TERMS STARTING WITH
poet. A car or chariot, drawn by horses. fate-wain.
poet and mystic, decided to sign his writings,
poet and philosopher Abū al-'Alā
poet and playwright (1869-1910), to whom the
poetaster ::: n. --> An inferior rhymer, or writer of verses; a dabbler in poetic art.
poetastry ::: n. --> The works of a poetaster.
poetess ::: n. --> A female poet.
poetic ::: a. --> Alt. of Poetical
poetical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to poetry; suitable for poetry, or for writing poetry; as, poetic talent, theme, work, sentiments.
Expressed in metrical form; exhibiting the imaginative or the rhythmical quality of poetry; as, a poetical composition; poetical prose.
poetically ::: adv. --> In a poetic manner.
poetico: poetic discourse
poetic: Related to a poetry; Characteristic of poets; description of persons, objects, or ideas that connect to the soul of the beholder
poetics ::: n. --> The principles and rules of the art of poetry.
poetic techniques: Devices used in poems to create effect, such as metaphors, enjambment and alliteration.
poeticule ::: n. --> A poetaster.
poetized ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Poetize
poetize ::: v. i. --> To write as a poet; to compose verse; to idealize.
poetizing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Poetize
poet laureate: In Britain this is a honorary post bestowed in acknowledgment of a poet's accomplishments. Tennyson ( 1850- 92) and Ted Hughes (1984-99) are examples of former poet laureates.
poet Mark Van Doren mentions Saraknyal in
poet ::: n. --> One skilled in making poetry; one who has a particular genius for metrical composition; the author of a poem; an imaginative thinker or writer.
poetry: A literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language and figurative language. Poetry is also created with a sense of the musicality, and is not just written for meaning.
poetry ::: “All poetry is an inspiration, a thing breathed into the thinking organ from above; it is recorded in the mind, but is born in the higher principle of direct knowledge or ideal vision which surpasses mind. It is in reality a revelation. The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Human and Divine
poetry ::: n. --> The art of apprehending and interpreting ideas by the faculty of imagination; the art of idealizing in thought and in expression.
Imaginative language or composition, whether expressed rhythmically or in prose. Specifically: Metrical composition; verse; rhyme; poems collectively; as, heroic poetry; dramatic poetry; lyric or Pindaric poetry.
poetry ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All poetry is an inspiration, a thing breathed into the thinking organ from above; it is recorded in the mind, but is born in the higher principle of direct knowledge or ideal vision which surpasses mind. It is in reality a revelation. The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Human and Divine
poet Shelley referred to himself as Ariel, and Andre
poetship ::: n. --> The state or personality of a poet.
poet: Someone who writes poetry. Sometimes a poet uses poetry as a means of expressing personal interactions, emotion, and/or a way to address political, humanitarian issues.
Poet, grammarian, and Bible commentator; Spain.
Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Boston and New
Poetical Works of John Milton. According to Ambe-
Poetical Works of John Milton (London, 1794),
Poetical Works of John Milton.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Containing, or occupied by, nothing; unfilled, empty, void. 2. Devoid (of something specified). 3. Without an incumbent or occupant; unfilled. 4. Void of thought or knowledge. Chiefly poet.
1. Of or pertaining to the universe in general or all things in it; existing or occurring everywhere or in all things; occasionally of or belonging to all nature. Chiefly poet. **2. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of all or the whole. 3. Applicable everywhere or in all cases; general. Universal.
1. To illuminate; make lighter or brighter, esp. poetic. 2. To enlighten the mind. illumes.
2. According to Plato, a prophetic prediction is a form of inspired "frenzy" which produces a good result which could not be obtained in a normal state of mind (Phaedrus). The other two forms of this abnormal activity are poetic inspiration and religious exaltation. This concept has been exalted by Christian theology which gave to it a divine origin: the gift of prediction is an attribute of a saint, and also of the biblical prophets.
acephalous ::: a. --> Headless.
Without a distinct head; -- a term applied to bivalve mollusks.
Having the style spring from the base, instead of from the apex, as is the case in certain ovaries.
Without a leader or chief.
Wanting the beginning.
Deficient and the beginning, as a line of poetry.
acheron ::: n. --> A river in the Nether World or infernal regions; also, the infernal regions themselves. By some of the English poets it was supposed to be a flaming lake or gulf.
adamant ::: n. --> A stone imagined by some to be of impenetrable hardness; a name given to the diamond and other substances of extreme hardness; but in modern mineralogy it has no technical signification. It is now a rhetorical or poetical name for the embodiment of impenetrable hardness.
Lodestone; magnet.
adj. 1. Very great in size, number, amount, or quantity. 2. Very great in degree, intensity, etc. Also fig. 3. Of very great area or extent; immense; extensive, far-stretching. vaster, sun-vast.* *n. 4. An immense or boundless expanse or space. Chiefly poet. Vast, vasts, Vasts, dream-vasts.**
advent ::: any important or epoch-making arrival. In modern usage applied poetically or grandiloquently to any arrival. advent"s, advents.
"Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things.” Letters on Savitri
“Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things.” Letters on Savitri
afflatus ::: the miraculous communication of supernatural knowledge; hence also, the imparting of an over-mastering impulse, poetic or otherwise; inspiration. A creative inspiration, as that of a poet; a divine imparting of knowledge, thus it is often called divine afflatus.
albion ::: n. --> An ancient name of England, still retained in poetry.
alcaic ::: a. --> Pertaining to Alcaeus, a lyric poet of Mitylene, about 6000 b. c. ::: n. --> A kind of verse, so called from Alcaeus. One variety consists of five feet, a spondee or iambic, an iambic, a long syllable, and two dactyls.
alliterative ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or characterized by, alliteration; as, alliterative poetry.
all- ::: prefix: Wholly, altogether, infinitely. Since 1600, the number of these [combinations] has been enormously extended, all-** having become a possible prefix, in poetry at least, to almost any adjective of quality. all-affirming, All-Beautiful, All-Beautiful"s, All-Bliss, All-Blissful, All-causing, all-concealing, all-conquering, All-Conscient, All-Conscious, all-containing, All-containing, all-creating, all-defeating, All-Delight, all-discovering, all-embracing, all-fulfilling, all-harbouring, all-inhabiting, all-knowing, All-knowing, All-Knowledge, all-levelling, All-Life, All-love, All-Love, all-negating, all-powerful, all-revealing, All-ruler, all-ruling, all-seeing, All-seeing, all-seeking, all-shaping, all-supporting, all-sustaining, all-swallowing, All-Truth, All-vision, All-Wisdom, all-wise, All-Wise, all-witnessing, All-Wonderful, All-Wonderful"s.**
amaranthine ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to amaranth.
Unfading, as the poetic amaranth; undying.
Of a purplish color.
anacreontic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, after the manner of, or in the meter of, the Greek poet Anacreon; amatory and convivial. ::: n. --> A poem after the manner of Anacreon; a sprightly little poem in praise of love and wine.
a native English form of the adverb may, now only in formal or poetic usage.
a native English form of the verb, to flutter, now only in formal and poetic usage.
a native English form of the verb, to hope, now only in formal and poetic usage.
a native English form of the verb, to know, now only in formal and poetic usage.
a native English form of the verb, to vaunt, now only in formal and poetic usage.
anthological ::: a. --> Pertaining to anthology; consisting of beautiful extracts from different authors, especially the poets.
apollo ::: n. --> A deity among the Greeks and Romans. He was the god of light and day (the "sun god"), of archery, prophecy, medicine, poetry, and music, etc., and was represented as the model of manly grace and beauty; -- called also Phebus.
Applied Hegel's idealism to literary criticism. Gave a new interpretation to poets' sentiments and ideals, and linked them to the civil history of Italy. New Italian idealism of about 1900 was based on his thought. -- L.V.
Apsaras ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana.
apsaras ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana.
Apsaras ::: “The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana.
archilochian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the satiric Greek poet Archilochus; as, Archilochian meter.
A related but different paradox is Grelling's (1908). Let us distinguish adjectives -- ie, words denoting properties -- as autological or i according as they do or do not have the property which they denote (in particular, adjectives denoting properties which cannot belong to words at all will be heterological). Then, e.g., the words polysyllabic, common, significant, prosaic are autological, while new, alive, useless, ambiguous, long are heterological. On their face, these definitions of autological and heterological are unobjectionable (compare the definition of onomatopoetic as similar in sound to that which it denotes). But paradox arises when we ask whether the word heterological is autological or heterological.
arise ::: 1. To get up from sleep or rest; to awaken; wake up. 2. To go up, come up, ascend on high, mount. Now only poet. **3. To come into being, action, or notice; originate; appear; spring up. 4. Of circumstances viewed as results: To spring, originate, or result from. 5. To rise from inaction, from the peaceful, quiet, or ordinary course of life. 6. To rise in violence or agitation, as the sea, the wind; to boil up as a fermenting fluid, the blood; so of the heart, wrath, etc. Now poet. 7. Of sounds: To come up aloud, or so as to be audible, to be heard aloud. arises, arising, arose, arisen. *(Sri Aurobindo also employs arisen as an adj.*)
"A Rishi is one who sees or discovers an inner truth and puts it into self-effective language — the mantra.” The Future Poetry
“A Rishi is one who sees or discovers an inner truth and puts it into self-effective language—the mantra.” The Future Poetry
aristophanic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Aristophanes, the Athenian comic poet.
art ::: --> The second person singular, indicative mode, present tense, of the substantive verb Be; but formed after the analogy of the plural are, with the ending -t, as in thou shalt, wilt, orig. an ending of the second person sing. pret. Cf. Be. Now used only in solemn or poetical style. ::: n.
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
asclepiad ::: n. --> A choriambic verse, first used by the Greek poet Asclepias, consisting of four feet, viz., a spondee, two choriambi, and an iambus.
asperse ::: v. t. --> To sprinkle, as water or dust, upon anybody or anything, or to besprinkle any one with a liquid or with dust.
To bespatter with foul reports or false and injurious charges; to tarnish in point of reputation or good name; to slander or calumniate; as, to asperse a poet or his writings; to asperse a man&
asphodel ::: a genus of liliaceous plants with very attractive white, pink or yellow flowers, mostly natives of the south of Europe; by the poets made an immortal flower, and said to cover the Elysian (heavenly, paradisal) fields.
Aswapati ::: Purani: “Aswapathy, the father of Savitri, has been significantly called by the poet ‘the Lord of Life’. (book II, Canto XV). The name suggests an affinity to Vedic symbolism. In the Veda, Aswa, the horse, is the symbol of life-energy or vital power. Aswa + aty, Lord, would mean the ‘Lord of Life’. In the poem King Aswapathy is the symbol of the aspiring soul of man as manifested in life on earth.”Savitri”—An Approach and a Study
ate ::: --> the preterit of Eat. ::: n. --> The goddess of mischievous folly; also, in later poets, the goddess of vengeance. ::: imp.
athenaeum ::: n. --> A temple of Athene, at Athens, in which scholars and poets were accustomed to read their works and instruct students.
A school founded at Rome by Hadrian.
A literary or scientific association or club.
A building or an apartment where a library, periodicals, and newspapers are kept for use.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
aurora ::: n. --> The rising light of the morning; the dawn of day; the redness of the sky just before the sun rises.
The rise, dawn, or beginning.
The Roman personification of the dawn of day; the goddess of the morning. The poets represented her a rising out of the ocean, in a chariot, with rosy fingers dropping gentle dew.
A species of crowfoot.
The aurora borealis or aurora australis (northern or
avernian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Avernus, a lake of Campania, in Italy, famous for its poisonous vapors, which ancient writers fancied were so malignant as to kill birds flying over it. It was represented by the poets to be connected with the infernal regions.
avesa ::: [entrance, possession]; exultation of the uplifting of the consciousness, elation of the inrush and passage [of poetical inspiration].
Bacon's theory of poetry also deserves consideration. Whereas reason adapts the mind to the nature of things, and science conquers nature by obeying her, poetry submits the shows of things to the desires of the mind and overcomes nature by allowing us in our imagination to escape from her. Out of present experience and the record of history, poetry builds its narrative and dramatic fancies. But it may also, in allegory and parable, picture symbolically scientific and philosophic truths and religious mysteries -- in which case it creates mythologies. Fr. Bacon, Works, 7 vols., 1857, ed. Spedding and Ellis. -- B.A.G.F.
ballad monger ::: --> A seller or maker of ballads; a poetaster.
bardic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to bards, or their poetry.
bardic ::: poetic.
bard ::: n. --> A professional poet and singer, as among the ancient Celts, whose occupation was to compose and sing verses in honor of the heroic achievements of princes and brave men.
Hence: A poet; as, the bard of Avon.
Alt. of Barde
The exterior covering of the trunk and branches of a tree; the rind.
Specifically, Peruvian bark.
bards ::: an ancient Celtic order of minstrel poets who composed and recited verses celebrating the legendary exploits of chieftains and heroes. 2. Poets, especially lyric poets.
barque ::: n. --> Formerly, any small sailing vessel, as a pinnace, fishing smack, etc.; also, a rowing boat; a barge. Now applied poetically to a sailing vessel or boat of any kind.
A three-masted vessel, having her foremast and mainmast square-rigged, and her mizzenmast schooner-rigged.
Same as 3d Bark, n.
beauty ::: “Beauty is the special divine Manifestation in the physical as Truth is in the Mind, Love in the heart, Power in the vital.” The Future Poetry
"Beauty is Ananda taking form — but the form need not be a physical shape. One speaks of a beautiful thought, a beautiful act, a beautiful soul. What we speak of as beauty is Ananda in manifestation; beyond manifestation beauty loses itself in Ananda or, you may say, beauty and Ananda become indistinguishably one.” The Future Poetry
“Beauty is Ananda taking form—but the form need not be a physical shape. One speaks of a beautiful thought, a beautiful act, a beautiful soul. What we speak of as beauty is Ananda in manifestation; beyond manifestation beauty loses itself in Ananda or, you may say, beauty and Ananda become indistinguishably one.” The Future Poetry
"Beauty is not the same as Delight, but like love it is an expression, a form of Ananda, created by Ananda and composed of Ananda.” The Future Poetry
“Beauty is not the same as Delight, but like love it is an expression, a form of Ananda, created by Ananda and composed of Ananda.” The Future Poetry
"Beauty is the way in which the physical expresses the Divine – but the principle and law of Beauty is something inward and spiritual and expresses itself through the form.” *The Future Poetry
“Beauty is the way in which the physical expresses the Divine—but the principle and law of Beauty is something inward and spiritual and expresses itself through the form.” The Future Poetry
beganst ::: a native English form of the verb, to begin, now only in formal and poetic usage.
Belphegor ::: Amal: “This name of a star brought in by Sri Aurobindo with powerful effect has practically no place in popular astronomy and figured rarely in past literary usage. In Syrian theology, Belphegor was a deity who symbolised the Sun. The Israelites also paid homage to him sometimes.” Sri Aurobindo—The Poet
bhava ::: 1. status of being. ::: 2. a becoming. ::: 3. a subjective state, one of the secondary subjective becomings of Nature (states of mind, affections of desire, movements of passion, the reactions of the senses, the limited and dual play of the reason, the turns of the feeling and moral sense). ::: 4. the affective nature. ::: 5. general sensation. ::: 6. [one of the sadanga]: the emotion or aesthetic feeling expressed by the form. ::: 7. [in poetry: feeling, mood, sentiment]. ::: bhavah [plural]
bindst ::: a native English form of the verb, to bind, now only in formal and poetic usage.
B. Lotze, Rudolph Hermann: (1817-1881) Empiricist in science, teleological idealist in philosophy, theist in religion, poet and artist at heart, Lotze conceded three spheres; Necessary truths, facts, and values. Mechanism holds sway in the field of natural science; it does not generate meaning but is subordinated to value and reason which evolved a specific plan for the world. Lotze's psycho-physically oriented medical psychology is an applied metaphysics in which the concept soul stands for the unity of experience. Science attempts the demonstration of a coherence in nature; being is that which is in relationship; "thing" is not a conglomeration of qualities but a unity achieved through law; mutual effect or influence is as little explicable as being: It is the monistic Absolute working upon itself. The ultimate, absolute substance, God, is the good and is personal, personality being the highest value, and the most valuable is also the most real. Lotze disclaimed the ability to know all answers: they rest with God. Unity of law, matter, force, and all aspects of being produce beauty, while aesthetic experience consists in Einfühlung. Main works: Metaphysik, 1841; Logik, 1842; Medezinische Psychologie, 1842; Gesch. der Aesthetik im Deutschland, 1868; Mikrokosmos, 3 vols., 1856-64 (Eng. tr. 1885); Logik 1874; Metaphysik, 1879 (Eng. tr. 1884). --K. F. L. Love: (in Max Scheler) Giving one's self to a "total being" (Gesamtwesen); it therefore discloses the essence of that being; for this reason love is, for Scheler, an aspect of phenomonelogical knowledge. -- P. A.
bourne ::: 1. A boundary; a limit. 2. A destination; a goal. Also fig. and poetic.
bower ::: a shaded, leafy recess; an arbour; also poetic, an abode.
bowwow ::: n. --> An onomatopoetic name for a dog or its bark. ::: a. --> Onomatopoetic; as, the bowwow theory of language; a bowwow word.
poet. A car or chariot, drawn by horses. fate-wain.
poetaster ::: n. --> An inferior rhymer, or writer of verses; a dabbler in poetic art.
poetastry ::: n. --> The works of a poetaster.
poetess ::: n. --> A female poet.
poetic ::: a. --> Alt. of Poetical
poetical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to poetry; suitable for poetry, or for writing poetry; as, poetic talent, theme, work, sentiments.
Expressed in metrical form; exhibiting the imaginative or the rhythmical quality of poetry; as, a poetical composition; poetical prose.
poetically ::: adv. --> In a poetic manner.
poetics ::: n. --> The principles and rules of the art of poetry.
poeticule ::: n. --> A poetaster.
poetized ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Poetize
poetize ::: v. i. --> To write as a poet; to compose verse; to idealize.
poetizing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Poetize
poet ::: n. --> One skilled in making poetry; one who has a particular genius for metrical composition; the author of a poem; an imaginative thinker or writer.
poetry ::: “All poetry is an inspiration, a thing breathed into the thinking organ from above; it is recorded in the mind, but is born in the higher principle of direct knowledge or ideal vision which surpasses mind. It is in reality a revelation. The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Human and Divine
poetry ::: n. --> The art of apprehending and interpreting ideas by the faculty of imagination; the art of idealizing in thought and in expression.
Imaginative language or composition, whether expressed rhythmically or in prose. Specifically: Metrical composition; verse; rhyme; poems collectively; as, heroic poetry; dramatic poetry; lyric or Pindaric poetry.
poetry ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All poetry is an inspiration, a thing breathed into the thinking organ from above; it is recorded in the mind, but is born in the higher principle of direct knowledge or ideal vision which surpasses mind. It is in reality a revelation. The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Human and Divine
poetship ::: n. --> The state or personality of a poet.
bringst ::: a native English form of the verb, to bring, now only in formal and poetic usage.
brotherhood ::: n. --> The state of being brothers or a brother.
An association for any purpose, as a society of monks; a fraternity.
The whole body of persons engaged in the same business, -- especially those of the same profession; as, the legal or medical brotherhood.
Persons, and, poetically, things, of a like kind.
"But the role of subliminal forces cannot be said to be small, since from there come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings towards a better self and better humanity without which man would be only a thinking animal — as also most of the art, poetry, philosophy, thirst for knowledge which relieve, if they do not yet dispel, the ignorance.” Letters on Yoga*
“But the role of subliminal forces cannot be said to be small, since from there come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings towards a better self and better humanity without which man would be only a thinking animal—as also most of the art, poetry, philosophy, thirst for knowledge which relieve, if they do not yet dispel, the ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
bzzzt, wrong "jargon" /bzt rong/ ({Usenet}, {Internet}) From the flim "Dead Poets Society", spoofing quiz shows such as "Truth or Consequences" where an incorrect answer earns a blast from the buzzer. An expression of mock-rude disagreement, often following a quote from another poster in a {forum}. The less abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is also common. [{Jargon File}] (2009-10-28)
cadence ::: 1. Balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory. 2. Music. A sequence of notes or chords that indicates the momentary or complete end of a composition, section, phrase, etc. 3. The flow or rhythm of events. 4. A recurrent rhythmical series; a flow, esp. the pattern in which something is experienced. 5. A slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading. cadences.
caledonia ::: n. --> The ancient Latin name of Scotland; -- still used in poetry.
calledst ::: a native English form of the verb, to call, now only in formal and poetic usage.
callest ::: a native English form of the verb, to call, now only in formal and poetic usage.
calliope ::: n. --> The Muse that presides over eloquence and heroic poetry; mother of Orpheus, and chief of the nine Muses.
One of the asteroids. See Solar.
A musical instrument consisting of a series of steam whistles, toned to the notes of the scale, and played by keys arranged like those of an organ. It is sometimes attached to steamboat boilers.
A beautiful species of humming bird (Stellula Calliope) of California and adjacent regions.
callst ::: a native English form of the verb, to call, now only in formal and poetic usage.
cambria ::: n. --> The ancient Latin name of Wales. It is used by modern poets.
camest ::: a native English form of the verb, to come, now only in formal and poetic usage.
cam"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb, to come, now only in formal and poetic usage.
can ::: --> an obs. form of began, imp. & p. p. of Begin, sometimes used in old poetry. [See Gan.] ::: n. --> A drinking cup; a vessel for holding liquids.
A vessel or case of tinned iron or of sheet metal, of various forms, but usually cylindrical; as, a can of tomatoes; an oil can; a
canst ::: a native English form of the adverb can, now only in formal or poetic usage.
casement ::: n. --> A window sash opening on hinges affixed to the upright side of the frame into which it is fitted. (Poetically) A window.
chamber ::: 1. Archaic or poetic: A room in a private house, esp. a bedroom. 2. An enclosed space; compartment. chamber"s, chambers, work-chamber.
chiaroscuro ::: 1. The arrangement of light and dark elements in a pictorial work of art. 2. *Poetic*: Contrasting sense as in, darkness and light, ‘joy and gloom", ‘praise and blame," etc.
China. The traditional basic concepts of Chinese metaphysics are ideal. Heaven (T'ien), the spiritual and moral power of cosmic and social order, that distributes to each thing and person its alloted sphere of action, is theistically and personalistically conceived in the Shu Ching (Book of History) and the Shih Ching (Book of Poetry). It was probably also interpreted thus by Confucius and Mencius, assuredly so by Motze. Later it became identified with Fate or impersonal, immaterial cosmic power. Shang Ti (Lord on High) has remained through Chinese history a theistic concept. Tao, as cosmic principle, is an impersonal, immaterial World Ground. Mahayana Buddhism introduced into China an idealistic influence. Pure metaphysical idealism was taught by the Buddhist monk Hsuan Ch'uang. Important Buddhist and Taoist influences appear in Sung Confucianism (Ju Chia). a distinctly idealistic movement. Chou Tun I taught that matter, life and mind emerge from Wu Chi (Pure Being). Shao Yung espoused an essential objective idealism: the world is the content of an Universal Consciousness. The Brothers Ch'eng Hsao and Ch'eng I, together with Chu Hsi, distinguished two primordial principles, an active, moral, aesthetic, and rational Law (Li), and a passive ether stuff (Ch'i). Their emphasis upon Li is idealistic. Lu Chiu Yuan (Lu Hsiang Shan), their opponent, is interpreted both as a subjective idealist and as a realist with a stiong idealistic emphasis. Similarly interpreted is Wang Yang Ming of the Ming Dynasty, who stressed the splritual and moral principle (Li) behind nature and man.
choosest ::: a native English form of the verb, to choose, now only in formal and poetic usage.
chylopoetic ::: a. --> Concerned in the formation of chyle; as, the chylopoetic organs.
circler ::: n. --> A mean or inferior poet, perhaps from his habit of wandering around as a stroller; an itinerant poet. Also, a name given to the cyclic poets. See under Cyclic, a.
circular ::: a. --> In the form of, or bounded by, a circle; round.
repeating itself; ending in itself; reverting to the point of beginning; hence, illogical; inconclusive; as, circular reasoning.
Adhering to a fixed circle of legends; cyclic; hence, mean; inferior. See Cyclic poets, under Cyclic.
Addressed to a circle, or to a number of persons having a common interest; circulated, or intended for circulation; as, a
claimest ::: a native English form of the verb, to claim, now only in formal and poetic usage.
claimst ::: a native English form of the verb, to claim, now only in formal and poetic usage.
climbst ::: a native English form of the verb, to climb, now only in formal and poetic usage.
climes ::: 1. Poetic: Regions or their climates; atmospheres. 2. The prevailing attitudes, standards or conditions of a group, period, or place.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: (1772-1834) Leading English poet of his generation along with his friend and associate, William Wordsworth. He was for a time a Unitarian preacher and his writings throughout display a keen interest in spiritual affairs. He was among the first to bring the German idealists to the attention of the English reading public. Of greatest philosophic interest among his prose works are Biographia Literaria, Aids to Reflection and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. His influence was greit upon his contemporaries and also upon the American transcendentalists. -- L.E.D.
coleridgian ::: a. --> Pertaining to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or to his poetry or metaphysics.
columbia ::: n. --> America; the United States; -- a poetical appellation given in honor of Columbus, the discoverer.
comest ::: a native English form of the verb, to come, now only in formal and poetic usage.
complainst ::: a native English form of the verb, to complain, now only in formal and poetic usage.
com"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb, to come, now only in formal and poetic usage.
consequence ::: “ Karma is nothing but the will of the Spirit in action, consequence nothing but the creation of will. What is in the will of being, expresses itself in karma and consequence. When the will is limited in mind, karma appears as a bondage and a limitation, consequence as a reaction or an imposition. But when the will of the being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become instead the joy of the creative spirit, the construction of the eternal mechanist, the word and drama of the eternal poet, the harmony of the eternal musician, the play of the eternal child.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
cosmogony ::: n. --> The creation of the world or universe; a theory or account of such creation; as, the poetical cosmogony of Hesoid; the cosmogonies of Thales, Anaxagoras, and Plato.
couldst ::: a native English form of the adverb could, now only in formal or poetic usage.
cretic ::: n. --> A poetic foot, composed of one short syllable between two long ones (- / -).
criedst ::: a native English form of the verb, to cry, now only in formal and poetic usage.
criest ::: a native English form of the verb, to cry, now only in formal and poetic usage.
dactyl ::: n. --> A poetical foot of three sylables (-- ~ ~), one long followed by two short, or one accented followed by two unaccented; as, L. tegm/n/, E. mer\b6ciful; -- so called from the similarity of its arrangement to that of the joints of a finger.
A finger or toe; a digit.
The claw or terminal joint of a leg of an insect or crustacean.
dantean ::: a. --> Relating to, emanating from or resembling, the poet Dante or his writings.
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
::: "Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense expression, the concentrated form of delight.” The Future Poetry*
“Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense expression, the concentrated form of delight.” The Future Poetry
desirest ::: a native English form of the verb, to desire, now only in formal and poetic usage.
dimeter ::: a. --> Having two poetical measures or meters. ::: n. --> A verse of two meters.
dissyllabic ::: a. --> Consisting of two syllables only; as, a dissyllabic foot in poetry.
distain ::: v. t. --> To tinge with a different color from the natural or proper one; to stain; to discolor; to sully; to tarnish; to defile; -- used chiefly in poetry.
distich ::: n. --> A couple of verses or poetic lines making complete sense; an epigram of two verses.
Alt. of Distichous
dithyramb ::: n. --> A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain.
divan ::: n. --> A book; esp., a collection of poems written by one author; as, the divan of Hafiz.
In Turkey and other Oriental countries: A council of state; a royal court. Also used by the poets for a grand deliberative council or assembly.
A chief officer of state.
A saloon or hall where a council is held, in Oriental countries, the state reception room in places, and in the houses of the
doest ::: a native English form of the verb, to do, now only in formal and poetic usage.
doggerel ::: a. --> Low in style, and irregular in measure; as, doggerel rhymes. ::: n. --> A sort of loose or irregular verse; mean or undignified poetry.
dome ::: n. --> A building; a house; an edifice; -- used chiefly in poetry.
A cupola formed on a large scale.
Any erection resembling the dome or cupola of a building; as the upper part of a furnace, the vertical steam chamber on the top of a boiler, etc.
A prism formed by planes parallel to a lateral axis which meet above in a horizontal edge, like the roof of a house; also, one of the planes of such a form.
drama ::: n. --> A composition, in prose or poetry, accommodated to action, and intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result. It is commonly designed to be spoken and represented by actors on the stage.
A series of real events invested with a dramatic unity and interest.
Dramatic composition and the literature pertaining to or
dreamst ::: a native English form of the verb, to dream, now only in formal and poetic usage.
drov"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to drive, now only in formal and poetic usage.
dusk ::: n. **1. The state or period of partial darkness between day and night; the dark part of twilight. 2. Partial darkness; shade; gloom. Dusk. adj. 3. Poetic. shady; gloomy. dusky.**
eatst ::: a native English form of the verb, to eat, now only in formal and poetic usage.
edge ::: n. 1. A dividing line; a border. Also fig. 2. Poet. A thin, sharpened side, as of the blade of a cutting instrument. 3. Fig. A brink or verge. 4. Sharpness or keenness of language, argument, tone of voice, appetite, desire, etc. flame-edge. *v. 5. To put a border or edge on . 6. Fig. To give keenness, sharpness, or urgency to. *edging.
elison ::: n. --> Division; separation.
The cutting off or suppression of a vowel or syllable, for the sake of meter or euphony; esp., in poetry, the dropping of a final vowel standing before an initial vowel in the following word, when the two words are drawn together.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: (1803-1882) American poet and essayist. His spirit of independence early led him to leave the pulpit for the lecture platform where he earned high rank as the leading transcendentalist and the foremost figure in the famous Concord group. His profound vision, his ringing spirit of individualism and his love of democracy place him among the New World's philosophic pantheon. His "The American Scholar," "The Over-Soul," ''Self-Reliance," "Compensation" and the Divinity School Address are perhaps the most famous of his lectures and essays. He edited The Dial, the official organ of the transcendental movement. His several trips to Europe brought him into contact with Coleridge and Wordsworth, but particularly with Carlyle.
enthusiasm ::: n. --> Inspiration as if by a divine or superhuman power; ecstasy; hence, a conceit of divine possession and revelation, or of being directly subject to some divine impulse.
A state of impassioned emotion; transport; elevation of fancy; exaltation of soul; as, the poetry of enthusiasm.
Enkindled and kindling fervor of soul; strong excitement of feeling on behalf of a cause or a subject; ardent and imaginative zeal or interest; as, he engaged in his profession with
epic ::: adj. 1. An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero. 2. Resembling or suggesting such poetry. 3. Heroic; majestic; impressively great. 4. Of unusually great size or extent. n. 5. An epic poem. 6. Any composition resembling an epic. epics.
epigrammatical ::: --> Writing epigrams; dealing in epigrams; as, an epigrammatical poet.
Suitable to epigrams; belonging to epigrams; like an epigram; pointed; piquant; as, epigrammatic style, wit, or sallies of fancy.
epopoeia ::: n. --> An epic poem; epic poetry.
erative ::: a. --> Pertaining to the Muse Erato who presided over amatory poetry.
erato ::: n. --> The Muse who presided over lyric and amatory poetry.
erin ::: n. --> An early, and now a poetic, name of Ireland.
ethopoetic ::: --> Expressing character.
eve ::: evening, fig., poet. eves.
eyen ::: n. pl. --> Eyes. ::: n. --> Plural of eye; -- now obsolete, or used only in poetry.
fabliau ::: n. --> One of the metrical tales of the Trouveres, or early poets of the north of France.
falchion ::: n. --> A broad-bladed sword, slightly curved, shorter and lighter than the ordinary sword; -- used in the Middle Ages.
A name given generally and poetically to a sword, especially to the swords of Oriental and fabled warriors.
Fechner, Gustav Theodor: (1801-1887) Philosophizing during the ascendency of modern science and the wane of metaphysical speculation, Fechner though as physicist believing in induction, analogy, history and pragmatic procedure, expounded a pure, objective idealism of Berkeley's type. With Oken and Schelling as spiritual guides, he held that everything is in consciousness, there are no substances, no things-in-themselves, everything, including animals, plants, earth, and heavens, shares the life of the soul (alles ist beseelt). In a consequent psycho-physicalism he interpreted soul (which is no substance, but the simplifying power in contrast to the diversifying physical) as appearance to oneself, and matter as appearance to others, both representing the same reality differentiated only in point of view. He applied the law of threshold to consciousness, explaining thus its relative discontinuity on one level while postulating its continuity on another, either higher or lower level. In God, as the highest rung of existence, there is infinite consciousness without an objective world. Evil arises inexplicably from darker levels of consciousness. With poetic imagination Fechner defended the "day-view" of the world in which phenomena are the real content of consciousness, against the "night-view" of science which professes knowledge of the not-sensation-conditioned colorless, soundless world.
fervent ::: poetic: boiling, burning, or glowing; fervid; heated
fescennine ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or resembling, the Fescennines. ::: n. --> A style of low, scurrilous, obscene poetry originating in fescennia.
findst ::: a native English form of the verb, to find, now only in formal and poetic usage.
Fine Arts: Opposite of mechanical arts. Distinction of the arts whose principle is based on beauty (poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, music). -- L.V.
flame "messaging" To rant, to speak or write incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude or with hostility toward a particular person or group of people. "Flame" is used as a verb ("Don't flame me for this, but..."), a flame is a single flaming message, and "flamage" /flay'm*j/ the content. Flamage may occur in any medium (e.g. spoken, {electronic mail}, {Usenet} news, {web}). Sometimes a flame will be delimited in text by marks such as ""flame on"..."flame off"". The term was probably independently invented at several different places. Mark L. Levinson says, "When I joined the Harvard student radio station (WHRB) in 1966, the terms flame and flamer were already well established there to refer to impolite ranting and to those who performed it. Communication among the students who worked at the station was by means of what today you might call a paper-based Usenet group. Everyone wrote comments to one another in a large ledger. Documentary evidence for the early use of flame/flamer is probably still there for anyone fanatical enough to research it." It is reported that "flaming" was in use to mean something like "interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions" (late-night bull sessions) at Carleton College during 1968-1971. {Usenetter} Marc Ramsey, who was at {WPI} from 1972 to 1976, says: "I am 99% certain that the use of "flame" originated at WPI. Those who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use a {TTY} for "real work" came to be known as "flaming asshole lusers". Other particularly annoying people became "flaming asshole ravers", which shortened to "flaming ravers", and ultimately "flamers". I remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't think "flame on/off" was ever much used at WPI." See also {asbestos}. It is possible that the hackish sense of "flame" is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida", Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on {Usenet}. [{Jargon File}] (2001-03-11)
fleest ::: a native English form of the verb, to flee, now only in formal and poetic usage.
flood ::: n. **1. A large body of water; a great flow or stream of any fluid; any great overwhelming quantity, also poet. & fig. 2. The rise and flowing in of the tide. 3. The rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto normally dry land. 4. Any great outpouring or stream. floods. v. 5. To flow or pour in or as if in a flood. flooded, flooding. ::: And heard the questioning of the unsatisfied flood **
flut"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to flute, now only in formal and poetic usage.
From the subliminal come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings tow’ards a better self and better humanity without which man svould be only a thinking animal — as also most of the art, , philosophy, poetry, thirst for knowledge which relieve, if they do not yet dispel, the ignorance.
garland ::: n. --> The crown of a king.
A wreath of chaplet made of branches, flowers, or feathers, and sometimes of precious stones, to be worn on the head like a crown; a coronal; a wreath.
The top; the thing most prized.
A book of extracts in prose or poetry; an anthology.
A sort of netted bag used by sailors to keep provision in.
A grommet or ring of rope lashed to a spar for convenience
gayatri. :::the name for a Sanskrit poetical meter that contains three lines of eight syllables each
Gay, John: (1669-1745) English schohr and clergyman, not to be confused with his contemporary, the poet and dramatist of the same name. He is important in the field of ethics for his Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality. This little work influenced David Hartley in his formulation of Associationism in Psychology and likewise sened to suggest the foundation for the later English Utilitarian School. -- L.E.D.
gaze ::: n. 1. The act of looking steadily, intently and with fixed attention. v. 2. To look long and fixedly, esp. in wonder or admiration, poet. **gazes, gazed, gazing, sun-gaze, Truth-gaze, star-gazer, outward-gazing, sun-gazing.**
gem ::: n. --> A bud.
A precious stone of any kind, as the ruby, emerald, topaz, sapphire, beryl, spinel, etc., especially when cut and polished for ornament; a jewel.
Anything of small size, or expressed within brief limits, which is regarded as a gem on account of its beauty or value, as a small picture, a verse of poetry, a witty or wise saying.
genius ::: n. --> A good or evil spirit, or demon, supposed by the ancients to preside over a man&
Genres: Types of art to which special rules and independent developments were attributed. For example: in poetry -- epic, lyric, dramatic; in painting -- historic, portrait, landscape; in music -- oratorical, symphonic, operatic. -- L.V.
georgic ::: a. --> A rural poem; a poetical composition on husbandry, containing rules for cultivating lands, etc.; as, the Georgics of Virgil.
Alt. of Georgical
gest ::: an abbreviated, poetic form of gesture.
givest ::: a native English form of the verb, to give, now only in formal and poetic usage.
glaive ::: n. --> A weapon formerly used, consisting of a large blade fixed on the end of a pole, whose edge was on the outside curve; also, a light lance with a long sharp-pointed head.
A sword; -- used poetically and loosely.
gleam ::: “That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
glimpse ::: n. 1. A very brief, passing look, sight, or view. 2. A momentary shining, a flash. lit. and fig. glimpses. v. 3. To catch sight of briefly or momentarily. 4. To obtain a brief, incomplete view of. Now only poet. glimpses, glimpsed, glimpsing.
glyconic ::: a. --> Consisting of a spondee, a choriamb, and a pyrrhic; -- applied to a kind of verse in Greek and Latin poetry. ::: n. --> A glyconic verse.
gnawest ::: a native English form of the verb, to gnaw, now only in formal and poetic usage.
goliardery ::: n. --> The satirical or ribald poetry of the Goliards.
gradus ::: n. --> A dictionary of prosody, designed as an aid in writing Greek or Latin poetry.
gules ::: n. --> The tincture red, indicated in seals and engraved figures of escutcheons by parallel vertical lines. Hence, used poetically for a red color or that which is red.
hadst ::: a native English form of the verb to have, now only in formal or poetic usage.
