A Plea for Spenser   Among great English poets the one who has suffered in these days of jangling nerves and psycho-analytic aberrations the utmost neglect because of his matter, mood and manner is Edmund Spenser. To the modern mind with its personal and introspective bent he seems quite useless, especially as he expended his imagination on themes which do not interest us any more, the age of chivalry and Una being more irrevocably gone than even that of the Canterbury pilgrims. In fact, whatever customs and figures of Chaucer's time may have fallen into obsolescence, the main stuff of his creation still corresponds to life's play around us, and that is why Spenser is as good as

Pegasus and "The White Horse" of G.K. Chesterton   1   It is often thought that to call G.K. Chesterton a poet is to mistake for the high and authentic light of inspiration mere rhetorical shades masquerading as poetic significances. But the fact is that in G.K.C. there is a genuine poet buried under the clever journalist. His mass of militant controversies has obscured the silver bow of poetic power which he brought in his multifarious armoury; the too frequent thunder of his excursions on a ponderous-bodied though nimble-footed charger of prose style has led us to forget that on occasion he rides out on a more Pegasus-like hoof-stroke. In sh

The Poetic Experience   If poetry is to glow with true beauty it must rise from living experience. This is not to rule out the Ariels of song: imagination may weave rainbows upon a delicate air, but the rainbows must be a genuine revelation and no coloured falsity. In other words, poetry is not confined to facts of mere earth: it can float in more tenuous regions, but it must create an impression that these regions, however incredible to the normal mind, do exist behind or beyond the familiar and tangible loveliness. The sole criterion, therefore, is: Does poetry come with an authentic power or no? Keats's magic casements may be only the eyes of daydream, they may exist only in

Poetic Appreciation   Prejudices, Principles, Perversities   Whoever wishes to catch the essence of poetry must throw aside all his pet prejudices about both the matter and the manner of art. No doubt, poetry of a particular type holds a special appeal for him, but that should not debar him from distilling the last drop of enjoyment from other types of verse or lead him to label them as artistic failures. For, all art is an attempt to express the various forces of man's being in a beautifully measured way, and so long as the measure of beauty is somehow obtained it would be preposterous as well as pitifully self-privative to denounce fr

The Poet and His Daimon   1   It is a very ancient view that occult purposes act from behind the exterior psychology to produce works of poetic excellence. For, all great poets have believed in invoking what they called the Muse: no poet denies that in his perfect moments a rare superhuman force rushes through his ordinary consciousness. However, in various poets the force functions in various ways. Byron did not believe that inspiration could come by sitting and waiting for it, and to disprove that Wordsworthian notion he conducted a series of experiments: evening after evening he sat with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, asking the Muse to come

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 illumine tones and methods which in other hands prove an aesthetic failure. In the initial phase, however, he was at his richest from the viewpoint of poetry proper, for there the inspiration seems to be the most continual.   Secret Worlds and Human Heart-tones   This inspiration is a distinct type of Symbolism: it is surcharg

THE WORDS OF POETRY   Degas, the famous painter, once said to Mallarme, the famous poet: "How is it that though I have plenty of ideas I still can't write poetry?" Mallarme replied: "My dear man, poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words."   This statement may seem at first to poke fun at Degas, archly pointing out an obvious truth to the rather dense painter. Mallarme no doubt, had often his tongue in his cheek, but he never lost a chance to comment on the essential nature of poetry. Coming from an indefatigable theoretician of aesthetics, the statement is a bit of literary criticism rather than a piece of academic witticism. It is meant to endow poetry

-004_Some Problems of Poetry (Three Letters) SOME PROBLEMS OF POETRY   (THREE LETTERS)   To D   Artistic intensity I have always stressed. It provides the key to a lot of problems connected with poetry. The problem of sincerity which you mention is one of them.   A poem is admittedly an art-medium and if an art-medium is chosen for what one has to say, artistic intensity is of paramount value. Once you grant this, it becomes pointless to speak, as you have done, of "simply an artistic value" in a spiritual poem. Perhaps you mean by "artistic value" decorativeness laid on from without or mere technical skill. But these things are not art. The former is in fact a fault which art m

-022_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri and Tennysonian Blank verse (A Letter) SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND TENNYSONIAN BLANK VERSE   A LETTER   I was much interested to read the views you have sent me of the two dons — one English, the other Irish — on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. The first of these Academics seems to me rather misguided in his evaluation of the epic's blank verse.   No doubt, he is right in saying that there was plenty of end-stopped blank verse in English before Savitri — but did you actually say that the only type had been the enjambed? Most probably, when you pointed out the "originality" of Sri Aurobindo's metrical form, you had more things in mind than merely its abstention

WORDSWORTH — MAN AND POET:  SOME REFLECTIONS IN 1970   1970 makes two hundred years since Wordsworth was born. Both during his lifetime and after, a lot has been written about the man and the poet. He is a figure of considerable importance and we may well set ourselves to throw together some facts and observations to stimulate a living perception of this strange and great figure.   APPEARANCE AND RELATIONSHIPS   Let us start with his appearance. We have often heard him described as most unpoetically horse-faced. But that is not the impression produced on all. Nor did he himself regard his physiognomy as poor. When Hazlitt spoke of his forehead as being nar