chapter XXIV New Birth or Decadence? AT THIS point we stand in the evolution of English poetry. Its course, we can see, is only one line of a com­mon evolution, and I have singled it out to at follow because, for two reasons, it seems to me the most complete and suggestive. It follows most faithfully the natural ascending curve 'of/the human spirit in this kind of rhythmic imaginative self-expression and, again, because of all the modern European languages it has the largest freest poetic energy and natural power, it responds, on the whole, most directly of all of them — in spite of certain se­rious limitations of the English mind — to the fountain motives, the e

CHAPTER XIV The Movement of Modern Literature             POETRY as the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernized mind begins with the writers of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. They are the free impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings. We se the initial tendencies which undergo a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and se3king have reached in the early twentieth a subtle intensity, refinement and variety of motives, a tense straining on many lines to find some last truth and utterance which must end either in a lingering dec

chapter XXV The Ideal Spirit of Poetry T0 ATTEMPT to presage the future turn or development of mind or life in any of its fields is always a hazardous occupation. Life and mind are not like physical Nature which runs in precise mechanical grooves; these are more mobile and freer powers. The gods of life and still more the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even when we can distinguish the main lines on which the working runs or has so far run, we are still unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will yet take or of what new thing they are in labour. It is therefore impossible to predict what the poetry of the future will actually

chapter XXVIII The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty THE light of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry the touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life. Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet, though they are often enough separated in our cr

chapter XXIX The Power of the Spirit A POETRY born direct from and full of the power of the spirit and therefore a largest and a deepest self-expression of the soul and mind of the race is that for which we are seeking and of which the more profound tendencies of the creative mind seem to be in travail. This poetry will be a voice of eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the s

-10_The Course of English Poetry – 1.htm CHAPTER IX The Course of English Poetry – 1             THESE are the general characteristics of English Poetry, the powers which have been at work in it. For we have to see first what are the spirit and temper that have stood behind and come to the front in a literature in order to understand the course that it has taken and the forms that it has assumed. The field which poetry covers is common ground, but each nation has its own characteristic spirit and creative quality which determine the province in which it will best succeed, the turn or angle of its vision and the shape of its work. The English poetical genius was evidently predestined by the co

-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