Ha-Levi, Judah: (b. ca. 1080, d. ca. 1140) Poet and philosopher. His Kuzari (Arabic Kitab Al-Khazari), written in dialogue form, has a double purpose. First, as its subtitle, A Book of Proofs and Arguments in Defense of the Humiliated Religion, indicates, it aims to prove the dignity and worth of Judaism. Secondly, he endeavors to show the insufficiency of philosophy and the superiority of the truths of revealed religion to those arrived at by logic. The admission of both Christianity and Islam that Judaism is their source proves the first. The exaltation of intuition as a means of certainty in matters of religion, and the claim that the prophet is the highest type of man rather than the philosopher purposes to substantiate the second. He endows the Jewish people with a special religio-ethical sense which is their share only and constitutes a quasi-biological quality. He assigns also a special importance to Palestine as a contributory factor in the spiritual development of his people, for only there can this religio-ethical sense come to full expression. -- M.W.
hardly ::: “Your ‘barely enough’, instead of the finer and more suggestive ‘hardly’, falls flat upon my ear; one cannot substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means intellectually the same thing; ‘hardly’ is the mot juste in this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not only juste but inevitable comes to replace it… . On this point I may add that in certain contexts ‘barely’ would be the right word, as for instance, ‘There is barely enough food left for two or three meals’, where ‘hardly’ would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the other way about in this line. Letters on Savitri
H. B. Curry, Consistency and completeness of the theory of combinators, ibid , pp. 54-61. Comedy: In Aristotle (Poetics), a play in which chief characters behave worse than men do in daily life, as contrasted with tragedy, where the main characters act more nobly. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates argues at the end that a writer of good comedies is able to write good tragedies. See Comic. Metaphysically, comedy in Hegel consists of regarding reality as exhausted in a single category. Cf. Bergson, Le rire (Laughter). Commentator, The: Name usually used for Averroes by the medieval authors of the 13th century and later. In the writings of the grammarians (modistae, dealing with modis significandi) often used for Petrus Heliae. -- R.A.
heads ::: poetry, prose and scholarship", with further subdivisions of each of these such as philosophy (darsana) under prose, and philology (nirukta) under scholarship; sahitya itself is sometimes listed separately from some of these divisions and subdivisions, seeming then to refer mainly to general prose writing.
hearest ::: a native English form of the verb, to hear, now only in formal and poetic usage.
hearkened ::: listened attentively to; heeded. Now only poet.
He lived in the time when the moral and cultural traditions of Chou were in rapid decline. Attempting to uphold the Chou culture, he taught poetry, history, ceremonies and music to 3,000 pupils, becoming the first Chinese educator to offer education to any who cared to come with or without tuition. He taught literature, human conduct, being one's true self and honesty in social relationships. He wrote the chronicles called Spring and Autumn. His tacit judgments on social and political events were such that "unruly ministers and villainous sons were afraid" to repeat their evil deeds.
hemistich ::: n. --> Half a poetic verse or line, or a verse or line not completed.
hem ::: pron. --> Them ::: interj. --> An onomatopoetic word used as an expression of hesitation, doubt, etc. It is often a sort of voluntary half cough, loud or subdued, and would perhaps be better expressed by hm.
He severely disciplined himself and practiced what he taught. He loved poetry, ceremonies and music. He was serious, honest, polite, filially pious towards his mother, stern toward his son, and friendly to his pupils. His most reliable teachings are found in the Lun Yu (Analects), aphorisms recorded by his followers. -- W.T.C.
hippocrene ::: n. --> A fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, fabled to have burst forth when the ground was struck by the hoof of Pegasus. Also, its waters, which were supposed to impart poetic inspiration.
::: ". . . Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through [gross forms created by Virat] those forms to see his own images behind them.” *The Future Poetry
“… Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through [gross forms created by Virat] those forms to see his own images behind them.” The Future Poetry
homeric ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Homer, the most famous of Greek poets; resembling the poetry of Homer.
horatian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Horace, the Latin poet, or resembling his style.
hyaline ::: a. --> Glassy; resembling glass; consisting of glass; transparent, like crystal. ::: n. --> A poetic term for the sea or the atmosphere.
The pellucid substance, present in cells in process of development, from which, according to some embryologists, the cell
Hyperbole: (Gr. hyperbole, over-shooting, excess) In rhetoric, that figure of speech according to which expressions gain their effect through exaggeration. The representation of things as greater or less than they really are, not intended to be accepted literally. Aristotle relates, for example, that when the winner of a mule-race paid enough money to a poet who was not anxious to praise half-asses, the poet wrote. "Hail, daughters of storm-footed steeds" (Rhetoric, III. ii. 14). -- J.K.F.
idyl ::: n. --> A short poem; properly, a short pastoral poem; as, the idyls of Theocritus; also, any poem, especially a narrative or descriptive poem, written in an eleveted and highly finished style; also, by extension, any artless and easily flowing description, either in poetry or prose, of simple, rustic life, of pastoral scenes, and the like.
improvisation ::: n. --> The act or art of composing and rendering music, poetry, and the like, extemporaneously; as, improvisation on the organ.
That which is improvised; an impromptu.
“In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or a possession of the mind by a greater power.” Letters on Poetry and Art
(In Aesthetics): A movement in both art and general aesthetic theory which was particularly widespread and influential in the last years of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. So interpreted, it is especially associated with Novalis, the Schlegels, and Jean Paul Richter in Germany, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Lamartine in France; Blake, Scott, the Lake Poets, Shelley, and Byron in England. As a general attitude toward art and its function, as an interpretation of the goodness, beauty, and purpose of life, romanticism has always existed and can be confined to no one period. The essence of romanticism, either as an attitude or as a conscious program, is an intense interest in nature, and an attempt to seize natural phenomena in a direct, immediate, and naive manner. Romanticism thus regards all forms, rules, conventions, and manners as artificial constructs and as hindrances to the grasp, enjoyment, and expression of nature, hence its continual opposition to any kind of classicism (q.v.), whose formalities it treats as fetters. Romanticism stresses the values of sincerity, spontaneity, and passion, as against the restraint and cultivation demanded by artistic forms and modes. It reasserts the primacy of feeling, imagination, and sentiment, as opposed to reason. It maintains that art should concern itself with the particular and the concrete, observing and reporting accurately the feelings aroused by nature, with no idealization or generalization. It commands the artist to feel freely and deeply, and to express what he has felt with no restraints, either artistic or social. It seeks in works of art a stimulus to imagination and feeling, a point of departure for free activity, rather than an object that it can accept and contemplate.
In aesthetics: The sense of depth and distance in painting as in poetry. Term used also for time elapsed. -- J.K.F.
inconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” *Letters on Savitri
". . . in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe — or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it — ‘an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force".” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient is the last resort of the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
"The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga :::
"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.” The Life Divine
"Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine. Letters on Savitri :::
"Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone". One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don"t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
**inconscient, Inconscient"s.**
In its narrower meaning, the fine arts and literature. The problem of the distinction and classification of the arts originated with Lessing in reaction to the interference of poetical values in painting and vice versa. He distinguished poetry dealing with consecutive actions from painting concerned with figures coexisting in space. Later, aestheticians divided the arts into many classifications. Zimmermann, a pupil of Herbart, distinguished three groups: arts of material representation (architecture, sculpture, etc.), arts of perceptive representation (painting, music). arts of the representation of thought (poetry). This partition suggested to Fiedler the aesthetics of pure visibility, to Hanslick the aesthetics of pure musicality. And from Fiedler's idea was derived the so-called Science of Art independent of aesthetics. -- L.V.
::: "Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” *Letters on Yoga
"Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” Letters on Yoga
“Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” Letters on Yoga
In organic bodies matter may become conscious. Mind, being an activity of the body, and unsubstantial, is not causally effective, but simply entertains and contemplates essences both enacted and unenacted. Its registration of the natural functions and drives of the body of which it is the aura, is desire, which gives values like truth, goodness, and beauty to the essences entertained. The desire to know, satisfied by intelligibility, creates science, which is investigation of the world of enacted essences, where alone the explanation of things is to be found.The natural desire to experience social harmony and to contemplate beauty creates morality, art, poetry and religion, which entertain in imagination and seek to make concrete by action, combinations of essences, often unenacted and purely ideal.
". . . in the Veda, Lord of the hosts of delight; in later mythology, the Gandharvas are musicians of heaven, ‘beautiful, brave and melodious beings, the artists, musicians, poets and shining warriors of heaven". . . .” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works ::: *Gandharvas.
“… in the Veda, Lord of the hosts of delight; in later mythology, the Gandharvas are musicians of heaven, ‘beautiful, braveand melodiousbeings, the artists, musicians, poets and shining warriors of heaven’….” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works. Gandharvas
intuition ::: direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process. intuition"s, intuitions, half-intuition.
Sri Aurobindo: "Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.” *The Life Divine
"Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ``stable lightnings"". When this original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"I use the word ‘intuition" for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word ‘consciousness" and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.” *The Life Divine - Sri Aurobindo"s footnote.
"For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret Supermind. . . .” The Life Divine
". . . intuition is born of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and indications and gathered data.” The Life Divine
"Intuition is above illumined Mind which is simply higher Mind raised to a great luminosity and more open to modified forms of intuition and inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
"Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses etc. But the limitation of the Intuition as compared with the supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. Also in coming into the mind it gets mixed with the mental movement and forms a kind of intuitive mind activity which is not the pure truth, but something in between the higher Truth and the mental seeking. It can lead the consciousness through a sort of transitional stage and that is practically its function.” Letters on Yoga
“Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ``stable lightnings’’. When this original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.” The Life Divine
Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into andmodified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and th
refore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of stable lightnings.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 983
“Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone’ but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone’. One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don’t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
Jhumur: “The creative force, the poet, the creator. It is the bird of eternity.”
kabiwalas [Beng.] ::: [a class of poetasters who specialised in the art of mutual jibing in verse].
kavi ::: poet; (in the Veda) seer, one who is "possessed of the Truthconsciousness and using its faculties of vision, inspiration, intuition, discrimination".
kavi samrat ::: [poet-emperor].
kavi ::: seer; poet (in classical Sanskrit the word is applied to any maker of verse or even of prose, but in the Veda it meant the poet-seer who saw and found the inspired word of his vision). ::: kavayah [plural] ::: kavibhih [instrumental plural]
kavya ::: poetry; the poetic faculty, the power of self-expression in the kavya rhythmic language of poetry which is "the highest form of speech available to man for the expression whether of his self-vision or of his world-vision"; the writing of poetry, part of sahitya, including work in the "epic, dramatic and the minor forms which again include narrative, lyric and reflective".
keel ::: 1. The principal structural member of a ship or boat, running lengthwise along the center line from bow to stern, to which the frames are attached. 2. A poetic word for ship.
keepest ::: a native English form of the verb, to keep, now only in formal and poetic usage.
knowest ::: a native English form of the verb, to know, now only in formal and poetic usage.
labored ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Labor ::: a. --> Bearing marks of labor and effort; elaborately wrought; not easy or natural; as, labored poetry; a labored style.
laureate ::: a. --> Crowned, or decked, with laurel. ::: n. --> One crowned with laurel; a poet laureate. ::: v. i.
leadst ::: a native English form of the verb, to lead, now only in formal and poetic usage.
ledst ::: the past tense of the native English form of the verb, to lead, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lendst ::: a native English form of the verb, to lend, now only in formal and poetic usage.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: (1729-1781) German dramatist and critic. He is best known in the philosophic field for his treatise on the limitations of poetry and the plastic arts in the famous "Laokoon." In the drama, "Nathan the Wise," he has added to the world's literature a profound plea for religious toleration. -- L.E.D.
livest ::: a native English form of the verb, to live, now only in formal and poetic usage.
liv"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to live, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lookst ::: a native English form of the verb, to look, now only in formal and poetic usage.
loosenest ::: a native English form of the verb, to loosen, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lovd"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to love, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lovest ::: a native English form of the verb, to love, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lov"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to love, now only in formal and poetic usage.
lyre ::: n. --> A stringed instrument of music; a kind of harp much used by the ancients, as an accompaniment to poetry.
One of the constellations; Lyra. See Lyra.
lyric ::: a. --> Alt. of Lyrical ::: n. --> A lyric poem; a lyrical composition.
A composer of lyric poems.
A verse of the kind usually employed in lyric poetry; -- used chiefly in the plural.
lyrical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a lyre or harp.
Fitted to be sung to the lyre; hence, also, appropriate for song; -- said especially of poetry which expresses the individual emotions of the poet.
Lyric: a. Literary genre pertaining to the absolute uniqueness of poets' sensations,
lyrist ::: 1. Music. One who plays a lyre. 2. A lyric poet.
lyrist ::: n. --> A musician who plays on the harp or lyre; a composer of lyrical poetry.
macaronic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or like, macaroni (originally a dish of mixed food); hence, mixed; confused; jumbled.
Of or pertaining to the burlesque composition called macaronic; as, macaronic poetry. ::: n. --> A heap of thing confusedly mixed together; a jumble.
machinery ::: n. --> Machines, in general, or collectively.
The working parts of a machine, engine, or instrument; as, the machinery of a watch.
The supernatural means by which the action of a poetic or fictitious work is carried on and brought to a catastrophe; in an extended sense, the contrivances by which the crises and conclusion of a fictitious narrative, in prose or verse, are effected.
The means and appliances by which anything is kept in
Madhav: “the poet uses the word ‘tenant’ to hint that Aswapathi’s presence on earth was only temporary; he was not a permanent resident of the earth; he was someone from above, from elsewhere, tenanting this little plot of earth for a particular purpose.” Sat-Sang Vol. VIII
Main works: Sense and Beauty, 1896; Interpret. of Poetry and Religion, 1900; Life of Reason, 5 vols , 1905-6 (Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, Reason in Science); Winds of Doctrine, 1913; Egotism in German Philosophy, 1915; Character and Opinion in the U. S., 1920; Skepticism and Animal Faith, 1923; Realms of Being, 4 vols., 1927-40 (Realm of Essence, Realm of Matter, Realm of Truth, Realm of Spirit). -- B.A.G.F. Sarva-darsana-sangraha: (Skr.) A work by Madhvavacarya, professing to be a collection (sangraha) of all (sarva) philosophic views (darsana) or schools. It includes systems which acknowledge and others which reject Vedic (s.v.) authority, such as the Carvaka, Buddhist and Jaina schools (which see). -- K.F.L.
maker ::: n. --> One who makes, forms, or molds; a manufacturer; specifically, the Creator.
The person who makes a promissory note.
One who writes verses; a poet.
makest ::: a native English form of the verb, to make, now only in formal and poetic usage.
Man alive, your proposed emendations are an admirable exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor "slow miraculous” above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence. First of all, you shift my "dimly” out of the way and transfer it to something to which it does not inwardly belongs make it an epithet of the gesture or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase "a gesture came” without anything to psychicise it becomes simply something that "happened”, "came” being a poetic equivalent for "happened”, instead of the expression of the slow coming of the gesture. The words "slow” and "dimly” assure this sense of motion and this concreteness to the word"s sense here. Remove one or both whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and as for the last its "came” gets another meaning and one feels that somebody very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was quite a miracle that it came out at all! "Dimly miraculous” means what precisely or what "miraculously dim” — it was miraculous that it managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after all? No doubt they try to mean something else — but these interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is necessary for the dawn"s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable? Letters on Savitri
Man alive, your proposed emendations are an admirable exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor”slow miraculous” above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence. First of all, you shift my”dimly” out of the way and transfer it to something to which it does not inwardly belongs make it an epithet of the gesture or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase”a gesture came” without anything to psychicise it becomes simply something that”happened”,”came” being a poetic equivalent for”happened”, instead of the expression of the slow coming of the gesture. The words”slow” and”dimly” assure this sense of motion and this concreteness to the word’s sense here. Remove one or both whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and as for the last its”came” gets another meaning and one feels that somebody very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was quite a miracle that it came out at all!”Dimly miraculous” means what precisely or what”miraculously dim”—it was miraculous that it managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after all? No doubt they try to mean something else—but these interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is necessary for the dawn’s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable? Letters on Savitri
Mantra: (Skr.) Pious thought couched in repeated prayerful utterances, for meditation or charm. Also the poetic portion of the Veda (q.v.). In Shaktism (q.v.) and elsewhere the holy syllables to which as manifestations of the eternal word or sound (cf. iabda, vac, aksara) is ascribed great mystic significance and power. -- K.F.L.
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” *The Future Poetry
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
mantra ::: : “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
marge ::: poet. margin, edge, material or immaterial.
mar ::: to damage or spoil to a certain extent; to render less perfect, attractive, useful; impair or spoil. Now poet. or rhet. **marred.**
mastersinger ::: n. --> One of a class of poets which flourished in Nuremberg and some other cities of Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries. They bound themselves to observe certain arbitrary laws of rhythm.
MATT RENTSCHLER ::: is a poet, arts scholar, Co-Director of the Integral Art Center, and Managing Editor of AQAL: Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his mate, Channon.
Meaning, Kinds of: In semiotic (q. v.) several kinds of meaning, i.e. of the function of an expression in language and the content it conveys, are distinguished. An expression (sentence) has cognitive (or theoretical, assertive) meaning, if it asserts something and hence is either true or false. In this case, it is called a cognitive sentence or (cognitive, genuine) statement; it has usually the form of a declarative sentence. If an expression (a sentence) has cognitive meaning, its truth-value (q. v.) depends in general upon both the (cognitive, semantical) meaning of the terms occurring, and some facts referred to by the sentence. If it does depend on both (a) and (b), the sentence has factual (synthetic, material) meaning and is called a factual (synthetic, material) sentence. If, however, the truth-value depends upon (a) alone, the sentence has a (merely) logical meaning (or formal meaning, see Formal 1). In this case, if it is true, it is called logically true or analytic (q. v.); if it is false, it is called logically false or contradictory. An expression has an expressive meaning (or function) in so far as it expresses something of the state of the speaker; this kind of meaning may for instance contain pictorial, emotive, and volitional components (e.g. lyrical poetry, exclamations, commands). An expression may or may not have, in addition to its expressive meaning, a cognitive meaning; if not, it is said to have a merely expressive meaning. If an expression has a merely expressive meaning but is mistaken as being a cognitive statement, it is sometimes called a pseudo-statement. According to logical positivism (see Scientific Empiricism, IC) many sentences in metaphysics are pseudo-statements (compare Anti-metaphysics, 2).
measure ::: n. 1. A unit of standard of measurement. 2. The extent, quantity, dimensions, etc. of (something), ascertained esp. by comparison with a standard. 3. Bounds or limits. 4. A definite or known quality or quantity measured out. 5. A short rhythmical movement or arrangement, as in poetry or music. measures. *v. 6. To determine the size, amount, etc. 7. To estimate the relative amount, value, etc., of, by comparison with some standard. 8. To travel or move over as if measuring. *measured, measuring.
mercury ::: n. --> A Latin god of commerce and gain; -- treated by the poets as identical with the Greek Hermes, messenger of the gods, conductor of souls to the lower world, and god of eloquence.
A metallic element mostly obtained by reduction from cinnabar, one of its ores. It is a heavy, opaque, glistening liquid (commonly called quicksilver), and is used in barometers, thermometers, ect. Specific gravity 13.6. Symbol Hg (Hydrargyrum). Atomic weight 199.8. Mercury has a molecule which consists of only one atom. It was
Metamathematics: See Proof theory, and Syntax, logical. Metaphor: Rhetorical figure transposing a term from its original concept to another and similar one. In its origin, all language was metaphoric; so was poetry. Metaphor is a short fable (Vico). -- L.V.
metred ::: v. 1. Composed verses; set to poetry. adj. **2.** Divided into a rhythmic pattern, or in a measured arrangement.
metre ::: n. --> Rhythmical arrangement of syllables or words into verses, stanzas, strophes, etc.; poetical measure, depending on number, quantity, and accent of syllables; rhythm; measure; verse; also, any specific rhythmical arrangements; as, the Horatian meters; a dactylic meter.
A poem.
A measure of length, equal to 39.37 English inches, the standard of linear measure in the metric system of weights and
mightst ::: a native English form of the adverb might, now only in formal or poetic usage.
minerva ::: n. --> The goddess of wisdom, of war, of the arts and sciences, of poetry, and of spinning and weaving; -- identified with the Grecian Pallas Athene.
minnesinger ::: n. --> A love-singer; specifically, one of a class of German poets and musicians who flourished from about the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the fourteenth century. They were chiefly of noble birth, and made love and beauty the subjects of their verses.
minstrel ::: n. --> In the Middle Ages, one of an order of men who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang verses to the accompaniment of a harp or other instrument; in modern times, a poet; a bard; a singer and harper; a musician.
minstrels ::: medieval entertainers who traveled from place to place, especially to sing and recite poetry.
missioned ::: adj. Chiefly poet. Charged with a mission.
mockst ::: a native English form of the verb, to mock, now only in formal and poetic usage.
morn ::: n. --> The first part of the day; the morning; -- used chiefly in poetry.
mould ::: n. 1. An often hollow matrix or form by which something is shaped; a model, a pattern. 2. Bodily form, body. Chiefly poet. **3. Poetic, the earth. moulds, moulders. v. 4. To work into a shape; fashion a material into a form. Chiefly poet. 5. To shape of form in or on a mould. moulds, moulded, moulding. adj. moulding. 6. Forming, shaping. moulded. 7. **Shaped or cast in a mould; made according to a mould; cut or shaped to a mould.
mount ::: v. --> A mass of earth, or earth and rock, rising considerably above the common surface of the surrounding land; a mountain; a high hill; -- used always instead of mountain, when put before a proper name; as, Mount Washington; otherwise, chiefly in poetry.
A bulwark for offense or defense; a mound.
A bank; a fund.
That upon which a person or thing is mounted
A horse.
mournst ::: a native English form of the verb, to mourn, now only in formal and poetic usage.
mov"st ::: a native English contracted form of the verb to move, now only in formal and poetic usage.
multitudinous ::: 1. Very numerous; existing in great numbers. 2. Consisting of many parts. 3. Populous; crowded, poet.
musal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Muses, or to Poetry.
museless ::: a. --> Unregardful of the Muses; disregarding the power of poetry; unpoetical.
muse ::: n. 1. A state of abstraction or contemplation; reverie. 2. The goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like. musings, musers. *v. 3. To be absorbed in one"s thoughts; engage in meditation. 4. To consider or say thoughtfully. mused, musing. adj. *mused. 5. Perplexed, bewildered, bemused. musing. 6. Being absorbed in thoughts; reflecting deeply; contemplating; engaged in meditation. muse-lipped.
muse ::: n. --> A gap or hole in a hedge, hence, wall, or the like, through which a wild animal is accustomed to pass; a muset.
One of the nine goddesses who presided over song and the different kinds of poetry, and also the arts and sciences; -- often used in the plural.
A particular power and practice of poetry.
A poet; a bard.
To think closely; to study in silence; to meditate.
myriad ::: n. 1. Ten thousand. 2. A very great or indefinitely great number of persons or things. myriads. *adj. 3. Constituting a very large, indefinite number; innumerable. Chiefly poet. *myriad-motioned.
mythopoetic ::: a. --> Making or producing myths or mythical tales.
n. 1. An arched structure, usually of masonry or concrete, serving to cover a space. Also fig. 2. An arched overhead covering, such as the sky, that resembles the architectural structure in form. Chiefly poet. v. **3. vaulted. **Having a hemispherical vault or dome.
nosopoetic ::: a. --> Producing diseases.
numerous ::: a. --> Consisting of a great number of units or individual objects; being many; as, a numerous army.
Consisting of poetic numbers; rhythmical; measured and counted; melodious; musical.
o ::: 1. Used before a name or noun in direct address, esp. in solemn or poetic language, to lend earnestness. 2. Used to express surprise or strong emotion.
obiyuary ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the death of a person or persons; as, an obituary notice; obituary poetry.
ode ::: n. --> A short poetical composition proper to be set to music or sung; a lyric poem; esp., now, a poem characterized by sustained noble sentiment and appropriate dignity of style.
odeon ::: n. --> A kind of theater in ancient Greece, smaller than the dramatic theater and roofed over, in which poets and musicians submitted their works to the approval of the public, and contended for prizes; -- hence, in modern usage, the name of a hall for musical or dramatic performances.
o"er ::: a poetic contraction of over.
oft ::: poet. Often.
onomatopoetic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to onomatopoeia; characterized by onomatopoeia; imitative; as, an onomatopoetic writer or word.
onomatope ::: n. --> An imitative word; an onomatopoetic word.
onomatopoeic ::: a. --> Onomatopoetic.
orb ::: 1. A sphere or spherical object. 2. An eye or eyeball. poet. and rhet. 3. A sphere or celestial body, such as the sun or the moon. 4. Something of circular form; a circle or an orbit. 5. *Fig. A range of endeavor or activity; a province. *orbs, moon-orb.
orphean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Orpheus, the mythic poet and musician; as, Orphean strains.
orpheus ::: n. --> The famous mythic Thracian poet, son of the Muse Calliope, and husband of Eurydice. He is reputed to have had power to entrance beasts and inanimate objects by the music of his lyre.
outpoured ::: flowed out rapidly; poured out. (Chiefly poetic.)
overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga
"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine
"The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.” The Life Divine
"The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri
"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga
*Overmind"s.
ovidian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Latin poet Ovid; resembling the style of Ovid.
paracrostic ::: n. --> A poetical composition, in which the first verse contains, in order, the first letters of all the verses of the poem.
parallelism ::: n. --> The quality or state of being parallel.
Resemblance; correspondence; similarity.
Similarity of construction or meaning of clauses placed side by side, especially clauses expressing the same sentiment with slight modifications, as is common in Hebrew poetry; e. g.: --//At her feet he bowed, he fell:/Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judg. v. 27.
partiality ::: n. --> The quality or state of being partial; inclination to favor one party, or one side of a question, more than the other; undue bias of mind.
A predilection or inclination to one thing rather than to others; special taste or liking; as, a partiality for poetry or painting.
pegasean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Pegasus, or, figuratively, to poetry.
pegasus ::: n. --> A winged horse fabled to have sprung from the body of Medusa when she was slain. He is noted for causing, with a blow of his hoof, Hippocrene, the inspiring fountain of the Muses, to spring from Mount Helicon. On this account he is, in modern times, associated with the Muses, and with ideas of poetic inspiration.
A northen constellation near the vernal equinoctial point. Its three brightest stars, with the brightest star of Andromeda, form the square of Pegasus.
pegst ::: a native English form of the verb, to peg, now only in formal and poetic usage. To mark with pegs (pins of wood); esp. to mark the boundaries of (a piece of ground, a claim for mining or gold-digging, etc.) with pegs placed at the corners. Also fig. in the sense of marking one"s position, claim, etc.
people ::: n. 2. The entire body of persons who constitute a community, tribe, nation, or other group by virtue of a common culture, history, religion, or the like. 3. Living beings. poet. 4. Pl. nations, races . v. 5. To fill or occupy with or as if with people; inhabit. peoples, peopled, peopling.
Persian Philosophy: Persia was a vast empire before the time of Alexander the Great, embracing not only most of the orientnl tribes of Western Asia but also the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Jews and the Egyptians. If we concentrate on the central section of Persia, three philosophic periods may be distinguished Zoroastrianism (including Mithraism and Magianism), Manichaeanism, and medieval Persian thought. Zarathustra (Or. Zoroaster) lived before 600 B.C. and wrote the Avesta, apparently in the Zend language. It is primarily religious, but the teaching that there are two ultimate principles of reality, Ormazd, the God of Light and Goodness, and Ahriman, God of Evil and Darkness, is of philosophic importance. They are eternally fighting Mitra is the intermediary between Ormazd and man. In the third century A. D., Mani of Ecbatana (in Media) combined this dualism of eternal principles with some of the doctrines of Christianity. His seven books are now known only through second-hand reports of Mohammedan (Abu Faradj Ibn Ishaq, 10th c., and Sharastani, 12th c.) and Christian (St. Ephrem, 4th c., and Bar-Khoni, 7th c.) writers. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.) has left several works criticizing Manichaeism, which he knew at first-hand. From the ninth century onward, many of the great Arabic philosophers are of Persian origin. Mention might be made of the epicureanism of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet, Omar Kayyam, and the remarkable metaphysical system of Avicenna, i.e. Ibn Sina (11th c.), who was born in Persia. -- V.J.B.
perturbed ::: Tehmi: “This word as well as ‘troubled’ a few lines before, is used in a more poetic and sensitive sense.”
petalling ::: a poetic image as of petals dropping or falling.
Philosophic speculations, heavily shrouded by "pre-logical" and symbolic language, started with the poetic, ritualistic Vedas (q.v.), luxuriating in polytheism and polyanthropoism, was then fostered by the Brahman caste in treatises called Aranyakas (q.v.) and Brahmanas (q.v.) and strongly promoted by members of the ruling caste who instituted philosophic congresses in which peripatetic teachers and women participated, and of which we know through the Upanishads (q.v.). Later, the main bulk of Indian Philosophy articulated itself organically into systems forming the nucleus for such famous schools as the Mimamsa and Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga, Nyaya and Vaisesika, and those of Buddhism and Jainism (all of which see). Numerous other philosophic and quasi philosophic systems are found in the epic literature and elsewhere (cf., e.g., Shaktism, Shivaism, Trika, Vishnuism), or remain to be discovered. Much needs to be translated by competent philosophers.
pindaric ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Pindar, the Greek lyric poet; after the style and manner of Pindar; as, Pindaric odes. ::: n. --> A Pindaric ode.
poematic ::: a. --> Pertaining to a poem, or to poetry; poetical.
poem ::: n. --> A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; -- contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.
A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.
poesy ::: n. --> The art of composing poems; poetical skill or faculty; as, the heavenly gift of poesy.
Poetry; metrical composition; poems.
A short conceit or motto engraved on a ring or other thing; a posy.
"Poetry is the rhythmic voice of life, but it is one of the inner and not one of the surface voices.” The Future Poetry
“Poetry is the rhythmic voice of life, but it is one of the inner and not one of the surface voices.” The Future Poetry
polyhymnia ::: n. --> The Muse of lyric poetry.
posy ::: n. --> A brief poetical sentiment; hence, any brief sentiment, motto, or legend; especially, one inscribed on a ring.
A flower; a bouquet; a nosegay.
profound ::: n. 1. That which is eminently deep, or the deepest part of something; a vast depth; an abyss. lit. and fig; chiefly poetical. adj. 2. Situated at or extending to great depth; too deep to have been sounded or plumbed. 3. Coming as if from the depths of one"s being. 4. Of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance. 5. Being or going far beneath what is superficial, external, or obvious. 6. Showing or requiring great knowledge or understanding. profounder.
prometheus ::: n. --> The son of Iapetus (one of the Titans) and Clymene, fabled by the poets to have surpassed all mankind in knowledge, and to have formed men of clay to whom he gave life by means of fire stolen from heaven. Jupiter, being angry at this, sent Mercury to bind Prometheus to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed upon his liver.
prophetic ::: “The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Divine and Human
prosaical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to prose; resembling prose; in the form of prose; unpoetical; writing or using prose; as, a prosaic composition.
Dull; uninteresting; commonplace; unimaginative; prosy; as, a prosaic person.
prosaist ::: n. --> A writer of prose; an unpoetical writer.
prose ::: n. --> The ordinary language of men in speaking or writing; language not cast in poetical measure or rhythm; -- contradistinguished from verse, or metrical composition.
Hence, language which evinces little imagination or animation; dull and commonplace discourse.
A hymn with no regular meter, sometimes introduced into the Mass. See Sequence.
prow ::: 1. The forward part of a ship"s hull; the; bow. 2. A ship. poet.
psalm ::: n. --> A sacred song; a poetical composition for use in the praise or worship of God.
Especially, one of the hymns by David and others, collected into one book of the Old Testament, or a modern metrical version of such a hymn for public worship. ::: v. t.
purana ::: n. --> One of a class of sacred Hindoo poetical works in the Sanskrit language which treat of the creation, destruction, and renovation of worlds, the genealogy and achievements of gods and heroes, the reigns of the Manus, and the transactions of their descendants. The principal Puranas are eighteen in number, and there are the same number of supplementary books called Upa Puranas.
Purani: “—a fine expressive word coined by the poet. Fluttering indicates movement, a changing movement and hue suggests colour. The movement of ‘desire’ is very nicely indicated by this word—an unsteady movement, constantly changing colour.”
Purani: “Aswapathy, the father of Savitri, has been significantly called by the poet ‘the Lord of Life’. (book II, Canto XV). The name suggests an affinity to Vedic symbolism. In the Veda, Aswa, the horse, is the symbol of life-energy or vital power. Aswa + aty, Lord, would mean the ‘Lord of Life’. In the poem King Aswapathy is the symbol of the aspiring soul of man as manifested in life on earth.”Savitri”—An Approach and a Study
Purani: “He [Sri Aurobindo] does the same [improving spontaneously upon the original in the alchemy of his poetical process] with several Vedic symbols which he employs. It [gold-horned herds] indicates the descent of the ‘gold-horned’ Cows—symbolising the richly-laden Rays of Knowledge—into the Inconscient of the earth, its ‘cave-heart’. Generally in the Veda the action is that of breaking open the Cave of the inconscient and releasing the pen of Cows, the imprisoned Rays of Life for the conscious possessions by the seeker. Here is how a Vedic hymn speaks about it: ‘They drove upwards, the luminous ones,—the good milch-cows, in their stone-pen within the hiding cave.’ Rig Veda IV, 1-13. One sees in Savitri the process reversed and the Master’s vision lays open the original act of involution of the Light into the darkness of the Inconscient.” Sri Aurobindo’s”Savitri”: An Approach and a Study.
Purani: “The Red-Wolf is the symbol of the powers that tear the ‘being’, that suddenly fall upon it to destroy it. They are persistent, destructive, cruel, unscrupulous powers of the lower Darkness. Sri Aurobindo in his expression has made the symbol more effective, improving spontaneously upon the original in the alchemy of his poetical process by the image of ‘fordless steam’. In the original hymn there is only ‘path’. The ‘fordless stream’ brings in the needed element of danger and difficulty of the path of the aspirant when he has to cross this dangerous region.”“Savitri”—An Approach and a Study
reasonest ::: a native English form of the verb, to reason, now only in formal and poetic usage.
regular ::: a. --> Conformed to a rule; agreeable to an established rule, law, principle, or type, or to established customary forms; normal; symmetrical; as, a regular verse in poetry; a regular piece of music; a regular verb; regular practice of law or medicine; a regular building.
Governed by rule or rules; steady or uniform in course, practice, or occurence; not subject to unexplained or irrational variation; returning at stated intervals; steadily pursued; orderlly; methodical; as, the regular succession of day and night; regular
reign ::: n. 1. Dominating power or influence. 2. Exercise of sovereign power, as by a monarch. 3. Poet. Dominance or widespread influence in a specific sphere. v. 4. To exercise sovereign power. 5. To be predominant or prevalent. reigns, reigned.
renard ::: n. --> A fox; -- so called in fables or familiar tales, and in poetry.
rhapsodist ::: n. --> Anciently, one who recited or composed a rhapsody; especially, one whose profession was to recite the verses of Hormer and other epic poets.
Hence, one who recites or sings poems for a livelihood; one who makes and repeats verses extempore.
One who writes or speaks disconnectedly and with great excitement or affectation of feeling.
rhapsodist ::: One who recited epic and other poetry, especially professionally, in ancient Greece. (Sri Aurobindo employs the word as an adj.)
rhapsodist ::: one who recited epic and other poetry, especially professionally, in ancient Greece. (Sri Aurobindo employs the word as an adj.)
rhyme ::: n. --> An expression of thought in numbers, measure, or verse; a composition in verse; a rhymed tale; poetry; harmony of language.
Correspondence of sound in the terminating words or syllables of two or more verses, one succeeding another immediately or at no great distance. The words or syllables so used must not begin with the same consonant, or if one begins with a vowel the other must begin with a consonant. The vowel sounds and accents must be the same, as also the sounds of the final consonants if there be any.
rhymer ::: n. --> One who makes rhymes; a versifier; -- generally in contempt; a poor poet; a poetaster.
rhymester ::: n. --> A rhymer; a maker of poor poetry.
rhyme ::: verse or poetry having correspondence in the terminal sounds of the lines. rhymes, rhymed, rhyme-beats, world-rhyme.
rhythmer ::: n. --> One who writes in rhythm, esp. in poetic rhythm or meter.
rhythm ::: n. --> In the widest sense, a dividing into short portions by a regular succession of motions, impulses, sounds, accents, etc., producing an agreeable effect, as in music poetry, the dance, or the like.
Movement in musical time, with periodical recurrence of accent; the measured beat or pulse which marks the character and expression of the music; symmetry of movement and accent.
A division of lines into short portions by a regular
rim ::: 1. The outer edge, border, margin, or brink of something,; often poetic. cloud-rimmed.
roamst ::: a native English form of the verb, to roam, now only in formal and poetic usage.
rondeau ::: n. --> A species of lyric poetry so composed as to contain a refrain or repetition which recurs according to a fixed law, and a limited number of rhymes recurring also by rule.
See Rondo, 1.
rubies ::: precious stones of a dark or deep red to deep purplish red; often used poetically, such as ruby red cheeks.
rune ::: n. --> A letter, or character, belonging to the written language of the ancient Norsemen, or Scandinavians; in a wider sense, applied to the letters of the ancient nations of Northern Europe in general.
Old Norse poetry expressed in runes.
sahityasmr.ti (sahityasmriti) ::: literary memory, the ability to recall sahityasmrti passages of poetry or other literature "not by effort to remember . . . but by inspiration" or any action of a "higher memory" by which "things are . . . remembered permanently without committing them to heart".
sapphic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Sappho, the Grecian poetess; as, Sapphic odes; Sapphic verse.
Belonging to, or in the manner of, Sappho; -- said of a certain kind of verse reputed to have been invented by Sappho, consisting of five feet, of which the first, fourth, and fifth are trochees, the second is a spondee, and the third a dactyl. ::: n.
sapphics ::: a metre used by Sappho (the famous Greek poetess of Lesbos [c 600 b.c.]).
Sarasvati (Saraswati) ::: "she of the stream, the flowing movement",Sarasvati a Vedic goddess who "represents the truth-audition, sruti, which gives the inspired word"; in later Hinduism, "the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry"; same as Mahasarasvati.SarasvatiSarasvati bhava
saraswati ::: n. --> The sakti or wife of Brahma; the Hindoo goddess of learning, music, and poetry.
satire ::: a. --> A composition, generally poetical, holding up vice or folly to reprobation; a keen or severe exposure of what in public or private morals deserves rebuke; an invective poem; as, the Satires of Juvenal.
