortal things, Apah, of the lower waters. Beyond the shining firmament are the ethereal waters and the firmament is their base and resting-place; Space is the world of light; the earth is the world mortal; and below the earth are the lower waters.     3. The Spirit