TWO NEGLECTED ENGLISH POETS   Joyce Chadwick and John A. Chadwick, contemporary with each other and belonging to our own time, are hardly heard of in English critical circles. The former died in England in 1950, the latter in India as far back as 1939; but their works have made little headway. Identical in surname, they were yet no relatives; they did not even come in contact and wrote without knowledge of each other's poetry. But their common surname is highly symbolic; for both expressed themselves under a similar spiritual stress and combined with the typical English note a mystic motive either directly caught from or indirectly attuned to modern renascent India.

LIFE, POETRY, LOVE, DEATH   A READER'S CRITICISM OF A POEM AND THE POET'S REJOINDER   LOVE AND DEATH   We sign mortality in our marriage-beds. Brief bliss alone cries out for the unborn child To carry a little farther man's flickering heart; That kiss of creation proves death's seal on our life. Immortals need no mating: dawns to come Laugh ever already in their sun-stream blood. They strive to sow the future with no sparks From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh. O soul, clasp not in love the body's doom. Let love be largeness never called to leap Breathless for kindling from two death-bound halves — Man th

-008_Keat^s On First Looking into Chapman's Homer- KEATS'S ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER*   SOME CRITICAL NOTES   This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective sonnet and as such is more comparable to the last-named than to the others except that Ozymandias contains, as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early

NOTES ON POETIC INSPIRATION   A PERSONAL DOCUMENT   People sometimes ask me: "How do you get poetic inspiration?" Inspiration comes to me in the form of a sudden spark or flame-seed falling into the consciousness. A kind of shock is felt and I know that the soul is pregnant with a poem. The poem may follow after a brief interval or there may be a long period of gestation, but I am absolutely certain of its growth in the subliminal as soon as that subtle shock is experienced. For instance, "Pointers", beginning —   Everything points now Somewhere, somewhere,  Silverly straining Through the dusk air —   was the result of my gazing out at t

-023_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri and Dante's Divina Commedia (Two Letters) SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA   TWO LETTERS   1     The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter.   The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic per

-001_Inspiration and Effort (A Letter) INSPIRATION AND EFFORT   (A LETTER)   You hold that genuine poetry is written always by inspiration — effortlessly — as if in a state of semi-trance. A correct view, this, as regards fundamentals. But you take my breath away by adding that, because in my letter I used words like "tried", "attempted", "sought" when I spoke of producing poetry of a mystic and spiritual order new in many respects to the English language, you drew the conclusion that I wrote my poems with a manufacturing mentality which thought out with intellectual labour all the phrases, linked up the different parts like a mechanic rivetting joints and constructed artificially an unfamiliar

-002_Poetic Values and Powers (A Letter) POETIC VALUES AND POWERS   (A LETTER)   You have defined the poet as a bringer of joy — and, since the joy of the mystical consciousness is the highest, you arrive at the conclusion that the highest type of poet is the mystical. Your conclusion is valid from a certain standpoint, but not as a judgment on art. Is art to be judged by its explicit nearness to or farness from the mystical realisation? The joy which art brings us is not always explicitly the mystical ananda: it is mostly that ananda in a specific disguise and it is not required to be more: hence our judgments on art have to be within the realm of that disguise. A poet is great not by speaking so

HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA 1. THE PRODIGAL POETIC PROMISE (a)   The Irish mystic and poet, AE, has written:   The gay romance of song Unto the spirit's life doth not belong.   And it is true that AE utters the core of himself best in chaste simple whispers. But the spiritual feeling caught in the series of great little books published by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in his early days is like a jet of rainbow-flame. Sometimes the colours fuse into a white light, but usually they sparkle and quiver and trace in the veil between the outward and the inward a variegated rift, so to speak, through which may be poured with an ever-largening impetus

THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE*   The poet who is not merely idealistic or religious but has a direct mystical sensitivity and of whom it may be said that his adventure is the Apocalypse — what species of poetry would he particularly aspire to write? In general answer to this query we may begin with some remarks on production from the dream-consciousness, the phenomenon now loosely known as Surrealism.   The ordinary notion about the dream-consciousness is very restricted and, though Freud and Jung have interestingly and ingeniously explored certain layers below the mind's threshold, they have not driven home the fact familiar to all practitioners of Yoga tha

ENGLISH STYLE   An English friend has written for the benefit of foreign aspirants to authorship in his language:   "In English, and especially in Modern English, one has to be very careful about over emphasis and over-statement. The word 'great', for example, which makes such a show in many other languages, is but sparingly used. We may apply it to men or women whose importance resides not in their position, not even in the stir they may have made in the world, but in the genuineness of achievement tested by time. It is felt to be too big, too judicial a word to be lavished on what is contemporary.   "A critic in a review will hesitate before describing a writer of the