Keeness and severity of remark; caustic exposure to reprobation; trenchant wit; sarcasm.
sayest ::: a native English form of the verb, to say, now only in formal and poetic usage.
sayst ::: a native English form of the verb, to say, now only in formal and poetic usage.
scalder ::: n. --> A Scandinavian poet; a scald.
scaldic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the scalds of the Norsemen; as, scaldic poetry.
Schlick, Moritz: (1882-1936) Taught at Rostock, Kiel, Vienna, also visit, prof.; Stanford, Berkeley. Founder of the Vienna Circle (see Scientific empiricism.) Called his own view "Consistent Empiricism." Main contributions: A logically revised correspondence view of the nature of truth. A systematic epistemology based on the distinction of (immediate) experience and (relational) knowledge. Clarified the analytic -- a priori character of logic and mathematics (by disclosing the "implicit definitions" in postulate systems). Repudiation of Kantian and phenomenological (synthetic) apriorism. Physicalistic, epistemological solution of the psycho-physical problem in terms of a double language theory. Earlier critical-realistic views were later modified and formulated as Empirical Realism. Greatly influenced in this final phase by Carnap and especially Wittgenstein, he considered the logical clarification of meanings the only legitimate task of a philosophy destined to terminate the strife of systems. Important special applications of this general outlook to logic and methodology of science (space, time, substance, causality, probability, organic life) and to problems of ethics (meaning of value judgments, hedonism, free-will, moral motivation). An optimistic, poetic view of the meaning of life is expressed in only partly published writings on a "Philosophy of Youth."
Secondary and derivative meanings: (a) Anything concerned with the supra-physical. Thus "metaphysical healing", "metaphysical poetry", etc. (b) Any scheme of explanation which transcends the inadequacies or inaccuracies of ordinary thought. -- W.S.W.
seekst ::: a native English form of the verb, to seek, now only in formal and poetic usage. seek"st.
seemst ::: a native English form of the verb, to seem, now only in formal and poetic usage.
seest ::: a native English form of the verb, to see, now only in formal and poetic usage.
self-expression ::: the expression or assertion of one"s own personality, as in conversation, behaviour, poetry, or painting.
semiped ::: n. --> A half foot in poetry.
sendesta ::: a native English form of the verb, to send, now only in formal and poetic usage.
seraph ::: n. --> One of an order of celestial beings, each having three pairs of wings. In ecclesiastical art and in poetry, a seraph is represented as one of a class of angels.
shalt ::: second person singular of shall, now only in formal and poetic usage.
shame ::: 1. A painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarassment, unworthiness, or disgrace. 2. Something that brings one dishonour, disgrace, or condemnation. Now poet.
shook ::: imp. --> of Shake ::: --> of Shake
imp. & obs. or poet. p. p. of Shake. ::: n.
shutst ::: a native English form of the verb, to shut, now only in formal and poetic usage.
silver ::: 1. The metal characterized in a pure state by its lustrous white colour and regarded as a valuable possession or medium of exchange; hence, silver coin; also money in general. 2. Having a soft, clear, resonant, melodious sound. 3. Resembling silver, especially in having a lustrous shine; silvery. Chiefly poet. **silver-grey, silver-winged, moon-silver.**
simile ::: n. --> A word or phrase by which anything is likened, in one or more of its aspects, to something else; a similitude; a poetical or imaginative comparison.
singsong ::: n. --> Bad singing or poetry.
A drawling or monotonous tone, as of a badly executed song. ::: a. --> Drawling; monotonous.
sirvente ::: n. --> A peculiar species of poetry, for the most part devoted to moral and religious topics, and commonly satirical, -- often used by the troubadours of the Middle Ages.
Sleep. often poet. 2. A natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended. 3. Fig. A dormant or quiescent state. slumber’s. v. 4. To pass time in sleep or drowse. 5. To be in a state of inactivity, negligence, or dormancy. slumbers, slumbered. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.)
sloka. ::: a stanza in Sanskrit poetry
slumber ::: 1. Sleep. often poet. **2. A natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended. 3. Fig. A dormant or quiescent state. slumber"s. v. 4. To pass time in sleep or drowse. 5. To be in a state of inactivity, negligence, or dormancy. slumbers, slumbered.* (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.*)
sod ::: the ground, especially when covered with grass. Freq. poet.
song ::: n. --> That which is sung or uttered with musical modulations of the voice, whether of a human being or of a bird, insect, etc.
A lyrical poem adapted to vocal music; a ballad.
More generally, any poetical strain; a poem.
Poetical composition; poetry; verse.
An object of derision; a laughingstock.
A trifle.
sonneteer ::: n. --> A composer of sonnets, or small poems; a small poet; -- usually in contempt. ::: v. i. --> To compose sonnets.
sorrow ::: 1. Mental suffering or pain caused by injury, loss, or despair. 2. Expression of sorrow; grieving; poet., tears. sorrow"s, Sorrow"s, sorrows, Man of Sorrows (see Man)
sotadic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or resembling, the lascivious compositions of the Greek poet Sotades. ::: n. --> A Sotadic verse or poem.
soundst ::: a native English form of the verb, to sound, now only in formal and poetic usage.
speakest ::: a native English form of the verb, to speak, now only in formal and poetic usage.
speakst ::: a native English form of the verb, to speak, now only in formal and poetic usage.
spenserian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the English poet Spenser; -- specifically applied to the stanza used in his poem "The Faerie Queene."
spire ::: poet. A structure or formation, such as a steeple, that tapers to a point at the top.
spondee ::: n. --> A poetic foot of two long syllables, as in the Latin word leges.
Sri Aurobindo, Avatar and Poet Supreme, has enriched Savitri, his magnum opus, with words from a number of languages. In fact he has also coined words when no word would suffice to convey the mantric power and meaning required.
Sri Aurobindo: "Beauty is the special divine Manifestation in the physical as Truth is in the Mind, Love in the heart, Power in the vital.” *The Future Poetry
Sri Aurobindo: " Karma is nothing but the will of the Spirit in action, consequence nothing but the creation of will. What is in the will of being, expresses itself in karma and consequence. When the will is limited in mind, karma appears as a bondage and a limitation, consequence as a reaction or an imposition. But when the will of the being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become instead the joy of the creative spirit, the construction of the eternal mechanist, the word and drama of the eternal poet, the harmony of the eternal musician, the play of the eternal child.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies"] might be all right for mental poetry — it won"t do for what I am trying to create — in that, one word won"t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam" and ‘glow" are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri *
Sri Aurobindo: "The prophetic or revealing power sees the substance; the inspiration perceives the right expression. Neither is manufactured; nor is poetry really a poiesis or composition, nor even a creation, but rather the revelation of something that eternally exists. The ancients knew this truth and used the same word for poet and prophet, creator and seer, sophos, vates, kavi.” Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "The word is a sound expression of the idea. In the supra-physical plane when an idea has to be realised, one can by repeating the word-expression of it, produce vibrations which prepare the mind for the realisation of the idea. That is the principle of the Mantras and of Japa. One repeats the name of the Divine and the vibrations created in the consciousness prepare the realisation of the Divine. It is the same idea that is expressed in the Bible: ‘God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light". It is creation by the Word.” *The Future Poetry
Sri Aurobindo: "Your ‘barely enough", instead of the finer and more suggestive ‘hardly", falls flat upon my ear; one cannot substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means intellectually the same thing; ‘hardly" is the mot juste in this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not only juste but inevitable comes to replace it… . On this point I may add that in certain contexts ‘barely" would be the right word, as for instance, ‘There is barely enough food left for two or three meals", where ‘hardly" would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the other way about in this line. Letters on Savitri
standest ::: a native English form of the verb, to stand, now only in formal and poetic usage.
steed ::: n. --> A horse, especially a spirited horse for state of war; -- used chiefly in poetry or stately prose.
stich ::: n. --> A verse, of whatever measure or number of feet.
A line in the Scriptures; specifically (Hebrew Scriptures), one of the rhythmic lines in the poetical books and passages of the Old Treatment, as written in the oldest Hebrew manuscripts and in the Revised Version of the English Bible.
A row, line, or rank of trees.
stilly ::: poetic: Quietly; calmly.
sullen ::: 1. Sombre; gloomy; dismal; sluggish; slow. 2. Gloomy or sombre in tone, color, or portent. Chiefly poet.
tartarus ::: n. --> The infernal regions, described in the Iliad as situated as far below Hades as heaven is above the earth, and by later writers as the place of punishment for the spirits of the wicked. By the later poets, also, the name is often used synonymously with Hades, or the Lower World in general.
tempean ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Temple, a valley in Thessaly, celebrated by Greek poets on account of its beautiful scenery; resembling Temple; hence, beautiful; delightful; charming.
tempst ::: a native English form of the verb, to tempt, now only in formal and poetic usage.
termless ::: 1. Having no bounds or limits; unending. 2. An archaic word for indescribable. Chiefly poet. **3.** Unconditional.
terza rima ::: --> A peculiar and complicated system of versification, borrowed by the early Italian poets from the Troubadours.
tetracolon ::: n. --> A stanza or division in lyric poetry, consisting of four verses or lines.
“That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
The extant works of Aristotle cover almost all thc sciences known in his time. They are charactenzed by subtlety of analysis, sober and dispassionate judgment, and a wide mastery of empirical facts; collectively they constitute one of the most amazing achievements ever credited to a single mind. They may conveniently be arranged in seven groups: the Organon, or logical treatises, viz. Categories, De Interpretione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistici Elenchi; the writings on physical science, viz. Physics, De Coelo, De Generatione et Corruptione, and Meteorologica; the biological works, viz. Historia Animalium, De Partibus Animalium. De Motu and De Incessu Animalium, and De Generatione Animalium; the treatises on psychology, viz. De Anima and a collection of shorter works known as the Parva Naturalia; the Metaphysics; the treatises on ethics and politics, viz. Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Constitution of Athens; and two works dealing with the literary arts, Rhetoric and Poetics. A large number of other works in these several fields are usually included in the Aristotelian corpus, though they are now generally believed not to have been written by Aristotle. It is probable also that portions of the works above listed are the work, not of Aristotle, but of his contemporaries or successors in the Lyceum.
"The greatest motion of poetry comes when the mind is still and the ideal principle works above and outside the brain, above even the hundred petalled lotus of the ideal mind, in its proper empire; for then it is Veda that is revealed, the perfect substance and expression of eternal truth.” Essays Divine and Human*
“The greatest motion of poetry comes when the mind is still and the ideal principle works above and outside the brain, above even the hundred petalled lotus of the ideal mind, in its proper empire; for then it is Veda that is revealed, the perfect substance and expression of eternal truth.” Essays Divine and Human
The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 27, Page: 26-27
The Mother: "For me poetry is beyond all philosophy and beyond all explanation.” On Education, MCW Vol. 12.
The Mother: “For me poetry is beyond all philosophy and beyond all explanation.” On Education, MCW Vol. 12.
The musician and the poet stand for a truth, it is the truth of the expression of the Spirit through beauty.
“The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” Letters on Savitri
"There are different kinds of knowledge. One is inspiration, i.e. something that comes out of the knowledge planes like a flash and opens up the mind to the Truth in a moment. That is inspiration. It easily takes the form of words as when a poet writes or a speaker speaks, as people say, from inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
“There are different kinds of knowledge. One is inspiration, i.e. something that comes out of the knowledge planes like a flash and opens up the mind to the Truth in a moment. That is inspiration. It easily takes the form of words as when a poet writes or a speaker speaks, as people say, from inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
*”…there is a spiritual mind which, can admit us to a greater and more comprehensive vision. *The Future Poetry*
“…there is a spiritual mind which, can admit us to a greater and more comprehensive vision. The Future Poetry
These are perhaps the most salient definitions along with relevant poems by two great poets, Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth.
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 201
thine ::: pron. & a. --> A form of the possessive case of the pronoun thou, now superseded in common discourse by your, the possessive of you, but maintaining a place in solemn discourse, in poetry, and in the usual language of the Friends, or Quakers.
thinkst ::: a native English form of the verb, to think, now only in formal and poetic usage.
thorough ::: prep. --> Through. ::: a. --> Passing through; as, thorough lights in a house.
Passing through or to the end; hence, complete; perfect; as, a thorough reformation; thorough work; a thorough translator; a thorough poet.
thou ::: obj. --> The second personal pronoun, in the singular number, denoting the person addressed; thyself; the pronoun which is used in addressing persons in the solemn or poetical style. ::: v. t. --> To address as thou, esp. to do so in order to treat with insolent familiarity or contempt.
Th. Skolem, Sur la portee du theoreme de Löwenheim-Skolem, Les Entretiens de Zurich sur les Fondements et la Methode des Sciences Mathematiques, Zurich 1941, pp. 25-52. Lucretius, Carus: (98-54 B.C.) Noted Roman poet, author of the famous didactic poem De Natura Rerum, in six books, which forms an interesting exposition of the philosophy of Epicureanism. -- M..F.
thy ::: pron. --> Of thee, or belonging to thee; the more common form of thine, possessive case of thou; -- used always attributively, and chiefly in the solemn or grave style, and in poetry. Thine is used in the predicate; as, the knife is thine. See Thine.
timeless ::: 1. Without beginning or end; eternal; everlasting. Chiefly poet. 2. Referring or restricted to no particular time. Timeless, timelessly, timelessness, Timelessness.
"To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote "His anger climbed against me in a stream", it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
“To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote ’His anger climbed against me in a stream’, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
torturest ::: a native English form of the verb, to torture, now only in formal and poetic usage.
touchest ::: a native English form of the verb, to touch, now only in formal and poetic usage.
tragi-comi-pastoral ::: a. --> Partaking of the nature of, or combining, tragedy, comedy, and pastoral poetry.
trenchant ::: poet. Sharp.
tribrach ::: n. --> A poetic foot of three short syllables, as, meblius.
trickst ::: a native English form of the verb, to trick, now only in formal and poetic usage.
trilogy ::: n. --> A series of three dramas which, although each of them is in one sense complete, have a close mutual relation, and form one historical and poetical picture. Shakespeare&
trimeter ::: a. --> Consisting of three poetical measures. ::: n. --> A poetical division of verse, consisting of three measures.
triton ::: n. --> A fabled sea demigod, the son of Neptune and Amphitrite, and the trumpeter of Neptune. He is represented by poets and painters as having the upper part of his body like that of a man, and the lower part like that of a fish. He often has a trumpet made of a shell.
Any one of many species of marine gastropods belonging to Triton and allied genera, having a stout spiral shell, often handsomely colored and ornamented with prominent varices. Some of the species are among the largest of all gastropods. Called also trumpet shell, and sea
troubadour ::: n. --> One of a school of poets who flourished from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, principally in Provence, in the south of France, and also in the north of Italy. They invented, and especially cultivated, a kind of lyrical poetry characterized by intricacy of meter and rhyme, and usually of a romantic, amatory strain.
trouveur ::: n. --> One of a school of poets who flourished in Northern France from the eleventh to the fourteenth century.
trump ::: n. --> A wind instrument of music; a trumpet, or sound of a trumpet; -- used chiefly in Scripture and poetry.
A winning card; one of a particular suit (usually determined by chance for each deal) any card of which takes any card of the other suits.
An old game with cards, nearly the same as whist; -- called also ruff.
A good fellow; an excellent person.
tuneless ::: a. --> Without tune; inharmonious; unmusical.
Not employed in making music; as, tuneless harps.
Not expressed in music or poetry; unsung.
twain ::: a. & n. --> Two; -- nearly obsolete in common discourse, but used in poetry and burlesque.
uropoetic ::: a. --> Producing, or favoring the production of, urine.
Of, pertaining to, or designating, a system of organs which eliminate nitrogenous waste matter from the blood of certain invertebrates.
Usanas Kavya (Ushanas Kavya) ::: [Ved.]: the rsi of the heavenward desire that is born from the seer knowledge; [in the [Gita], Usanas Kavi is named as vibhuti among the seer-poets].
valmiki. ::: the first poet of India, author of the Ramayana and the Yoga Vasistha
Vedas, dating from 2000 BC or earlier, consisting of several mythological and poetical accounts of the origin of the world, hymns praising the gods, and ancient prayers for life and prosperity; "praise verse"
veilst ::: a native English form of the verb, to veil, now only in formal and poetic usage.
verge ::: 1. The extreme edge or margin; a border. 2. An enclosing limit, line, belt, or strip. 3. The edge of something as the horizon, mainly poetic. 4. The limit beyond which something happens or changes. verge"s, verges.
verse ::: 1. A succession of metrical feet written, printed, or orally composed as one line; one of the lines of a poem. 2. A poem, or piece of poetry. 3. A particular type of metrical composition. verses.
versemonger ::: n. --> A writer of verses; especially, a writer of commonplace poetry; a poetaster; a rhymer; -- used humorously or in contempt.
verse ::: n. --> A line consisting of a certain number of metrical feet (see Foot, n., 9) disposed according to metrical rules.
Metrical arrangement and language; that which is composed in metrical form; versification; poetry.
A short division of any composition.
A stanza; a stave; as, a hymn of four verses.
One of the short divisions of the chapters in the Old and New Testaments.
versification ::: n. --> The act, art, or practice, of versifying, or making verses; the construction of poetry; metrical composition.
versifier ::: n. --> One who versifies, or makes verses; as, not every versifier is a poet.
One who converts into verse; one who expresses in verse the ideas of another written in prose; as, Dr. Watts was a versifier of the Psalms.
verve ::: n. --> Excitement of imagination such as animates a poet, artist, or musician, in composing or performing; rapture; enthusiasm; spirit; energy.
victorian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the reign of Queen Victoria of England; as, the Victorian poets.
". . . Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, . . . .” The Future Poetry
“… Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, …” The Future Poetry
virgilian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Virgil, the Roman poet; resembling the style of Virgil.
vivacious ::: a. --> Having vigorous powers of life; tenacious of life; long-lived.
Sprightly in temper or conduct; lively; merry; as, a vivacious poet.
Living through the winter, or from year to year; perennial.
wast ::: a second person singular past tense of be. poet.
wast ::: --> The second person singular of the verb be, in the indicative mood, imperfect tense; -- now used only in solemn or poetical style. See Was.
weep ::: 1. To express grief, sorrow, or any overpowering emotion by shedding tears; cry. 2. To shed tears as an expression of emotion. 3. To express grief or anguish for; lament, (chiefly poet.). weeps, wept.
wert ::: --> The second person singular, indicative and subjunctive moods, imperfect tense, of the verb be. It is formed from were, with the ending -t, after the analogy of wast. Now used only in solemn or poetic style. ::: n. --> A wart.
What the Vedic poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realisation, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word, of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed. it was a thinking that came on the wings of a great soul rhythm, chandas. For the seeing could not be separated from the hearing; it was one act.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 26, Page: 217-218
What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 26, Page: 423
whence ::: 1. Out of which place; from or out of which. By reason of which; from which. 2. Poet. From where; from what place. 3. From what origin or source.
whirlbat ::: n. --> Anything moved with a whirl, as preparatory for a blow, or to augment the force of it; -- applied by poets to the cestus of ancient boxers.
wild ::: adj. 1. Occurring, growing, or living in a natural state; not domesticated, cultivated, or tamed. 2. Uninhabited; desolate; a wilderness. 3. Of great violence or intensity, as the sea, etc. 4. Unrestrained, untrammelled, or unbridled; behaving without restraint. 5. Unrestrained by reason or prudence. 6. Furiously disturbed or turbulent; stormy. wilder, wild-beast, wild-drakes.* *n. wilds. 7.* A desolate, uncultivated, or uninhabited region, esp. poetic.*
Word ::: “The word is a sound expression of the idea. In the supra-physical plane when an idea has to be realised, one can by repeating the word-expression of it, produce vibrations which prepare the mind for the realisation of the idea. That is the principle of the Mantras and of Japa. One repeats the name of the Divine and the vibrations created in the consciousness prepare the realisation of the Divine. It is the same idea that is expressed in the Bible: ‘God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light’. It is creation by the Word.” The Future Poetry
would-be ::: a. --> Desiring or professing to be; vainly pretending to be; as, a would-be poet.
zephyr ::: n. --> The west wind; poetically, any soft, gentle breeze.
KEYS (10k)
64 Sri Aurobindo
5 Jalaluddin Rumi
4 Buson
2 Red Hawk
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 Li Bai
2 Plato
2 Matsuo Basho
2 Hafiz
1 Zelda Fitzgerald
1 Yoka Diashi
1 Wilfred Owen
1 Umberto Eco
1 "Ten Thousand Flowers in Spring" by Wu-Men
1 Takarai Kikaku
1 Taigu Ryokan
1 Sumnun al Muhibb
1 Stephen Levine
1 Shaykh Abu Bakr Shibli
1 Rumi( 1207 - 1273)
1 -Rumi
1 Plato
1 Oscar Wilde
1 Omar Khayyam
1 Novalis
1 Nicolas Chamfort
1 Nanuo Sakaki
1 Misato
1 Megan Scribner
1 Masaoka Shiki 1867-1902
1 Maghribi
1 Lu Wu-pei
1 Khalil Gibran
1 Kamo no Chōmei
1 Kamir
1 Joseph Campbell
1 John Henry Newman
1 Jien
1 Jacques Maritain
1 Izumi Shikibu
1 Heinrich Heine
1 Eric Micha'el Leventhal
1 Emily Dickinson 1(830 - 1886) American poet.
1 Emily Dickinson
1 Elder Porphyrios
1 e. e. cummings
1 Denise Levertov
1 Charles Bukowski
1 Cassandra Clare
1 Binavi Badakhshani 13th century(?) Sufi poet.
1 Binavi Badakhshan
1 Bertrand Russell
1 Attar of Nishapur
1 a poet]
1 Anatole France
1 Amal Kiran
1 Allen Ginsberg
1 Alexander Pope
1 Alejandro Jodorowsky
1 Albert Einstein
1 Ogawa
1 Leonardo da Vinci
1 Jorge Luis Borges
1 Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr
1 Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
1 Abraham Maslow
1 Aberjhani
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
131 Atticus Poetry
20 Ralph Waldo Emerson
18 Wallace Stevens
13 W H Auden
12 Horace
11 Plato
11 Carl Sandburg
10 T S Eliot
10 Robert Frost
10 Jean Cocteau
9 John Keats
9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
9 Henry David Thoreau
9 Anne Sexton
8 G K Chesterton
8 Charles Bukowski
7 Stephen King
7 Stanley Kunitz
7 Robert Graves
7 Marianne Moore
1:'My life depends on my dying'." ~ -Rumi, poet, #KEYS
2:Heaven's way is round, earth's way is square. ~ Lu Wu-pei, (Chinese poet) #KEYS
3:the Most Beautiful Names." ~ ~ Binavi Badakhshan, (13th cent.) Sufi poet, #KEYS
4:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
~ Plato,#KEYS
5:Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. ~ Elder Porphyrios, #KEYS
6:All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen, #KEYS
7:forgetfulness woke up and found myself asleep." ~ Binavi Badakhshani 13th century(?) Sufi poet., #KEYS
8:How rueful, this world." ~ Jien, (1155-1225), a Japanese poet, historian, and Buddhist monk, Wikipedia., #KEYS
9:Is doomed like a rose that blooms out of season" ~ Red Hawk, (Robert Moore), b. 1943), American poet. See, #KEYS
10:I should have looked elsewhere." ~ Red Hawk, (R. Moore, b. 1943) American poet. "The Art of Dying,", (1994), #KEYS
11:bloomed for ever dies." ~ Omar Khayyam, (1048 - 1131) Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
12:Even as if love's time unvanishing were." ~ Sumnun al Muhibb, (d. 905 AD). Sufi poet. Known as "Sumnun the Lover.", #KEYS
13:Tomorrow morning, if you think of it, grab your zither and come again." ~ Li Bai, (aka Li Po, 701-762), Chinese poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
14:Madmen know only the easiest part of love." ~ Shaykh Abu Bakr Shibli, (861-946) important Sufi poet of Persian descent, Wikipedia., #KEYS
15:Unbeing dead isn't being alive." ~ e. e. cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright, Wikipedia., #KEYS
16:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
~ Abraham Maslow,#KEYS
17:A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth ~ Hafiz, #KEYS
18:Vision is the characteristic power of the poet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
19:if not in the give and take of Love. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
20:And love your Lord by serving Him. For lovers are but servants of the Beloved. ~ a poet], @Sufi_Path #KEYS
21:I have no news of coming or passing away: it happened much faster than one breath." ~ Attar of Nishapur, (1145 - 1221) Persian poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
22:you have come; you must keep on trying to obtain immortality because here as a visitor only you have come." ~ Maghribi, (1350-1407) dervish poet., #KEYS
23:and look … The stars!" ~ Takarai Kikaku, (1661-1707), Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō, Wikipedia., #KEYS
24:in the light of your present." ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal, literary consultant and holistic educator on the island of Maui, Hawaii, poet and author., #KEYS
25:It's his job." ~ Heinrich Heine, (1797-1856), a German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic, Wikipedia. Spoken on his deathbed, Wikipedia., #KEYS
26:If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain." ~ Emily Dickinson, (1830 -1886), American poet, wrote nearly 1,800 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
27:no part left out." ~ Izumi Shikibu, (b. 976?) a mid-Heian period Japanese poet. She is a member of the Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals, Wikipedia, #KEYS
28:The poet is a magician who hardly knows the secret of his own spell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Word and the Spirit, #KEYS
29:If this poem becomes a part of your life,
it will make you a part of the Poet whose heights
have sent this call to our lowlands. ~ Amal Kiran, 17.08.1993#KEYS
30:Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. His residence is next to mine, His furniture is love." ~ Emily Dickinson 1(830 - 1886) American poet., #KEYS
31:Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
~ Albert Einstein, Einstein and the Poet,#KEYS
32:If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads." ~ Anatole France, (1844 - 1924) French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers, Wikipedia., #KEYS
33:I searched for myself and found only God I searched for God and found only myself." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1278) Sufi poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
34:But with only one heart we human beings are born." ~ Nanuo Sakaki, (1923-2008) Japanese poet,) from his poem "Homo Erectus Ambulant" in his book "Break the Mirror", (1987), #KEYS
35:Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge." ~ Stephen Levine, (1937-2016) American poet, author and teacher best known for his work on death and dying, Wikipedia., #KEYS
36:There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." ~ Oscar Wilde, (1854 -1900), an Irish poet and playwright, Wikipedia., #KEYS
37:Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. ~ Plato, #KEYS
38:and our story, an old forgotten dream." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
39:That mercy show to me." ~ Alexander Pope, (1688 - 1744) English poet, and the foremost poet of the early 18th century, known for his satirical and discursive poetry, Wikipedia, #KEYS
40:It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #KEYS
41:What the poet sees and feels, not what he opines, is the real substance of his poetry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Poets of the Dawn - II, #KEYS
42:The poet's first concern and his concern always is with living beauty and reality, with life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Breath of Greater Life, #KEYS
43:Tie two birds together. They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings." ~ Rumi( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #KEYS
44:Drama is the poet's vision of some part of the world-act in the life of the human soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Course of English Poetry - II, #KEYS
45:The philosopher's soul dwells in his head, the poet's soul is in his heart; the singer's soul lingers about his throat, but the soul of the dancer abides in all her body.
~ Khalil Gibran,#KEYS
46:Beauty and Mirror and the Eyes which see." ~ Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr, (967 - 1049), famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
47:The wife unsung remains
Sharing his pleasures, taking half his pains
While to dream faces mounts the poet's song. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Euphrosyne#KEYS
48:A poet's largeness and ease of execution,—succeeds more amply on the inferior levels of his genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Poets of the Dawn - II, #KEYS
49:Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
50:Run to his feet - He is standing close to you head right now You have slept for millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning." ~ Kamir, 15th-cent. Indian mystic poet, Wikipedia, #KEYS
51:Only in a hut built for the moment can one live without fear." ~ Kamo no Chōmei, (1153 or 1155-1216), a Japanese author, poet, and essayist. Became a Buddhist and lived as a hermit, Wikipedia., #KEYS
52:A God who cannot smile could not have created this humorous universe." ~ Sri Aurobindo, (1872 - 1950) Indian philosopher, yogi, guru, poet, and nationalist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
53:Your pain is a school unto itself-- and your joy a lovely temple." ~ Aberjhani, (b.1957) historian, columnist, novelist, poet, artist, and editor," Wrote "The River of Winged Dreams," "Wikipedia., #KEYS
54:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,#KEYS
55:Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it." ~ Denise Levertov, (1923 - 1997) American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Wikipedia., #KEYS
56:in all this nothing is without refuge. I alone have nowhere in life to turn. Forever drunk, I face rock-born moon, sing for wildflowers sights and smells." ~ Li Bai, (aka Li Po, 701-762), Chinese poet, #KEYS
57:Come out of the circle of time and enter the circle of love." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 -1273), Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
58:it can only find itself in changing forms." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861-1941), a Bengali poet & musician, reshaped Bengali literature & music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
59:I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least." ~ Walt Whitman, (1819 - 1892) American poet, essayist, and journalist. From his poem, "Song of Myself.", #KEYS
60:Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861 - 7 1941), a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent, Wikipedia., #KEYS
61:Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861 - 7 1941), a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent, Wikipedia.", #KEYS
62:The enlightening power of the poet's creation is vision of truth, its moving power is a passion of beauty and delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Breath of Greater Life, #KEYS
63:There is only one path to Heaven. On Earth we call it Love." ~ Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, best known for his book "Walden", Wikipedia, #KEYS
64:Earth and her strong winds move me, take me away, and my soul is swept up in joy." ~ Uvavnuk, 19th century Eskimo shaman woman, oral poet, Wikipedia. Trans. by Jane Hirshfield. For music see: http://bit.ly/2DPCu2U, #KEYS
65:se man is never less alone than when he is alone." ~ Jonathan Swift, (1667-1745), an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric, became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, Wikipedia., #KEYS
66:The world is no more than the Beloved single face; In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist." ~ Ghalib, (1797 - 1869) prominent Urdu and Persian poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire, Wikipedia., #KEYS
67:Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty — that is all you know on earth, and all you need to know." ~ John Keats, (1795 - 1821), English Romantic poet, one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, Wikipedia., #KEYS
68:If the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
69:This is what our love is—a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds." ~ Aberjhani, (b. 1957), historian, columnist, novelist, poet, artist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
70:A man my fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, (1809-1894), poet, physician, and essayist, father of the judge, Wikipedia., #KEYS
71:Do not seek any rules or method of worship. Say whatever your pained heart chooses." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
72:Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between contradictions... For the god wants to know himself in you." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875 - 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
73:The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another, one which will last forever…" ~ Anatole France, (1844-1924), a French poet, journalist, and successful novelist with several best-sellers, Wikipedia., #KEYS
74:The ego is the false, self-born out of fear and defensiveness." ~ John O'Donohue, (1956 -2008) an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. as an author is best known for popularizing Celtic spirituality, Wikipedia., #KEYS
75:It is nothingness and helplessness & need, When love penetrates the breast, The heart's blood seeps out through the eye. Love does not sit with ease & repose." ~ Nizami Ganjavi, (1141 - 1209), greatest poet in Persian lit., Wiki., #KEYS
76:Now I have no choice but to see with your eyes, So I am not alone, so you are not alone." ~ Yiannis Ritsos, (1909 -1990), Greek poet, left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II, Wikipedia., #KEYS
77:I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder." ~ Denise Letvertov, (1923 - 1997) American poet, recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Wikipedia, #KEYS
78:The soul would have no rainbows if the eyes had no tears." ~ John Vance Cheney, (1848 ~1922) American poet, essayist and librarian…. His collected works, written between 1887 and his death in 1922, fill eight volumes, Wikipedia., #KEYS
79:A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead," ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875 - 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
80: When you can no longer tell the difference between being yourself and being love, you are not far from waking up. " ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal, literary consultant and holistic educator on the island of Maui, Hawaii, poet and author, #KEYS
81:with a radish." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-Tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
82:Reason and taste, two powers of the intelligence, are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist, while to the poet they are only minor deities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Essence of Poetry, #KEYS
83:For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." ~ Walt Whitman, (1819 - 1892) American poet, essayist, and journalist.He was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
84:I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875-1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Wikipedia, #KEYS
85:Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844 - 1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
86:Avoid hurting any living animal, and do whatever thou likest, For in my book of laws there is no crime but this." ~ Hafiz Shirázi, (1315-1390), Persian poet, his collected works are regarded as a pinnacle of Persian literature, Wikipedia, #KEYS
87:For in and out, above, below, Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow show, Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, Round which we Phantom Figures come and go." ~ Omar Khayyam, (1048 - 1131) Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
88:And we too, just once. and never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875 - 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet & novelist. Wikipedia, #KEYS
89:Like a hand that possesses five fingers is destiny: when it wants anyone to be obeying its decree … it places two of the fingers on the ears and two on the eyes and one on the lips, saying 'Silent be!'" ~ Kasim Anwar, (1336-1433) Sufi poet., #KEYS
90:The poet really creates out of himself and not out of what he sees outwardly: that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
91:There is great battle raging: for my mouth not to harden and my jaws not to become like heavy doors of an iron safe, so my life may not be called pre-death." ~ Yehuda Amichai, (1924-2000) considered as Israel's greatest modern poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
92:Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense." ~ e. e. cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays, Wikipedia., #KEYS
93:He am I whom I love, He whom I love is I, Two Spirits in one single body dwelling. So seest thou me, then seest thou Him, And seest thou Him, then seest thou Us." ~ Al- Hallaj, (c. 858 - 922) Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
94:In my belief, the beloved and the lover are one: the desire, the desired and the desirer, are one I am told, 'Seek His Essence,' but …how can I seek when the sought and the seeker are one!" ~ Shah Ni'Matli'llah, (1330-1431) Sufi Master and poet., #KEYS
95:If you become addicted to looking back, half your life will be spent in distraction and the other half in regret." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
96:We are constantly invited to be what we are." ~ Henry David Thoreau, (1817 -1862) American essayist, poet, and philosopher, leading transcendentalist, best known for his book "Walden," a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, Wikipedia., #KEYS
97:To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from presuppositions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot." ~ Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr, (967 - 1049), famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia, #KEYS
98:Be patent toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875 - 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Wikipedia., #KEYS
99:A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. ~ Margaret Atwood, #KEYS
100:Do good under all circumstances, but with no care for any profit, or any blessedness, or any damnation, or any salvation, or any martyrdom; but all you do or omit should be for the honor of Love." ~ Hadewijch, (13 cnt.) 13th-century poet and mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
101:The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away, We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains." ~ Li Po, (701-762), Chinese poet acclaimed as a genius who took traditional poetic forms to new heights, Wikipedia., #KEYS
102:Put your thoughts to sleep let them not cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Drown them in the sea of love." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), 13th-century Persian poet; Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
103:Flying out from the Great Buddha's nose: a swallow." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals, better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
104:Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again. ~ Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction 92, #KEYS
105:If one is chained, a chain breaker one has to be: If the way is lost then a way-finder one has to be. One has to live a thousand years in one moment: instantly, a multitudinous traveler, one has to be." ~ Attar of Nishapur, ((c. 1145 - c. 1221), Persian Sufi poet., #KEYS
106:To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844 - 1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history, Wikipedia., #KEYS
107:America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still." ~ e. e. cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, Wikipedia., #KEYS
108:Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861 - 1941), a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wikipedia., #KEYS
109:Facing wine, I missed night coming on and falling blossoms filling my robe. Drunk, I rise and wade the midstream moon, birds soon gone, and people scarcer still." ~ Li Bai, (aka Li Po, 701-762), Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own day to the present as a genius, Wikipedia., #KEYS
110:Here is the secret of happiness. Forget yourself and think of others." ~ Swami Paramananda, (1884-1940), an early Indian teacher who went to the United States to spread the Vedanta philosophy. He was a mystic, a poet and an innovator in spiritual community living, Wikipedia., #KEYS
111:If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give." ~ George MacDonald, (1824 - 1905) Scottish author, poet Christian minister, figure in modern fantasy literature, Wikipedia., #KEYS
112:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch." ~ E. E. Cummings, (1894 -1962), American poet, painter, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
113:He hath not lived here, who hath sober lived. And he that dieth not drunk hath missed the mark. With tears then let him mourn himself, whose life Hath passed, and he no share of it hath had." ~ Ibn al-Farid, (1181 - 1234) Esteemed as the greatest mystic poet of the Arabs, Wik., #KEYS
114:I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes." ~ e. e. Cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, author, and playwright, Wikipedia., #KEYS
115:As long as we see what has come to pass as being unfair, we'll be a prisoner of what might have been." ~ Mark Nepo, 1951, American poet and spiritual adviser, taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 30 years. Quote from his book, "The Book of Awakening,", (2011), #KEYS
116:Witnessing is the ego watching whatever is going on [especially in the mind and body] without judgment…. Don't value or judge what you're observing. Just see it completely impersonally." ~ Lee Lozowick, (1943-2010) American spiritual teacher, author, poet, and singer, Wikipedia, #KEYS
117:He was asked "What is evil and what is the worst evil?" The Master replied, "Evil is 'thou': and the worst evil is ' thou', when thou knowest it not." ~ Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr, (967 - 1049), Famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
118:Without Art we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science we should always worship false gods." ~ W. H. Auden, (1907 - 1973) English-American poet; poetry noted for its stylistic and technical achievement; its engagement with politics, morals, love, & religion, Wikipedia, #KEYS
119:You goal is not to seek love, but merely to seek, find and remove all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it" ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
120:Open your door, Beloved, You are the wine, I am the cup You are eternal, I am a prisoner of time. 'Silence fool, who would open his door to a madman.'" ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
121:Drunk and notorious all year round may the lover be; in a frenzy, spellbound, crazy, let him be, constantly. When sober we are suffering, because of everything… but when we are intoxicated … everything we set free." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
122: The intelligence can also follow this trend, but is ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Personality,#KEYS
123:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization....It refers to man's desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming. ~ Abraham Maslow, #KEYS
124:Whatever you have in your mind—forget it; whatever you have in your hand—give it; whatever is to be your fate—face it." ~ Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr, (967 -1049), famous Sufi poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia. "One day man will realize that his own I AM-ness is the God he has been seeking throughout the ages, and that his own sense of awareness - his consciousness of being - is the one and only reality." ~ Neville Goddard, "The Complete Reader,", (2013), #KEYS
125:The poet-philosopher or the philosopher-poet, whichever way we may put it, is a new formation of the human consciousness that is coming upon us. A wide and rationalising (not rationalistic) intelligence deploying and marshalling out a deep intuitive and direct Knowledge that is the pattern of human mind developing in the new age. Bergson's was a harbinger, a definite landmark on the way. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine arrives and opens the very portals of the marvellous temple city of a dynamic integral knowledge. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #KEYS
126:This eternal lila is the eternal truth, and, therefore, its this eternal lila - the playful love-making of Radha and Krishna, which the Vaishnava poets desired to enjoy. If we analyse the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva we shall find not even a single statement which shows the poet's desire to have union with Krishna as Radha had,- he only sings praises the lila of Radha and Krishna and hankers after a chance just to have peep into the divine lila, and this peep into the divine lila is the highest spiritual gain which poets could think of. ~ Gautam Dasgupta (1976:125-26), quoted by Wimal Dissanayake, in Narratives of Agency: Self-making in China, India, and Japan, p. 132 #KEYS
127:We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, #KEYS
128:
Often, when I read Sri Aurobindo's works or listen to His words, I am wonderstruck: how can this eternal truth, this beauty of expression escape people? It is really strange that He is not yet recognised, at least as a supreme creator, a pure artist, a poet par excellence! So I tell myself that my judgments, my appreciations are influenced by my devotion for the Master - and everyone is not devoted. I do not think this is true. But then why are hearts not yet enchanted by His words?
