-19_The Poets of the Dawn – 3.htm CHAPTER XVIII The Poets of the Dawn – 3             IF WORDWORTH and Byron failed by an excess of the alloy of untransmuted intellect in their work, two other poets of the time, Blake and Coleridge, miss the highest greatness they might otherwise have attained by an opposite defect, by want of the gravity and enduring substance which force of thought gives to the poetical inspiration. They are, Coleridge in his scanty best work, Blake almost always, strong in sight, but are unable to command the weight and power in the utterance which arises from the thinking mind when it is illumined and able to lay hold on and express the reality behind the idea. They hav

-21_Recent English Poetry – 1.htm Chapter XX Recent English Poetry – 1 THE movement away from the Victorian type in recent and contemporary English poetry cannot be said to have yet determined its final orientation. But we may distin­guish in its uncertain fluctuations, its attempts in this or that direction certain notes, certain strong tones, certain original indications which may help us to disengage the final whither of its seekings. In the mass it appears as a broadening of the English poetic mind into a full oneness with the great stream of modern thought and tendency, an opening up out of the narrower Victorian insularity to admit a greater strength, subtlety and many-sidedness of th

chapter XXVII The Breath of Greater Life THE turn of poetry in the age which we have now left behind, was, as was inevitable in a reign of dominant intellectuality, a pre-occupation with reflective thought and there­fore with truth, but it was not at its core and in its essence a poetic thought and truth and its expression, however artistically dressed with image and turn or enforced by strong or dexterous phrase, however frequently searching, apt or picturesque, had not often, except in one or two exceptional voices, the most moving and intimate tones of poetry. The poets of the middle nineteenth century in England and America philosophised, moralised or

section nine Poetic Creation and Yoga – Utility of Literature, etc. in Sadhana READING AND POETIC CREATION AND YOGA A literary man is one who loves literature and literary activities for their own separate sake. A Yogi who writes is not a literary man for he writes only what the inner Will and Word wants him to express. He is a channel and instrument of something greater than his own literary personality. Of course the literary man and the intellectual love reading—books are their mind's food. But writing is another matter. There are plenty of people who never write a word in the literary way but are enormous readers. One reads for ideas, for knowled

1 THE SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION UPON EARTH The eight articles constituting the first section, were the last of Sri Aurobindo's prose writings. He wrote them specially for the Bulletin of Physical Education, later called the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

Perfection of the Body THE perfection of the body, as great a perfection as we can bring about by the means at our disposal, must be the ultimate aim of physical culture. Perfection is the true aim of all culture, the spiritual and psychic, the mental, the vital and it must be the aim of our physical culture also. If our seeking is for a total perfection of the being, the physical part of it cannot be left aside; for the body is the material basis, the body is the instrument which we have to use. Sariram. khalu dharma- sãdhanam, says the old Sanskrit adage, – the body is the means of fulfilment of dharma, and dharma means every ideal which we can propose to ourselv

All-Will and Free-Will HIS is surely a bounded soul who has never felt the brooding wings of a Fate overshadow the world, never looked beyond the circle of persons, collectivities and forces, never been conscious of the still thought or the assured movement of a Presence in things determining their march. On the other hand, it is the sign of a defect in the thought or a void of courage and clearness in the temperament to be overwhelmed by Fate or hidden Presence and reduced to a discouraged acquiescence, — as if the Power in things nullified or rendered superfluous and abortive the same Power in myself. Fate and free- will are only two movements of one indivisibl

Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity TWO truths, discoveries with an enormous periphery of luminous result and of considerable essential magnitude, evolution and heredity, figure today in the front of thought, and I suppose we have to take them as a well-established unquenchable light upon our being, lamps of a constant lustre, though not yet very perfectly trimmed, final so far as anything is final in man's constantly changing cinematographic process of the development of intellectual knowledge. They may be said to make up almost the whole fundamental idea of life in the way of seeing peculiar to a mind dominated, fashioned, pressed into its powerful moulds by t

The Universal Consciousness "I have encountered in my life several examples of people living or trying to live in the universal consciousness and it seemed to me that it rendered them less compassionate, less humane, less tender to the sufferings of others. It seems to me that if it is necessary not to remain in the individual consciousness whey it is a question of our-own sufferings it is otherwise when it is a question of sympathising with the sufferings of others. In my opinion we feel more keenly the troubles of our brothers in humanity if we remain in the individual consciousness. But I may be mistaken and ask only to be enlightened by you on this point."

Karma ONE finds an unanswerable truth in the theory of Karma, - not necessarily in the form the ancients gave to it, but in the idea at its centre, - which at once strikes the mind and commands the assent of the understanding. Nor does the austerer reason, distrustful of first impressions and critical of plausible solutions, find after the severest scrutiny that the more superficial understanding, the porter at the gateways of our mentality, has been deceived into admitting a tinsel guest, a false claimant into our mansion of knowledge. There is a solidity at once of philosophic and of practical truth supporting the idea, a bed-rock of the deepest universal undeniable verities agai