TALK NINE The critic of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review, for all his show of learning, might as well have been the young lady who has become memorable with the question: "What are Keats?" The ignorance displayed of the world of poetry could have been com-pared also to that of the old lady who went to a lecture on Burns and came back disappointed that the lecturer throughout shot away from the subject and, instead of giving advice on how to treat the effects of flame-heat or of boiling water on the skin, kept talking of some Scottish poet. Today we look far more appre-ciatively at Endymion than did the eye of the notorious Jeffrey. It is a wonde

TALK THIRTY-THREE Your brains must have fairly reeled in an attempt to get into some sort of focus the "lustre" of the "Reality" Sri Aurobindo has shown in the lines I discussed in our last talk. Perhaps a reeling brain is the best help towards knowing such a Reality from within. What I mean is a condition of the sort the Zen Buddhists of Japan seek to impart or undergo. I don't mean the whack on the head which at times the Zen Master, in order to bring about Satori or flash of insight, gives to a disciple at the proper psychological moment, saying to himself, "Now for my stick to make a mystic of him!" I mean not the physical but the mental sho

TALK TWELVE We gave — before a bit of digression -some instances of markedly musical lines of poetry. Now I want to recall you to the fact which my quotations prior to the musical lines may have served to spotlight — namely, that lines with no particular music can be great in poetic effect. Let me cite some more to render that fact vivid. I shall take instances picked out by a critic whose name I forget and I shall add one or two the critic seems to have forgotten. On several occasions we have drawn on King Lear's speeches. Here are three lines at almost the beginning of his speech in the midst of the storm on the heath. He is contrasting, in r

TALK TWENTY-FOUR I have been making for some time a daylong and occasionally even nightlong chase of Blake's "Tyger". Listen to the poem and tell me if the fiery fellow is not worth the chase: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the ha

TALK THIRTY We have now to take a close look at Mallarme's Azure. We have already seen it as something of a lost Eden to which he has a nostalgic relation in the midst of his quest for a new kind of poetic utterance that keeps eluding him. You may note that the Azure makes here for Mallarme a joint reality with rose-woods. Flowers on the earth and the blue sky above fused in his mind and in an early reference to the latter he speaks of the former as having their origin in the Azure: he makes Mother Earth cull flowers Des avalanches d'or du vieil azur, au jour Premier... (From the ancient azure's avalanching gold, On the first day.

TALK THREE In the last two talks we touched on the poetic mood and the poetic process from various sides and gave them a high significance and value. Today I wish to quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which sum up, as it were, the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. But before I do so I must notice a possible objection to the spiritual view we have taken of the poetic process. We may be told: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They speak of all sorts of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. Lucretius, the great Roman poet, scoffed at religion, and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was a ma

TALK TWENTY-ONE So the Quarterly Examination has come and gone, and we are together again. We were as if enemies for a while: now once more there is peace between us and we can look back calmly on wounds given or taken. But is it really a fact that you felt the Quarterly Examination as Keats had felt the Quarterly Review in which his Endymion had been attacked? Surely you can't picture me as a sort of Jeffreys exulting at the sight of your discomfiture? Besides, I was not solely responsible for the paper. The second question asking you to comment on the statement that "poets are born, not made" was neither born from me like a spontaneous sword try

TALK TWENTY-NINE Mallarme, with precise yet puzzling image-combinations that would suggest a meaning as elusive as in wordless Music, sought to embody in poetic words a supra-intellectual sense of some perfect Beyond of Silence. His attitude to the work he had undertaken is stated by Stefan George (pronounced Gayorgay), one of his early admirers, in a forceful German phrase: Und fur sein denkbild blutend Mallarme. which means, And bleeding for his ideal, Mallarme. It is well known how whole-heartedly Mallarme dedicated his life to achieving his poetic object. But people who feel that he sought some Beyond mistake certain expressi

A BACK-LOOK AT MACBETH I was not given a theme in advance. Nirod has just now said, "Talk about Macbeth — or, if you like, about the Sonnets. After all, it doesn't matter because it's the same genius who wrote the play and those poems." Perhaps he should have added, "It's the same non-genius who is going to talk." Well, as he has mentioned Macbeth first, I take it that his preference is for the play. The only trouble is that all of you have studied it very lately whereas my memory of it goes back by several decades. So, naturally, it's a little hazy. Still, it is not difficult to say a few things by way of introduction. There has been a controversy as to

TALK TWENTY-EIGHT Let us continue from where we left off in the last lecture — or, if you think that what I said last time left you in a bewilderedly broken condition of mind, I shall refer not to the last lecture but to the last fracture. Perhaps my words now will set some of the broken pieces together. Mallarme's is a mysticism of a very mystifying kind Before him there had been mystical poetry, but except for Blake it had not the quality of mystification which this Frenchman brought into play. His was a step necessary in the evolution of the poetic conscious-ness towards what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry, a poetry written n