Who can understand Sri Aurobindo? He is as vast as the universe and his teaching is infinite...
The only way to come a little close to him is to love him sincerely and give oneself unreservedly to his work. Thus, each one does his best and contributes as much as he can to that transformation of the world which Sri Aurobindo has predicted. 2 December 1964
~ The Mother, On Education, 396,#KEYS
129: The purpose of creation, is lila. The concept of lila escapes all the traditional difficulties in assigning purpose to the creator. Lila is a purpose-less purpose, a natural outflow, a spontaneous self-manifestation of the Divine. The concept of lila, again, emphasizes the role of delight in creation. The concept of Prakriti and Maya fail to explain the bliss aspect of Divine. If the world is manifestation of the Force of Satcitananda, the deployment of its existence and consciousness, its purpose can be nothing but delight. This is the meaning of delight. Lila, the play, the child's joy, the poet's joy, the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy of the soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground ~ Sri Aurobindo, Philosophy of Social Development, pp-39-40 #KEYS
130:15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold:The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world. Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided" The hero returns to the world of common day and must accept it as real. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
131:To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in God's house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creator's body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Chapter 1, The Cycle of Society,#KEYS
132:The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
133:A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #KEYS
134:... although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can harly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, August 12, 1904, #KEYS
135:Inspiration is always a very uncertain thing; it comes when it chooses, stops suddenly before it has finished its work, refuses to descend when it is called. This is a well-known affliction, perhaps of all artists, but certainly of poets. There are some who can command it at will; those who, I think, are more full of an abundant poetic energy than careful for perfection; others who oblige it to come whenever they put pen to paper but with these the inspiration is either not of a high order or quite unequal in its levels. Again there are some who try to give it a habit of coming by always writing at the same time; Virgil with his nine lines first written, then perfected every morning, Milton with his fifty epic lines a day, are said to have succeeded in regularising their inspiration. It is, I suppose, the same principle which makes Gurus in India prescribe for their disciples a meditation at the same fixed hour every day. It succeeds partially of course, for some entirely, but not for everybody. For myself, when the inspiration did not come with a rush or in a stream,-for then there is no difficulty,-I had only one way, to allow a certain kind of incubation in which a large form of the thing to be done threw itself on the mind and then wait for the white heat in which the entire transcription could rapidly take place. But I think each poet has his own way of working and finds his own issue out of inspiration's incertitudes.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Inspiration and Effort - I,#KEYS
136:1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki
2nd row Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton
3rd row Goethe
...
I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe - it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter - only Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send into the third row with Goethe, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.
Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or if Wordsworth had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol, it might be different, but we have to take things as they are. As it is, all began magnificently, but none of them finished, and what work they did, except a few lyrics, sonnets, short pieces and narratives, is often flawed and unequal. If they had to be admitted, what about at least fifty others in Europe and Asia? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art,#KEYS
137:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?
Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?
Poets, when they write poems...
Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!
What does "inspired" mean?
It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.
Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.
Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.
Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#KEYS
138:The poet-seer sees differently, thinks in another way, voices himself in quite another manner than the philosopher or the prophet. The prophet announces the Truth as the Word, the Law or the command of the Eternal, he is the giver of the message; the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done that, his whole work is done; he need not be its explicit spokesman or its official messenger. The philosopher's business is to discriminate Truth and put its parts and aspects into intellectual relation with each other; the poet's is to seize and embody aspects of Truth in their living relations, or rather - for that is too philosophical a language - to see her features and, excited by the vision, create in the beauty of her image.
No doubt, the prophet may have in him a poet who breaks out often into speech and surrounds with the vivid atmosphere of life the directness of his message; he may follow up his injunction "Take no thought for the morrow," by a revealing image of the beauty of the truth he enounces, in the life of Nature, in the figure of the lily, or link it to human life by apologue and parable. The philosopher may bring in the aid of colour and image to give some relief and hue to his dry light of reason and water his arid path of abstractions with some healing dew of poetry. But these are ornaments and not the substance of his work; and if the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. Thus the more rigid metaphysicians are perhaps right in denying to Nietzsche the name of philosopher; for Nietzsche does not think, but always sees, turbidly or clearly, rightly or distortedly, but with the eye of the seer rather than with the brain of the thinker. On the other hand we may get great poetry which is full of a prophetic enthusiasm of utterance or is largely or even wholly philosophic in its matter; but this prophetic poetry gives us no direct message, only a mass of sublime inspirations of thought and image, and this philosophic poetry is poetry and lives as poetry only in so far as it departs from the method, the expression, the way of seeing proper to the philosophic mind. It must be vision pouring itself into thought-images and not thought trying to observe truth and distinguish its province and bounds and fences.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
139:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.
This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
140:HOW CAN I READ SAVITRI?
An open reply by Dr Alok Pandey to a fellow devotee
A GIFT OF LOVE TO THE WORLD
Most of all enjoy Savitri. It is Sri Aurobindo's gift of Love to the world. Read it from the heart with love and gratitude as companions and drown in its fiery bliss. That is the true understanding rather than one that comes by a constant churning of words in the head.
WHEN
Best would be to fix a time that works for you. One can always take out some time for the reading, even if it be late at night when one is done with all the daily works. Of course, a certain receptivity is needed. If one is too tired or the reading becomes too mechanical as a ritual routine to be somehow finished it tends to be less effective, as with anything else. Hence the advice is to read in a quiet receptive state.
THE PACE
As to the pace of reading it is best to slowly build up and keep it steady. To read a page or a passage daily is better than reading many pages one day and then few lines or none for days. This brings a certain discipline in the consciousness which makes one receptive. What it means is that one should fix up that one would read a few passages or a page or two daily, and then if an odd day one is enjoying and spontaneously wants to read more then one can go by the flow.
COMPLETE OR SELECTIONS?
It is best to read at least once from cover to cover. But if one is not feeling inclined for that do read some of the beautiful cantos and passages whose reference one can find in various places. This helps us familiarise with the epic and the style of poetry. Later one can go for the cover to cover reading.
READING ALOUD, SILENTLY, OR WRITING DOWN?
One can read it silently. Loud reading is needed only if one is unable to focus with silent reading. A mantra is more potent when read subtly. I am aware that some people recommend reading it aloud which is fine if that helps one better. A certain flexibility in these things is always good and rigid rules either ways are not helpful.
One can also write some of the beautiful passages with which one feels suddenly connected. It is a help in the yoga since such a writing involves the pouring in of the consciousness of Savitri through the brain and nerves and the hand.
Reflecting upon some of these magnificent lines and passages while one is engaged in one\s daily activities helps to create a background state for our inner being to get absorbed in Savitri more and more.
HOW DO I UNDERSTAND THE MEANING? DO I NEED A DICTIONARY?
It is helpful if a brief background about the Canto is known. This helps the mind top focus and also to keep in sync with the overall scene and sense of what is being read.
But it is best not to keep referring to the dictionary while reading. Let the overall sense emerge. Specifics can be done during a detailed reading later and it may not be necessary at all. Besides the sense that Sri Aurobindo has given to many words may not be accurately conveyed by the standard dictionaries. A flexibility is required to understand the subtle suggestions hinted at by the Master-poet.
In this sense Savitri is in the line of Vedic poetry using images that are at once profound as well as commonplace. That is the beauty of mystic poetry. These are things actually experienced and seen by Sri Aurobindo, and ultimately it is Their Grace that alone can reveal the intrinsic sense of this supreme revelation of the Supreme. ~ Dr Alok Pandey,#KEYS
141:(Nirodbaran:) "It was the first week of January 1930.
At about 3 p.m., I reached Dilip Kumar Roy's place. "Oh, you have come! Let us go," he said, and cutting a rose from his terrace-garden he added, "Offer this to the Mother." When we arrived at the Ashram he left me at the present Reading Room saying, "Wait here." My heart was beating nervously as if I were going to face an examination. A stately chair in the middle of the room attracted momentarily my attention. In a short while the Mother came accompanied by Nolini, Amrita and Dilip. She took her seat in the chair, the others stood by her side. I was dazzled by the sight. Was it a ‘visionary gleam’ or a reality? Nothing like it had I seen before. Her fair complexion, set off by a finely coloured sari and a headband, gave me the impression of a goddess such as we see in pictures or in the idols during the Durga Puja festival. She was all smiles and redolent with grace. I suppose this was the Mahalakshmi smile Sri Aurobindo had spoken of in his book The Mother. She bathed me in the cascade of her smile and heart-melting look. I stood before her, shy and speechless, made more so by the presence of the others who were enjoying the silent sweet spectacle. Minutes passed. Then I offered to her hand my rose and did my pranam at her feet which had gold anklets on them. She stooped and blessed me. On standing up, I got again the same enchanting smile like moonbeams from a magic sky. After a time she said to the others, "He is very shy." "[1]
(Amal Kiran:) "Now to come back to all the people, all – the undamned all who were there in the Ashram. Very soon after my coming Dilip Kumar Roy came with Sahana Devi. They came and settled down. And, soon after that, I saw the face of my friend Nirod. It was of course an unforgettable face. (laughter) I think he had come straight from England or via some place in Bengal, but he carried something of the air of England. (laughter) He had passed out as a doctor at Edinburgh. I saw him, we became friends and we have remained friends ever since. But when he came as a doctor he was not given doctoring work here. As far as I remember he was made the head of a timber godown! (laughter) All sorts of strange jobs were being given to people. Look at the first job I got. The Mother once told me, "I would like you to do some work." I said, "All right, I am prepared to do some work." Then she said,"Will you take charge of our stock of furniture?" (laughter)"[2]
(Amal Kiran:) "To return to my friend Nirod – it was after some time that he got the Dispensary. I don't know whether he wanted it, or liked it or not, but he established his reputation as the frowning physician. (laughter) People used to come to him with a cold and he would stand and glare at them, and say, "What? You have a cold!" Poor people, they would simply shiver (laughter) and this had a very salutary effect because they thought that it was better not to fall ill than face the doctor's drastic disapproval of any kind of illness which would give him any botheration. (laughter) But he did his job all right, and every time he frightened off a patient he went to his room and started trying to write poetry (laughter) – because that, he thought, was his most important job. And, whether he succeeded as a doctor or not, as a poet he has eminently succeeded. Sri Aurobindo has really made him a poet.
The doctoring as well as the poetry was a bond between us, because my father had been a doctor and medicine ran in my blood. We used to discuss medical matters sometimes, but more often the problems and pains of poetry."[3] ~ https://wiki.auroville.org.in/wiki/Nirodbaran#KEYS
142:
Sometimes while reading a text one has ideas, then Sweet Mother, how can one distinguish between the other person's idea and one's own?
Oh! This, this doesn't exist, the other person's idea and one's own idea.
Nobody has ideas of his own: it is an immensity from which one draws according to his personal affinity; ideas are a collective possession, a collective wealth.
Only, there are different stages. So there is the most common level, the one where all our brains bathe; this indeed swarms here, it is the level of "Mr. Everybody". And then there is a level that's slightly higher for people who are called thinkers. And then there are higher levels still - many - some of them are beyond words but they are still domains of ideas. And then there are those capable of shooting right up, catching something which is like a light and making it come down with all its stock of ideas, all its stock of thoughts. An idea from a higher domain if pulled down organises itself and is crystallised in a large number of thoughts which can express that idea differently; and then if you are a writer or a poet or an artist, when you make it come lower down still, you can have all kinds of expressions, extremely varied and choice around a single little idea but one coming from very high above. And when you know how to do this, it teaches you to distinguish between the pure idea and the way of expressing it.
Some people cannot do it in their own head because they have no imagination or faculty for writing, but they can do it through study by reading what others have written. There are, you know, lots of poets, for instance, who have expressed the same idea - the same idea but with such different forms that when one reads many of them it becomes quite interesting to see (for people who love to read and read much). Ah, this idea, that one has said it like this, that other has expressed it like that, another has formulated it in this way, and so on. And so you have a whole stock of expressions which are expressions by different poets of the same single idea up there, above, high above. And you notice that there is an almost essential difference between the pure idea, the typal idea and its formulation in the mental world, even the speculative or artistic mental world. This is a very good thing to do when one loves gymnastics. It is mental gymnastics.
Well, if you want to be truly intelligent, you must know how to do mental gymnastics; as, you see, if you want really to have a fairly strong body you must know how to do physical gymnastics. It is the same thing. People who have never done mental gymnastics have a poor little brain, quite over-simple, and all their life they think like children. One must know how to do this - not take it seriously, in the sense that one shouldn't have convictions, saying, "This idea is true and that is false; this formulation is correct and that one is not and this religion is the true one and that religion is false", and so on and so forth... this, if you enter into it, you become absolutely stupid.
But if you can see all that and, for example, take all the religions, one after another and see how they have expressed the same aspiration of the human being for some Absolute, it becomes very interesting; and then you begin... yes, you begin to be able to juggle with all that. And then when you have mastered it all, you can rise above it and look at all the eternal human discussions with a smile. So there you are master of the thought and can no longer fly into a rage because someone else does not think as you, something that's unfortunately a very common malady here.
Now, there we are. Nobody has any questions, no?
That's enough? Finished! ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955,#KEYS
143:Death & Fame
When I die
I don't care what happens to my body throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
But I want a big funeral St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother 96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters their grandchildren, companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan--
Next, teacher Trungpa Vajracharya's ghost mind, Gelek Rinpoche, there Sakyong Mipham, Dalai Lama alert, chance visiting America, Satchitananda Swami Shivananda, Dehorahava Baba, Karmapa XVI, Dudjom Rinpoche, Katagiri & Suzuki Roshi's phantoms Baker, Whalen, Daido Loorie, Qwong, Frail White-haired Kapleau Roshis, Lama Tarchen --
Then, most important, lovers over half-century Dozens, a hundred, more, older fellows bald & rich young boys met naked recently in bed, crowds surprised to see each other, innumerable, intimate, exchanging memories
"He taught me to meditate, now I'm an old veteran of the thousandday retreat --"
"I played music on subway platforms, I'm straight but loved him he loved me"
"I felt more love from him at 19 than ever from anyone"
"We'd lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly arms round each other"
"I'd always get into his bed with underwear on & by morning my skivvies would be on the floor"
"Japanese, always wanted take it up my bum with a master"
"We'd talk all night about Kerouac & Cassady sit Buddhalike then sleep in his captain's bed."
"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"
"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my stomach shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "
"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth & fingers along my waist"
"He gave great head"
So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commin-gling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997 and surprise -- "You too? But I thought you were straight!"
"I am but Ginsberg an exception, for some reason he pleased me."
"I forgot whether I was straight gay queer or funny, was myself, tender and affectionate to be kissed on the top of my head, my forehead throat heart & solar plexus, mid-belly. on my prick, tickled with his tongue my behind"
"I loved the way he'd recite 'But at my back allways hear/ time's winged chariot hurrying near,' heads together, eye to eye, on a pillow --"
Among lovers one handsome youth straggling the rear
"I studied his poetry class, 17 year-old kid, ran some errands to his walk-up flat, seduced me didn't want to, made me come, went home, never saw him again never wanted to... "
"He couldn't get it up but loved me," "A clean old man." "He made sure I came first"
This the crowd most surprised proud at ceremonial place of honor--
Then poets & musicians -- college boys' grunge bands -- age-old rock star Beatles, faithful guitar accompanists, gay classical con-ductors, unknown high Jazz music composers, funky trum-peters, bowed bass & french horn black geniuses, folksinger fiddlers with dobro tamborine harmonica mandolin auto-harp pennywhistles & kazoos
Next, artist Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60's India, Late fauve Tuscan painter-poets, Classic draftsman Massa-chusets surreal jackanapes with continental wives, poverty sketchbook gesso oil watercolor masters from American provinces
Then highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio-philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex
"I met him dozens of times he never remembered my name I loved him anyway, true artist"
"Nervous breakdown after menopause, his poetry humor saved me from suicide hospitals"
"Charmant, genius with modest manners, washed sink, dishes my studio guest a week in Budapest"
Thousands of readers, "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"
"I saw him read Montclair State Teachers College decided be a poet-- "
"He turned me on, I started with garage rock sang my songs in Kansas City"
"Kaddish made me weep for myself & father alive in Nevada City"
"Father Death comforted me when my sister died Boston l982"
"I read what he said in a newsmagazine, blew my mind, realized others like me out there"
Deaf & Dumb bards with hand signing quick brilliant gestures
Then Journalists, editors's secretaries, agents, portraitists & photo-graphy aficionados, rock critics, cultured laborors, cultural historians come to witness the historic funeral Super-fans, poetasters, aging Beatnicks & Deadheads, autograph-hunters, distinguished paparazzi, intelligent gawkers
Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997
~ Allen Ginsberg,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:A poet over 30 is pathetic ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 2:The fellow is either a madman or a poet. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 3:The man is either crazy or he is a poet. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 4:To a poet nothing can be useless. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 5:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 6:Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 7:The poet is always our contemporary. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 8:Even a poet cannot get everything right. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 9:To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 10:Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 11:A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 12:The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 13:I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 14:Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 15:A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 16:Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 17:For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 18:The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagiarizes, ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 19:I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 20:The poet's labors are a work of joy, and require peace of mind. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 21:And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 22:I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 23:Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 24:A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 25:A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 26:No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 27:Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 28:A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 29:One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 30:Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are! ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 31:A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 32:What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 33:A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 34:Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! They had no poet, and they died ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 35:Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 36:It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 37:I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 38:At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 39:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 40:God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 41:The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 42:The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring. ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 43:A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 44:Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 45:The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 46:Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 47:Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 48:Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 49:The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 50:The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes... ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 51:For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 52:The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 53:How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 54:They shall be accounted poet kings / Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 55:A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 56:Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 57:The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 58:For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 59:That is the way Emerson said it. But here is the way a poet -the late Douglas Mallochsaid ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 60:The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 61:Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 62:The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 63:I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 64:He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 65:I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 66:I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 67:The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 68:If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 69:When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 70:A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 71:In the words of the poet, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, this erstwhile youth replies, I just can't ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 72:Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool. ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 73:A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 74:A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 75:Every poem can be considered in two ways& 76:Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 77:A poet is someone who can pour light into a spoon, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy mouth. ~ hafez, @wisdomtrove 78:Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 79:Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 80:Pound's crazy. All poets are... . They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 81:How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 82:She can't help it,' he said. & 83:The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 84:If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 85:With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 86:Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people. ~ kahlil-gibran, @wisdomtrove 87:As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 88:The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 89:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 90:We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 91:The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 92:The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 93:The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict among us, gods or people. Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 94:The true poet is a friendly man. He takes to his arms even cold and inanimate things, and rejoices in his heart. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 95:Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 96:Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 97:The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 98:The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 99:The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 100:Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 101:No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 102:The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 103:The poet and the politician have this in common: their greatness depends on the courage with which they face the challenges of life. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 104:When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 105:Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 106:A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 107:Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 108:The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 109:The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 110:He who studies to imitate the poet Pindar, O Julius, relies on artificial wings fastened on with wax, and is sure to give his name to a glassy sea. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 111:thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 112:Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 113:I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 114:master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 115:This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim. ~ alfred-lord-tennyson, @wisdomtrove 116:I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 117:A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 118:Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 119:Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 120:A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 121:Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 122:Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 123:Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 124:Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 125:Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds). ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 126:Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 127:If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 128:Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different! ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 129:There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 130:Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 131:Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life? ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 132:I cannot conceive why people will always mix up my own character and opinions with those of the imaginary beings which, as a poet, I have the right and liberty to draw. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 133:The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 134:For men may prove and use their friends, as the poet expresses it, usque ad aras, meaning that a friend should not be required to act contrary to the law of God. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 135:There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 136:I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 137:Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 138:The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 139:Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 140:When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 141:Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 142:The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 143:You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 144:And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 145:The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 146:What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 147:Imagination, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. Ambrose Bierce ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 148:Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? & 149:Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport; By his own talents he worked his undoing. Oh, you who pass by, if ever you have loved, Think it not a burden to wish him calm repose. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 150:The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 151:Constellations shine with light that was emitted aeons ago, and I wait for something to come to me, words that a poet might use to illuminate life's mysteries. But there is nothing. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 152:When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 153:Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 154:Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 155:A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland. ~ kahlil-gibran, @wisdomtrove 156:Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 157:Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 158:The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 159:I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,& 160:You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 161:The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 162:The role of the poet is almost nothing... drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 163:Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 164:England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature& 165:Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 166:a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 167:The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 168:Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness. ~ nathaniel-hawthorne, @wisdomtrove 169:Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 170:As poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore reminds us, "We cannot cross the sea merely by staring at the water." Simplicity has power. And living on purpose comes to this: Just do it. How much simpler can we get? ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 171:If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 172:In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 173:... Who alive can say & 174:What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 175:It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 176:I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 177:I can't think of any poet-recluses outside of one dead Jeffers. [Robinson Jeffers] The rest of them want to slobber over each other and hug each other. It appears to me that I am the last of the poet-recluses. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 178:All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been! ~ fred-rogers, @wisdomtrove 179:Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult... The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 180:The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 181:LSD, yeah, the big parade ‚Äì everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 182:Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 183:I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 184:The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 185:Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace">Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 186:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 187:I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry Ô¨Årst, Ô¨Ånds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 188:Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 189:Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 190:As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 191:We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That’s how you have to think of this. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 192:Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain& 193:This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 194:I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 195:It is one of the great paradoxities of life that not-knowing leads to the ‘deep knowing’ that the ancients called ‘gnosis’. As the poet Robert Frost writes so beautifully: We dance around in a ring, and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 196:It is one of the great paradoxities of life that not-knowing leads to the ‘deep knowing’ that the ancients called ‘gnosis’. As the poet Robert Frost writes so beautifully: We dance around in a ring, and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 197:Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 198:A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden "A poem... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness... It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 199:Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 200:It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 201:Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 202:the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 203:I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I"m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 204:A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 205:I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog... .Only in the novel are all things given full play. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 206:We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 207:It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 208:It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 209:This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: & 210:Imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless that, like a high ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment. The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant. He is tempted to say many things which might better be omitted, or, at least shut up in fewer words. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 211:Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 212:When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always& 213:Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 214:Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers? ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 215:This perpetual longing for happiness—which can, by definition, never be fulfilled because that very search itself denies the happiness that is present in our own being now—condemns us to an endless search in the future and thus perpetuates unhappiness. It is for this reason that the poet said, Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. ~ rupert-spira, @wisdomtrove 216:The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 217:When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 218:The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers& 219:The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 220:The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 221:Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. . . . Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 222:The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 223:I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. & 224:When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 225:Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 226:If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 227:A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound beomes like the sound of beautiful music . . . . And men flock about the poet saying, Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 228:My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it... In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie... It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs... I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 229:The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 230:To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 231:We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men! ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 232:Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to express some of the most profound teachings of interdependence and emptiness I've ever heard. With the eloquence of a poet, he holds up a sheet of paper and teaches us that the rain cloud and the tree and the logger who cut the tree down are all there in the paper. He's been one of the most significant carriers of the lamp of the dharma to the West that we have had. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 233:What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music... . And people flock around the poet and say: & 234:Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 235:The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body. ~ anthony-de-mello, @wisdomtrove 236:We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 237:The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up And I said: Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys That we have to draw every fall. May I draw a fox instead? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up once more and said: Teacher, My heart is falling asleep And it wants to wake up. It needs to be outside. Sit down, he said. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 238:I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 239:Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 240:For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 241:I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 242:Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 243:The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 244:That perhaps is your task& 245:I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. We formed sort of a laser beam of protest. Every painter, every writer, every stand-up comedian, every composer, every novelist, every poet aimed in the same direction. Afterwards, the power of this incredible new weapon dissipated. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 246:Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day and night; it is not of the earth. But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust. Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart. The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother- dust. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 247:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 248:One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 249:When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 250:Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint... They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 251:My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and & 252:If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 253:Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 254:True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero-really look-and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 255:This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:You must be a poet, ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
2:Den Unge Poet
~ Emil Aarestrup,#NFDB
3:I'd better be a poet ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
4:Limbs of a dismembered poet. ~ Horace, #NFDB
5:For nothing keeps a poet ~ Joyce Kilmer, #NFDB
6:A poet over 30 is pathetic ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
7:Poet: gardener of epitaphs. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
8:A poet is always learning. ~ Malika Booker, #NFDB
9:God is the perfect poet. ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
10:You poet boys are dangerous. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
11:The rhyme of the poet ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
12:A poet must learn to wage war. ~ Ho Chi Minh, #NFDB
13:An anaesthetic is a poet-killer. ~ Lewis Hyde, #NFDB
14:A poet could kill the dead. ~ Cameron Conaway, #NFDB
15:Don't send a poet to London. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
16:Every man is a poet at heart. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
17:Honor is the greatest poet. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
18:I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem. ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
19:and the poet, Longfellow. ~ Patricia Wentworth, #NFDB
20:It is always a poet's winter. ~ Kate Braverman, #NFDB
21:Scientist alone is true poet. ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
22:We need help, the poet reckoned. ~ Edward Dorn, #NFDB
23:All a poet can do today is warn. ~ Wilfred Owen, #NFDB
24:Every man is a poet when he is in love. ~ Plato, #NFDB
25:You want to be a poet and not die. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
26:A good poet's made as well as born. ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
27:Memory is a poet, not an historian. ~ Marie Howe, #NFDB
28:No bad man can be a good poet. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
29:Once a poet, always a poet. ~ Catherine McKenzie, #NFDB
30:The true poet dreams being awake. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
31:What the poet is searching for ~ Antonio Machado, #NFDB
32:At the touch of love, everyone is a poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
33:I am a poet. Words are my currency. ~ Lynn Cullen, #NFDB
34:The fellow is either a madman or a poet. ~ Horace, #NFDB
35:The man is either crazy or he is a poet. ~ Horace, #NFDB
36:To be a true poet is to become God. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
37:Was ever poet so trusted before? ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
38:A poet is a painter of the soul. ~ Isaac D Israeli, #NFDB
39:A poet is a world enclosed in a man. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
40:I'm a poet who can whine in meter ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
41:Not deep the poet sees, but wide. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
42:One must love a poet on its own terms. ~ Paul Gray, #NFDB
43:She was not a poet. She was a poem. ~ Deborah Levy, #NFDB
44:To a poet nothing can be useless. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
45:What poet would not grieve to see ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
46:I was a poet too; but modern taste ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
47:Me - the poet - lost for words. ~ Jessica Brockmole, #NFDB
48:The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
49:Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday. ~ Ted Kooser, #NFDB
50:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet ~ Plato, #NFDB
51:He wasn't a poet, not everyone is. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay, #NFDB
52:Poet's food is love and fame. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
53:YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING. ~ Amy King, #NFDB
54:Always be a poet, even in prose. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
55:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
56:Banksy is a poet, but so was hitler. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
57:God was a poet the day he made Jude. ~ Juliette Cross, #NFDB
58:I am merely a poet dying far from home. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
59:The poet is always our contemporary. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
60:To be a poet you have to experiment. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
61:At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
62:Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. ~ Czeslaw Milosz, #NFDB
63:Eyes of a poet, hands of a killer. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
64:[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
65:Oh what a poet I will flay myself into. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
66:Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
67:to the poet a pearl is a tear of the sea ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
68:A poet is a musician who can't sing. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
69:Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot. ~ Plato, #NFDB
70:I am a poet in deeds--not often in words. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
71:If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. ~ David Carradine, #NFDB
72:I’m not a poet—I’m a drifter in the arts. ~ Taylor Mead, #NFDB
73:The poet is stepping out of the airplane. ~ Jack Spicer, #NFDB
74:The true poem is the poet's mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
75:To love is to transform; to be a poet. ~ Norman O Brown, #NFDB
76:to the poet, a pearl is a tear of the sea ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
77:A poet begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
78:A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. ~ Jack Spicer, #NFDB
79:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
~ Plato,#NFDB
80:For a poet, style is the only morality. ~ Jennifer Stone, #NFDB
81:For love: a poet. For romance: a journalist. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
82:How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
83:Language is the machine of the poet. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
84:Memory is each man's poet-in-residence. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
85:The poet is he who fights on the passionate ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
86:You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
87:And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet. ~ Christopher Marlowe, #NFDB
88:For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet ~ Plato, #NFDB
89:Some moralist or mythological poet ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
90:A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made. ~ Luis Bunuel, #NFDB
91:Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
92:I have a poet's weakness for symbols. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
93:The poet is the priest of the invisible. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
94:The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one, ~ Bayard Taylor, #NFDB
95:The poet thinks with his poem... ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
96:'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
97:This poet is a griot in search of a village. ~ Kwame Dawes, #NFDB
98:You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams... ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
99:A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
100:At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. ~ Lauren Rowe, #NFDB
101:Even a poet cannot get everything right. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
102:I'm very much aware I can't think. I'm a poet. ~ Ren Daumal, #NFDB
103:The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature. ~ Edward Dahlberg, #NFDB
104:The eye is the notebook of the poet. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
105:The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle. ~ Lucinda Williams, #NFDB
106:The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
107:A beautiful woman is a practical poet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
108:A poet is somebody who has written a poem. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
109:I think being a poet, period, is isolating. ~ Victoria Chang, #NFDB
110:Test of the poet is knowledge of love, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
111:Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet. ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
112:A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
113:Envy won't make you a better poet. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer, #NFDB
114:Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet. ~ Clarence Darrow, #NFDB
115:To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
116:A poet must sing for his own people. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman, #NFDB
117:Better to have the poet's heart than brain, ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
118:I’ll be damned, you’re a poet. Welcome to hell. ~ James Wright, #NFDB
119:The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
120:The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
121:The starving poet business is no good nowadays. ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
122:What a comfort to know that God is a poet. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
123:Whoever would understand the poet ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
124:An undevout poet is an impossibility. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
125:Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
126:Cosmos and its stars; poet and his poetry! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
127:everybody loves a poet
a poet loves everybody ~ Aram Saroyan,#NFDB
128:For the way of the comets is the poet's way. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva, #NFDB
129:I am a black woman poet and I sound like one. ~ Lucille Clifton, #NFDB
130:Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
131:The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
132:A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
133:If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved. ~ Gregory Corso, #NFDB
134:Inside every man there is a poet who died young. ~ Stefan Kanfer, #NFDB
135:Man is the poet who kills, Woman the angel who eats. ~ Greg Bear, #NFDB
136:One can be a great poet and be politically stupid. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
137:Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport; ~ Ovid, #NFDB
138:The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent. ~ Horace, #NFDB
139:You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
140:I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet. ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
141:I know as well as thee that I am no poet born ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
142:It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
143:I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
144:Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
145:The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great. ~ Nick Flynn, #NFDB
146:The Poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
147:A poet is a good citizen turned inside out. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
148:A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens, ~ Carolyn Kizer, #NFDB
149:No place is a place until it has found its poet. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
150:Not being a poet, I prize truth above beauty. ~ Judith Rich Harris, #NFDB
151:oh each poet’s a beautiful human girl who must die. ~ Alice Notley, #NFDB
152:See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
153:The poet writes the history of his own body. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
154:A boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd, #NFDB
155:A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
156:Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
157:For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
158:I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet. ~ Theodore Roethke, #NFDB
159:My pecker’s a poet.” “How’s that?” “He’s a longfellow. ~ Sam Torode, #NFDB
160:The end of spring- the poet is brooding about editors. ~ Yosa Buson, #NFDB
161:The poet should touch our heart by showing his own ~ Leslie Stephen, #NFDB
162:Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet. ~ Misha Collins, #NFDB
163:But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
164:Every poet — every storyteller — requires motivation. ~ Andrew Pyper, #NFDB
165:He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up. ~ James M Barrie, #NFDB
166:He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love. ~ Eric Gamalinda, #NFDB
167:It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet. ~ Lytton Strachey, #NFDB
168:Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
169:The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagiarizes. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
170:To a poet every curve of her was a well place word. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
171:We are symbols, and inhabit symbols. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet, #NFDB
172:a poet can always find something good to write about. ~ Colleen Houck, #NFDB
173:a poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses, ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
174:If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.
~ Gregory Corso,#NFDB
175:Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
176:The poet is the one who breaks through our habits. ~ Saint John Perse, #NFDB
177:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
178:The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone. ~ Theodore Roethke, #NFDB
179:The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
180:The true philosopher and the true poet are one, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
181:To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
182:You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
183:Any decent poet can use words to stop
the bleeding. ~ Serhiy Zhadan,#NFDB
184:A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
185:Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
186:Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet? ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
187:Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
188:[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
189:Every poet has trembled on the verge of science. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
190:I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
191:No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet. ~ Claude Monet, #NFDB
192:None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet. ~ Torquato Tasso, #NFDB
193:The poet's labors are a work of joy, and require peace of mind. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
194:An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer. ~ Marlon Brando, #NFDB
195:And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
196:A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
197:Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
198:I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it ~ Marianne Moore, #NFDB
199:I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet. ~ Aristide Maillol, #NFDB
200:I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
201:Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
202:The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
203:Why he's a poet, you know, so he may live upon learning. ~ Fanny Burney, #NFDB
204:If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
205:I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times. ~ Carol Ann Duffy, #NFDB
206:... a man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet. ~ John Barth, #NFDB
207:A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
208:A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
209:A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
210:A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
211:I discovered our dear poet in my office, a simple clerk. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
212:The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong. ~ George Meredith, #NFDB
213:The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table. ~ Yvor Winters, #NFDB
214:What the world calls sorrow is really joy to the poet. ~ Munshi Premchand, #NFDB
215:As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
216:brilliant and audacious as ever — a beat poet of paranoia. He ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
217:God is the Poet, and we are the verses or songs He writes. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
218:Hey, Babe."
The man was a poet.
"Hey."
I was too. ~ Alice Clayton,#NFDB
219:I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
220:In dreams begin responsibilities,” as the poet Yeats said, ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
221:I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson. ~ Anne Stevenson, #NFDB
222:No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
223:The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired. ~ Paul Eluard, #NFDB
224:they say of the poet and the madmn we all have a little ~ Luis J Rodr guez, #NFDB
225:Was there a poet who hadn't written about skylarks? ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
226:We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago. ~ Richard J Daley, #NFDB
227:A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
228:A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
229:Being a poet doesn't automatically emasculate you, Claudia. ~ Oliver Bowden, #NFDB
230:Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
231:He kisses like a poet. Like he's writing poems on my lips. ~ Veronica Rossi, #NFDB
232:I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony. ~ Ben Hecht, #NFDB
233:So dawn goes down today, the poet wrote.Nothing gold can stay. ~ John Green, #NFDB
234:The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his. ~ Robert Graves,#NFDB
235:The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
236:The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
237:Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest... ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
238:And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, ~ Delmore Schwartz, #NFDB
239:Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
240:Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
241:it's so easy to be a poet
and so hard to be
a man. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
242:Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
243:You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics. ~ Petra Haden, #NFDB
244:A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
245:A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
246:Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life. ~ Kathleen Raine, #NFDB
247:Dear Gris, if there's one thing I can't abide it's a bad poet. ~ Cat Hellisen, #NFDB
248:I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet. ~ Yehuda Amichai, #NFDB
249:One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
250:One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
251:So dawn does down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay. ~ John Green, #NFDB
252:So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay. ~ John Green, #NFDB
253:...the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. ~ Philip Sidney, #NFDB
254:We first make our habits, then our habits make us. ENGLISH POET. ~ Sean Covey, #NFDB
255:A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
256:By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
257:Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are! ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
258:Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
259:May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
260:My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away. ~ Nikky Finney, #NFDB
261:The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
262:The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
263:The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe. ~ Osip Mandelstam, #NFDB
264:To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ~ Colette, #NFDB
265:Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet. ~ John Crowe Ransom, #NFDB
266:What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
267:When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet. ~ Melvin B Tolson, #NFDB
268:Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? ~ Alice Munro, #NFDB
269:Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. ~ Steven Seagal, #NFDB
270:A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
271:A poet never takes notes..you never take notes in a Love Affair. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
272:A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
273:In fact, you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. ~ Aim C saire, #NFDB
274:May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
275:The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
276:The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
277:The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
278:To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ~ Colette, #NFDB
279:What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
280:American poet who wrote: “If Barley be wanting to make into malt ~ Susan Cheever, #NFDB
281:A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke ~ Max Eastman, #NFDB
282:A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
283:The poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
284:Who could imagine a poet wearing anything other than black? ~ Ann Demeulemeester, #NFDB
285:An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
286:A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are. ~ Jack Prelutsky, #NFDB
287:I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet. ~ Carl Rakosi, #NFDB
288:I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king ~ Frank Sinatra, #NFDB
289:Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture. ~ Helen Hayes, #NFDB
290:They are the eyes of a poet, or painter—an artist, a tortured soul. ~ Morgan Rice, #NFDB
291:When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family. ~ Gregory Orr, #NFDB
292:Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
293:Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
294:Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet. ~ Mary Ruefle, #NFDB
295:A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure. ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
296:- How is he in bed? Gladiator or poet?
