Chapter XIII    The Course of English Poetry ­ 5   WHEN a power of poetry in a highly evolved language describes so low a downward curve as to reach this dry and brazen intellectualism, it is in danger of losing much of its vitality and flexibilities of expression and it may even, if it has lived too long, enter into a stage of decadence and perish by a dull slow decay of its creative force. That has happened more than once in literary history; but there can always be a saving revulsion, a return of life by a shock from without or a liberating impulse from within. And this saving revulsion, when it comes, is likely, if bold enough, to compensat

Chapter VII    The Word and the Spirit   A DEVELOPMENT of the kind of which we are speaking must affect not only the frames of poetry, but initiate also a subtle change of its word and rhythmic movement. The poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit, the chosen medium of the soul's self-expression, and any profound modification of the inner habit of the soul, its thought atmosphere, its way of seeing, its type of feeling, any change of the light in which it lives and the power of the breath which it breathes, greatening of its elevations or entry into deeper chambers of its self must reflect itself in a corresponding modification, changed intensity

'The Future Poetry' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 10   Poems in Quantitative Metres   Ilion15     Dawn over Ilion   Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals, Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending, Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine. Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty, All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother. Out of the formless vision of Ni

Chapter XVIII    The Poets of the Dawn ­ 3   IF WORDSWORTH 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.

The Future Poetry   with   On Quantitative Metre       Publisher

  A draft of the poem on pages 377­78 On Quantitative Metre  

Chapter XIV    The Movement of Modern  Literature ­ 1   MODERN poetry carrying in it the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised mind begins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Here are the free, impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings. Here we see the initial tendencies which have undergone a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and seeking have reached in the early twentieth a quite unprecedented subtle intensity, refinement and variety of motives and even a tense straining on many lines to fi

"Is India Civilised?"     "Is India Civilised?"   A BOOK under this rather startling title was published some years ago by Sir John Woodroffe, the well-known scholar and writer on Tantric philosophy, in answer to an extravagant jeu d'esprit by Mr. William Archer. That well-known dramatic critic leaving his safe natural sphere for fields in which his chief claim to speak was a sublime and confident ignorance, assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable bar

Indian Culture and External Influence     Indian Culture and External Influence   IN CONSIDERING Indian civilisation and its renascence, I suggested that a powerful new creation in all fields was our great need, the meaning of the renascence and the one way of preserving the civilisation. Confronted with the huge rush of modern life and thought, invaded by another dominant civilisation almost her opposite or inspired at least with a very different spirit to her own, India can only survive by confronting this raw, new, aggressive, powerful world with fresh diviner creations of her own spirit, cast i

The Renaissance in India with A Defence of Indian Culture     VOLUME 20   THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO   © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA    Publisher's Note   Most of the essays that make up this volume have appeared until now under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture. That tit