CHAPTER   III Rhythm and Movement THE Mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual  reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly  one, a highest  intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of verbal form and thought-substance, or style, and a highest intensity of the soul's vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets; and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work, the spots in the sun. Bu

CHAPTER V Poetic Vision and the Mantra THIS highest intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual element of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion of the beauty in the thing discovered and its expression, - for all great poetic utterance is discovery, - rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are rare and come like brilliant accident

CHAPTER XIX The Victorian Poets             THE 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, struck across by some mo

-24_Recent English Poetry – 4.htm chapter XXIII Recent English Poetry – 4 THE inspiring spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness and presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning, but it is necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change that is coming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer, more

-09_The Character of English Poetry – 2.htm CHAPTER VIII The Character of English Poetry – 2 WHAT kind or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind so constituted? The Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circumstance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations have in this field been conspicuous by their silence or the rarity of their speech. After the old rude epics, saga or Nibelungenlied, we have to wait till quite recent times for poetic utterance, nor, when it came, was it rich or abundant. In Germany a brief period of strong productive culture in which the great names Goethe and Hein

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE FUTURE POETRY was first published as a series of essays in the Arya from 1917 to 1920. Sri Aurobindo thought of revising it before giving it the form of a book. He wished to add even a few chapters, especially dealing with the Metaphysicals and the Modern Poets. He was not able to do more than write a few paragraphs supplementary to matter already treated. Although these have been incorporated in their proper places the book first brought but in 1953 remains for practical purposes a reprint of the original essays. LETTERS ON POETRY, LITERATURE AND ART has been added here as a separate part of the volume for the purposes of the C

-14_The Course of English Poetry – 5.htm CHAPTER XIII The Course of English Poetry – 5 A POWER of poetry in a highly evolved language which describes so low a downward curve as to reach this dry and brazen intellectualism, must either perish by a dull slow decay of its creative force and live flexibilities of expression,  -that has happened more than once in literary history, -or else be saved by a violent revulsion. But this saving revulsion, if it comes, is likely, if bold enough, to compensate for the past prone descent by an equally steep ascension to an undreamed-of novelty of illumined motive and revealing spirit. This is the economy of Nature’s lapses in the things of the mind no less th

chapter XXX The Form and the Spirit A CHANGE in the spirit of poetry must necessarily bring with it a change of its forms, and this departure may be less or greater to the eye, more inward or more outward, but always there must be at least some subtle and profound alte­ration which, whatever the apparent fidelity to old moulds, is cer­tain to amount in fact to a transmutation, since even the outward character and effect become other than they were and the soul of substance and movement a new thing. The opening of the creative mind into an intuitive and revelatory poetry need not of itself compel a revolution and total breaking up of the old forms and a creat

-11_The Course of English Poetry – 2.htm CHAPTER X The Course of English Poetry – 2 BEAUTIFUL as are many of its productions, powerful as it is in the mass, if we look at it not in detail, not merely revelling in beauty of line and phrase and image, in snatches of song and outbursts of poetic richness and power, but as a whole, as definite artistic creation, this wealthiest age of English poetry bears a certain stamp of defect and failure. It cannot be placed for a moment as a supreme force of excellence in literary culture by the side of the great ages of Greek and Roman poetry, but, besides that, it falls short too in aesthetic effect and virtue in comparison with other poetic periods les

-16_The Movement of Modern Literature – 2.htm CHAPTER  XV The Movement of Modern Literature – 2             OUT of the period of dominant objective realism what emerges with the strongest force is a movement to quite an opposite principle creation, a literature of pronounced and conscious subjectivity. There is throughout the nineteenth century and apparent contradiction between its professed literary aim and theory and the fundamental unavoidable character of much of its inspiration. In aim throughout, -though there are notable exceptions, - It professes a strong objectivity. The temper of the age has been an earnest critical and scientific curiosity, a desire to se, know and understand the w