- Hmmm... A poetic gladiator. ~ J D Robb,#NFDB
297:I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
298:It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
299:I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
300:I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
301:…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
302:When a poet speaks of truth to another poet, what hope has truth? ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
303:Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter. ~ Edmond Jabes, #NFDB
304:A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
305:A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
306:At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
307:Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power. ~ Paul Fry, #NFDB
308:How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster? ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
309:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
310:Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
311:I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet. ~ Kenneth Koch, #NFDB
312:In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
313:The first time I ever cried in a movie was in Dead Poet's Society. ~ John Krasinski, #NFDB
314:The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
315:The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it. ~ Hilde Bruch, #NFDB
316:What a lovely drink this is, it makes one want to be a poet ~ Mustafa Kemal Atat rk, #NFDB
317:What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively. ~ Cynthia Bourgeault, #NFDB
318:All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher! ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
319:A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet. ~ Eugene Field, #NFDB
320:A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen. ~ Cecil Day Lewis, #NFDB
321:God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
322:God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations. ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
323:If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet. ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
324:I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
325:It was a lot less pleasant than travel via a discorporated poet. ~ Jonathan L Howard, #NFDB
326:The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
327:The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes... ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
328:They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet. ~ Janet Frame, #NFDB
329:Tinted Distances is the achievement of a wise and discerning poet. ~ Claudia Emerson, #NFDB
330:A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
331:A poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
332:A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human beast. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
333:A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing. ~ William A Henry III, #NFDB
334:A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
335:British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
336:Destiny never defames herself but when she lets an excellent poet die. ~ Thomas Nashe, #NFDB
337:If a poet writes to save his soul, he may save the soul of others. ~ Richard Eberhart, #NFDB
338:I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
339:I will dream to become a great writer or great poet of the world. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
340:She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
341:The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
342:To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
343:As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling.” — ~ Claudia Rankine, #NFDB
344:as the poet June Jordan wrote, “We are the ones we have been waiting for. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
345:A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently. ~ Richard Brookhiser, #NFDB
346:I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
347:The best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker. ~ Pablo Neruda, #NFDB
348:The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
349:We are made of all those who have built and broken us.” Atticus, poet ~ Winter Renshaw, #NFDB
350:A culture,” the poet W. H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
351:A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
352:A smile, like the poet's muse,
Inspires passion in the lover's heart ~ Alex Z Moores,#NFDB
353:I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
354:If the poet is not a real genius, I do not know what a genius is. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
355:I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott. ~ Walter Dean Myers, #NFDB
356:no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
357:The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
358:The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
359:The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe. ~ Comte de Lautr amont, #NFDB
360:A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
361:A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
362:a poet will even face death when he sees his people oppressed. ~ Carolina Maria de Jesus, #NFDB
363:Being a great poet doesn't always mean that you write great poetry. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
364:Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
365:... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ... ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
366:Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water), ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
367:The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
368:The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
369:A poet is different. A poet transforms the world with Such small hands. ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
370:Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
371:Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
372:Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question. ~ Dorianne Laux, #NFDB
373:It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. ~ Sofia Kovalevskaya, #NFDB
374:I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China. ~ Shan Sa, #NFDB
375:Let me tell you the tale of a poet who hanged himself with promises. . . . ~ C S Friedman, #NFDB
376:Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
377:Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses. ~ Vicente Aleixandre, #NFDB
378:Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
379:The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
380:The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
381:The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
382:The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
383:All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen, #NFDB
384:Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet. ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
385:For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim. ~ Philip Pullman, #NFDB
386:I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened. ~ Lester Cole, #NFDB
387:If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
388:It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world. ~ Sanober Khan, #NFDB
389:I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, #NFDB
390:Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see. ~ William Ellery Channing, #NFDB
391:The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
392:The poet laureate of England talked about murdering Jews on the West Bank. ~ Steven T Katz, #NFDB
393:The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
394:A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
395:Apparently, she was going to visit an evil witch with a scary poet vampire. ~ Erin Kellison, #NFDB
396:Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
397:Every poet hopes that after-times Shall set some value on his votive lay. ~ Caroline Norton, #NFDB
398:Eyes of a poet, hands of a killer.
Who the hell are you? ~ Alexandra Bracken,#NFDB
399:I’d rather be a bookie than a goddamn poet,” was his legendary response. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
400:If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
401:If he had had no education, maybe Basho could have been a much greater poet. ~ Nanao Sakaki, #NFDB
402:In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it. ~ Antonio Machado, #NFDB
403:I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry. ~ Denis, #NFDB
404:She's a good poet but a very neurotic woman."
"Don't the two go together? ~ Michael Nava,#NFDB
405:The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
406:THE pathology of the poet says that "the undevout astronomer is mad"; ~ Arthur Edward Waite, #NFDB
407:There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
408:To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer. ~ Lucille Clifton, #NFDB
409:To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist. ~ Thomas Cole, #NFDB
410:You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable. ~ Paul Claudel, #NFDB
411:A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
412:A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
413:Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
414:If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
415:Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
416:I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's ~ Wilfred Owen, #NFDB
417:Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet. ~ Alphonse de Lamartine, #NFDB
418:The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
419:...what else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love?... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
420:Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community. ~ Joan Larkin, #NFDB
421:A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
422:A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet. ~ Christian Morgenstern, #NFDB
423:A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko, #NFDB
424:Every poet creates their own universe that looks more beautiful than reality. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
425:Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
426:He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. ~ Anne Carson, #NFDB
427:I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
428:If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET. ~ Countee Cullen, #NFDB
429:IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
430:People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all. ~ Petra Haden, #NFDB
431:The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
432:To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons. ~ Harold Bloom, #NFDB
433:… where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise wrote the poet Thomas Gray. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
434:A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory. ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
435:As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
436:But as poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
437:For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
438:I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
439:My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
440:The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ~ Christopher Morley, #NFDB
441:The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful. ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
442:The Poet in his ArtMust intimate the whole, and say the smallest part. ~ William Wetmore Story, #NFDB
443:The poet speaks only to the poet. Spirit answereth spirit. The rest is hogwash. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
444:The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line. ~ Basil Bunting, #NFDB
445:The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
446:A great poet from ancient times put it this way: Love is the beauty of the soul. ~ Jeff Wheeler, #NFDB
447:How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they ~ John Keats, #NFDB
448:i am simply the poet. the poem is the one that can change your life. – medium ~ Nayyirah Waheed, #NFDB
449:Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
450:The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne, #NFDB
451:Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing. ~ Countee Cullen, #NFDB
452:You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it. ~ Kenneth Koch, #NFDB
453:21. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
454:An hour later it had become obvious that as a swordsman Alucius made a fine poet. ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB
455:A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
456:A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams. ~ Rene Char, #NFDB
457:Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, #NFDB
458:As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound. ~ Harold S Kushner, #NFDB
459:Even the dog is described by the poet to have received justice under Ramarajya. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
460:I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against. ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
461:I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
462:Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive. ~ Alfred de Musset, #NFDB
463:Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet, #NFDB
464:Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to drawing down worlds! ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
465:The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
466:The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
467:To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, #NFDB
468:What is meant for you is always meant to find you. —Indian poet-saint Lalleshwari ~ Tosha Silver, #NFDB
469:Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing! ~ Countee Cullen, #NFDB
470:You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~ John Ciardi, #NFDB
471:Your daddy doesn't know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet. ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
472:A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning. ~ James Dickey, #NFDB
473:Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
474:People living deeply,” wrote poet and diarist Anaïs Nin, “have no fear of death. ~ Steve Chandler, #NFDB
475:Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled. The ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
476:Stuart M. Sperry. Keats the Poet. Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ, 1993, ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
477:The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
478:The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile ~ G rard de Nerval, #NFDB
479:the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, #NFDB
480:To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet. ~ Dick Gregory, #NFDB
481:What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician? ~ Nellie Melba, #NFDB
482:A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
483:A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
484:A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening. ~ James Dickey, #NFDB
485:A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
486:Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet. ~ Luc Delahaye, #NFDB
487:Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~ Alfred de Musset, #NFDB
488:I am the poet of the high wire - I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances. ~ Philippe Petit, #NFDB
489:My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate." ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
490:Once we’re grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying. ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
491:The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
492:You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic. ~ Lloyd Alexander, #NFDB
493:A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
494:For the godly poet must be chaste himself, but there is no need for his verses to be so. ~ Catullus, #NFDB
495:Healing,” said the poet, “is not a science but the intuitive art of wooing nature. ~ Krista Tippett, #NFDB
496:If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
497:I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read. ~ Nell Freudenberger, #NFDB
498:I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
499:I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
500:It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind. ~ William Congreve, #NFDB
501:I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
502:language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
503:She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head ~ Linda Wagner Martin, #NFDB
504:The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns. ~ Gabriela Mistral, #NFDB
505:The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet. ~ Yehuda Amichai, #NFDB
506:The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it. ~ Wendy Cope, #NFDB
507:You don't have to flay him with it. He's the son of a poet and has the soul of a bard. ~ Teal Ceagh, #NFDB
508:Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
509:A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
510:... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
511:I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet. ~ John Quincy Adams, #NFDB
512:I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery. ~ Michael Stipe, #NFDB
513:In the words of the poet, my heart was in the east with you, but my body was out west. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
514:Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good. ~ Janet Fitch, #NFDB
515:No poet worth the name can disregard his or her subjects, which come from the heart.” — ~ Henri Cole, #NFDB
516:The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
517:The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
518:The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
519:To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets. ~ John Ashbery, #NFDB
520:Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
521:20th century poetry is a piñata. Images break from the earth when the poet strikes it. ~ Diane Glancy, #NFDB
522:Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
523:A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, #NFDB
524:For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing. ~ Robin Morgan, #NFDB
525:He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
526:if I can’t write poetry, at least perhaps I can try to think and feel like a poet. ~ Richard B Wright, #NFDB
527:Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
528:The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
529:The first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile . ~ G rard de Nerval, #NFDB
530:The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving. ~ James Elroy Flecker, #NFDB
531:The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy. ~ Max Jacob, #NFDB
532:...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old. ~ Owen Barfield, #NFDB
533:The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
534:The Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful. Makes Money.” Within ~ Linda Wagner Martin, #NFDB
535:to put it as philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson did, “To be simple is to be great. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
536:And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast) / The lie that flatters I abhor the most. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
537:Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations! ~ Elizabeth Bishop, #NFDB
538:I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem. ~ Jaime Gil de Biedma, #NFDB
539:I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
540:In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived. ~ Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve, #NFDB
541:Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
542:Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
543:Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
544:One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring." ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
545:Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
546:The child and the poet know that Reality is what does not need to be realistic. ~ Vicki Lewis Thompson, #NFDB
547:The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
548:The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
549:The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
550:There has never been a poet or orator who thought another better than himself. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
551:Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet)." - Vimalananda ~ Robert E Svoboda, #NFDB
552:Where there is a monster, the wise American poet Ogden Nash told us, there is a miracle. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
553:Who was a queen and loved a poet once
Humpbacked, a dwarf? ah, women can do that! ~ Robert Browning,#NFDB
554:Your eyelashes will write on my heart
the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
555:A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
556:For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
557:I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. ~ Francois Mauriac, #NFDB
558:I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. ~ Fran ois Mauriac, #NFDB
559:...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
560:Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15. ~ James Fenton, #NFDB
561:The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper. ~ Edward Dahlberg, #NFDB
562:The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
563:The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
564:There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
565:The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist. ~ Theophile Gautier, #NFDB
566:To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. ~ Karl Jaspers, #NFDB
567:Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
568:A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against. ~ Rod McKuen, #NFDB
569:A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
570:As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
571:Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
572:For as fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet. ~ John Keble, #NFDB
573:For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
574:I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
575:I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet. ~ August Wilson, #NFDB
576:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
577:In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. ~ Henri Cole, #NFDB
578:Nietzsche: A poet with a philosophy. A system without a method. A mustache with a man. ~ Eric Jarosinski, #NFDB
579:No dust from her behavior ever settled on the mirror of the Emperor's mind.
(Court Poet) ~ Gill Paul,#NFDB
580:The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
581:They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page. ~ Richard Yates, #NFDB
582:You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that. ~ Edna St Vincent Millay, #NFDB
583:A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. ~ Edmond de Goncourt, #NFDB
584:Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics. ~ Yehuda Amichai, #NFDB
585:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
586:Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’ ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
587:Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
588:Put a girl in
moonlight
and tell only truths
and every man
becomes a poet. ~ Atticus Poetry,#NFDB
589:Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn’t mind. ~ Joan D Vinge, #NFDB
590:The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
591:The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world. ~ Lotte Lehmann, #NFDB
592:When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life. ~ John Drinkwater, #NFDB
593:[When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet] ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
594:A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers. ~ Irving Bacheller, #NFDB
595:A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
596:by the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
597:Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
598:Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
599:No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
600:One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry. ~ Nathalie Sarraute, #NFDB
601:Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose. ~ Diane di Prima, #NFDB
602:The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
603:The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
604:—Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other] ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
605:When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
606:Wine it is the milk of Venus, And the poet's horse accounted: Ply it and you all are mounted. ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
607:A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus become his best encourager. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman, #NFDB
608:Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
609:As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
610:A true poet writes from the language and experiences of their own heart, not those of others. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
611:German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
612:Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
613:I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not. ~ Frank O Hara, #NFDB
614:Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
615:Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet's eyes and recounted in a poet's terms. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
616:The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
617:The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
618:The words are the mirror of a poet. Through which you can see the reflection of himself. ~ Gaurav Dagaonkar, #NFDB
619:Three things that enrich the poet: Myths, poetic power, a store of ancient verse. ~ The Red Book of Hergest, #NFDB
620:Why worry? What is meant for you is always meant to find you. —Indian poet-saint Lalleshwari ~ Tosha Silver, #NFDB
621:You either a poet or a homosexual."
"Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both? ~ Paul Beatty,#NFDB
622:You should have been a poet."
"I was." (Gesture towards his rags.) "Isn't that obvious? ~ Samuel Beckett,#NFDB
623:A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
624:A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
625:A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things. ~ Jane Kenyon, #NFDB
626:A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
~ Jean Cocteau,#NFDB
627:But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? ~ Plato, #NFDB
628:If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
629:If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
630:In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand. ~ Kenneth Branagh, #NFDB
631:Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
632:Suicide is career gold for the poet. Sadly, the poet isn’t around to reap any benefits from it. ~ Jim Behrle, #NFDB
633:Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me. ~ Krist Novoselic, #NFDB
634:Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees. ~ Czeslaw Milosz, #NFDB
635:What poet's persuasion can reconcile the length of those days with the brevity of life? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
636:A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
637:As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
638:Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense ~ Lucille Clifton, #NFDB
639:God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
640:it is the function of a poet to relate not things that have happened, but things that may happen, ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
641:I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
642:I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
643:Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust? ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
644:Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of. ~ John Dos Passos, #NFDB
645:warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
646:A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician. ~ Karl Weierstrass, #NFDB
647:and a smaller, sad, little-dead-poet sphere with acne scars spins around us lighting the night... ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
648:As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
649:Gortrek gave him a look. 'Never get into a war of words with a poet, Ironbreaker. You can't win. ~ Nathan Long, #NFDB
650:He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
651:I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
652:I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
653:lf Fuzuli says there is loyalty in beauties. Don't be fooled, for the words of a poet are surely lies. ~ Fuz l, #NFDB
654:Never durst a poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink was tempered with love's sighs. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
655:The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
656:The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
657:While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
658:A scholar is someone who sticks to things.
A poet is someone who uses whatever sticks to him. ~ Barbara Sher,#NFDB
659:At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
660:Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
661:Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief. ~ Bono, #NFDB
662:Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
663:if the poet becomes what-is, then what-is (and no one else) becomes the author of the poem. ~ Robert Bringhurst, #NFDB
664:If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
665:Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now? ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
666:Mr. Rihani is a man of ardent poetic temperament, a clever poet, and a man of unworldly ideals. ~ Edwin Markham, #NFDB
667:The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet. ~ Horace, #NFDB
668:When it hurts,’ wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, ‘we return to the banks of certain rivers, ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB
669:A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
670:Gems from the Turkish poet ~ Jalaluddin Rumi #JoyTrain #Joy #Love #Peace #Inspiration RT @arunbhar @BethFratesMD, #NFDB
671:getting up to piss at three AM, which some poet or other has rightly dubbed the Hour of the Wolf. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
672:I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
673:If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
674:I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry. ~ Anthony Mackie, #NFDB
675:The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words. ~ Stephane Mallarme, #NFDB
676:we might as well live life as if -as the poet Rumi put it-everything is rigged in our favor ~ Arianna Huffington, #NFDB
677:Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
678:He’d already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes. Ringil ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
679:He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages. ~ Christopher Pearse Cranch, #NFDB
680:Let there be a patron like Maecenus, Flaccus, and your lands will give you a poet like Virgil ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
681:Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
682:Poet Henry David Thoreau once burned down 300 acres of forest trying to cook a fish. ~ Bathroom Readers Institute, #NFDB
683:The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
684:The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
685:The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~ Lionel Trilling, #NFDB
686:Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack. ~ Ho Chi Minh, #NFDB
687:Vision is the characteristic power of the poet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #NFDB
688:A wise man can and should stand above his times, not so the poet, but he should be their apex. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
689:Bertolucci is extraordinary in his ability to perceive, he's a poet...he is very easy to work for. ~ Marlon Brando, #NFDB
690:Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief? ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
691:I'm much more of a musician than a poet. I just feel much more confident about my musical abilities. ~ Mary Timony, #NFDB
692:Is he a poet? Or a genuine one? An emancipator? Or a subjugator? A good one? Or an evil one? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
693:It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
694:No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
695:No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
696:Paul Eckman says, “The face tells us subtleties in feelings that only a poet can put into words. ~ Gavin de Becker, #NFDB
697:She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
698:There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said Truth is the daughter of Time. ~ Aulus Gellius, #NFDB
699:When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
700:a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
701:A troubled youth
burnt me alive
the poet came from the ashes
the words came from the fire ~ Atticus Poetry,#NFDB
702:Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
703:God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations. ~ Robert Browning, Paracelsus (1835), Part II, #NFDB
704:Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
705:I felt miserable. When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt. But he was a poet. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
706:It seems as if one-half of the world had been made by an engineer and the other half by a foolish poet. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
707:Nothing reveals a poet's weakness like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
708:Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
709:The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
710:Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
711:A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. ~ Charlie Chaplin, #NFDB
712:The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
713:The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form. ~ Muriel Rukeyser, #NFDB
714:Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool. ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
715:A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
716:A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
717:A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
718:But where are the snows of last year? That was the greatest concern of Villon, the Parisian poet. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
719:Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them? ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
720:I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
721:Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
722:poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can’t be a poet. Mrs. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
723:She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
724:She can’t help it,” he said. “She’s got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
725:The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
726:The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
727:There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
728:To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
729:When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
730:A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
731:All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face. ~ Selima Hill, #NFDB
732:A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth ~ Hafiz, #NFDB
733:Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before. ~ Robert Charles Wilson, #NFDB
734:I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
735:It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write. ~ Henry R Luce, #NFDB
736:It’s from the Tang poet Qian Xu’s poem “Furled Plantains”: Green waxen candles from which no flames rise. ~ Cao Xueqin, #NFDB
737:Jule was a poet—poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence. ~ Joan D Vinge, #NFDB
738:Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
739:No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
740:Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
741:The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
742:The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency---half tiger,half poet. ~ Yehudi Menuhin, #NFDB
743:Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
744:Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
745:A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon, Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth. ~ Hafez, #NFDB
746:A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
747:As the poet E. E. Cummings observed, “Always a more beautiful answer that asks a more beautiful question. ~ Sue Johnson, #NFDB
748:A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry. ~ David J Delaney, #NFDB
749:Being engaged with life. One has to develop a poet's eye for perfect moments, moments that most people pass by. ~ Jewel, #NFDB
750:He is a lyric poet . . . aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed. ~ Samuel Barber, #NFDB
751:In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can’t stop the lines in time, so I’m a novelist. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
752:In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet. ~ Jayne Cortez, #NFDB
753:Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
754:need a poet who can really write. Nowadays it seems like ‘many are gone, and those that live are bad’.12 ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
755:Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
756:The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
757:There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.' ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
758:This is really what you want? To live with a poet?” “Yes,” she said. “With the hot plate? And the lice? ~ Joshua Ferris, #NFDB
759:We ask the poet: 'What subject have you chosen?' instead of: 'What subject has chosen you? ~ Marie von Ebner Eschenbach, #NFDB
760:When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
761:For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
762:I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
763:The only gift is a portion of thyself . . . the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb. . . . ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
764:A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice. ~ Frances Mayes, #NFDB
765:For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other. ~ Kathy Acker, #NFDB
766:If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
767:I lost everything I had, but in the process I found myself.” - Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet and mystic. ~ Rahul Deokar, #NFDB
768:It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. ~ David Benioff, #NFDB
769:I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags. ~ W S Merwin, #NFDB
770:Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
771:The poet is afraid to make any place feel too much like home because then she might have to stop running. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
772:A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
773:Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
774:He was a cowboy with the soul of a poet. To this day, he is the most American American I’ve ever met. ~ Seth Grahame Smith, #NFDB
775:How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
776:If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination ~ David Allan Coe, #NFDB
777:If you are a poet, you will clearly see a cloud floating on this sheet of paper.
Thich Nhat Hanh ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,#NFDB
778:Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
779:Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
780:That is the difference between a botanist and a poet: a botanist knows about the flower, the poet knows the flower. ~ Osho, #NFDB
781:The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party, ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
782:the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
783:There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. ~ Emile Zola, #NFDB
784:There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. ~ mile Zola, #NFDB
785:When I am old I shall become an itinerant poet and wear a straw hat and never worry about love again. Tuesday, ~ Zen Cho, #NFDB
786:Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. — Heinrich Heine, German poet ~ Jennifer A Nielsen, #NFDB
787:You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
788:...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
789:A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
790:Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"! ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
791:poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
792:She does not love you.
Your metaphors thrill her
you are her poet.
But that's all there's to it. ~ Mahmoud Darwish,#NFDB
793:The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
794:the poet I saw once...
but whose words have long been
in my mind, windows of invincible candles... ~ Nathalie Handal,#NFDB
795:This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
796:When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
797:All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
798:A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth ~ Hafiz#poetry, #NFDB
799:Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
800:Hence as the poet says: People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
801:PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that - stone walls do not a prison make. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
802:The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
803:The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
804:These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them! ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
805:The sky too is deep,
the water immeasurably deep.
Of heaven and earth we know nothing
[unnamed poet] ~ Alan Booth,#NFDB
806:This was a Poet - It is That
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings -
And Attar so immense ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
807:Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea? ~ Yasunari Kawabata, #NFDB
808:Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him! ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
809:I always admire writers. My father was a writer, a poet. I always admire people who can clearly state their mind. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
810:I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. ~ Leslie Fiedler, #NFDB
811:Never was flattery lost on a poet's ear; a simple race, they waste their toil for the vain tribute of a smile. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
812:The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
813:American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet. ~ Diane Wakoski, #NFDB
814:And long after I have given up, my heart still searches for you without my permission.” —Rudy Francisco, poet ~ Winter Renshaw, #NFDB
815:A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, “We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war. ~ Max Hastings, #NFDB
816:Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
817:He had not been much of a poet, but poet enough for his love-sonnets and satires to weaken his lungs. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner, #NFDB
818:Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. ~ Mark Doty, #NFDB
819:I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
820:It's not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It's with words."
- the poet Mallarmé to Degas ~ Ryan Holiday,#NFDB
821:Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did. ~ Robert Lowell, #NFDB
822:Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away. ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
823:Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
824:Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
825:The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
826:You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
827:As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
828:children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don't have no sense ~ Lucille Clifton,#NFDB
829:I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents. ~ Tony Kushner, #NFDB
830:I've almost seen him. And Poet," she says, and I want tot say, You have seen him and you didn't want him. ~ Cath Crowley, #NFDB
831:Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
832:The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
833:The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
834:The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
835:The poet who does not revere his art, and believe in its sovereignty, is not born to wear the purple. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman, #NFDB
836:This is a folk-tale of Manhattan. For a folk-tale, you need tradition. That came when the poet died in Apple Place. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
837:Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
838:A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
839:For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo. ~ Cornel West, #NFDB
840:[He] had the soul of a poet, and because of this, he liked very much to consider questions that had no answers. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
841:If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making. ~ E E Cummings, #NFDB
842:If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making. ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
843:I once heard the poet laureate say that the reason why we value real flowers is because we know they're dying. ~ Victoria Danann, #NFDB
844:it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
845:It must be frustrating being a poet-or any sort of artist-and not being able to offend anyone any more. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB
846:I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine. —RUMI, SUFI POET, from LIKE THIS You ~ Charlotte Kasl, #NFDB
847:The condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
848:the poet Emerson said that when we have worn out our shoes, the strength of the journey has passed into our body. ~ Ruta Sepetys, #NFDB
849:The poet is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
850:To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
851:With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
852:am, as an English poet says in an entirely different context, ‘as free as the road, as loose as the wind.’” Brunetti ~ Donna Leon, #NFDB
853:As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
854:Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
855:Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
856:For nine more nights they trained, after an arduous day’s march, Vaelin would try to turn a poet into a swordsman. ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB
857:He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
858:N-am nici ambiţii şi nici dorinţe.
A fi poet nu e pentru mine o ambiţie.
e doar felul meu de a fi singur. ~ Fernando Pessoa,#NFDB
859:Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet. ~ Henning Mankell, #NFDB
860:The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
861:The poet is a magician who hardly knows the secret of his own spell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Word and the Spirit, #NFDB
862:You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet; because poetry is beyond hooks and holes. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
863:A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet may crack a joke that will take hold. ~ E B White, #NFDB
864:Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984, ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
865:Every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it."
- from "The Adventure of a Poet ~ Italo Calvino,#NFDB
866:I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak. ~ Allison Joseph, #NFDB
867:I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
868:I wished he didn’t look like an angry god and write like a tortured poet. It would have made hating him so much easier. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
869:Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
870:The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me. ~ G rard de Nerval, #NFDB
871:A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
872:A woman who writes has power, and a woman power is feared.”-Gloria E. Anzaldúa, queer Chicana poet & writer ~ Gloria E Anzald a, #NFDB
873:Ideas were found by the freethinker,
expressed by poet with the new words,
formulated by scholar into knowledge. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
874:I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- ) ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
875:Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
876:Peter James Stanlis. Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher. Second Edition. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008, ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
877:The fairy poet takes a sheet Of moonbeam, silver white; His ink is dew from daisies sweet, His pen a point of light. ~ Joyce Kilmer, #NFDB
878:The poet is a Cyclops in the Kingdom of the Blind whose sole cure for the madness of his vision must be starvation. ~ David B Lentz, #NFDB
879:We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. —John Dryden, seventeenth-century English poet and dramatist ~ Marci Shimoff, #NFDB
880:When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario’s cape. ~ Paul Monette, #NFDB
881:When you choose to be a poet,
you become a place that people walk through
and then leave when they are ready ~ Rudy Francisco,#NFDB
882:Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
883:It seems more than likely that the translating of poetry is going to rub off on the translator if he or she is a poet. ~ Ron Padgett, #NFDB
884:What was said by the Latin poet of labor--that it conquers all things--is much more true when applied to impudence. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
885:As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
886:But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
887:Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
888:The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.' ~ Tertullian, #NFDB
889:There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
890:To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
891:To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
892:Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
893:Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
894:A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it? ~ Vera Nazarian, #NFDB
895:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
896:a poet of ancient Rome called Ovid, who most assuredly was not a Christian.” The magister looked sadly at Father Willibald ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
897:Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” W. H. Auden, Poet 1907 – 1973 ~ Vickie McKeehan, #NFDB
898:I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
899:Sure, I can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “‘But only God can make a tree. ~ Daniel James Brown, #NFDB
900:The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms. ~ Clement Greenberg, #NFDB
901:The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
902:There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
903:The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. ~ William James, #NFDB
904:You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the
poet’s consciousness in his best moods. ~ George Eliot,#NFDB
905:A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any style of poetry.
David J Delaney © ~ David J Delaney,#NFDB
906:Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
907:He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
908:He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~ George Sand, #NFDB
909:I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet. ~ Leni Riefenstahl, #NFDB
910:Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. ~ Aravind Adiga, #NFDB
911:It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening. ~ V S Pritchett, #NFDB
912:Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. —HEINRICH HEINE, German critic and poet ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
913:The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
914:The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
915:The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.12 ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, #NFDB
916:They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
917:Thomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that 'pursuit' of happiness because the 'pursuit' puts it back on you. ~ Will Smith, #NFDB
918:Un poet de mare viziune (Baudelaire, Rilke, de ex.) afirmă în două versuri mai mult decât un filozof în toată opera sa. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
919:We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
920:What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
921:With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult. ~ Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve, #NFDB
922:A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
923:And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
924:A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
925:Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight. ~ David Biespiel, #NFDB
926:Happiness is where we find it, but rarely where we seek it…” – Jean Antoine Petit-Senn (1792–1870) French-Swiss Poet ~ Shadonna Richards, #NFDB
927:How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
928:I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
929:I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me. ~ Sam Hamill, #NFDB
930:I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
931:No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world. ~ Alfred Tennyson,#NFDB
932:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
~ Abraham Maslow,#NFDB
933:As the poet Alexander Pope said: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
934:Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black? ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
935:I could make a poet out of far less promising material. I could make a poet out of two sticks and a piece of orange peel. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
936:If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.' ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
937:Poets and children," said Sylvan. "We are the same really. When you can't find a poet, find a child. Remember that. ~ Patricia MacLachlan, #NFDB
938:Remember what the poet Shakespeare said, Jeeves? 'Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear.' You'll find it in one of his plays. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
939:The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:
It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we. ~ Prageeta Sharma,#NFDB
940:When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
941:As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
942:But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
943:But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. Now, ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
944:In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. ~ Stephen Greenblatt, #NFDB
945:Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that. ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
946:The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three. ~ Margaret Fuller, #NFDB
947:The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. ~ Lionel Trilling, #NFDB
948:The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
949:The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry. ~ Herbert Spencer, #NFDB
950:This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
951:A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
952:[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona. ~ Jay Michaelson, #NFDB
953:Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
954:Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said. ~ Alice Fulton, #NFDB
955:Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
956:If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster ~ Arthur Machen, #NFDB
957:It is the mark of a great poet to write words that feel as though they have stood witness to your most intimate memory of love. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
958:One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles. SHABKAR, TIBETAN POET ~ Barbara Ann Kipfer, #NFDB
959:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,#NFDB
960:Scientist!' I accuse.
'Poet!' she retorts.
We both smile, delighted and not trying to hide our delight from each other. ~ Nicola Yoon,#NFDB
961:The Moon said my spine was out of order
yet everything was in its place
The Moon said a poet must drift sometimes ~ Casey Renee Kiser,#NFDB
962:The world is full of magical things waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960)
NOVELIST AND POET ~ Rhonda Byrne,#NFDB
963:Where have all the poets gone? Rhyme with passion left unsung, Even now my heart it yearns, Until my poet prince returns.’ ~ Heather Burch, #NFDB
964:You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. ~ Theophile Gautier, #NFDB
965:Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
966:I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor there. ~ Victoria Chang, #NFDB
967:We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay, #NFDB
968:I would rather be a swineherd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
969:Let yourself be silently drawn by
the stronger pull of what you really love.
— Rumi (C. 1207 C.E.-1273 C.E.), Sufi poet ~ Gregg Braden,#NFDB
970:Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
971:So Mr. Pizarsky had been a poet? That was how he’d said it: “I was a poet." As if the poet had died. He was hiding, perhaps. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
972:The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
973:The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
974:There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth. ~ James Thurber, #NFDB
975:Wasn't sunrise meant to be the hour of hope? 'The season of creation' some poet or other had once called it. Fucking poet. ~ Uzma Aslam Khan, #NFDB
976:But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet. ~ Jeffery Deaver, #NFDB
977:Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
978:I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
979:Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth. ~ Julio Cort zar, #NFDB
980:Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet. ~ Phyllis McGinley, #NFDB
981:The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
982:The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
983:The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
984:There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
985:There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
986:The true poet is a friendly man. He takes to his arms even cold and inanimate things, and rejoices in his heart. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
987:A Dedication She lends her pen, to thoughts of him, that flow from it, in her solitary. For she is his poet, And he is her poetry. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
988:Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
989:For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
990:Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
991:I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet ~ Nick Cave, #NFDB
992:Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
993:Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem. ~ Marc Andre Fleury, #NFDB
994:The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
995:[The poet] is no arguer . . . he is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
996:There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German. ~ Paul Celan, #NFDB
997:They are fools who kiss and tell'-- Wisely has the poet sung. Man may hold all sorts of posts If he'll only hold his tongue. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
998:Thus does unjust suspicion follow even the most blameless for, as the poet says, "Who shall escape calumny?"
Who, indeed! ~ Jerome K Jerome,#NFDB
999:Tibetan poet Shabkar said: “One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
1000:We should give heed to what has been said by the heathen poet: “Do not yield to evils but proceed more boldly against them.”15 ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1001:Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else. ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
1002:You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
1003:A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
1004:A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1005:A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1006:As the Irish poet John O’Donohue puts it, “There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans. ~ Sue Johnson, #NFDB
1007:Early in the twentieth century, E.E.Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. ~ Clive James, #NFDB
1008:I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet. ~ Alice Eve, #NFDB
1009:Sure, I can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “‘But only God can make a tree.’” Pocock ~ Daniel James Brown, #NFDB
1010:The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane. ~ Rose Macaulay, #NFDB
1011:The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
1012:Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card. ~ Max Euwe, #NFDB
1013:A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1014:a poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite. ~ Adam Nicolson, #NFDB
1015:Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do. ~ Harold Bloom, #NFDB
1016:Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-
a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable. ~ Rabih Alameddine,#NFDB
1017:I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
1018:None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry. ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
1019:There has never been a poet able to heal with words, nor accurately express with phrases, the pain of missing a lost loved one. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
1020:The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it. ~ John Ciardi, #NFDB
1021:Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
1022:For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means? ~ Plato, #NFDB
1023:Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. ~ John Drinkwater, #NFDB
1024:I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
1025:In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter. ~ John D Agata, #NFDB
1026:Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
1027:Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. One more tale to stay alive. ~ Louise Gl ck, #NFDB
1028:The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. ~ Salvador Dal, #NFDB
1029:the mind poet stays in the house / the house is empty and it has no walls / the poem is seen from all sides / everywhere / at once. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
1030:The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1031:The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
1032:To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery. ~ Nicole Brossard, #NFDB
1033:What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. ~ Barbara Kingsolver, #NFDB
1034:You are the bloom of a spring, a poet's imagination so true... It's amazing how much more beautiful you look, each time I see you. ~ Rohit Sharma, #NFDB
1035:As the poet Charles Baudelaire quipped, the devil wins at the point where he is able to convince the world that he doesn’t exist. ~ Michael Hudson, #NFDB
1036:Even now I often ask myself: perhaps love produces a feeling of inspiration similar to that experienced by an artist or a poet? ~ Chingiz Aitmatov, #NFDB
1037:Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
1038:had been an ambitious poet, without a particularly delicate sense of language, but an abundance of melodrama and overwrought emotion. ~ Ann Leckie, #NFDB
1039:I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, #NFDB
1040:I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1041:It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1042:po·et·as·ter n. a person who writes inferior poetry. late 16th cent.: modern Latin, from Latin poeta 'poet' + -ASTER. ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
1043:Pretty much every artist in Scotland - musician, writer, poet, actor - they're all part of a thing called the National Collective. ~ Roddy Woomble, #NFDB
1044:That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1045:The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
1046:The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
1047:The poet begins where the man ends.
The man's lot is to live his human life,
the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. ~ Jos Ortega y Gasset,#NFDB
1048:There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
1049:The sun surrendered its splendor—why, it was like poetry; he was a poet; Norman smiled. He was many things. If they only knew—— But ~ Robert Bloch, #NFDB
1050:And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers. ~ Lord Byron,#NFDB
1051:Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish. ~ Leslie Fiedler, #NFDB
1052:A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1053:It took me awhile to not be ashamed to be a poet in the business environment, and to be a business person in the poet environment. ~ Victoria Chang, #NFDB
1054:I will have my serpent’s tongue - my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. ~ Gloria E Anzald a, #NFDB
1055:Other writers who moonlight as booksellers include Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich, Garrison Keillor and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1056:The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life... ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
1057:The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
1058:Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
1059:The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1060:The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1061:the reader is hurried out of himself by the force of the poet’s imagination, and turns in one place to a hearer, in another to a spectator. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1062:There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne, #NFDB
1063:William Blake writes, “A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect — the Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
1064:Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise, instead, seek what they sought.” –Matsuo Bashō Japanese poet of the Edo period ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1065:I thought I was going to be a poet when I was in college, but then I found out I was poor so I decided to do something I'd get paid for. ~ Josh Lieb, #NFDB
1066:I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci, #NFDB
1067:No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1068:Poetry is given to the poet. I don’t think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1069:She lends her pen,
to thoughts of him,
that flow from it,
in her solitary.
For she is his poet,
And he is her poetry. ~ Lang Leav,#NFDB
1070:Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage. ~ Paul Engle, #NFDB
1071:A life-whether seamstress or poet, farmer or king-is measured not by length, but by the worth of its deeds, and the power of its dreams. ~ T A Barron, #NFDB
1072:But I'm a woman, and as the great poet so cleverly wrote, hell
hath no fury as a woman scorned. Consider me your personal hell. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1073:Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously. ~ Patricia Highsmith,#NFDB
1074:Certainly, he was the only one in the room who'd actually engaged Dante in direct conversation and informed the Poet he was an ass. ~ Sylvain Reynard, #NFDB
1075:David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic. ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
1076:i cannot love you gently, it’s not in me to love in part, so I will love You completely, and a little madly . . . – Matt Spencer, Poet ~ Kennedy Ryan, #NFDB
1077:If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1078:Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous; and the poet will be able to perform few wonders, when he is astonished by wonders. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
1079:It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #NFDB
1080:I understand the phrase "Honor the Women" all too well: the poet has probably a wife of his own, but he prefers to honor another. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1081:Ruth Zardo. A gifted poet. One of the most distinguished in the nation. But that gift had come wrapped in more than a dollop of crazy. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
1082:Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool.
But you yourself may prove to show it,
Every fool is not a poet. ~ Alexander Pope,#NFDB
1083:The poet and the politician have this in common: their greatness depends on the courage with which they face the challenges of life. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1084:The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1085:All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake, Because in us keen longings they awake. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench, #NFDB
1086:For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
1087:I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
1088:It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
1089:The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman, #NFDB
1090:What the poet sees and feels, not what he opines, is the real substance of his poetry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Poets of the Dawn - II, #NFDB
1091:When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1092:Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1093:A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
1094:As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers. ~ Ali Liebegott, #NFDB
1095:Eggs I must instantly have!" she announced. "And Lope de Vega I will not have, though in general a fine poet, but not in the kitchen! ~ Georgette Heyer, #NFDB
1096:He who dares not to choose his path will end as the stair upon which the powerful tread. Carl Scharnberg, Danish poet (1930–1995) ~ Jesper Bugge Kold, #NFDB
1097:I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1098:Indeed, there is pain when spring buds burst..."
Wasn't there a Swedish poet who had said something like that? Or was she Finnish? ~ Jostein Gaarder,#NFDB
1099:I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy? ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1100:Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1101:Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. —Aristophanes, Greek comic poet (c. 450-385 BCE) ~ Tom Standage, #NFDB
1102:The good poet sticks to his real loves, to see within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race. ~ Karl Shapiro, #NFDB
1103:They are fools who kiss and tell'--
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue. ~ Rudyard Kipling,#NFDB
1104:while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1105:A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1106:A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
1107:Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. ~ Satya Nadella, #NFDB
1108:But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
1109:I am the poet of the body
and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me
and the pains of hell are with me ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
1110:I have loved enough women to know how to paint.
