-06_The Flame of D' Annunzio.htm The Flame of D'Annunzio Years ago I read a panegyric by Arnold Bennett upon the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Flame of Life — that elaboration of his amour with the famous Eleonora Duse. Lately I went through the book. D'Annunzio the poet has tried to be at full blast in its prose. But I am afraid this heated prose has not the vibrant genuineness I prize. Though there is no doubt that D'Annunzio has an extremely expressive mind, his expression here is rarely shot with imagination enough to make it great poetic literature. I find him more a rhetorician than a poet. There is a basic want of piercing felicitous vision and intuition in his language, and to cove

Mail-bag Musings A man of letters is often taken to be a man with infinite leisure for letter-writing. His mail-bag bursts with queries and some of them push the interrogation mark to the farthest ends of the universe! But questions are a good stimulus and one who is pelted with them begins to look about him with new eyes and in directions undreamt of. Here are a few I pick out of a recent barrage with a direct or indirect relation to a causerie on literature. Confucius and a Curious Classification A correspondent echoes the "intrigued" uncertainty felt by Bertrand Russell about a saying of Confucius. "Men of virtue," declares Confucius, "love the mountains, men of learn

Poet and Mystic and Woman-Hunter There are few figures in fiction with whom I feel more in sympathy than the one set alive by Charles Morgan at the centre of his novel, Sparkenbroke. Piers Tenniel, Lord Sparkenbroke, poet and mystic and woman-hunter - I seem to look into his heart and discover there with diamond concreteness something which is in the heart of every true idealist who is yet enmeshed in the crude flames that corrupt bodily desire. Bodily desire is not itself a sin: it can be a force of self-liberation like the urge of any other part of the being, if it goes burning with adoration and service at the feet of some visualised form of the Divine - but by

Some Points about Poetry The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's I have already dealt in a special essay in the Second Annual (recently reviewed in the All-India Weekly) of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay. Savitri marks a new age of mystical poetry, and all lovers of literature as well as mysticism will await with wonder-lit eyes further instalments of it. The first canto is accompanied by a se

-05_Sri Aurobindo's 72nd Birthday.htm Sri Aurobindo's 72nd Birthday On the fifteenth of this month, August, Sri Aurobindo reaches the age of seventy-two. But immediately we state that fact our minds are filled with a sense of contradiction. We used to speak of Tagore advancing in years and we speak now of Gandhi growing old: nothing strange is felt by us in our utterances. Sri Aurobindo, however, makes any calculation in terms of age a falsity. Fundamentallly such a calculation errs because of Sri Aurobindo's mysticism. Both Tagore and Gandhi can be called great, but their greatness is of the human and not the divine type. The essence of Tagore is the poet, of Gandhi the moralist, of Sri Aurobindo t

The Muse and the Mystic A bright young man, himself a budding poet, wrote to me about my own poetry, appreciating certain pieces of a bold and pungent type, but deploring my general mystical trend as unmodern, divorced from hard facts like slums and brothels, flying away from the delights of sense, out of tune with the revelations of science, unhelpful towards "breasting" life's miseries, a stumbling-block to a true fulfilment of the poetic urge as well as a bar to a true rapport between author and reader. I am glad my "modern" and "realistic" friend made his position so clear to me. But I am afraid that what he has made me see most clearly is that his position is rat

A Poet on Poetry By far the boldest definition of poetry is A.E. Housman's in that much-in-little of a book, The Name and Nature of Poetry, which I have recently read again. Yes, the boldest - and yet it seems to be both natural and penetrating, a logical completion of the hints thrown out by other poets concerning their own art. Wordsworth's is well-known: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Byron, with his usual turn for rhetoric, expresses this spontaneity and power in a more impressive, almost threatening manner: "Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake." Shelley has a less psychoanalytic idea and prefers a p

Critics' Complaints Not all can sup with satisfaction on poetry and when poetry is mystical the stomach and the palate are still more disgruntled. Even good critics come out with various complaints. I happen to be addicted to the mystical Muse and have received quite an assortment of criticisms, a part of which it might be of interest to consider in brief for the literary or psychological questions raised. The Regret About "Preciousness" There was the English professor who, though giving high praise, regretted "the tendency to be precious and not simple enough". But can mystical and spiritual poetry that is deeply dyed in the unknown be ever simple? No matter how bare

The Peacock Lute Sarojini Naidu flashed out that phrase in a poem - Professor Bhushan has caught it on the title-page of his excellent new anthology of poems written in English by Indians. Both are acts of inspiration. The fine phrase becomes a focus of special significance when applied to Indian poetry in any form. A peacock is commonly known for three things: the abundant colour of its plumes, its keen dancing - and its look of vanity. But the vision of the East has not found the peacock invariably vain: to be self-delighted has for the Indian a profound sense as well as a superficial one, since self-delight can stand for an independence of outward objects or occasions for

The Fetish of Theory I am sometimes asked what my "theory" is about the writing of a poem. The question finds me at a loss how properly to understand it. For, about the writing of a poem I have no theory if by that term is meant any notion that a poem should be in a certain style and make use of a particular type of words and concern itself with a limited field of themes. I know a poem to be just this: intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm plus the act of being a harmonious whole. The language may be common or kingly, the style simple or complex, the thought plain or picturesque, the emotion day-to-day or once-in-a-blue-moon. It does not matter what them