chapter XXVI The Sun of Poetic Truth what is the kind of Truth which we can demand from the spirit of poetry, from the lips of the inspired singer, or what do we mean when we speak of Truth as one of the high powers and godheads of his work and of its light as a diviner sunlight in which he must see and shape from its burning rays within and around him the flame-stuff of his creation? We have all our own notions of the Truth and that gives an ambiguous character to the word and brings in often a narrow and limited sense of it into our idea of poetry. But first there is the primary objection, plausible enough if we look only at the glowing robe and not at th

-34_The Process, Form and Substance of Poetry .htm SECTION ONE The Process, Form and Substance of Poetry THREE ELEMENTS OF POETIC CREATION Poetry, or at any rate a truly poetic poetry, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only. There are three elements in the production of poetry; there is the original source of inspiration, there is the vital force of creative beauty which contributes its own substance and impetus and often determines the form, except when that also comes ready made from the original source; there is finally the transmitting outer consciousness of the poet. The most genu

section TWO Sources of Poetic Inspiration and Vision Mystic and Spiritual Poetry POETRY OF PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 1 Certainly — Homer and Chaucer are poets of the physical consciousness. I have pointed that out in The Future Poetry.¹ 2 You cant drive a sharp line between the subtle physical and physical like that in these matters. If a poet wrote from the out­ward physical only, his work is likely to be more photographic than poetic. 31.5.1937 3 The Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the t

CHAPTER II The Essence of Poetry IN ORDER to get a firm clue which we can ­follow fruitfully in the retrospect and prospect we have proposed to ourselves, it will not be amiss to enquire what is the highest power we demand, from poetry; or, — let us put it more largely and get nearer the root of the matter, — what may be the nature of poetry, its essential law, and how out of ' that arises the possi­bility of its use as the mantra of the Real. Not that we need spend a vain effort in labouring to define anything so profound, elusive and indefinable as the breath of poetic creation; to take the myriad-stringed harp of Saraswati to pieces for the pur­pose of scie

-13_The Course of English Poetry – 4.htm CHAPTER XII The Course of English Poetry – 4 IN THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, of a great power of achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns to failure, wastes the power spent and makes the total result much inferior to what it should have been with so much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius to raise it into the highest heights of the empyrean. The mind of this age went for its sustaining influence and its suggestive models to Greece, Rome and France. That we inevitable; for these have been the three intellectual n

-12_The Course of English Poetry – 3.htm CHAPTER XI The Course of English Poetry – 3             THE Elizabethan drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it is great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The ret of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and firm intellectual value. Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curiosity

CHAPTER   III Rhythm and Movement THE Mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual  reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly  one, a highest  intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of verbal form and thought-substance, or style, and a highest intensity of the soul's vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets; and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work, the spots in the sun. Bu

CHAPTER V Poetic Vision and the Mantra THIS highest intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual element of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion of the beauty in the thing discovered and its expression, - for all great poetic utterance is discovery, - rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are rare and come like brilliant accident

CHAPTER XIX The Victorian Poets             THE associated in England with the name of Victoria was in poetry, like that of Pope and Dryden, an age of dominant intellectualism; but, unlike that hard and sterile period, it has been an imaginative, artistic intellectualism touched with the greater and freer breath of modern thought and its wide interest and fullness of matter, not brass-bound in furbished and narrow bands of social ease and polite refinement, but alive, astir, capable of personal energy and inspiration, aesthetical in its refinements, above all not entirely satisfied with itself, but opened up to some mountain-top prospects, struck across by some mo

-24_Recent English Poetry – 4.htm chapter XXIII Recent English Poetry – 4 THE inspiring spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness and presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning, but it is necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change that is coming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer, more