If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet. ~ Sarah Ruhl,#NFDB
1111:Never does a star grace this land with a poet’s light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
1112:Some people are suspicious of others who have more than one talent. I've had poets tell me to my face that an actress can't be a poet. ~ Grace Zabriskie, #NFDB
1113:That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1114:You like that poet, Bukowski?” “Yeah,” I answered, confused. “Don’t try.” “I don’t understand.” “That’s what it says, on Bukowski’s grave. ~ Kami Garcia, #NFDB
1115:Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that. ~ Steve Earle, #NFDB
1116:He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. ~ Nell Zink, #NFDB
1117:If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain. —Maya Angelou, author and poet Have ~ Marci Shimoff, #NFDB
1118:It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
1119:Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, trees, flowers, water and love. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
1120:Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
1121:Poet
To mask the fiery thought,
in simple words succeeds.
For still the craft of genius is,
To mask a king in weeds ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
1122:The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else. —E. E. CUMMINGS, POET (1894–1962) ~ Mark Divine, #NFDB
1123:The mystic poet William Blake once wrote, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind. ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
1124:The Persian poet Rumi says, The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. ~ Elizabeth Lesser, #NFDB
1125:The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1126:There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library. ~ Anthony Hecht, #NFDB
1127:War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1128:A man--poet, prophet, or whatever be may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1129:A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1130:A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
1131:A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
1132:But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung. ~ Vita Sackville West, #NFDB
1133:Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbart
The human power is revealed by poet
Il potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#NFDB
1134:Now go. An actor should know when to leave the stage, a poet when the lay is finished, and a bard when it is time to put aside the lute. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
1135:Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
1136:Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
1137:The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance. ~ A R Ammons, #NFDB
1138:As the poet William Blake so eloquently stated: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
1139:If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
1140:I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse,
but then I weren't much of a poet ~ Nick Cave,#NFDB
1141:In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1142:I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet. ~ William Everson, #NFDB
1143:[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. ~ George Oppen, #NFDB
1144:It's all the same. Don't you see? The Beast, the Bog, the Poem, the Poet, the world. They all love you. They've loved you this whole time. ~ Kelly Barnhill, #NFDB
1145:Love is a great poet, its resources are inexhaustible, but if the end it has in view is not obtained, it feels weary and remains silent. ~ Giacomo Casanova, #NFDB
1146:One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. ~ Connie Willis, #NFDB
1147:People like me spend years learning the techniques of meditation. But you're a poet, and poets are born knowing the language of angels. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
1148:Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet, #NFDB
1149:The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1150:Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1151:while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,#NFDB
1152:A poet need not trouble himself if he lies. He lies only in the matter of love, as the regions of the heart are open to tempting conquest. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
1153:From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
1154:He who studies to imitate the poet Pindar, O Julius, relies on artificial wings fastened on with wax, and is sure to give his name to a glassy sea. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1155:I once stirred thunder in the skies, And now, unlike the days of yore - Just tears in a drunken poet’s eyes And laughter - from some whore. ~ Alexander Blok, #NFDB
1156:I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
1157:Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right. ~ Flora Thompson, #NFDB
1158:To the poet, whoever he was, whose song gave a richer light to that first bright flare of English civilization, this book is gratefully dedicated. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
1159:Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets. ~ Democritus, #NFDB
1160:A life- whether seamstress of poet, farmer or king, is not measured by it's length, but by the worth of it's deeds and the power of it's dreams. ~ T A Barron, #NFDB
1161:Amos had wanted to be a poet when he was a boy. He’d wound up a scientist. Danny was a poet, who somehow happened to have become a scientist. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1162:An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy. ~ Charles Williams, #NFDB
1163:Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1164:A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~ E B White, #NFDB
1165:A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1166:For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
1167:He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet. ~ Subramanya Bharathi, #NFDB
1168:I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist. ~ Harold Bloom, #NFDB
1169:I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1170:In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet. ~ Roberto Bolano, #NFDB
1171:In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
1172:On Burns
In whomsoe'er, since Poesy began,
A Poet most of all men we may scan,
Burns of all poets is the most a Man.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,#NFDB
1173:Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
1174:Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
1175:The poet’s first concern and his concern always is with living beauty and reality, with life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Breath of Greater Life, #NFDB
1176:The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1177:To “seek inspiration” has always seemed to me a ridiculous and absurd fancy: inspiration cannot be sought out; it must find the poet. For ~ Alexander Pushkin, #NFDB
1178:What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
1179:Drama is the poet’s vision of some part of the world-act in the life of the human soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Course of English Poetry - II, #NFDB
1180:Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. —last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486 ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1181:I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune. ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
1182:I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways. ~ Michael Longley, #NFDB
1183:In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1184:O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
1185:The poet lusts after emotionally unavailable people because she doesn't have to worry about commitment. The poet desperately wants commitment. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
1186:The true poet, is like a man who's happy anywhere, in endless measure, if he's allowed to look at leaves and grass, to see the sun rise and set. ~ Jacob Grimm, #NFDB
1187:To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1188:Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1189:Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1190:Epitaph Of A Young Poet Who Died Before Having
Achieved Success
Beneath this sod lie the remains
Of one who died of growing pains.
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
1191:I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
1192:Imagine a twelve-year-old-girl.
Imagine her being attacked, raped and murdered.
Take your time.
Then imagine God.
M. Barin, poet ~ H kan Nesser,#NFDB
1193:In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem. ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
1194:... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
1195:The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
1196:The poet John Ciardi pointed out, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea. ~ Tucker Max, #NFDB
1197:This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
1198:To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
1199:We're different, this poet and I. In looks, in body,
in background. But I don't feel so different
when I listen to her. I feel heard. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo,#NFDB
1200:Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1201:A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1202:Cicada
Sick of his own face,
sick of his skin, of the dark,
he crawls outside himself
to sing–
a better poet than most. ~ Hosho McCreesh,#NFDB
1203:Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
1204:I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
1205:I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1206:It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1207:It was in that small lack of movement that Poet could see true horror. A mirror held up to the human race and how it can be manipulated. Ruined. ~ Suzanne Young, #NFDB
1208:It was in this tradition that the Beowulf poet, innovative though he was, composed his work, and we may imagine the splendor of a court wherein such a ~ Unknown, #NFDB
1209:No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet* said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1210:Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
1211:So too the poet, in representing men who are irascible or indolent, or have other defects of character, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1212:The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1213:The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1214:The poet Jason Shinder wrote, “Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1215:There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing. ~ Ted Kooser, #NFDB
1216:The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
1217:The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
1218:According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it. ~ Qiu Xiaolong, #NFDB
1219:a poet is a poet only insofar as he sees himself surrounded by figures who live and act before him and into whose inmost nature he can see. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1220:Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes. ~ Roberto Calasso, #NFDB
1221:Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
~ Albert Einstein, Einstein and the Poet,#NFDB
1222:Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
1223:I envy the poet. He is encouraged toward drunkenness and wallows with nubile wenches while the painter must endure wretchedness and pain for his art. ~ Rembrandt, #NFDB
1224:Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant. ~ Mira Nair, #NFDB
1225:O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
1226:She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable. ~ Deborah Levy, #NFDB
1227:The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
1228:The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
1229:The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
1230:The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1231:The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
1232:truth of the verse of the poet, Pope, who said: "Remembrance and reflection how allied! What thin partitions sense from thought divide! ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1233:A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world. ~ Johann Gottfried Herder, #NFDB
1234:As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
1235:A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1236:I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1237:If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven. ~ Charles Ives, #NFDB
1238:I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian. ~ Roger Zelazny, #NFDB
1239:I serve the king of dreams and I do his bidding. But you are correct once I was a poet and like all poets I spent too long in the kingdom of dreams. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1240:It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker. ~ Katy Lederer, #NFDB
1241:Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1242:Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1243:The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1244:The deviant that does not observe the trivial uses of the language is a poet, a deviant who violates the banal customs of society is a criminal. ~ William C Brown, #NFDB
1245:The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1246:There are some things which no novelist, no historian, should attempt; some few scenes in life’s drama which even no poet should dare to paint. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
1247:This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1248:A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1249:Aphorism: what is worth quoting from the soul’s dialogue with itself. ~ Yahia Lababidi (b. 1973), Egyptian-Lebanise essayist and poet. Signposts to Elswhere (2008), #NFDB
1250:A poet’s largeness and ease of execution,—succeeds more amply on the inferior levels of his genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Poets of the Dawn - II, #NFDB
1251:Blame the poets. It’s easier to stir people to rebellion if they think they’re on the side of a demigod or some chosen one. Never trust a poet. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1252:I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet . . . So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
1253:If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1254:I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40, #NFDB
1255:national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
1256:Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith. ~ Ariel Gore, #NFDB
1257:Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
1258:Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40, #NFDB
1259:The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman. ~ Heraclitus,#NFDB
1260:The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
1261:The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide. ~ Marilyn Hacker, #NFDB
1262:[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them. ~ Anthony Minghella, #NFDB
1263:A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
1264:A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better. ~ Richard Hugo, #NFDB
1265:At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet. ~ Ama Ata Aidoo, #NFDB
1266:A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world... ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1267:Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1268:Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1269:I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1270:In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension. ~ Dana Gioia, #NFDB
1271:I was a tiny bug. Now a mountain. I was left behind. Now honored at the head. You healed my wounded hunger and anger, and made me a poet who sings about joy. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1272:Someone asked me when is my birthday?
The poet inside me replied,
"My birthday is on the last day of the year,
It's 31st December my dear! ~ Anamika Mishra,#NFDB
1273:The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
1274:Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem. ~ Karen Tei Yamashita,#NFDB
1275:The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1276:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1277:The young artist of today need no longer say 'I am a painter,' or 'a poet,' or 'a dancer.' He is simply an 'artist.' All of life will be open to him. ~ Allan Kaprow, #NFDB
1278:What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now. ~ Nicholson Baker, #NFDB
1279:A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1280:But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright. ~ Beth Henley, #NFDB
1281:Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked.
"It's perfect... a masterpiece."
"Do you think it'll sell?" I asked.
"No fucking way. ~ Dan Simmons,#NFDB
1282:Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself. ~ Stephen Spender, #NFDB
1283:The poet Emily Dickinson said that nature is a haunted house, while art is a house that tries to be haunted. She was born and died in the same room. ~ Simon Van Booy, #NFDB
1284:The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
1285:The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1286:You want to be a poet and you’re not. By the time you realize you’re not doomed, your life is going to be over and you’ll never have taken any risks. ~ Tarryn Fisher, #NFDB
1287:A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face. ~ John Boyne, #NFDB
1288:A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be ~ Abraham H Maslow, #NFDB
1289:"Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living." ~ Albert Einstein(Einstein and the Poet, 1983), #NFDB
1290:Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, #NFDB
1291:Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it. ~ Elizabeth Bear, #NFDB
1292:Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge,#NFDB
1293:tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman. ~ M John Harrison, #NFDB
1294:VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant. ~ Tom Stoppard,#NFDB
1295:You know what I love about you? You can go from cussing sailor to poet laureate in three seconds without batting an eyelash. It's quite impressive. ~ Georgina Guthrie, #NFDB
1296:You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, “The wound is the place where the light enters you. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1297:A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season. ~ Wilfred Owen, #NFDB
1298:A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
1299:Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession. ~ Selima Hill, #NFDB
1300:Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
1301:Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are really princesses who are waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. RILKE Letters to a Young Poet ~ Sera Beak, #NFDB
1302:The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest. ~ Isaac D Israeli, #NFDB
1303:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. It ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1304:You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
1305:A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~ Samuel McChord Crothers, #NFDB
1306:Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels. ~ Charlie Chaplin, #NFDB
1307:Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without. ~ Gregory Pardlo, #NFDB
1308:for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1309:History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream. ~ Lilian Whiting, #NFDB
1310:Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
1311:line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face. ~ John Boyne, #NFDB
1312:The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1313:The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1314:There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. ~ Jean Giraudoux, #NFDB
1315:The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker. ~ Eula Biss, #NFDB
1316:The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us —the poet —whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1317:And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet." ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
1318:If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1319:In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
1320:I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
1321:Just as a great poet can use one scene to bring another new, unknown vista into view. It should be obvious, but the best metaphors make the best poems. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1322:Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1323:Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
1324:That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet. ~ Matthew Zapruder, #NFDB
1325:The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
1326:The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
1327:The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman. ~ Heraclitus,#NFDB
1328:The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1329:...they wore their hair long like a poet who hopes that romantically flowing locks will make up for a wretched inability to find a rhyme for “daffodil. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1330:...Age gave her the peace, at least, to live inside that moment like a poet - to not sacrifice the beauty to the anxiety of What Next, but to just observe. ~ Shannon Hale, #NFDB
1331:Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet. ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
1332:Four hundred and fifty years earlier, the poet Kabir, whose profession as a spinner/weaver was in part emulated by Gandhi, had also spoken of Ram-Rahim. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
1333:Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out. ~ Christopher Bram, #NFDB
1334:He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar. ~ Emily St John Mandel, #NFDB
1335:I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
1336:I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it. ~ Jon McGregor, #NFDB
1337:Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. Ogden Nash (1902–71), American poet I ~ Sandi Toksvig, #NFDB
1338:One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
1339:Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
1340:So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question. ~ Adam Kirsch, #NFDB
1341:The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it. ~ Sam Hamill, #NFDB
1342:THE POET CAROLYN KIZER SAID TO ME once, “Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.” Maybe storytellers are interested mostly in life and commas. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1343:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1344:The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1345:To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
1346:"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn. ~ Sandra Cisneros, #NFDB
1347:Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
1348:But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist. ~ Lytton Strachey, #NFDB
1349:It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
1350:names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them (bitch-cunt-whore-poet) to each other beneath the bedclothes, they were like poison in the air. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1351:Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe. ~ Adam Kirsch, #NFDB
1352:Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis. ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
1353:Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1354:There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1355:The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1356:They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it.
(On being named Minnesota's first Poet Laureate) ~ Robert Bly,#NFDB
1357:Untitled
'Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool.
But you yourself may serve to show it,
Every fool is not a poet.'
~ Alexander Pope,#NFDB
1358:And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul. ~ Richard Selzer, #NFDB
1359:As a poet and as an actress, we're taught to be far more elaborate with our words and - I wouldn't say generalize, but definitely stronger with our choices. ~ Masiela Lusha, #NFDB
1360:Every man or woman is a potential poet or artist. Everyone has the capacity to bring to their work the dignity, purposefulness, and presence of the artist. ~ Laurence Boldt, #NFDB
1361:I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
1362:I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
1363:Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds). ~ Horace, #NFDB
1364:Pentru poet, obiectivitatea este totul, pentru filoyof, subiectivitatea. Poertul este glasul universului, filoyoful este glasul Unului elementar, al principiului. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
1365:People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
1366:The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote that once in a lifetime hope and history can rhyme. Evolution is what happens when history and change are in rhyme. ~ Sharon Moalem, #NFDB
1367:The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and -- from time immemorial--the woman. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, #NFDB
1368:There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all. -Ogden Nash, poet (1902-1971) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1369:Would anyone but a crazed bicephalous being, half engineer, half poet, willingly shackle himself to a venture of such magnitude? I am prisoner of my dream. ~ Philippe Petit, #NFDB
1370:You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1371:A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1372:define stones as rocks that have been put to use, so that, as the poet Don McKay put it, “What happens between a rock and stone is simply everything human.” At ~ Kate Harris, #NFDB
1373:Du er ogsaa Kunstnersjæl, Skonaand, en Smagens Mand, et Artistgemyt,en Bohême, en Satan. Men du er ogsaa Poet. Fan ved hva du er altsammen, du er meget spredt. ~ Knut Hamsun, #NFDB
1374:Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1375:For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You’re a witness. ~ Iain Sinclair, #NFDB
1376:I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet. ~ Lord Chesterfield, #NFDB
1377:I’m A Queer Poet Too! She stressed queer not because she walked around identifying as a queer poet but so that the youth understood she would fuck her. ~ Michelle Tea, #NFDB
1378:I've barely survived inside a world that took too long to ring it's song. The poet simply becomes the the last line of his greatest poem he never wrote. ~ Brandon Villasenor, #NFDB
1379:You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet."
Rey smiled.
"Can I be both?"
"But you'd rather be a poet."
"Who wouldn't?" he said. ~ Daniel Alarc n,#NFDB
1380:A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. ~ Charles Olson, #NFDB
1381:A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1382:Like a starved plant, that lack of spotlight made her gnarled and twisted, sapping her of compassion and righteousness.” Tobe, my man, you’re a freaking poet. ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
1383:The first part of my name, Khalil Gibran, seems to be paying huge dividends in terms of the artistic life of the poet from whom my name was inspired. ~ Khalil Gibran Muhammad, #NFDB
1384:The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1385:The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1386:The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1387:The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1388:To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy. ~ Rene Char, #NFDB
1389:What poet was it who wrote there's no pain worse than the pain of a broken heart? Sentimental shit. He should have spent more time in the Emporer's prisons. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1390:As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life. ~ Charles Baxter, #NFDB
1391:At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it. ~ Arthur Golden, #NFDB
1392:Fucking gorgeous man. And the best part? The way he looked at me. Like I was the prettiest girl in the room. “Hey, babe.” The man was a poet. “Hey.” I was too. ~ Alice Clayton, #NFDB
1393:In every [other] pursuit men without natural aptitude succeed by obstinate study of technique, but who is not a poet by nature can never become one by art. ~ Giambattista Vico, #NFDB
1394:It is the poet who goes further than any human scientist. The poet who with her dredging net must haul up difficult things and return them to the present. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
1395:No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1396:Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more. ~ Marvin Bell, #NFDB
1397:There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
1398:to be a poet means
to live
with a permanent wound
forever
susceptible
to either
the shade
of the sky
or someone's eyes. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
1399:I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun, #NFDB
1400:If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1401:Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever? ~ David Markson, #NFDB
1402:Katherine Sedley was the only daughter and heiress to the libertine poet Sir Charles Sedley, and grew into a thoroughly scandalous lady in her own right. ~ Susan Holloway Scott, #NFDB
1403:Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1404:poet Edwin Markham wrote, There is a destiny that makes us brothers None goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others Comes back into our own. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
1405:The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), XI., #NFDB
1406:The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
1407:Bob Altman got nothing from the TV series 'M*A*S*H,' and the royalties for the theme song went to his oldest son, Michael, who wrote it as a 15-year-old poet! ~ Mitchell Zuckoff, #NFDB
1408:For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1409:I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it. Then ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1410:it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
1411:I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
1412:MY MOTHER AND HER ELDEST brother have facility with language, insight into people and social conditions. He became a famous poet (under the pen name Shivasagar), ~ Sujatha Gidla, #NFDB
1413:My ultimate goal is to spend as many of my moments in life as I can in that world that the poet Rumi talks about, 'a place beyond rightness and wrongness. ~ Marshall B Rosenberg, #NFDB
1414:Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
1415:Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1416:The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
1417:There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won. ~ Stephen Dobyns, #NFDB
1418:You don’t sound like a scientist, you sound like a poet.”
Rey smiled, “Can I be both?”
But you’d rather be a poet.”
Who wouldn’t?” he said. ~ Daniel Alarc n,#NFDB
1419:And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them into shapes, and give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1420:And so I just grieve, groaning,
'Let me not go
To the Place of the Shorn:
My heart is now precious...
For I, I am a poet—
And my flower is golden. ~ David Bowles,#NFDB
1421:As Maya Angelou, American author, poet, and self-described Renaissance Woman, wrote, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
1422:I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1423:I said, “Lee, you have the soul of a poet.” He said, “I am a poet—I’ve written over a hundred poems,” which, I think, is about the least poetic thing I’ve ever heard. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1424:It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
1425:Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different! ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB
1426:The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. ~ Eugene Ionesco, #NFDB
1427:The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. ~ Eug ne Ionesco, #NFDB
1428:The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler. ~ Robert Schumann, #NFDB
1429:There’s a great line from the poet Anaïs Nin that reads: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
1430:You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis, #NFDB
1431:One day you will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon. Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1432:She was eleven, after all. She was both even and odd. She was ready to be many things at once—child, grown-up, poet, engineer, botanist, dragon. The list went on. ~ Kelly Barnhill, #NFDB
1433:The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
1434:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. —G. K. Chesterson ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
1435:There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
1436:The role of the poet in "destitute times" is to keep the memory of the gods alive, to inspire people to reimagine them, and find the courage to believe in them anew. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
1437:We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings. ~ David Amram, #NFDB
1438:A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered. ~ Lee Strasberg, #NFDB
1439:A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
1440:Andrea Gibson is a truly American poet, or rather, she represents the America I want to live in. Her work lights a candle to lead us where we need to go. ~ Cristin O Keefe Aptowicz, #NFDB
1441:As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1442:Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not. ~ Ann Demeulemeester, #NFDB
1443:He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician. ~ Tom Hayden, #NFDB
1444:I always was a rebel...but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted...and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
1445:Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1446:Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life? ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1447:The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do. ~ Mark Van Doren, #NFDB
1448:The poet Hafiz writes, Don’t surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1449:The poet Longfellow writes, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
1450:The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1451:When people start talking about enjambment and line endings, I always shut them up. This is not something to talk about, this is a private matter, it's up to the poet. ~ James Tate, #NFDB
1452:All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1453:Commemoration of John Donne, Priest, Poet, 1631 He was the Word that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it I do believe, and take it. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
1454:I cannot conceive why people will always mix up my own character and opinions with those of the imaginary beings which, as a poet, I have the right and liberty to draw. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1455:If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable. ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
1456:I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant! ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
1457:Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1458:The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
1459:The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. —G. K. Chesterson W ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
1460:The work of the poet has always been to shine a bright light on the absurdities of society, challenging hypocrisy and greed, and presenting the tools of change. (Donovan) ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
1461:This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If ~ Kim Addonizio, #NFDB
1462:Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
1463:You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1464:Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet? ~ Boris Johnson, #NFDB
1465:He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, #NFDB
1466:How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness! A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1467:I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. ~ Jesmyn Ward, #NFDB
1468:Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
1469:Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1470:No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1471:Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet. ~ Cristina Garc a, #NFDB
1472:The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1473:The august Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé defined poetry as a hermetic practice: “Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery. ~ Alex Ross, #NFDB
1474:The enlightening power of the poet’s creation is vision of truth, its moving power is a passion of beauty and delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Breath of Greater Life, #NFDB
1475:The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. ~ John Drinkwater, #NFDB
1476:Woman is often fickle, said François I; and woman is like the waves, said Shakespeare.3 One was a great king, the other a great poet, so they must have known women. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1477:A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is ourselves. ' ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
1478:And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1479:Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost. ~ Anne Stevenson, #NFDB
1480:But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
1481:Do you love your country?"
"What, England?" asked Elliot. "Wow. Am I a poet in 1914?"
"What," said Commander Woodsinger.
"What," said Elliot. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,#NFDB
1482:Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical. ~ Fidel Castro, #NFDB
1483:Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
1484:For men may prove and use their friends, as the poet expresses it, usque ad aras, meaning that a friend should not be required to act contrary to the law of God. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
1485:He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1486:Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky,#NFDB
1487:I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last. ~ Leslie Fiedler, #NFDB
1488:Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music. ~ Langdon Brown Gilkey, #NFDB
1489:Niall Lynch was a braggart poet, a loser musician, a charming bit of hard luck bred in Belfast but born in Cumbria, and Ronan loved him like he loved nothing else. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1490:Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field. ~ Kathleen Raine, #NFDB
1491:The poet Rumi says: "How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
1492:What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1493:And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1494:As for the world, all reality has no other excuse for existence except to offer the poet the chance to play a sublime match against it -- a match that is list in advance. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
1495:As poet Charles Bukowski put it, "It's not the big things that send us to the madhouse, not the loss of a love, but the shoelace that breaks when there's no time left. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1496:Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom. ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson, #NFDB
1497:For even the heathen poet said, “I was wrong in thinking that that kingdom which is established by force is stronger than that which is joined together by friendship.“6 ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1498:I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. ~ Sandra Cisneros, #NFDB
1499:It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing. ~ Sofia Kovalevskaya, #NFDB
1500:One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder. ~ Ella Maillart, #NFDB
638 Poetry
436 Integral Yoga
95 Philosophy
86 Fiction
55 Occultism
42 Mysticism
32 Christianity
21 Psychology
20 Philsophy
16 Yoga
9 Mythology
5 Science
5 Education
3 Zen
3 Integral Theory
2 Sufism
2 Hinduism
2 Baha i Faith
1 Theosophy
1 Thelema
1 Alchemy
225 Sri Aurobindo
167 Nolini Kanta Gupta
122 John Keats
89 The Mother
59 Percy Bysshe Shelley
58 Satprem
57 William Wordsworth
36 Walt Whitman
34 H P Lovecraft
31 Aleister Crowley
24 Robert Browning
22 William Butler Yeats
21 Rabindranath Tagore
21 A B Purani
20 Ralph Waldo Emerson
20 Friedrich Nietzsche
20 Aristotle
18 Saint Augustine of Hippo
15 Li Bai
15 Lalla
15 Carl Jung
13 Kobayashi Issa
13 Jorge Luis Borges
12 Plato
12 Farid ud-Din Attar
11 James George Frazer
11 Aldous Huxley
10 Friedrich Schiller
9 Sri Ramakrishna
9 Nirodbaran
9 Jalaluddin Rumi
9 Edgar Allan Poe
8 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
8 Hakim Sanai
7 Yosa Buson
6 Yuan Mei
6 Saint John of the Cross
6 Joseph Campbell
6 Henry David Thoreau
6 George Van Vrekhem
6 Bulleh Shah
6 Baba Sheikh Farid
5 Swami Vivekananda
5 Plotinus
5 Mansur al-Hallaj
5 Kabir
5 Jakushitsu
4 Symeon the New Theologian
4 Saint Teresa of Avila
4 Ramprasad
4 Jordan Peterson
3 Tao Chien
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Solomon ibn Gabirol
3 Shankara
3 Rudolf Steiner
3 Rainer Maria Rilke
3 Po Chu-i
3 Ovid
3 Mirabai
3 Mechthild of Magdeburg
3 Lucretius
3 Ikkyu
3 Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
2 William Blake
2 Swami Krishnananda
2 Sarmad
2 Saint Therese of Lisieux
2 Saint Francis of Assisi
2 Saadi
2 Rabbi Abraham Abulafia
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Paul Richard
2 Nachmanides
2 Masahide
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
2 Ken Wilber
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Hsuan Chueh of Yung Chia
2 Hakuin
2 Dogen
2 Chiao Jan
2 Baha u llah
2 Anonymous
2 Alfred Tennyson
122 Keats - Poems
59 Shelley - Poems
57 Wordsworth - Poems
48 Letters On Poetry And Art
36 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
36 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
34 Whitman - Poems
34 Lovecraft - Poems
27 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
24 Browning - Poems
22 Yeats - Poems
21 Record of Yoga
21 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
20 Poetics
20 Emerson - Poems
19 Tagore - Poems
19 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
18 The Synthesis Of Yoga
18 Magick Without Tears
18 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
16 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
16 The Life Divine
16 The Human Cycle
16 Letters On Yoga II
15 Li Bai - Poems
15 Letters On Yoga IV
14 City of God
12 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
11 Words Of Long Ago
11 The Perennial Philosophy
11 The Golden Bough
11 Liber ABA
11 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
11 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
10 The Divine Comedy
10 Schiller - Poems
9 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
9 The Secret Of The Veda
9 Questions And Answers 1956
9 Labyrinths
8 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
8 Poe - Poems
8 Letters On Yoga I
8 Collected Poems
7 Vedic and Philological Studies
7 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
6 Walden
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
6 Savitri
6 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
6 Questions And Answers 1953
6 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
6 Preparing for the Miraculous
6 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
6 On the Way to Supermanhood
6 On Education
6 Mysterium Coniunctionis
6 Agenda Vol 07
6 Agenda Vol 02
6 Agenda Vol 01
5 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
5 Essays On The Gita
5 Agenda Vol 04
5 Agenda Vol 03
5 5.1.01 - Ilion
4 Twilight of the Idols
4 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
4 Talks
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Goethe - Poems
4 Faust
4 Essays Divine And Human
4 Aion
3 The Phenomenon of Man
3 The Future of Man
3 Some Answers From The Mother
3 Rumi - Poems
3 Rilke - Poems
3 Questions And Answers 1954
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
3 Of The Nature Of Things
3 Metamorphoses
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 Borges - Poems
3 Bhakti-Yoga
3 Agenda Vol 12
3 Agenda Vol 05
3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
2 The Study and Practice of Yoga
2 The Red Book Liber Novus
2 Symposium
2 Song of Myself
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Selected Fictions
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Liber Null
2 Letters On Yoga III
2 Let Me Explain
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Dogen - Poems
2 Crowley - Poems
2 Anonymous - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 06
00.00 - Publishers Note, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have pleasure in presenting the Second Volume of the Collected Works of Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta. The six books in this volume were originally published separately. The Essays are mainly concerned with Mysticism and poetry.
We are happy to note that the Government of India have given to our Centre of Education a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualtiesone can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said
Kurasya dhr niit duratyay1
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Zen
Not much, but I like poetry, it is because of that I read it.
It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.
--
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to brea the the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with a new consciousness which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a *super-epic,* it is super-literature, super- poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value - spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come into contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We can make a distinction here between two types of expression which we have put together indiscriminately, figures and symbols. Figures, we may say, are those that are constructed by the rational mind, the intellect; they are mere metaphors and similes and are not organically related to the thing experienced, but put round it as a robe that can be dropped or changed without affecting the experience itself. Thus, for example, when the Upanishad says, tmnam rathinam viddhi (Know that the soul is the master of the chariot who sits within it) or indriyi haynhu (The senses, they say, are the horses), we have here only a comparison or analogy that is common and natural to the poetic manner. The particular figure or simile used is not inevitable to the idea or experience that it seeks to express, its part and parcel. On the other hand, take this Upanishadic perception: hirayamayena patrea satyasyphitam mukham (The face of the Truth lies hidden under the golden orb). Here the symbol is not mere analogy or comparison, a figure; it is one with the very substance of the experience the two cannot be separated. Or when the Vedas speak of the kindling of the Fire, the rushing of the waters or the rise of the Dawn, the images though taken from the material world, are not used for the sake of mere comparison, but they are the embodiments, the living forms of truths experienced in another world.
When a Mystic refers to the Solar Light or to the Fire the light, for example, that struck down Saul and transformed him into Saint Paul or the burning bush that visited Moses, it is not the physical or material object that he means and yet it is that in a way. It is the materialization of something that is fundamentally not material: some movement in an inner consciousness precipitates itself into the region of the senses and takes from out of the material the form commensurable with its nature that it finds there.
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Upanishadic Symbolism A Vedic Conception of the poet
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Beautiful in the Upanishads
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The form of a thing can be beautiful; but the formless too has its beauty. Indeed, the beauty of the formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the soul of beauty that is what suffuses, with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm, the realisation and poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms that are scattered abroad in their myriad manifest beauty hold within themselves a secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name of Beauty can be compared to nothing on the phenomenal hemisphere of Nature; it has no adequate image or representation below:
na tasya pratimsti
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The rich and sensuous beauty luxuriating in high colour and ample decoration that one meets often in the creation of the earlier Vedic seers returned again, in a more chiselled and polished and stylised manner, in the classical poets. The Upanishads in this respect have a certain kinship with the early poets of the intervening ageVyasa and Valmiki. Upam KlidsasyaKalidasa revels in figures and images; they are profusely heaped on one another and usually possess a complex and composite texture. Valmiki's images are simple and elemental, brief and instinct with a vast resonance, spare and full of power. The same brevity and simplicity, vibrant with an extraordinary power of evocation, are also characteristic of the Upanishadic mantra With Valmiki's
kamiva dupram
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Upanishadic Symbolism A Vedic Conception of the poet
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the poet
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta A Vedic Conception of the poet
A Vedic Conception of the poet
'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the gods. The Vedas mean by this attribute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heavenkavi kavitv divi rpam sajat.1Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the poet discovers and embodies? HeavenDyaushas a very definite connotation in the Veda. It means the luminous or divine Mind 2the mind purified of its obscurity and limitations, due to subjection to the external senses, thus opening to the higher Light, receiving and recording faithfully the deeper and vaster movements and vibrations of the Truth, giving them a form, a perfect body of the right thought and the right word. Indra is the lord of this world and he can be approached only with an enkindled intelligence, ddhay man,3a faultless understanding, sumedh. He is the supreme Artisan of the poetic power,Tash, the maker of perfect forms, surpa ktnum.4 All the gods turn towards Indra and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty.5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the poet's weaving;6 the poet is the priest who calls down and works out the right thinking in the sacrificial labour of creation.7 But that creation is made in and through the inner mind and the inner senses that are alive to the subtle formation of a vaster knowledge.8 The poet envisages the golden forms fashioned out of the very profundity of the consciousness.9 For the substance, the material on which the poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names.10 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth.11The form of beauty is the body of the Truth.
The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara. He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.12 A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his,nigam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun,srya caku.13 He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.14 In the second place, the poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, ncak;15 he is the Seer-Will,kavikratu.16 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.17 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the poet gives birth to the Truth, srya satyasava, satyya satyaprasavya. But the poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator,savit, he is also the builder or fashioner,ta, and he is the organiser,vedh is personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara, of the Truth.18 As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,19 the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The poet pursues the Path of the Right;20 it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.21 He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;22 he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond 23into the world of felicity.
Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyi His hand is dripping with sweetness,kavir hi madhuhastya.24 The poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.25 He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.26? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.27Indeed this sparkling Delight is the poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.28
The solar vision of the poet encompasses in its might the wide Earth and Heaven, fuses them in supreme Delight in the womb of the Truth.29 The Earth is lifted up and given in marriage to Heaven in the home of Truth, for the creation and expression of the Truth in its varied beauty,cru citram.
The poet creates forms of beauty in Heaven; but these forms are not made out of the void. It is the Earth that is raised to Heaven and transmuted into divine truth forms. The union of Earth and Heaven is the source of the Joy, the Ananda, that the poet unseals and distributes. Heaven and Earth join and meet in the world of Delight; between them they press out Soma, the drink of the gods.
The Mind and the Body are held together by means of the Life, the mid-world. The Divine Mind by raising the body-consciousness into itself gathers up too, by that act, the delight of life and releases the fountain of immortal Bliss. That is the work and achievement of the gods as poets.
Where then is the birth of the poets? Ask it of the Masters. The poets have seized and mastered the Mind, they have the perfect working and they fashion the Heaven.
On this Earth they hold everywhere in themselves all the secrets. They make Earth and Heaven move together, so that they may realise their heroic strength. They measure them with their rhythmic measurings, they hold in their controlled grasp the vast and great twins, and unite them and establish between them the mid-world of Delight for the perfect poise.30
All the gods are poetstheir forms are perfect, surpa, suda, their Names full of beauty,cru devasya nma.31 This means also that the gods embody the different powers that constitute the poetic consciousness. Agni is the Seer-Will, the creative vision of the poet the luminous energy born of an experience by identity with the Truth. Indra is the Idea-Form, the architectonic conception of the work or achievement. Mitra and Varuna are the large harmony, the vast cadence and sweep of movement. The Aswins, the Divine Riders, represent the intense zest of well-yoked Life-Energy. Soma is Rasa, Ananda, the Supreme Bliss and Delight.
The Vedic poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art tooat least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.32
Rig Veda, X. 124. 7
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
As his love for God deepened, he began either to forget or to drop the formalities of worship. Sitting before the image, he would spend hours singing the devotional songs of great devotees of the Mother, such as Kamalakanta and Ramprasad. Those rhapsodical songs, describing the direct vision of God, only intensified Sri Ramakrishna's longing. He felt the pangs of a child separated from its mother. Sometimes, in agony, he would rub his face against the ground and weep so bitterly that people, thinking he had lost his earthly mother, would sympathize with him in his grief. Sometimes, in moments of scepticism, he would cry: "Art Thou true, Mother, or is it all fiction — mere poetry without any reality? If Thou dost exist, why do I not see Thee? Is religion a mere fantasy and art Thou only a figment of man's imagination?" Sometimes he would sit on the prayer carpet for two hours like an inert object. He began to behave in an abnormal manner
, most of the time unconscious of the world. He almost gave up food; and sleep left him altogether.
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The real organizer of the Samaj was Devendranath Tagore (1817-1905), the father of the poet Rabindranath. His physical and spiritual beauty, aristocratic aloofness, penetrating intellect, and poetic sensibility made him the foremost leader of the educated Bengalis. These addressed him by the respectful epithet of Maharshi, the "Great Seer". The Maharshi was a Sanskrit scholar and, unlike Raja Rammohan Roy, drew his inspiration entirely from the Upanishads. He was an implacable enemy of image worship ship and also fought to stop the infiltration of Christian ideas into the Samaj. He gave the movement its faith and ritual. Under his influence the Brahmo Samaj professed One Self-existent Supreme Being who had created the universe out of nothing, the God of Truth, Infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Power, the Eternal and Omnipotent, the One without a Second. Man should love Him and do His will, believe in Him and worship Him, and thus merit salvation in the world to come.
By far the ablest leader of the Brahmo movement was Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884). Unlike Raja Rammohan Roy and Devendranath Tagore, Keshab was born of a middle-class Bengali family and had been brought up in an English school. He did not know Sanskrit and very soon broke away from the popular Hindu religion. Even at an early age he came under the spell of Christ and professed to have experienced the special favour of John the Baptist, Christ, and St. Paul. When he strove to introduce Christ to the Brahmo Samaj, a rupture became inevitable with Devendranath. In 1868 Keshab broke with the older leader and founded the Brahmo Samaj of India, Devendra retaining leadership of the first Brahmo Samaj, now called the Adi Samaj.
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Sri Ramakrishna also became acquainted with a number of people whose scholarship or wealth entitled them everywhere to respect. He had met, a few years before, Devendranath Tagore, famous all over Bengal for his wealth, scholarship, saintly character, and social position. But the Master found him disappointing; for, whereas Sri Ramakrishna expected of a saint complete renunciation of the world, Devendranath combined with his saintliness a life of enjoyment. Sri Ramakrishna met the great poet Michael Madhusudan, who had embraced Christianity "for the sake of his stomach". To him the Master could not impart instruction, for the Divine Mother "pressed his tongue". In addition he met Maharaja Jatindra Mohan Tagore, a titled aristocrat of Bengal; Kristodas Pal, the editor, social reformer, and patriot; Iswar Vidyasagar, the noted philanthropist and educator; Pundit Shashadhar, a great champion of Hindu orthodoxy; Aswini Kumar Dutta, a headmaster, moralist, and leader of Indian Nationalism; and Bankim Chatterji, a deputy magistrate, novelist, and essayist, and one of the fashioners of modern Bengali prose. Sri Ramakrishna was not the man to be dazzled by outward show, glory, or eloquence. A pundit without discrimination he regarded as a mere straw. He would search people's hearts for the light of God, and if that was missing he would have nothing to do with them.
