-20_Time's Gap.htm Time's Gap Who could have believed that from Edith Sitwell of the rather equivocal fame of self-consciously clever and deliberately perverse effusions like Jane, Jane! tall as a crane, The light comes creating down the lane, one would get the magnificent lines: That old rag-picker blown along the street Was once great Venus. But now Age unkind Has shrunken her so feeble and so small - Weak as a babe. And she who gave the Lion's kiss Has now all Time's gap for her piteous mouth. Aeschylus might have had a hand in them - Aeschylus of the grandiose and compact audacities. Marlowe might have moulded them - Marlowe with his sublime violence. Here is not

Yeats and Shaw Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations." It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can be nothing but frustrated rage, a weakling with a sword in his hand but unable to wield it; he can only scowl and spit. Shaw is like a fencing expert, parrying blows and dealing death-wounds with such smooth ease, such effortlessness, such absence of violent waste that he appears to many eyes "vegetarian"

Science and Poetry Have you read I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry? If you have not, you have missed a very sharp and well-phrased formulation, within a brief compass, of both the value and defect the poetic expression and poetic response in life have for a scientific-minded literary critic. Richards has a genuine concern for the general health and balance of human nature. He makes no denial of the richness poetry brings us. A most apt remark of his runs: "To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone - the mistake is easy and, if carried far, disastrous — but to live in a way of which reason, a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve." And a clear full sen

The Process of Great Poetry No lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth, but the delight breathes a superhuman air and is no outcome of transfigured fantasy. Why then should we later look upon these moments with diffidence in their revelatory touch on our being? At times poets themselves shirk in retro

-005_Chapter 004 (Page 166-Page 220).htm From Kathleen Raine We live in a very mysterious world, in which thoughts are realities that communicate in ways other than print. Of course any dream contains many elements but I have no doubt that there was indeed some meeting between us in yours. I enclose the book review in last week's TLS which as you see is extremely hostile and malicious (besides being a typical example of the decline in values in this country over the last years) and I was very distressed about it - more than I at my age should have been, but I had hoped that a review in the TLS might have made our work in Temenos better known to more people who might share our concern to restore true val

-007_Chapter 006 (Page 269-Page 291).htm From Kathleen Raine I have received and read your Blake's Tyger with delight. I must, I think, concede you the victory - your laying out of the whole map of Blake's inner world and its dynamics in the context of Milton's poem does convince. Whether when Blake wrote The Tyger he himself as yet saw that whole universe as a whole scarcely matters, since it was already implicit, as the oak within the acorn. You have woven every symbolic term into the complete pattern. Perhaps in the Milton chapter I was tempted to think that you had done little more than show that Blake uses a Miltonic vocabulary, that all those grand Miltonic words in The Tyger are simply that - a M

-002_Chapter 001 (Page 1-Page 70).htm From Kathleen Raine What a surprise and a pleasure to hear from you again after all these years, and I certainly thought the publication of our correspondence had been long forgotten. I look forward to re-reading your own letters but did quickly run through my side of the correspondence to see whether what I had then written was too foolish or far from what I now feel about these things.I found that on the whole I do think as I did, only with perhaps greater pessimism about the future of all the world and English as the world]-language not of Shakespeare and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know

Indian Poets and English Poetry Indian Poets and English Poetry Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry First Published 1594 (Typeset in Times 11/13) ISBN HI-7058-398-5 © Kathleen Raine & K. D. Sethna Published by and Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry 605002 PRINTED IN INDIA

-004_Chapter 003 (Page 119-Page 165).htm From K. D. Sethna I see that you want to cry halt to our discussion of Sri Aurobindo as poet. Very well. But some points about your general attitude to poetry and certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo seem to call for some comment from me. First, the mixing up of the romantic with the sentimental. Surely, sentimentalism and romanticism are not synonymous? Highly romantic is Shelley's Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower. Our modern taste for stronger meat, the more direct, the more down-to-earth may not relish such a vision

-003_Chapter 002 (Page 71-Page 118).htm From Kathleen Raine Although I might postpone this letter for weeks until I had read or re-read all Sri Aurobindo's works, I don't suppose I could answer it better than by sitting down now - the first of the dark evenings of our winter when the extra hour of evening daylight is curtailed and I have the evening hours before me. I will make a few reflections and then turn to your letter and see where I get with that. It is a remarkable letter, full of eloquent, true, beautiful things. Many of these are inspiring and illuminating to me and I am privileged to receive such a letter and to be able to exchange thoughts, even in the role of the Devil's Advo