Sri Aurobindo. The Future Poetry. SABCL volume 9

SRI AUROBINDO

The Future Poetry

and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art

The Future Poetry

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 complexity of its spirit and its union of opposite powers to an adventurous consecutive seeking over the whole field; but in first potentiality its limitations point to a more facile success in the concrete or imaginative presentation of life, a more difficult success in the intellectual or spiritual interpretation of life, while most difficult of all for it would be a direct presentation of the things beyond, of mystic realities or of the higher truths of the spirit. Yet, on the other hand, if this difficulty could once be overcome, then because of the profounder intensity of the power of poetical speech which this literature has developed, the very highest expression of these things would be possible, a nearer expression than would be possible without much fashioning to the poetry of the Latin tongues whose speech has been cast in the mould of a clear or high intellectuality rather than into the native utterance of imaginative vision. We see in modern French creation a constant struggle with this limitation and, even, a poet like Mallarmé breaking the mould of the French speech in his desperate effort to force it to utter what is to its natural clear lucidity almost unutterable. No such difficulty presents itself in English poetry; the depths, the vistas of suggestion, the power to open the doors of the infinite are already there for the mind rightly gifted to evoke and use for the highest purposes. Much less naturally fitted for fine prose utterance, the language has all the close lights and shades, the heights and depths, the recesses of fathomless sense needed by the poet.

We have to see how this has come about; for it has not been accomplished at all easily, but only by much effort and seeking. We observe first that English poetry has covered the field that lies before the genius of poetry by successive steps which follow the natural ascending order of our developing perceptions. It began by a quite external, a clear and superficial substance and utterance. It proceeded to a deeper vital poetry, a poetry of the power and beauty and wonder and spontaneous thought, the joy and passion and pain, the colour and music of Life, in which the external presentation of life and things was taken up, but exceeded and given its full dynamic and imaginative content. From that it turned to an attempt at mastering the secret of the Latins, the secret of a clear, measured and intellectual dealing with life, things and ideas. Then came an attempt, a brilliant and beautiful attempt to get through Nature and thought and the mentality in life and Nature and their profounder aesthetic suggestion to certain spiritual truths behind them. This attempt could not come to perfect fruition, partly because there had not been the right intellectual preparation or a sufficient basis of spiritual knowledge and experience and only so much could be given as the solitary individual intuition of the poet could by a sovereign effort attain, partly because after the lapse into an age of reason the spontaneous or the intenser language of spiritual poetry could not always be found or, if found, could not be securely kept. So we get a deviation into another age of intellectual, artistic or reflective poetry with a much wider range, but less profound in its roots, less high in its growth; and partly out of this, partly by a recoil from it has come the turn of recent and contemporary poetry which seems at last to be approaching the secret of the utterance of profounder truth with its right magic of speech and rhythm.

We get the first definite starting-point of this movement in the poetry of Chaucer when the rough poverty of the Anglo-Saxon mind first succeeded in assimilating the French influence and refining and clarifying by that its speech and its aesthetic sense. It is characteristic of the difficulty of the movement that as in its beginning, so at each important turn, or at least on the three first occasions of a new orientation, it has had thus to go to school, to make almost a fresh start under the influences of a foreign culture and poetry, needing in spite of so much poetic originality and energy and genius a strong light of suggestion from outside to set it upon its way. All modern literatures have at one time or another needed this kind of external help, but once formed and in possession of themselves they adopt impresses more or less lightly and only as a secondary assistance. But here we have a remodelling of the whole plan under foreign teaching. Chaucer gives English poetry a first shape by the help of French romance models and the work of Italian masters; the Elizabethans start anew in dependence on Renaissance influences from France and Italy and a side wind from Spain; Milton goes direct to classical models; the Restoration and the eighteenth century take pliantly the pseudo-classical form from the contemporary French poets and critics. Still this dependence is only in externals; in the essential things of poetry some native character prevails, a new turn is rapidly given, an original power and method emerges; the dynamic vitality of the race was too great not to arrive almost at once at a transmutation.

The first early motive and style of this poetry as it emerges in Chaucer strikes at once an English note. The motive is the poetic observation of ordinary human life and character — without any preoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in the individual mind and temperament of the poet. Chaucer has his eye fixed on the object, and that object is the external action of life as it passes before him throwing its figures on his mind and stirring it to a kindly satisfaction in the movement and its interest, to a blithe sense of humour or a light and easy pathos. He does not seek to add anything to it or to see anything below it or behind its outsides, nor does he look at all into the souls or deeply into the minds of the men and women whose appearance, action and easily apparent traits of character he describes with so apt and observant a fidelity. He does not ask himself what is the meaning of all this movement of life or the power in it or draw any large poetic idea from it; he is not moved to interpret life, a clear and happy presentation is his business. It is there simply in the sunlight with its familiar lines and normal colours, sufficiently interesting in itself, by its external action, and he has to record it, to give it a shape in lucid poetic speech and rhythm; for to turn it into stuff of poetry that and the sunlight of his own happy poetic temperament in which he bathes it is all he needs. And the form he gives it is within its limits and for its work admirably apt, sufficient and satisfying,— provided we ask from it nothing more than it has to offer us. Chaucer had learnt ease, grace and lucidity from the French romance poetry and from the great Italians a sufficient force and compactness of expression which French verse had not yet attained. But neither his poetic speech nor his rhythm has anything of the plastic greatness and high beauty of the Italians. It is an easy, limpid and flowing movement, a stream rather than a well,— for it has no depths in it,— of pure English utterance just fitted for the clear and pleasing poetic presentation of external life as if in an unsullied mirror, at times rising into an apt and pointed expression, but for the most part satisfied with a first primitive power of poetic speech, a subdued and well-tempered even adequacy. Only once or twice does he by accident strike out a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters.