--- KRISTODAS PAL
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
of a poet: the head of An Adulterous Woman: the
head of a Man of Valour: the head of a Satyr:
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The chapter is a short essay in poetic form on
Determinism. It hymns the great law of Equilibrium
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eye that weeps" is a poetic Arab name for the lingam).
The doctrine is that the Great Work should be accomplished without creating n
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(As a great poet has expressed it: "We don't want to
fight, but, by Jingo, if we do-") This is his meaning
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and the rest of the chapter in poetry, the upward.
The first part shows the fall from Nought in four
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the poetry.
The master salutes the previous paragraphs as horses which, although in
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The poet asks, in verse 1, How can we baffle the
Three Characteristics?
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
IN THE HISTORY of the arts, genius is a thing of very rare occurrence. Rarer still, however, are the competent reporters and recorders of that genius. The world has had many hundreds of admirable poets and philosophers; but of these hundreds only a very few have had the fortune to attract a Boswell or an Eckermann.
When we leave the field of art for that of spiritual religion, the scarcity of competent reporters becomes even more strongly marked. Of the day-to-day life of the great theocentric saints and contemplatives we know, in the great majority of cases, nothing whatever. Many, it is true, have recorded their doctrines in writing, and a few, such as St. Augustine, Suso and St. Teresa, have left us autobiographies of the greatest value.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Over and above Sadhana, writing work and rendering spiritual help to the world during his apparent retirement there were plenty of other activities of which the outside world has no knowledge. Many prominent as well as less known persons sought and obtained interviews with him during these years. Thus, among well-known persons may be mentioned C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sarala Devi, Dr. Munje, Khasirao Jadhav, Tagore, Sylvain Levy. The great national poet of Tamil Nadu, S. Subramanya Bharati, was in contact with Sri Aurobindo for some years during his stay at Pondicherry; so was V.V.S. Aiyar. The famous V. Ramaswamy Aiyangar Va Ra of Tamil literature[3] stayed with Sri Aurobindo for nearly three years and was influenced by him. Some of these facts have been already mentioned in The Life of Sri Aurobindo.
Jung has admitted that there is an element of mystery, something that baffles the reason, in human personality. One finds that the greater the personality the greater is the complexity. And this is especially so with regard to spiritual personalities whom the Gita calls Vibhutis and Avatars.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the artist absorbed in his art, the philosopher thinking out the problems of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the scientist, the scholar caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past bears record.
But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
music, painting and poetry, he later became a teacher of music
in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. He
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to say in a poetic form.
Love from your mother.
--
I want to ask you something concerning my poetry.
It has stopped now. Is there some inner preparation
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Yes, I think in fact that your poetry has stopped so that you
can prepare yourself for a higher inspiration. You were going
--
You have my full consent to write poetry, and Sri Aurobindo
says that there is no doubt about your poetic capacity. Today's
poem is very good. But when you try to write every day, it
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Vedic Conception of the poet Sri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsSri Aurobindo: The Age of Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo: The Age of Sri Aurobindo
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A Vedic Conception of the poet Sri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That Power, that Spirit has been growing and gathering its strength during all the millenniums that humanity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on earth, the Higher Man also took his birth. Since the hour the Spirit refused to be imprisoned in its animal sheath and came out as man, it approached by that very uplift a greater freedom and a vaster movement. It was the crest of that underground wave which peered over the surface from age to age, from clime to clime through the experiences of poets and prophets and sages the Head of the Sacrificial Horse galloping towards the Dawn.
And now the days of captivity or rather of inner preparation are at an end. The voice in the wilderness was necessary, for it was a call and a communion in the silence of the soul. Today the silence seeks utterance. Today the shell is ripe enough to break and to bring out the mature and full-grown being. The king that was in hiding comes in glory and triumph, in his complete regalia.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For, till now Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary consciousness Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principlesmana puvvangam dhamm1. The consciousness beyond mind has not yet been made a patent and dynamic element in the life upon earth; it has been glimpsed or entered into in varying degrees and modes by saints and seers; it has cast its derivative illuminations in the creative activities of poets and artists, in the finer and nobler urges of heroes and great men of action. But the utmost that has been achieved, the summit reached in that direction, as exampled in spiritual disciplines, involves a withdrawal from the evolutionary cycle, a merging and an absorption into the static status that is altogether beyond it, that lies, as it were, at the other extreme the Spirit in itself, Atman, Brahman, Sachchidananda, Nirvana, the One without a second, the Zero without a first.
The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind: a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just above the mind the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and destructionit is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense experience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: The Age of Sri Aurobindo Mystic poetry
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsSri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems
Sri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems
What is the world that Sri Aurobindo sees and creates? poetry is after all passion. By passion I do not mean the fury of emotion nor the fume of sentimentalism, but what lies behind at their source, what lends them the force they have the sense of the "grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croixTie God to the gibbet, you have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create sublime poetry out of it. What is the dead matter that has found life and glows and vibrates in Sri Aurobindo's passion? It is something which appears to many poetically intractable, not amenable to aesthetic treatment, not usually, that is to say, nor in the supreme manner. Sri Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it. Herein lies the greatness of his achievement. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of Milton, has been regarded by poets as "harsh and crabbed" and as such unfit for poetic delineation. Not a few poets indeed foundered upon this rock. A poet in his own way is a philosopher, but a philosopher chanting out his philosophy in sheer poetry has been one of the rarest spectacles.1 I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in more thought-power) that marks the nee plus ultra of his poetic achievement.
And yet what can be more poetic in essence than philosophy, if by philosophy we mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his own being, the why and the whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of human joys and sorrows the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the human element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is humanity in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude.
We do not say that poets have never sung of God and Soul and things transcendent. poets have always done that. But what I say is this that presentation of spiritual truths, as they are in their own home, in other words, treated philosophically and yet in a supreme poetic manner, has always been a rarity. We have, indeed, in India the Gita and the Upanishads, great philosophical poems, if there were any. But for one thing they are on dizzy heights out of the reach of common man and for another they are idolised more as philosophy than as poetry. Doubtless, our Vaishnava poets sang of God and Love Divine; and Rabindranath, in one sense, a typical modern Vaishnava, did the same. And their songs are masterpieces. But are they not all human, too human, as the mad prophet would say? In them it is the human significance, the human manner that touches and moves us the spiritual significance remains esoteric, is suggested, is a matter of deduction. Sri Aurobindo has dealt with spiritual experiences in a different way. He has not clothed them in human symbols and allegories, in images and figures of the mere earthly and secular life: he presents them in their nakedness, just as they are seen and realised. He has not sought to tone down the rigour of truth with contrivances that easily charm and captivate the common human mind and heart. Nor has he indulged like so many poet philosophers in vague generalisations and colourless or too colourful truisms that do not embody a clear thought or rounded idea, a radiant judgment. Sri Aurobindo has given us in his poetry thoughts that are clear-cut, ideas beautifully chiselledhe is always luminously forceful.
Take these Vedantic lines that in their limpidity and harmonious flow beat anything found in the fine French poet Lamartine:
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
--
This is sheer philosophy, told with an almost philosophical bluntnessmay be, but is it mere philosophy and mediocre poetry? Once more listen to the Upanishadic lines:
Deep in the luminous secrecy, the mute
--
We have been speaking of philosophy and the philosophic manner. But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean nothing more and nothing lessthan the force of thought and the mass of thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference between the past and the present human consciousness in so far at least as it has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet
Of imagination all compact.. . .
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling.8
The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulsesit is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his au thentic followers the movement came to the forefront of human consciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.
poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly"introvert", a modern mind would term it that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own au thenticity and self-sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem9 magnificently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and incompatible.
Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application,even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clo the with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:
. . . . .O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning!
--
We have in Sri Aurobindo a passage parallel in sentiment, if not of equal poetic value, which will bear out the contrast:
My mind within grew holy, calm and still
--
The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in that of earthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the earthly life, even so Sri Aurobindo has made a passion of the spiritual life. poetry after all has a mission; the phrase "Art for Art's sake" may be made to mean anything. poetry is not merely what is pleasing, not even what is merely touching and moving but what is at the same time, inspiring, invigorating, elevating. Truth is indeed beauty but it is not always the beauty that captivates the eye or the mere aesthetic sense.
And because our Vedic poets always looked beyond humanity, beyond earth, therefore could they make divine poetry of humanity and what is of earth. Therefore it was that they were pervadingly so grandiose and sublime and puissant. The heroic, the epic was their natural element and they could not but express themselves in the grand manner Sri Aurobindo has the same outlook and it is why we find in him the ring of the old-world manner.
Mark the stately march, the fullness of voice, the wealth of imagery, the vigour of movement of these lines:
--
This is poetry salutary indeed if there were any. We are so often and so much enamoured of the feminine languidness of poetry; the clear, the sane, the virile, that is a type of poetry that our nerves cannot always or for long stand. But there is poetry that is agrable and there is poetry that is grand, as Sainte Beuve said. There are the pleasures of poetry and there are the "ardours of poetry". And the great poets are always grand rather than agrable, full of the ardours of poetry rat her than the pleasures of poetry.
And if there is something in the creative spirit of Sri Aurobindo which tends more towards the strenuous than the genial, the arduous than the mellifluous, and which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than the easy felicity of Valmiki, however it might have affected the ultimate value of his creation, according to certain standards,14 it has illustrated once more that poetry is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative visionit is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.
James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet."
Sri Aurobindo: "Who".
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Sri Aurobindo: The Age of Sri Aurobindo Mystic poetry
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So the problem that concerns man, the riddle that humanity has to solve is how to find out and follow the path of creativity. If we are not to be dead matter nor mere shadowy illusions we must be creative. A misconception that has vitiated our outlook in general and has been the most potent cause of a sterilising atavism in the moral evolution of humanity is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind. It is enough if we others can understand and follow themMahajano yena gatahlet the great souls initiate and create, the common souls have only to repeat and imitate.
But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.03 - Mystic poetry
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Sri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems The poetry in the Making
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsMystic poetry
Mystic poetry
I would like to make a distinction between mystic poetry and spiritual poetry. To equate mysticism and spirituality is not always happy or even correct. Thus, when Tagore sings:
Who comes along singing and steering his boat?
--
Is there not a fundamental difference, difference not merely with regard to the poetic personality, but with regard to the very stuff of consciousness? There is direct vision here, the fullness of light, the native rhythm and substance of revelation, as if
In the dead wall closing from a wider self,
--
When the Spirit speaks its own language in its own name, we have spiritual poetry. If, however, the Spirit speaksfrom choice or necessity-an alien language and manner, e.g., that of a profane consciousness, or of the consciousness of another domain, idealistic or philosophical or even occult, puts on or imitates spirit's language and manner, we have what we propose to call mystic poetry proper. When Samain sings of the body of the dancer:
Et Pannyre deviant fleur, flamme, papillon! ...
--
both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise the earth and the flesh that they seem ostensibly only a vesture of something else behind, something mysterious and other-worldly, something other than, even just opposite to what they actually are or appear to be. That is the mystique of the senses which is a very characteristic feature of some of the best poetic inspirations of France. Baudelaire too, the Satanic poet, by the sheer intensity of sympathy and sincerity, pierces as it were into the soul of things and makes the ugly, the unclean, the diseased, the sordid throb and glow with an almost celestial light. Here is the Baudelairean manner:
Tout casss
--
It is not merely by addressing the beloved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance,ad nauseam.A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
--
The famous Song of Solomon too is not on a different footing, when the poet cries:
Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;
--
one can explain that it is the Christ calling the Church or God appealing to the human soul or one can simply find in it nothing more than a man pining for his woman. Anyhow I would not call it spiritual poetry or even mystic poetry. For in itself it does not carry any double or oblique meaning, there is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper,
Breaking the silence of the seas
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I do not know if this is not mysticism, what else is. Neither is religious poetry true mysticism (or true spirituality). I find more mysticism in
Come, let us run
--
I am anticipating however, I shall come to the point presently again. I was speaking of spiritual poetry. Listen once more to these simple, transparent, yet vibrant lines:
But how shall body not seem a hollow space
--
This is spiritual matter and spiritual manner that can never be improved upon. This is spiritual poetry in its quintessence. I am referring naturally here to the original and not to the translation which can never do full justice, even at its very best, to the poetic value in question. For apart from the individual genius of the poet, the greatness of the language, the instrument used by the poet, is also involved. It may well be what is comparatively easy and natural in the language of the gods (devabhasha) would mean a tour de force, if not altogether an impossibility, in a human language. The Sanskrit language was moulded and fashioned in the hands of the Rishis, that is to say, those who lived and moved and had their being in the spiritual consciousness. The Hebrew or even the Zend does not seem to have reached that peak, that absoluteness of the spiritual tone which seems inherent in the Indian tongue, although those too breathed and grew in a spiritual atmosphere. The later languages, however, Greek or Latin or their modern descendants, have gone still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears.
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and un poetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the supra-sensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reactionit is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since thennot merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goe the is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardyindeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.
We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. Perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective"introvert"and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off in the end with metaphysics.
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and mannerswabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:
To see a World in a grain of Sand,
--
And a considerable impact of it is vibrant and aglow in these lines of a contemporary Indian poet:
Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
--
This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual proper, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental experiences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the deeper and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme. ||26.15||
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This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
"Flyaway, far from these morbid miasmas, go and purify yourself in the higher air and drink, like a pure and divine liquor, the clear fire that fills the limpid spaces."18
That angelic poets should be inspired by the same ideal is, of course, quite natural: for they sing:
Not a senseless, trancd thing,
--
poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and puritykatharsisnot trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsisinstead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
--
This is religious poetry, pure and simple, expressing man's earliest and most elementary feeling, marked by a broad candour, a rather shallow monotone. But that feeling is raised to a pitch of fervour and scintillating sensibility in Vaughan's
They are all gone into the world of light
--
The same poet is at once religious and mystic find philosophical in these lines, for example:
That All, which always is All every where,
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Keats: "Ode on the poets".
Addison: "Hymn":
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Sri Aurobindo: Ahana and Other Poems The poetry in the Making
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying view-point which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievementsour science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present-day activities.
A new impulse is there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has been spontaneously sown, we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and develop it along its proper line of growth. For, also certain it is that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in tentative things, in mere experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the intuition has not yet become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain, in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in art and literature discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of reforming humanity by a business pact.
All this may be good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings that we feel in our heartour urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.04 - The poetry in the Making
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Mystic poetry Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and Mystics The poetry in the Making
The poetry in the Making
Is the artist the supreme artist, when he is a genius, that is to sayconscious in his creation or is he unconscious? Two quite opposite views have been taken of the problem by the best of intelligences. On the one hand, it is said that genius is genius precisely because it acts unconsciously, and on the other it is asserted with equal emphasis that genius is the capacity of taking infinite pains, which means it is absolutely a self conscious activity.
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Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrumentnothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.
The absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
Not only so, the future development of the poetic consciousness seems inevitably to lead to such a consummation in which the creative and the critical faculties will not be separate but form part of one and indivisible movement. Historically, human consciousness has grown from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to self-consciousness; man's creative and artistic genius too has moved pari passu in the same direction. The earliest and primitive poets were mostly unconscious, that is to say, they wrote or said things as they came to them spontaneously, without effort, without reflection, they do not seem to know the whence and wherefore and whither of it all, they know only that the wind bloweth as it listeth. That was when man had not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, was still in the innocence of childhood. But as he grew up and progressed, he became more and more conscious, capable of exerting and exercising a deliberate will and initiating a purposive action, not only in the external practical field but also in the psychological domain. If the earlier group is called "primitives", the later one, that of conscious artists, usually goes by the name of "classicists." Modern creators have gone one step farther in the direction of self-consciousness, a return upon oneself, an inlook of full awareness and a free and alert activity of the critical faculties. An unconscious artist in the sense of the "primitives" is almost an impossible phenomenon in the modern world. All are scientists: an artist cannot but be consciously critical, deliberate, purposive in what he creates and how he creates. Evidently, this has cost something of the old-world spontaneity and supremacy of utterance; but it cannot be helped, we cannot comm and the tide to roll back, Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and new orientation discovered.
The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
That is what is wanted at present in the artistic world the true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution, the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies that the future poet has to be a mysticin him will be fulfilled the travail of man's conscious working. The self-conscious craftsman, the tireless experimenter with his adventurous analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple and elastic, tempered, refined and enriched it; that is comparable to what we call the aspiration or call from below. Now the Grace must descend and fulfil. And when one rises into this higher consciousness beyond the brain and mind, when one lives there habitually, one knows the why and the how of things, one becomes a perfectly conscious operator and still retains all spontaneity and freshness and wonder and magic that are usually associated with inconscience and irreflection. As there is a spontaneity of instinct, there is likewise also a spontaneity of vision: a child is spontaneous in its movements, even so a seer. Not only so, the higher spontaneity is more spontaneous, for the higher consciousness means not only awareness but the free and untrammelled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is.
Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full participation of a refined and transparent and enriched instrument in the delivery of superconscious truth and beauty will surely mean not only a new but the very acme of aesthetic creation. We thus foresee the age of spiritual art in which the sense of creative beauty in man will find its culmination. Such an art was only an exception, something secondary or even tertiary, kept in the background, suggested here and there as a novel strain, called "mystic" to express its unfamiliar nature-unless, of course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious.
I have spoken of the source of inspiration as essentially and originally being a super-consciousness or over-consciousness. But to be more precise and accurate I should add another source, an inner consciousness. As the super-consciousness is imaged as lying above the normal consciousness, so the inner consciousness may be described as lying behind or within it. The movement of the inner consciousness has found expression more often and more largely than that of over-consciousness in the artistic creation of the past : and that was in keeping with the nature of the old-world inspiration, for the inspiration that comes from the inner consciousness, which can be considered as the lyrical inspiration, tends to be naturally more "spontaneous", less conscious, since it does not at all go by the path of the head, it evades that as much as possible and goes by the path of the heart.
But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the heart too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all?
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Well, it is sheer incantation. It is word-weaving, rhythm plaiting, thought-wringing in order to pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to a higher, a deeper degree. We may be speaking of tins and tinsel, bones and dust, filth and misery, of the underworld of ignorance and ugliness,
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
and the imaginative idealist, the romantically spiritual poet says that these or
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
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Heaven and Earth are not incommensurables, divinity and humanity function as one reality, towards one purpose and end: cruel heaven, miserable humanity? Well, this is how they appear to the poet's eye:
Le Ciel! Couvercle noir de la grande marmite
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Ifso long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon earth something of her charm and wizardry. The fullness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould.
"The Last Voyage" by Charles Williams-A Little Book of Modern Verse, (Faber and Faber).
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Mystic poetry Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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The poetry in the Making Vivekananda
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsRabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man
Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man
Tagore is a great poet: he will be remembered as one of the I greatest world- poets. But humanity owes him anotherperhaps a greaterdebt of gratitude: his name has a higher value, a more significant potency for the future.
In an age when Reason was considered as the highest light given to man, Tagore pointed to the Vision of the mystics as always the still greater light; when man was elated with undreamt-of worldly success, puffed up with incomparable material possessions and powers, Tagore's voice rang clear and emphatic in tune with the cry of the ancients: "What shall I do with all this mass of things, if I am not made immortal by that?" When men, in their individual as well as collective egoism, were scrambling for earthly gains and hoards, he held before them vaster and cleaner horizons, higher and deeper ways of being and living, maintained the sacred sense of human solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine, one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but hypnotised men's minds, and Superman or God-man came to be equated with the Titan, Tagore saw through the falsehood and placed in front and above all the old-world eternal verities of love and self-giving, harmony and mutuality, sweetness and light. When pessimism, cynicism, agnosticism struck the major chord of human temperament, and grief and frustration and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the inevitable order of earthlylifebhasmantam idam shariramhe continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and Immortality are the breath of things, the birth right of human beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never tobe contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brahman.
Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of the Spirit, who always soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In the other two it comes in as strange flashes from an unknown country, as a sort of irruption or on the peak of the poetic afflatus or enthousiasmos.
The world being nothing but Spirit made visible is, according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind has to repossess and clo the itself with that mantle of beauty. The world is beautiful, because it is the image of the Beautiful, because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who is Beauty supreme. Now by a strange alchemy, a wonderful effect of polarisation, the very spiritual element in Tagore has made him almost a pagan and even a profane. For what are these glories of Nature and the still more exquisite glories that the human body has captured? They are but vibrations and modulations of beauty the delightful names and forms of the supreme Lover and Beloved.
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The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out-as some, purists one may call them, have done-that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)in the sense that problems exist for himsocial, political, economic, national, humanitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of human destiny, of Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his acceptance of the world, an introvert, to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe' and human life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take interest in the dynamic working out of the world process, he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world, although real, is only a symbolic shadowplay to which he can but be a witness-real, is only a nothing more.
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Tagore was a poet; this poetic power of his he put in the service of the great cause for the divine uplift of humanity. Naturally, it goes without saying, his poetry did not preach or propagandize the truths for which he stoodhe had a fine and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in a poetic way but to sing them. And he sang them not in their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, but in and through human values and earthly norms. The especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he himself says, in the note of unboundedness in things bounded that it describes. A mundane, profane sensuousness, Kalidasian in richness and sweetness, is matched or counterpointed by a simple haunting note imbedded or trailing somewhere behind, a lyric cry persevering into eternity, the nostalgic cry of the still small voice.2
Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities are uplifted and suffused with a "light that never was, on sea or land."
Another great poet of the spirit says also, almost like Tagore:
Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.3
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Tagore the poet reminds one often and anon of Kalidasa. He was so much in love, had such kinship with the great old master that many of his poems, many passages and lines are reminiscences, echoes, modulations or a paraphrase of the original classic. Tagore himself refers in his memoirs to one Kalidasian line that haunted his juvenile brain because of its exquisite music and enchanting imagery:
Mandki nirjharikarm vodh muhuh-kamPita-deva-druh
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Both the poets were worshippers, idolaters, of beauty, especially of natural physical beauty, of beauty heaped on beauty, of beauty gathered, like honey from all places and stored and ranged and stalled with the utmost decorative skill. Yet the difference between the two is not less pronounced. A philosopher is reminded of Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality, in connection with certain aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is something moving, flowing, dancing, rippling; it is especially the beauty which music embodies and expresses. A Kalidasian beauty, on the contrary, is statuesque and plastic, it is to be appreciated in situ. This is, however, by the way.
Sri Aurobindo: "Ahana", Collected Poems & Plays, Vol. 2
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The poetry in the Making Vivekananda
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsVivekananda
Vivekananda
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The gospel of strength that Vivekananda spread was very characteristic of the man. For it is not mere physical or nervous bravery, although that too is indispensable, and it is something more than moral courage. In the speeches referred to, the subject-matter (as well as the manner to a large extent) is philosophical, metaphysical, even abstract in outlook and treatment: they are not a call to arms, like the French National Anthem, for example; they are not merely an ethical exhortation, a moral lesson either. They speak of the inner spirit, the divine in man, the supreme realities that lie beyond. And yet the words are permeated through and through with a vibration life-giving and heroic-not so much in the explicit and apparent meaning as in the style and manner and atmosphere: it is catching, even or precisely when he refers, for example, to these passages in the Vedas and the Upanishads, magnificent in their poetic beauty, sublime in their spiritual truth,nec plus ultra, one can say, in the grand style supreme:
Yasyaite himavanto mahitv
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Rabindranath Tagore: A Great poet, a Great Man Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsBlaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsWalter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection
Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of humanityin poets and artists and seers and great men of actioncan be observed a certain characteristic form of consciousness, which is something other than, greater than the consciousness of the mere self. It is difficult as yet to characterise definitely what that thing is. It is the awakening of the self to something which is beyond itselfit is the cosmic self, the oversoul, the universal being; it is God, it is Turiya, it is sachchidanandain so many ways the thing has been sought to be envisaged and expressed. The consciousness of that level has also a great variety of names given to it Intuition, Revelation, cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness. It is to be noted here, however, that the thing we are referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite, the One without a second. It is not, that is to say, the supreme Reality the Brahmanin its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman, that status of the supreme Reality where creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise, it is the Truth-worldRitam the domain of typal realities. The distinction is necessary, as there does seem to be such a level of consciousness intermediary, again, between man and the Absolute, between self-consciousness and the supreme consciousness. The simplest thing would be to give that intermediate level of consciousness a negative namesince being as yet human we cannot foresee exactly its composition and function the super-consciousness.
The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something deeper than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot."(A.E.)
This passage from the self-conscient to the super-conscient does not imply merely a shifting of the focus of consciousness. The transmutation of consciousness involves a purer illumination, a surer power and a wider compass; it involves also a fundamental change in the very mode of being and living. It gives quite a different life-intuition and a different life-power. The change in the motif brings about a new form altogether, a re-casting and re-shaping and re-energising of the external materials as well. As the lift from mere consciousness to self-consciousness meant all the difference between an animal and a man, so the lift again from self-consciousness to super-consciousness will mean the difference of a whole world between man and the divine creature that is to be.
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsWilliam Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The ideal was Blake's. It will not sound so revolting if we understand what the poet meant by Hell. Hell, he explains, is simply the body, the Energy of Lifehell, because body and life on earth were so considered by the orthodox Christianity. The Christian ideal demands an absolute denial and rejection of life. Fulfilment is elsewhere, in heaven alone. That is, as we know, the ideal of the ascetic. The life of the spirit (in heaven) is a thing away from and stands against the life of the flesh (on earth). In the face of this discipline, countering it, Blake posited a union, a marriage of the two, considered incompatibles and incommensurables. Enfant terrible that he was, he took an infinite delight in a spirit of contradiction and went on expatiating on the glory of the misalliance. He declared a new apocalypse and said that Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell:
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.. . . If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
creator, a pure artist, a poet par excellence! So I tell myself that my judgments, my appreciations are influenced
by my devotion for the Master - and not everyone is
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsNicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsAldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsGoe the
Goethe
--
The year 1949 has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental experience, the major Intuition that stirred this human soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goe the was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poetical by nature, can be moulded to embody the great beauty of great poetry. He made the German language sing, even as the sun's ray made the stone of Memnon sing when falling upon it. Goe the was a man of consummate culture. Truly and almost literally it could be said of him that nothing human he considered foreign to his inquiring mind. And Goe the was a man of great wisdom. His observation and judgment on thingsno matter to whatever realm they belonghave an arresting appropriateness, a happy and revealing insight. But above all, he was an aspiring soulaspiring to know and be in touch with the hidden Divinity in man and the world.
Goe the and the Problem of Evil
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel oneself, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's dutythere is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by Sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely and integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outerspontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or haltna me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsT. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
In these latest poems of his, Eliot has become outright a poet of the Dark Night of the Soul. The beginnings of the new avatar were already there certainly at the very beginning. The Waste Land is a good preparation and passage into the Night. Only, the negative element in it was stronger the cynicism, the bleakness, the sereness of it all was almost overwhelming. The next stage was "The Hollow Men": it took us right up to the threshold, into the very entrance. It was gloomy and fore-boding enough, grim and seriousno glint or hint of the silver lining yet within reach. Now as we find ourselves into the very heart of the Night, things appear somewhat changed: we look at the past indeed, but can often turn to the future, feel the pressure of the Night yet sense the Light beyond overarching and embracing us. This is how the poet begins:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
--
Yes, by the force of this secret knowledge he has discovered, this supreme skill in action, as it is termed in the Eastern lore, I that the poet at last comes out into the open, into the light and happiness of the Dawn and the Day:
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
--
It is the song of redemption, of salvation achieved, of Paradise regained. The full story of the purgatory, of man's calvary is beautifully hymned in these exquisite lines of a haunting poetic beauty married to a real mystic sense:
The dove descending breaks the air
--
The Divine Love is a greater fire than the low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome, the only thing to do here is to be done with it. The true renunciation, that which is deep and abiding, is not, however, so simple a thing, such a short cut. So our poet says, but the world is not dark enough, it is not lonesome enough: the world lives and moves in a superficial half-light, it is neither real death nor real life, it is death in life. It is this miserable mediocrity, the shallow uncertainty of consciousness that spells danger and ruin for the soul. Hence the poet exclaims:
. . . . Not here
--
Eliot's is a very Christian soul, but we must remember at the same time that he is nothing if not modern. And this modernism gives all the warp and woof woven upon that inner core. How is it characterised? First of all, an intellectualism that requires a reasoned and rational synthesis of all experiences. Another poet, a great poet of the soul's Dark Night was, as we all know, Francis Thompson: it was in his case not merely the soul's night, darkness extended even to life, he lived the Dark Night actually and physically. His haunting, weird lines, seize within their grip our brain and mind and very flesh
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,5
--
That is the lesson that our poet has learnt from the Gita and that is the motto he too would prescribe to the seekers.
Now, a modern poet is modern, because he is doubly attracted and attached to things of this world and this mundane life, in spite of all his need and urge to go beyond for the larger truth and the higher reality. Apart from the natural link with which we are born, there is this other fascination which the poor miserable things, all the little superficialities, trivialities especially have for the modern mind in view of their possible sense and significance and right of existence. These too have a magic of their own, not merely a black magic:
..... our losses, the torn seine,
--
It is true the movement towards transcendence is stronger and apparent in our poet, but the other kindred point-of home and time-is not forgotten. So he says:
.History may be servitude,
--
Nothing can be clearer with regard to the ultimate end the poet has in view. Listen once more to the hymn of the higher reconciliation:
The dance along the artery
--
The Word was made flesh and the Word was made poetry. To express the supreme Word in life, that is the work of the sage, the Rishi. To express the Word in speech, that is the labour of the poet. Eliot undertook this double function of the poet and the sage and he found the task difficult. The poet has to utter the unutterable, if he is to clo the in words the mystic experience of the sage in him. That is Eliot's ambition:
.... Words, after speech, reach
--
And a lower and more facile inspiration tempts the poet and he often speaks with a raucous voice, even as the Arch-tempter sought to lure the Divine Word made flesh:
... Shrieking voices
--
Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or often he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. Perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums like
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
--
Here the poet is almost grimly tense, concentrated and has not allowed himself to be dissipated by thinkings and arguments, has confined himself wholly to a living experience. That is because the poet has since then moved up and sought a more rarefied air, a more even and smooth temper. The utter and absolute poetic ring of the Inferno is difficult to maintain in the Paradiso, unless and until the poet transforms himself wholly into the Rishi, like the poet of the Gita or the Upanishads.
"East Coker"
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta poets and MysticsNicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich
--
It is not a mere notion or superstition, it is an occult reality that gives sanctity to a particular place or region. The saintly soul has always been also a pilgrim, physically, to holy places, even to one single holy place, if he so chooses. The puritan poet may say tauntingly:
Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In Golgotha him dead who lives in heaven
--
The stress of the inner urge to the heights and depths of spiritual values and realities found special and significant expression in his paintings. It is a difficult problem, a problem which artists and poets are tackling today with all their skill and talent. Man's consciousness is no longer satisfied with the customary and the ordinary actions and reactions of life (or thought), with the old-world and time-worn modes and manners. It is no more turned to the apparent and the obvious, to the surface forms and movements of things. It yearns to look behind and beyond, for the secret mechanism, the hidden agency that really drives things. poets and artists are the vanguards of the age to come, prophets and pioneers preparing the way for the Lord.
Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical: secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words, concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of whichbalance, regularity, fixity, soliditywas greatly utilised by the French painter Czanne and poet Mallarm who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet, the priest in him was the stronger element and made use of the artist as the rites andceremoniesmudras and chakrasof his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.
A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitivealmost aboriginalelement in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful the classic grace and aristocracyform one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Although there is a certain charm and poetry in the
fact that there is no formal date for the creation of
--
It is a poetic way of expressing the transformation which is going
to take place and which is more complicated than that.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But as soon as you want to express it, it escapes like water running through your fingers; all the fluidity is lost, it evaporates. A rather vague, poetic or artistic expression is much truer, much nearer to the truth something hazy, nebulous, undefined. Something not concretized like a rigid mental expressionthis rigidity that the mind has introduced right down into the Inconscient.
This vision of the Inconscient (Mother remains gazing for a moment) it was the MENTAL Inconscient. Because the starting point was mental. A special Inconscientrigid, hard, resistantwith all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A mentalized Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixitya FIXITYcomes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless the plasticity has gone.
0 1960-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It gives me the impression of something like Yes, thats it, like a cavemanOh (Mother speaks mockingly), surely one of the cave artists or poets or writers! The intellectual life of the caves, I mean! But the cave happens to be low and when youre in it, you are like this (Mother stoops over), but the whole time you want to stand up straight. That makes you furious. Thats exactly the feeling it gives menot a cave meant for a man standing on his two feet; its a cave for a lion or for for any four-legged animal.
Its symbolic. Im speaking symbolically.
0 1960-08-10 - questions from center of Education - reading Sri Aurobindo, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Then they asked some questions about teaching literature and poetry. I answered them. And then, at the bottom, I added this:
If you carefully study what Sri Aurobindo has written on every subject
0 1960-10-02b, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Yes, my dear little one, it is much better like thatit becomes poetry.3
With all my tender affection.
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
He lives in a region which is largely a kind of vital vibration which penetrates the mind and makes use of the imagination (essentially its the same region most so-called cultured men live in). I dont mean to be severe or critical, but its a world that likes to play to itself. Its not really what we could call histrionics, not thatits rather a need to dramatize to oneself. So it can be an heroic drama, it can be a musical drama, it can be a tragic drama, or quite simply a poetic drama and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, its a romantic drama. And then, these soul states (!) come replete with certain spoken expressions (laughing) Im holding myself back from saying certain things!You know, its like a theatricals store where you rent scenery and costumes. Its all ready and waitinga little call, and there it comes, ready-made. For a particular occasion, they say, Youre the woman of my life (to be repeated as often as necessary), and for another they say Its a whole world, a whole mode of human life which I suddenly felt I was holding in my arms. Yes, like a decoration, an ornament, a nicetyan ornament of existence, to keep it from being flat and dull and the best means the human mind has found to get out of its tamas. Its a kind of artifice.
So for persons who are severe and grave (there are two such examples here, but its not necessary to name them) There are beings who are grave, so serious, so sincere, who find it hypocritical; and when it borders on certain (how shall I put it?) vital excesses, they call it vice. There are others who have lived their entire lives in a yogic or religious discipline, and they see this as an obstacle, illusion, dirtyness (Mother makes a gesture of rejecting with disgust), but above all, its this terrible illusion that prevents you from nearing the Divine. And when I saw the way these two people here reacted, in fact, I said to myself, but you see, I FELT So strongly that this too is the Divine, it too is a way of getting out of something that has had its place in evolution, and still has a place, individually, for certain individuals. Naturally, if you remain there, you keep turning in circles; it will always be (not eternally, but indefinitely) the woman of my life, to take that as a symbol. But once youre out of it, you see that this had its place, its utilityit made you emerge from a kind of very animal-like wisdom and quietude that of the herd or of the being who sees no further than his daily round. It was necessary. We mustnt condemn it, we mustnt use harsh words.
--
What I saw is this world, this realm where people are like that, they live that, for its necessary to get out from below and this is a wayits a way, the only way. It was the only way for the vital formation and the vital creation to enter into the material world, into inert matter. An intellectualized vital, a vital of ideas, an artist; it even fringes upon or has the first drops of poetrythis poetry which upon its peaks goes beyond the mind and becomes an expression of the Spirit. Well, when these first drops fall on earth, it stirs up mud.
And I wondered why people are so rigid and severe, why they condemn others (but one day Ill understand this as well). I say this because very often I run into these two states of mind in my activities (the grave and serious mind which sees hypocrisy and vice, and the religious and yogic mind which sees the illusion that prevents you from nearing the Divine)and without being openly criticized, Im criticized Ill tell you about this one day
0 1960-11-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its a lack of plasticity in the mind, and they are bound by the expression of things; for them, words are rigid. Sri Aurobindo explained it so well in The Secret of the Veda; he shows how language evolves and how, before, it was very supple and evocative. For example, one could at once think of a river and of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo also gives the example of a sailboat and the forward march of life. And he says that for those of the Vedic age it was quite natural, the two could go together, superimposed; it was merely a way of looking at the same thing from two sides, whereas now, when a word is said, we think only of this word all by itself, and to get a clear picture we need a whole literary or poetic imagery (with explanations to boot!). Thats exactly the case with these children; theyre at a stage where everything is rigid. Such is the product of modern education. It even extracts the subtlest nuance between two words and FIXES it: And above all, dont make any mistake, dont use this word for that word, for otherwise your writings no good. But its just the opposite.
(silence)
0 1961-04-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other story dates farther back. I was living in another house (we had the whole fifth floor), and once a week I used to hold meetings there with people interested in occultism they came to have me demonstrate or tell them about occult practices. There was a Swedish artist, a French lady and a young French boy, a student and a poet. His parents were decent country people who bled themselves white to pay for his life in Paris. This boy was very intelligent and a true artist, but he was depraved. (We knew about it, but it was his private life and none of our business.) One evening, when four or five of us were to meet, this boy didnt turn up, although he had said he would. We had our meeting anyway and didnt think much about itwe thought he must have been busy elsewhere. Around midnight, when the people were leaving, I open the door. A big black cat was sitting in the doorway and, in a single bound, it jumps on me, just like that, all curled up in a ball. So I calm it down, I look at itAh, the eyes! They were this boys eyes. (I no longer recall his name.) Right away (at the time we were all involved in occultism), we knew something had happened; he had been unable to come and the cat had incarnated his vital force.
The next day, all the newspapers were full of a vile murder: a pimp had murdered this boyit was disgusting! Something utterly vile. And it had happened at the very moment he should have come the concierge had seen him going into the house with this pimp. What happened? Was it just for money or for something elsevice? Or what?
0 1961-07-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know, Savitri is an exact descriptionnot literature, not poetry (although the form is very poetical)an exact description, step by step, paragraph by paragraph, page by page; as I read, I relived it all. Besides, many of my own experiences that I recounted to Sri Aurobindo seem to have been incorporated into Savitri. He has included many of themNolini says so; he was familiar with the first version Sri Aurobindo wrote long ago, and he said that an enormous number of experiences were added when it was taken up again. This explained to me why suddenly, as I read it, I live the experienceline by line, page by page. The realism of it is astounding.
