9   The qualities and defects of Romanticism, English and Continental - the Romantic pointer to a new poetry of the Spirit   "If we wish to distinguish a single characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century," writes Bowra,1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things... They brought to poetry not m

10   The mind of Romanticism and the Victorian sequel - The spiritual note in the older poetry, Classical or Romantic, and in the second Romanticism   We may hazard the guess that the promise given by modern English Romanticism will be fulfilled most perfectly if certain recent glowings of the mystical in English poetry blend with influences of a spiritually resurgent India to seize most intimately on the soul of that Movement and carry it beyond the Spirit's dawn-flush known to it in the old days. The mind at work in it rose suddenly from a submerged racial being which, whatever developments in its own line may be attained by it

7   The Natural and the Supernatural in Romanticism - Wordsworth's complex mysticism of Nature   To the Romantics the supernatural was a wide mystery with many recesses and revelatory aspects. The one thing it was not was some Aloofness excluding the natural. Its activity as Nature was - to revert to Whitehead's language - organic, but in the ultra-Whiteheadian sense that finds perhaps its most philosophical account in Wordsworth's poetry when he writes in the Ninth Book of his Excursion: To every Form of being is assigned An active Principle: - howe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things,

11   A resume and a lookforward - the nature of poetry and its spiritual consummation -a defence of mysticism - the paramount significance of Romanticism's poetry of the Spirit - spiritual poetry and two styles: Classical and Romantic   In rounding off our survey we may cite a passage by Havelock Ellis on three famous personalities of the stage: it indicates with a fine imagination some essential qualities of the three strands we have traced in our subject. "The word classic suggests to some people the coolly artificial, the conventionally unreal. Ristori was at the farthest remove from that. She was the adorable revelation of what the classic really

CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC Classical and Romantic AN APPROACH THROUGH SRI AUROBINDO AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA) SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY First published 1997 (Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino) ©Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997 Published by and Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry - 605 002 PRINTED IN INDIA (0660/14.1.95/500)

1   The complexity of the problem - the approach through Sri Aurobindo - the nature of poetry - the common poetic power, the differences of expression - differences of degree and of kind   Perhaps more ink has been shed in making a distinction between "Classical" and "Romantic" than on any other prob-lem in literature: already in 1936 F. L. Lucas1 could count 11,397 books, including his own. Once even some blood was about to be shed: on the night of November 25, 1830, the theatre at Paris where Victor Hugo's Romantic play Hernani was first shown became a roaring cockpit of combatant critics. But not always has much light been shed: possibly the heat of the

FOREWORD We were doing Coleridge's Kubla Khan in the first year Poetry Class at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. When we had recovered enough from the intoxication of reading it and could ask critical questions, the very first and the most general and fundamental that arose were apropos of the line: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted... They were, "What exactly does the epithet 'romantic' mean here? And how does it reflect the mind of the movement in English and Continental literature called Romanticism as distinguished from the other called Classicism - Romanticism of which Kubla Khan is itself considered one of the quint

6   The climax of the second Romanticism: poetry of the Age of Wordsworth - the Romantic quintessence of Kubla Khan   In appearance, the second Romantic Movement started in England at the end of the eighteenth century by a revolt against the artificial "poetic diction" of the pseudo-Augustan Age. Wordsworth asked for a natural language and, though in some respects he went to an extreme by insisting on almost conversational naivete, what ultimately he and his contemporaries wanted was a living speech not ruled by a too externalised mind. Naturalness connoted the mind of thought expressing itself vividly from a depth of the being. Here it is inte

2   The "planes" of poetic expression - the psychological plane of Classicism: the creative Intelligence - the four phases of Classicism   We have quoted Sri Aurobindo as saying that the poet, by means of the images Nature affords us not on one but on many planes of her creation, aims essentially at interpreting what she conceals from us but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal. "Many planes of creation" - it is through such a vision of things that we get Sri Aurobindo's formula of

4   The climax of the first Romanticism: Elizabethan poetry -Shakespeare and Spenser   As a poet of Romantic drama, Shakespeare is - to quote Sri Aurobindo's words1 - "quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in exter-nals'; they have the same outward form and crude materials, but not the inner dramatic method by which he transformed and gave' them a quite other meaning and value; and later romantic drama, though it has tried hard to imitate the Shakespearian motive and touch, has been governed by another kind of poetic mind and its intrinsic as distinguished from its external method has been really d