No other great poetical literature has had quite such a beginning. Others also started with a poetry of external life, Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with the historical epic of Ennius, French with the feudal romances of the Charlemagne cycle and the Arthurian cycle. But in none of these was the artistic aim simply the observant presentation of Greek or Roman or feudal life. Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature. Ennius’ object was like Virgil’s to cast into poetical utterance the spirit of Rome. So the spirit of Catholic and feudal Europe transmutes life and gives in its own way an ideal presentation of it which only misses greatness by the inadequacy of its speech and rhythmic movement and the diffuse prolixity of its form. Chaucer’s poetic method has no such great idea or uplifting motive or spirit. Whether the colour he gives happens to be realistic or romantic, it falls within the same formula. It is the reflecting of an external life, with sometimes just a tinge of romantic illumination, in an observing mind that makes itself a shining poetic mirror.

The spirit of English poetry having thus struck its first strong note, a characteristic English note, having got as far as the Anglo-Saxon mind refined by French and Italian influence could go in its own proper way and unchanged nature, came suddenly to a pause. Many outward reasons might be given for that, but none sufficient; for the real cause was that to have developed upon this line would have been to wander up and down in a cul-de-sac; it would have been to anticipate in a way in poetry the self-imprisonment of Dutch art in a strong externalism, of a fairer kind indeed, but still too physical and outward in its motive. English poetry had greater things to do and it waited for some new light and more powerful impulse to come. Still this external motive and method are native to the English mind and with many modifications have put their strong impress upon the literature. It is the method of English fiction from Richardson to Dickens; it got into the Elizabethan drama and prevented it, except in Shakespeare, from equalling the nobler work of other great periods of dramatic poetry. It throws its limiting shade over English narrative poetry, which after its fresh start in the symbolism of the Faery Queen and the vital intensity of Marlowe ought either to have got clear away from it or at least to have transmuted it by the infusion of much higher artistic motives. To give only one instance in many, it got sadly in the way of Tennyson, who yet had no real turn for the reproduction of life, and prevented him from working out the fine subjective and mystic vein which his first natural intuitions had discovered in such work as the Lady of Shalott and the Morte d’Arthur; we have to be satisfied instead with the Princess and Enoch Arden and the picturesque triviality of the Idylls of the King which give us the impression of gentlemen and ladies of Victorian drawing-rooms masquerading as Celtic-mediaeval knights and dames, with a meaning of some kind in it all that does not come home to us because it is lost in a falsetto mimicking of the external strains of life. Certainly, it is useless to quarrel with national tendencies and characteristics which must show themselves in poetry as elsewhere; but English poetry had opened the gates of other powers and if it could always have lifted up the forms of external life by these powers, the substance of its work might then have meant much more to the world and the strength of its vision of things might constantly have equalled the power and beauty of its utterance. As it is, even poets of great power are being constantly led away by this tendency from the fulfilment of their more characteristic potentialities.

The new light and impulse that set free the silence of the poetic spirit in England for its first abundant and sovereign utterance, came from the Renaissance in France and Italy. The Renaissance meant many things and it meant too different things in different countries, but one thing above all everywhere, the discovery of beauty and joy in every energy of life. The Middle Ages had lived strongly and with a sort of deep and sombre force, but, as it were, always under the shadow of death and under the burden of an obligation to aspire through suffering to a beyond; their life is bordered on one side by the cross and on the other by the sword. The Renaissance brings in the sense of a liberation from the burden and the obligation; it looks at life and loves it in excess; it is carried away by the beauty of the body and the senses and the intellect, the beauty of sensation and action and speech and thought,— of thought hardly at all for its own sake, but thought as a power of life. It is Hellenism returning with its strong sense of humanity and things human, nihil humani alienum¹³⁸, but at first a barbarised Hellenism, unbridled and extravagant, riotous in its vitalistic energy, too much overjoyed for restraint and measure.

Elizabethan poetry is an expression of this energy, passion and wonder of life, and it is much more powerful, disorderly and unrestrained than the corresponding poetry in other countries, having neither a past traditional culture nor an innate taste to restrain its extravagances. It springs up in a chaos of power and of beauty in which forms emerge and shape themselves by a stress within it for which there is no clear guiding knowledge except such as the instinctive genius of the age and the individual can give. It is constantly shot through with brilliant threads of intellectual energy, but is not at all intellectual in its innate spirit and dominant character. It is too vital for that, too much moved and excited; for its mood is passionate, sensuous, loose of rein; its speech sometimes liquid with sweetness, sometimes vehement and inordinate in pitch, enamoured of the variety of its notes, revelling in image and phrase, a tissue of sweet or violent colours, of many-hued fire, of threads of golden and silver light.

It bestowed on the nation a new English speech, rich in capacity, gifted with an extraordinary poetic intensity and wealth and copiousness, but full also of the disorder and excess of new formation. A drama exultant in action and character, passion and incident and movement, a lyric and romantic poetry of marvellous sweetness, richness and force are its strong fruits. Here the two sides of the national mind throw themselves out for the first time with a full energy, but within the limits of a vital, sensuous and imaginative mould, the one dominant in its pure poetry, the other ordinarily in its drama, but both in Shakespeare welded into a supreme phenomenon of poetic and dramatic genius. It is on the whole the greatest age of utterance,— though not of highest spirit and aim,— of the genius of English poetry.

This is unrevised text as it was published at the monthly review Arya (5. No 1 — August 1918.– pp.56-64). Revised text see here.

¹ CWSA, vol. 26: The