Great Meanings There is the famous case of the examinee who on being asked to paraphrase the well-known words from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn - Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter - wrote: "It is nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." We may be inclined to laugh at the ingenious fool. Do we, however, understand Keats rightly? Most of those who have not read his poem think he meant that new and unfamiliar tunes are more enjoyable than the ones to which we have been accustomed. In fact, this is not at all what he had in mind. He was talking of the carved figures on an ancient vase used for storing the ashes of the dead: some of these figur

The Attack on Romantic Idealism The romantic temperament is on the decline. To surround sex with the idealistic imagination is fast becoming unfashionable. It is regarded as playing a sort of secular "stooge" to that "arch-enemy of progress", the religious and mystical tendency. That is one aspect of the attack - scientific naturalists telling "visionary" poets to cut their colourful "cackle" and come down to brasstacks of animal reality. The other aspect of the attack is derived, surprisingly, from just the opposite quarter - the camp not of scientific naturalists but of those who have developed a spiritual world-view and seen the need of an inner Godwar

A Few Explanations These causeries, for all their play of changing mood and personal idiosyncrasy, were not conceived merely as passing thoughts. Seriousness went to their making and they were intended to go a long way - yet with no burden of an abstract unbending mind. Depth of thinking was sought to be reached here by a vivid and many-sided though not imprecise and unmethodical movement: vision was to accompany logic. But the yoking of the poetic intuition with the logical faculty might very well prove a worse hindrance for the common reader. The common reader had to be respected: I must not tie him up in colourful complexities and snatch him away from practical issues.

"The Red Immortal" Let me say at once that I do not have in mind either Lenin or Stalin. The word "red" here is not a synonym for "Soviet". It connects up with more natural and much older things than the economic system of Communist Russia - things like roses and human blood. To get my meaning you must ask what the red rose symbolises. The extreme beauty of a rose, steeped in crimson, stands, to the poetic eye, for the beauty-thrill between human beings, which we call love. It is the stir of love in our blood that Flecker named The red immortal riding through the hearts of men. Poets do not spin merely pretty phrases. They strain to pluck their language from the depths

Some Matters of the Muse Knowing that I have been enamoured of the Muse for quite a long time, a reader who is anxious to absorb her influence has asked me some questions about the appreciation of poetic quality, rhythm-values, mystical tones, the inevitable form. The questions are far from easy to answer, because the analytic mind is not the prime judge in poetry. The critical intelligence can distinguish shades, elucidate imagery, point out technical effects, but all this after something else has felt and recognised inspiration, the divine afflatus. Vision, word, rhythm - these three are so closely related, so charged with one another's essence, that the act of poe

THE THINKING CORNER The Thinking Corner Causeries on Life and Literature AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA) The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA First published 1996 (Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino) © Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) Published by The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A. Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA

-06_The Flame of D' Annunzio.htm The Flame of D'Annunzio Years ago I read a panegyric by Arnold Bennett upon the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Flame of Life — that elaboration of his amour with the famous Eleonora Duse. Lately I went through the book. D'Annunzio the poet has tried to be at full blast in its prose. But I am afraid this heated prose has not the vibrant genuineness I prize. Though there is no doubt that D'Annunzio has an extremely expressive mind, his expression here is rarely shot with imagination enough to make it great poetic literature. I find him more a rhetorician than a poet. There is a basic want of piercing felicitous vision and intuition in his language, and to cove

Mail-bag Musings A man of letters is often taken to be a man with infinite leisure for letter-writing. His mail-bag bursts with queries and some of them push the interrogation mark to the farthest ends of the universe! But questions are a good stimulus and one who is pelted with them begins to look about him with new eyes and in directions undreamt of. Here are a few I pick out of a recent barrage with a direct or indirect relation to a causerie on literature. Confucius and a Curious Classification A correspondent echoes the "intrigued" uncertainty felt by Bertrand Russell about a saying of Confucius. "Men of virtue," declares Confucius, "love the mountains, men of learn

Poet and Mystic and Woman-Hunter There are few figures in fiction with whom I feel more in sympathy than the one set alive by Charles Morgan at the centre of his novel, Sparkenbroke. Piers Tenniel, Lord Sparkenbroke, poet and mystic and woman-hunter - I seem to look into his heart and discover there with diamond concreteness something which is in the heart of every true idealist who is yet enmeshed in the crude flames that corrupt bodily desire. Bodily desire is not itself a sin: it can be a force of self-liberation like the urge of any other part of the being, if it goes burning with adoration and service at the feet of some visualised form of the Divine - but by

Some Points about Poetry The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's I have already dealt in a special essay in the Second Annual (recently reviewed in the All-India Weekly) of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay. Savitri marks a new age of mystical poetry, and all lovers of literature as well as mysticism will await with wonder-lit eyes further instalments of it. The first canto is accompanied by a se