As for me, Im now on the second part of On Himself ; I am beginning to enjoy myself.
0 1961-08-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was during this period that I used to go out of my body every night and do the work Ive spoken of in Prayers and Meditations (I only mentioned it in passing).8 Every night at the same hour, when the whole house was very quiet, I would go out of my body and have all kinds of experiences. And then my body gradually became a sleepwalker (that is, the consciousness of the form became more and more conscious, while the link remained very solidly established). I got into the habit of getting up but not like an ordinary sleepwalker: I would get up, open my desk, take out a piece of paper and write poems. Yes, poems I, who had nothing of the poet in me! I would jot things down, then very consciously put everything back into the drawer, lock everything up again very carefully and go back to bed. One night, for some reason or other, I forgot and left it open. My mother came in (in France the windows are covered with heavy curtains and in the morning my mother would come in and violently throw open the curtains, waking me up, brrm!, without any warning; but I was used to it and would already be prepared to wake upotherwise it would have been most unpleasant!). Anyway, my mother came in, calling me with unquestionable authority, and then she found the open desk and the piece of paper: Whats that?! She grabbed it. What have you been up to? I dont know what I replied, but she went to the doctor: My daughter has become a sleepwalker! You have to give her a drug.
It wasnt easy.
0 1961-09-03, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You understand, if I were British and writing in English, I could try to do a book on Sri Aurobindo using Savitri alone. With quotations from Savitri one can maintain a certain poetical rhythm, and this rhythm can generate an opening. But in French it isnt possiblehow could it be translated?
Yes, thats what I mean-but even in English.
0 1961-09-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have the right to 150 pages! The publisher is giving me 150 pages in his collection. Terrible. But in this Sri Aurobindo, you understand, I would like to make his whole poetic aspect stand out, that poetry which is like the Veda, like a revelation, so a bit of space is required: it cant be squeezed into a few lines, or reduced to a skeleton.
This analogy between the ancient form of spiritual revelations and Savitri, this blossoming into poetry of his prophetic revelation is what could be called the most exceptional part of his work. And what is remarkable (I saw him do it) is that he changed Savitri: he went along changing it as his experience changed.
It is clearly the continuing expression of his experience.
0 1961-11-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not including poetry.
***
0 1962-02-03, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Besides, if you remember the beginning of Savitri (I read it only recently, I hadnt known it), in the second canto, speaking of Savitri, he says she has come (he puts it poetically, of course!) to (laughing) kick out all the rulesall the taboos, the rules, the fixed laws, all the closed doors, all the impossibilitiesto undo it all.
I went one better; I didnt even know the rules so I didnt need to fight them! All I had to do was ignore them, so they didnt exist that was even better.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You may say, what need is there of a Samgha? Let me be free and live in every vessel; let all become one without form and let whatever must be happen in the midst of that vast formlessness. There is a truth there, but only one side of the truth. Our business is not with the formless Spirit alone; we have also to direct the movement of life. And there can be no effective movement of life without form. It is the Formless that has taken form and that assumption of name and form is not a caprice of Maya. Form is there because it is indispensable. We do not want to rule out any activity of the world as beyond our province. Politics, industry, society, poetry, literature, art will all remain, but we must give them a new soul and a new form.
Why have I left politics? Because the politics of the country is not a genuine thing belonging to India. It is an importation from Europe and an imitation. At one time there was a need of it. We also have done politics of the European kind. If we had not done it, the country would not have risen and we too would not have gained experience and attained full development. There is still some need of it, not so much in Bengal as in the other provinces of India. But the time has come to stop the shadow from extending and to seize on the reality. We must get to the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works.
0 1962-09-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am not doing it to show it to people or to have anyone read it, but to remain in Savitris atmosphere, for I love that atmosphere. It will give me an hour of concentration, and Ill see if by chance. I have no gift for poetry, but Ill see if it comes! (It surely wont come from a mentality developed in this present existence theres no poetic gift!) So its interesting, Ill see if anything comes. I am going to give it a try.
I know that light. I am immediately plunged into it each time I read Savitri. It is a very, very beautiful light.
0 1962-10-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At their maximum, at the height of their possibilities, human conceptions can at the VERY BEST express something or other of the overmind. For me it is very vivid, very familiar, because I have lived there a lot. But even so, I consider words too awkward to express italthough with poetic metaphors you might just manage to convey an impression of it. But as for speaking of the Other Thing, I am quite aware that. Because even when youre right in the Experience, the only thing you feel like doing is keeping quiet. You cant talk. As soon as you utter a word, poof! It all clouds over. Its useless.
But physically, for instance, you see this object [Satprem picks up a paperweight]. Now, I see it in a certain way but you, with a supramental consciousness?
0 1962-10-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It would be all right if I was writing stories or poetry, but to write something that has to hang together.
That doesnt matter! It will hang together by an invisible thread, and that will be far more interesting.
0 1963-01-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It isnt thought out, it just comes. Its probably not poetry, not even free verse, but it does contain something.
So I made a resolve (because its neither to be published nor to be shown, but its a marvelous delight): I will simply keep it the way I keep the Agenda. I have a feeling that, later, perhaps (how can I put it?) when people can be less mental in their activity, it will put them in touch with that light [of Savitri]you know, immediately I enter something purely white and silent, light and alive: a sort of beatitude.
--
I may even keep the manuscript in pencil: the temptation to correct is very bad. Very bad because its the surface understanding that wants to correctliterary taste, poetical sense and all those things that are down there (gesture down below). You know, its as if (I dont mean the words themselves), as if the CONTENT of the words were projected on a perfectly blank and still screen (Mother points to her forehead), as if the words were projected on it.
The trouble is writing, the materialization between the vision and the writing; the Force has to drive the hand and the pencil, and there is a slight theres still a very slight resistance. Otherwise, if I could write automatically, oh, how nice it would be!
--
So I will go on. If there are corrections, they can only come through the same process, because at this point to correct anyhow would spoil it all. There is also the mixing (for the logical mind) of future and present tenses but that too is deliberate. It all seems to come in another way. And well, I cant say, I havent read any French for ages, I have no knowledge of modern literatureto me everything is in the rhythm of the sound. I dont know what rhythm they use now, nor have I read what Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Future poetry. They tell me that Savitris verse follows a certain rule he explained on the number of stresses in each line (and for this you should pronounce in the pure English way, which somewhat puts me off), and perhaps some rule of this kind will emerge in French? We cant say. I dont know. Unless languages grow more fluid as the body and mind grow more plastic? Possible. Language too, maybe: instead of creating a new language, there may be transitional languages, as, for instance (not a particularly fortunate departure, but still), the way American is emerging from English. Maybe a new language will emerge in a similar way?
In my case it was from the age of twenty to thirty that I was concerned with French (before twenty I was more involved in vision: painting; and sound: music), but as regards language, literature, language sounds (written or spoken), it was approximately from twenty to thirty. The Prayers and Meditations were written spontaneously with that rhythm. If I stayed in an ordinary consciousness I would get the knack of that rhythm but now it doesnt work that way, it wont do!
0 1963-03-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I believe its his Messageall the rest is preparation, while Savitri is the Message. Unfortunately, there were two morons here who fancied correcting himwhile he was alive! (A. especially, hes a poet.) Hence all those Letters on poetry Sri Aurobindo wrote. Ive always refused to read them I find it outrageous. He was forced to explain a whole poetic technique the very idea! Its just the contrary: it comes down from above, and AFTERWARDS you explain. Like a punch in sawdust: inspiration comes down, and afterwards you explain why its all arranged as it is but that just doesnt interest me!
(silence)
0 1963-07-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats impossible to translate is the musical rhythm of the sentence thats impossible. Because the English rhythm and the French rhythm are very different in character, and if you translate literally something that has a poetic rhythm in English, it may not come out poetic at all in French. So a translation is a translation, we have to settle for it. But there will still be quite enough ideas left to do people some good!
Yes, but sometimes it becomes quite jerky. The French has a staccato, powerful rhythm, so in English it gives an impression of small bits cut and pasted together. But anyway, I think she is doing as well as can be done.
--
I dont seek to translate poetically, I only try to render the meaning. I read the English sentence until I SEE the meaning clearly, and once I see it, I put it into French, but very awkwardly I dont claim to be a poet! Only, the meaning is correct.
This translation will not serve any purposeit serves a purpose only for me. But I dont even have the time, I can hardly spare half an hour a day for this work I hope I can offer myself half an hour a day!
0 1963-07-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body had based its sort of sense of good health on a certain number of vibrations, and whenever those vibrations were present, it felt in good health; when something came and disturbed them, it felt that it was about to fall ill or that it was ill, depending on the intensity. All that has changed now: those basic vibrations have simply been removed, they no longer exist; the vibrations on which the body based its sense of good or ill healthremoved. They are replaced by something else, and something else of such a nature that good health and illness have lost all meaning! Now, there is the sense of an established harmony among the cells, increasingly established among the cells, which represents the right functioning, whatever that may be: its no longer a question of a stomach or a heart or this or that. And the slightest thing that comes and disturbs that harmony is VERY painful, but at the same time there is the knowledge of what to do to reestablish the harmony instantly; and if the harmony is reestablished, the functioning isnt affected. But if out of curiosity, for instance (its a mental illness in humans), you start asking yourself, Whats that? What effect will it have? Whats going to happen? (what the body calls the desire to learn), if you are unlucky enough to be that way, you can be sure (laughing) that youll have something very unpleasant which, according to the doctor (according to ignoramuses), becomes an illness or disrupts the bodys functioning. While if you dont have that unhealthy curiosity and, on the contrary, will the harmony not to be disrupted, you only have to, we could say poetically, bring one drop of the Lord on the troubled spot for everything to be fine again.
The body is unable to know things in the way it did formerly.
0 1963-09-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know whether its listening or seeing: its something in between. For a very long time, all my contacts with the invisible were visual contacts, but now there is sound too. So this is how it works: I simply have to be attentive, that is to say, not actively busy with something else. If I stay still, it comes: its exactly like a rivulet, a tiny rivulet flowing out of a mountain; its very clear and pure like pure water, very transparent, and very white and luminous at the same time. It comes (gesture as of pearls of water dropping) and it arranges itself here, just above the head, in the form of words. It arranges itself, and someone, I dont know who (probably Sri Aurobindo! because its someone with a poetic power), looks after the sound and the placement of the words, and puts them in the proper order. Finally, after a little while, its complete. And then I write it downits very amusing.
Thats what happened with the English translation: I had said with authority, It will not be translated. Then this morning, when I wasnt thinking of anything at all, it came all on its own. That is to say, to be precise, I was telling the fact to someone who knows English better than French, so I said it in English, and once it was said I noticed, Well, well! Ah, thats it, thats right! It was the experience that had expressed itself in English.
0 1964-01-08, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, if we wanted to make poetry (its no longer a philosophical or spiritual way of seeing, but a pictorial way), we could imagine a Lord who is a totality of all the possible and impossible possibilities, in quest of a Purity and Perfection that can never be reached and are ever progressive and the Lord would get rid of all in the Manifestation that weighs down His unfoldingHe would begin with the nastiest. You see it? Total Night, total Unconsciousness, total Hatred (no, hatred still implies that Love exists), the incapacity to feel. Nothingness.
Were on the way. I still have a little bit of it [that total Unconsciousness] left.
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
G. brought back from Paris a book, an albuman album of photographs. On one side of the book there is a photograph, and on the other a facsimile of the handwriting probably of well-known authors, poets, writers, and so on I didnt read that. A facsimile and a photograph. They call it Dream Paris! (Mother raises her eyes heavenwards)
The photos attempt to be very artistic. They are taken from quite unusual angles and some are very fine. On the whole, a little vulgar: too many people kissing, socks hanging in the sunthey confuse the artistic with the uncommon, the unconventional. To be unconventional is very good, but still it could be directed towards the Beautiful rather than Anyway. I was looking at the book, turning the pages, and while looking I thought, Well, really, someone who doesnt know Paris at all would get a queer idea of it! There isnt one single picture that makes you say, Oh, thats beautiful, except a view of the Seine and also a few trees, which could as well be in the countryside. And I kept turning and turning the pages. Suddenly I saw (I had my magnifying glass to see better) a view of the banks of the Seine with the boxes of those what are they called?
0 1964-04-19, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
People are miserable in the midst of their wealth, their faces are hard and closed, they are harassed. There are fine beings, but all their energy is devoured by this devouring life I will never come back here, I dont belong here, Ive never belonged here! The best of their ideal is as aggressive as they themselves are I like them, but they are thousands and thousands of miles away from any true truth, it will take them many centuries to broaden a little. At any rate, it is clear that no book, no word will be able to change that, another Power is needed. I will nonetheless write that Sannyasin, but afterwards nothing but tales or poetry.
***
0 1965-12-28, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Pretty paper to write poetry on!
Will you write?
Me! I am no poet!
The first poetry I was able to appreciate in my life was Savitri. Previously, I was closed. To me it was always words: hollow, hollow, hollow, just wordswords for words sake. So as a sound its pretty, but I prefer music. Music is better!
This translation of Savitri gives me a whole lot of fun, its great fun for me.
0 1965-12-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, I assure you, you can believe me (Mother laughs), I have a little experience: its done. To put it poetically, Your head is in the Light. But your vital doesnt want this manifestation; your vital wanted a vital manifestation, as for instance when it was in the virgin forest, chopping trees down: it wanted to have the sense of the power of life. And that has been denied to it (for yogic AND material reasons, both extremes, because the body wasnt made for that, and because [laughing] the yoga has no time to waste with that), so Mister Vital is furious! It has been told, Calm down, be at peace, quite at peace, its all right, you too will have your joy, but once you are transformed. And it may be less pugnacious or rebellious or aggressive than before, but its dissatisfied, so its what gives you the feeling, But I have no sign that Im making headway! I have no sign that I am progressing. Quite the contrary! Quite the contrary, its more and more dull, more and more morose, more and more ordinary, that is to say, less and less consonant with my ideal, and my ideal
Thats not exactly the point. Yes, when its in one of its fits, its like that, but
0 1966-02-23, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is a sequel to the story. He came afterwards. Once he was formed again, he came; he stayed near me and told me, I have come because it was my desire and intention to go to India with you, and I want to accomplish it. And he came with me; when I left for India (the second time), he came with me. And long after my returnlong after, when Pavitra came hereone night, I suddenly saw F. and Pavitra embracing each other! Just like that. Then F. entered him. And the interesting thing is that Pavitra had no liking for poetry and very little interest in art, and after that boy united with him, he began having a very special understanding of poetry and showing interest in art! He really felt a change in him (I hadnt told him what had happened).
I have seen several such cases, but that one was so clear! So clear, so precise. And without the collaboration of active thought I wasnt thinking about it at all: one night I saw them like that, Pavitra having come out of his body, and the other leaving (he was always in repose in my aura), he left my aura, they embraced, and then one entered the other.1
--
The other2 also was a poet, but he was the son of some very good folks (I think they were from the lower middle class, or maybe even peasants, people from the country), very good folks who had made considerable effort to send their son for studies in Paris. He was a very good student. A boy of the same age: about twenty or twenty-one. A fairly good poet, intelligent, and he was especially interested in occultism. But as for him, he wasnt inwardly formed; it was only his vital consciousness that took over the cat.
But strangely, the look of the cats eyes changed completely.
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is here a level (gesture at breast level) where something plays with words, images, sentences, like that (shimmering, undulating gesture): it makes pretty images; and it has a power to put you in contact with the thing, maybe a greater power (at least as great, but maybe greater) than here (gesture at the top of the forehead), than the metaphysical expression (metaphysical is a way of putting it). Images. That is, poetry. There is in it an almost more direct access to that inexpressible Vibration. I see Sri Aurobindos expression in its poetic form, it has a charm and a simplicitya simplicity and a softness and a penetrating charm that puts you in direct contact much more intimately than all those things of the head.
There. So in fact, we havent done a thing (laughing), weve wasted our time!
0 1966-06-15, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My idea (if I have one), and what makes me persist in writing, is that all that I have said in an intellectual way, which appeals to peoples intellectual consciousness, Id like to say it in a deeper way, which is a rhythm (people call it poetry, but as for me I dont understand a thing about poetry). What Id like is to express an inner rhythm, to touch another layer of the being, deeper than those things of the intellect. The Adventure of Consciousness appeals to peoples intellectual consciousness, its to make them understand. But what Id like is to touch something else. To say the same thing with an inner rhythm images.
Maybe thats why, maybe I am also responsible?
0 1966-06-29, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your explanation is more poetic, its more literary, but still I am not sure thats it.
Its the substance of the world, what constitutes the world.
--
Without consciousness, no existence, thats perfectly true, but it doesnt explain what consciousness is. But your explanation is poetic enough, at any rate!
In Indian philosophy, they put Existence before Consciousness. They say Sat-Chit-Ananda.2 So if we say, Chit-Sat-Ananda! And its not true.
0 1966-08-31, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If it could be translated into words, it would be so pretty (thats when I understand poets!). That ineffable Presence seems to be saying, You see, I was always there, and you didnt know it. And its lived at the very heart of the cells: You see, you know that I was always there, but you didnt know it. And then (Mother smiles on in a contemplation) Its a tiny nothingwhich changes everything.
Thats how a dead man can come back to life. Thats how: through that change.
0 1966-11-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its the first time this year it has happened to me. Previously, it used to happen fairly often, but its the first time this year. It shows that, all the same, things are improving. Oh, but it was terrible, people cant imagine what it is! It takes hold of everyone and everybody, every circumstance and everything, and it gives shape to disintegrationquite like this Gentleman (I think hes the one!), quite like him. But it doesnt have the poetic form [of Savitri], of course, its not a poet: it has all the meanness of life. And it insists on that a great deal. These last few days it insisted on it a great deal. I said to myself, See, all that is written and said is always in a realm of beauty and harmony and greatness, and, anyway, the problem is put with dignity; but as soon as it becomes quite practical and material, its so petty, so mean, so narrow, so ugly! Thats the proof. When you get out of it, its all right, you can face all problems, but when you come down here, its so ugly, so petty, so miserable. We are such slaves to our needs, oh! For one hour, two hours, you hold on, and after And its true, physical life is uglynot everywhere, but anyway I always think of plants and flowers: thats really lovely, its free from that; but human life is so sordid, with such crude and imperious needsits so sordid. Its only when you begin to live in a slightly superior vision that you become free from that; in all the Scriptures, very few people accept the sordidness of life. And of course, thats what this Gentleman insists on. I said, Very well. This bodys answer is very simple: We certainly arent anxious that life should continue as it is. It doesnt find it very pretty. But we conceive of a lifea life as objective as our material lifewhich wouldnt have all these sordid needs, which would be more harmonious and spontaneous. Thats what we want. But he says its impossiblewe have been told its not only possible but certain. So theres the battle.
Then comes the great argument: Yes, yes, one day it will be, but when? For the time being you are still swamped in all this and you plainly see it cant change. It will go on and on. In millennia, yes, it will be. Thats the ultimate argument. He no longer denies the possibility, he says, All right, because you have caught hold of something, youre hoping to realize it now, but thats childishness.
0 1967-12-16, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo said it, of course. He said it, he wrote it in black and white (I forget the exact words): The pure divine love can manifest safely only in a in a ground (its not ground ) of Truth. I dont remember now. If we wanted to put it poetically, wed say, in a land of Truth.
So before we can proclaim, Love, manifest yourself, win the Victory, the ground of Truth must be ready.
0 1969-11-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Things can be said in a psychological way, as in The Adventure of Consciousness, psychological and reasoned, or else they can be said in a more poetic form, that is, in the form of a novel or a play or a poem I dont know.
Poem? Have you ever written poems?
0 1970-09-12, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, isnt that poetry?
Of course not, Mother! Thats how it IS. One just has to see: the outer world is more and more infernal.
0 1971-05-26, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(M.:) My first reaction was this: I found the book very poetic, very lovely I mean the French.
Its good, isnt it?
Yes. The English seemed less poetic to me. Its a translation, but it didnt give me the same impression as the French.
So, whats to be done? Another translation?
I dont know, Mother, I am unable to say. I cant say if its a good translation or a bad one, but when I read it, I felt it was a translation. And it was less poetic the French is much more poetic.
All right. Can it be used or not?
0 1971-10-06, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, that! It would take a poet to do that. Youre speaking of my translation?
Yes, Mother.
0 1971-12-11, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This year, we are celebrating Sri Aurobindos Birth Centenary. He is known to barely a handful of men and yet his name will resound when the great men of today or yesterday are buried under their own debris. His work is discussed by philosophers, praised by poets, people acclaim his sociological vision and his yoga but Sri Aurobindo is a living ACTION, a Word becoming real, and every day in the thousand circumstances that seem to want to rend the earth and topple its structures we can witness the first reflux of the Force he has set in motion. At the beginning of this century, when India was still struggling against British domination, Sri Aurobindo asserted: It is not a revolt against the British Government [that is needed]. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.2
For the problem is fundamental. It is not a question of bringing a new philosophy to the world or new ideas or illuminations, as they are called. The question is not of making the Prison of our lives more habitable, or of endowing man with ever more fantastic powers. Armed with his microscopes and telescopes, the human gnome remains a gnome, pain-ridden and helpless. We send rockets to the moon, but we know nothing of our own hearts. It is a question, says Sri Aurobindo, of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution.3 For, in actuality, he says, the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit.4 Beyond the mental man we are, there exists the possibility of another being who will be the spearhead of evolution as man was once the spearhead of evolution among the great apes. If, says Sri Aurobindo, the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man, man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god.5 Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us how to create this other being, this supramental being, and not only to tell us but actually to create this other being and open the path of the future, to hasten upon earth the rhythm of evolution, the new vibration that will replace the mental vibrationexactly as a thought one day disturbed the slow routine of the beastsand will give us the power to shatter the walls of our human prison.
0 1972-11-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
poetically, I could say: a few seconds in heaven and hours in hell.
Its better not to speak about it.
02.01 - A Vedic Story, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsA Vedic Story
A Vedic Story
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A mind that is not rigidly limited to the ratiocinative process, but has been remoulded in the light and rhythm of inspiration and intuition and revelation and other higher sources still beyond becomes at once a transfigured vessel, an apt instrument to incarnate and dynamise in the physical and material field truths and realities that normally lie far and above. Something of the kind, though in a small measure, happens, for example, in a poet or an artist. A poet who moves by vision and inspiration is not, at least need not be, devoid of mind: the mind in ills case is not annihilated or even kept in abeyance, but sublimated, undergoing a reorientation and reorganisation, acquiring a new magnitude. Even if there is a suspension of the ratiocinative faculty, it would not mean a suspension of the mental power in itself, but rather an enhancement in a new degree. The same may happen to the other parts and planes of human consciousness and existence.
Of course, if one chooses, one can sidetrack these intervening ranges of consciousness between the Spirit and Matter, and strike something like a chord line between the two; but also one need not follow this bare straight ascetic line of ascension; one can pursue a wider, a circular or global movement which not only arrives but fulfils. The latter is Nature's method of activity, Nature being all reality. The exclusive line is meant for individuals, and even as such it has a value and sense in the global view, for this too is contri butory to the total urge and its total consummation.
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the sovereign sweetness or violent poetry
Of their beautiful or terrible delight.
02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When man was a dweller of the forest,a jungle man,akin to his forbear the ape, his character was wild and savage, his motives and impulsions crude, violent, egoistic, almost wholly imbedded in, what we call, the lower vital level; the light of the higher intellect and intelligence had not entered into them. Today there is an uprush of similar forces to possess and throw man back to a similar condition. This new order asks only one thing of man, namely, to be strong and powerful, that is to say, fierce, ruthless, cruel and regimented. Regimentation can be said to be the very characteristic of the order, the regimentation of a pack of wild dogs or wolves. A particular country, nation or raceit is Germany in Europe and, in her wake, Japan in Asiais to be the sovereign nation or master race (Herrenvolk); the rest of mankindo ther countries and peoplesshould be pushed back to the status of servants and slaves, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. What the helots were in ancient times, what the serfs were in the mediaeval ages, and what the subject peoples were under the worst forms of modern imperialism, even so will be the entire mankind under the new overlordship, or something still worse. For whatever might have been the external conditions in those ages and systems, the upward aspirations of man were never doubted or questioned they were fully respected and honoured. The New Order has pulled all that down and cast them to the winds. Furthermore in the new regime, it is not merely the slaves that suffer in a degraded condition, the masters also, as individuals, fare no better. The individual here has no respect, no freedom or personal value. This society or community of the masters even will be like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; the individuals are merely functional units, they are but screws and bolts and nuts and wheels in a huge relentless machinery. The higher and inner realities, the spontaneous inspirations and self-creations of a free soulart, poetry, literaturesweetness and light the good and the beautifulare to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life.
Those that have stood against this Dark Force and its over-shadowing menaceeven though perhaps not wholly by choice or free-will, but mostly compelled by circumstancesyet, because of the stand they have taken, now bear the fate of the world on their shoulders, carry the whole future of humanity in their march. It is of course agreed that to have stood against the Asura does not mean that one has become sura, divine or godlike; but to be able to remain human, human instruments of the Divine, however frail, is sufficient for the purpose, that ensures safety from the great calamity. The rule of life of the Asura implies the end of progress, the arrest of all evolution; it means even a reversal for man. The Asura is a fixed type of being. He does not change, his is a hardened mould, a settled immutable form of a particular consciousness, a definite pattern of qualities and activitiesgunakarma. Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and impulsion. The domain of enjoyment, on the other hand, is where we reap the fruits of our past Karma; it is the result of an accumulated drive of all that we have done, of all the movements we have initiated and carried out. It is a status of being where there is only enjoyment, not of becoming where there can be development and new creation. It is a condition of gestation, as it were; there is no new Karma, no initiative or change in the stuff of the consciousness. The Asuras are bhogamaya purusha, beings of enjoyment; their domain is a cumulus of enjoyings. They cannot strike out a fresh line of activity, put forth a new mode of energy that can work out a growth or transformation of nature. Their consciousness is an immutable entity. The Asuras do not mend, they can only end. Man can certainly acquire or imbibe Asuric force or Asura-like qualities and impulsions; externally he can often act very much like the Asura; and yet there is a difference. Along with the dross that soils and obscures human nature, there is something more, a clarity that opens to a higher light, an inner core of noble metal which does not submit to any inferior influence. There is this something More in man which always inspires and enables him to break away from the Asuric nature. Moreover, though there may be an outer resemblance between the Asuric qualities of man and the Asuric qualities of the Asura, there is an intrinsic different, a difference in tone and temper, in rhythm and vibration, proceeding as they do, from different sources. However cruel, hard, selfish, egocentric man may be, he knows, he admitsat times, if hot always, at heart, if not openly, subconsciously, if not wholly consciously that such is not the ideal way, that these qualities are not qualifications, they are unworthy elements and have to be discarded. But the Asura is ruthless, because he regards ruthlessness as the right thing, as the perfect thing, it is an integral part of his swabhava and swadharma, his law of being and his highest good. Violence is the ornament of his character.
02.02 - Rishi Dirghatama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsRishi Dirghatama
Rishi Dirghatama
--
Indeed the darkness and the blindness seem to have been the Divine's grace upon him, for his eyes turned inward to other domains and saw strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they are now familiar even to the common man. They are mottoes and proverbs we all quote at all times. "Truth is one, the wise call it in different ways"the mantra is from Dirghatama. "Heaven is my father, Earth my mother"this is also from Dirghatama. The famous figure of two birds with beautiful wing dwelling on the same tree comes also from Dirghatama. There are a good many sayings of this kind that have become intimate companions to our lips of which the source we do not know. When we read the mantras of Dirghatama we are likely to exclaim even as the villager did when he first saw Hamlet played in London, "It is full of quotations."
You must have already noticed that the utterance of Dirghatama carries a peculiar turn, even perhaps a twist. In fact his mantras are an enigma, a riddle to which it is sometimes difficult to find the fitting key. For example when he says, "What is above is moving downward and what is down is moving upward; yes, they who are below are indeed up above, and they who are up are here below," or again, "He who knows the father below by what is above, and he who knows the father who is above by what is below is called the poet (the seer creator)", we are, to say the least, not a little puzzled.
The old delightful rishito use the epithets he gives to his Agniand blind into the bargain, continues, the substance and manner in the same way paradoxical and enigmatic, perhaps deliberately tantalising and confusing:
--
Needless to say these are signs and symbols and figures of a language seeking to express truths and realities of an invisible world, spiritual and occult. We are reminded of the "twilight" language of the poet-saints (Siddhacharyas) of Bengal of much later days.
There is no end to the problems that face Dirghatama with his almost tormented mind. Listen once more to this riddle:
02.03 - The Shakespearean Word, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsThe Shakespearean Word
The Shakespearean Word
The Vedic rishi, says the poet, by his poetic power, brings out forms, beautiful forms in the high heaven.
In this respect, Shakespeare is incomparable. He has through his words painted pictures, glowing living pictures of undying beauty.
Indeed all poets do this, each in his own way. To create beautiful concrete images that stand vivid before the mind's eye is the natural genius of a poet. Here is a familiar picture, simple and effective, of a material vision:
Cold blows the blast across the moor
--
We may turn to an Eastern poet to see how he too has gone the same way although in a different tone and temper. Here is a Kalidasian image:
To climb upon his Bull high and snow-white even like Mount Kailas
--
One can go on ad infinitum, for in a sense poetry is nothing but images. Still I am tempted to give a last citation from Dante, the superb Dante, in his grand style simple:
Logiornosen'andava, el'aerbruno
--
Characteristically of the poet these lines give an image that is bareness itself, chiselled in stone or modelled in bronze.
All these images however, or most of them, belong to one category or genre. They are painted pictures,still life, on the whole, presented in two dimensions. Kalidasa himself has described the nature or character of this artistic effect. In describing a gesture of Uma he says, 'she moved not, she stopped not' (na yayau na tasthau); it was, as it were, a movement suddenly arrested and held up on a canvas. The imagery is as though of a petrification. The figures of statuary present themselves to our eyes in this connection-a violent or intense action held at one point and stilled, as for example, in the Laocoon or the Discabolo.
This is usually what the poets, the great poets have done. They have presented living and moving bodies as fixed, stable entities, as a procession of statues. But Shakespeare's are not fixed stable pictures but living and moving beings. They do not appear as pictures, even like moving pictures on a screen, a two-dimensional representation. Life in Shakespeare appears, as in life, exactly like a three-dimensional phenomenon. You seem to see forms and figures in the round, not simply in a frontal view. A Shakespearean scene is not only a feast for the eye but is apprehended as though through all the' senses.
However, we must not forget Michael Angelo in this connection. He is living, he is energetic, to a supreme degree. If we seek anywhere intense au thentic life-movement, it is there at its maximum perhaps. Even his" statues are a paean of throbbing pulsating bodies. Still he has planted moving life in immobility and stilled rigidity. It is a passing moment stopped as though by magic; a mortis rigor holds in and controls, as it were, a wild vigour spurting out.
--
Borrowing an analogy from modern knowledge, I may say that the Shakespearean word is a particle or wave of life-power. Modern science posits as the basis of the material creation, as its ultimate constituents, these energy-particles. Even so it seems to me that at the basis of all poetic creation there lie what may be called word-particles, and each poet has a characteristic quality or energy of the word-unit. The Shakespearean word, I have said, is a life-energy packet; and therefore in his elaboration of the Word, living figures, moving creatures leap up to our sight.
Shakespeare himself has said of his hero Romeo, characterising the supreme beauty the hero embodies:
--
In the world of poetry Dante is a veritable avatar . His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive energy, Tapas. In Kalidasa the quantum is that of the energy of the light in sensuous beauty. And Homer's voice is a quantum of the luminous music of the spheres.
The word-unit, the language quantum in Sri Aurobindo's poetry is a packet of consciousness-force, a concentrated power of Light (instinct with a secret Delight)listen:
Lone in the silence and to the vastness bared,
02.04 - Two Sonnets of Shakespeare, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsTwo Sonnets of Shakespeare
Two Sonnets of Shakespeare
02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsRobert Graves
Robert Graves
Robert graves is not a major poet, and certainly not a great poet. He is a minor poet. But in spite of his minor rank he is a good poet: here he presents up a jewel, a beautiful poem 1 both in form and substance. He has indeed succeeded, as we shall see, in removing the veil, the mystic golden lid, partially at least and revealed to our mortal vision a glimpse of light and beauty and truth, made them delightfully sink into and seep through our aesthetic sense.
Like the poet his idol also is of a lower rank or of a plebeian status. He keeps away from such high gods as Indra and Agni and Varuna and Mitra: great poets will sing their praises. He will take care of the lesser ones, those who are moving in the shadow of the great ones and are hardly noticed. Even in these modern days, goddess Shitala, the healing goddess of epidemics, lives side by side with Durga.
But really it does not matter if the deity is small. For, if the worship is sincere and the offering pure, they ultimately reach the Divine. Did not Sri Krishna say in the Gita that whom-soever you may worship and in whatever way, that in the end' reaches him? The importance and significance of worship do not depend upon their size and scale: a little water, a leaf, a flower may more than do.
--
We may ask in this connection which deity does our poet invoke here, to whom does he raise his offerings, to whomkasmai devya? One need not be startled at the answer: it is the toadstool. But the mushroom growth assumes a respectable figure in the guise of its Sanskrit name,chatraka. Kalidasa did one better. His magic touch gave the insignificant flora a luminousrobeilndhra, a charming name. The great poet tells us that the earth is not barren or sterilekartum yat camahmucchilndhrmabandhym. The next pertinent question is: why does the poet worship a toadstool? What is his purpose? Does a toadstool possess any special power? This leads us to a hidden world, to the 'mysteries' spoken of by the poet himself.
In ancient days and in some spiritual practice and discipline this fungus had a special use for a definite purpose. Its use produces on one a drowsy effect, perhaps a strong and poisonous intoxicating effect. What is the final result of this drugging? We know that in our country among the sadhus and some sects practising occult science, taking of certain herbal drugs is recommended, even obligatory. Today Aldous Huxley has taken up the cue, in the most modern fashion indeed, and prescribed mescalin in the process of Yoga and spiritual practice. Did the Vedic Rishis see in the same way a usefulness of Soma, the proverbial creeper secreting the immortal drink of delight? However, the Tantriksadhaks hold that particular soporifics possess the virtue of quieting the external senses and dulling and deadening the sense organs, and thereby freeing the inner and subtler consciousness in its play and manifestation.
Our poet too is saying something in the same line. He is appealing to the toadstool god to give him the right vision, to take him to the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, evenwhile in the physical body, existence in heaven,ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said.
That he may pass me through when my star falls
--
However the poet says that as the toadstool is born in the midst of thunder and lightning, his strength and capacity are of the nature of thunderenduring and hard and powerful. Born thus it spreads everywhere and lasts through all time. From the beginning of creation this god has sprouted up everywhere, as giver of pleasure and ecstasy and intoxication. To worship him is to worship earth, to worship Dionysus himself. But one needs to worship this god in the right way, to give oneself away wholly to him. Once upon a time the demons for some selfish interest wanted to capture and imprison him. The result was disastroushe thought of depriving them of their power of movement and drowning them into the ocean. On the contrary, to the devoted which world does he reveal, which delight bring? Let us listen to the poet:
Lead us with your song, tall Queen of earth!
--
Of course, in Sri Aurobindo we reach the inner and higher world through a luminous path, through worlds of light, ranging one upon another. It is a journey through pure air and clear light. Conversely the poet of the toadstool leads one by the passage of an acid drunkenness and a half-conscious drowse. If the goal here is a delight and a freedom they are arrived at after traversing a purgatory or undergoing a troubled purification. But this too leads verily to a world of the gods.
This "little slender lad, whose flesh is bitter, lightning engendered, born from dungs of mares" is perhaps a symbol of our human receptacle. We have to carry this mortal frame with its clay feet and make the effort towards self-transcendence: the alchemy's other name is self-purification and self-perfection. This tender shoot is a mysterious chemical storehouse, its fermentation and purification and use awaken in us the sleeping divine will, give a clear vision, guide us through the secret worlds and ultimately to the home of Immortality. The Vedic Rishis sang to the Soma creeper or god Soma,Tatra mm. amtam kdhi, O Somadeva, carry us where thou flowest down and there make us immortal. For there abound all delight, all ecstasy, all enjoyment, all lure and the supreme Desire ofdesirenanda, moda, mud, pramud, kma4are these not the five fruits of heaven the poet of the West mentions?
"The Ambrosia of Dionysus and Semele" in New Poems 1962 (Cassel-London).
02.06 - Boris Pasternak, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsBoris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
The portrait of the late poet (for he is more of a poet than a novelist, as has been pointed out) on the cover of the British edition of his novel Dr. Zhivago seems to be the very image of the tragic hero. Indeed he reminds one of Hamlet as he stood on the ramparts of the castle of Elsinore. Curiously, the very first poem in the collection at the end of that book is entitled "Hamlet" and the significant cry rings out of it:
Abba, Father, if it be possible
--
Inner divinity does not save you from an outer calvary. But you know how to accept it and go through it, not only patiently but gladly, for thereby you take upon yourself the burden of sorrow that is humanity's share in the life here below. I referred at the beginning to the tragedy of a sensitive soul; I may turn the phrase and speak of the sensitivity of a tragic soul. There are souls that are tragic in the very grain it is that which gives an unearthly beauty, nobilityindeed the martyr's aureole. It is not only that our sweetest songs arise out of our saddest thought, but that, as our poet says,
The whole existence awaits its warmth
--
Pasternak's poetry is characterized by this tragic sensitivity, a nostalgia woven into the fabric of the utterance, its rhythm and imagery, its thought and phrasing. "The eternal note of sadness" which Arnold heard and felt in the lines of Sophocles, we hear in the verses of Pasternak as well. Almost echoing the psalmist's cry of Vanity of vanities, Pasternak sings:
But who are we, where do we come from
02.06 - Vansittartism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A son of the soil, an eminent erstwhile collaborator of Hitler, who has paid for his apostasy, offered a compromise solution. He says, Germany, as a matter of fact, is not one but two: there is the Eastern Germany (the Northern and the Eastern portion) and there is the Western Germany (the South and the West) and the two are distinct and differenteven antagonisticin temperament and character and outlook. The Western Germany is the true Germany, the Germany of light and culture, the Germany that produced the great musicians, poets and idealists, Goe the and Heine and Wagner and Beethoven. The other Germany represents the dark shadow. It is Prussia and Prussianised Germany. This Germany originally belonged to the bleak, wild, savage, barbarous East Europe and was never thoroughly reclaimed and its union with the Western half was more political than psychological. So this ex-lieutenant of Hitler proposed to divide and separate the two altogether and form two countries or nations and thus eliminate the evil influence of Prussianism and Junkerism.
The more democratic and liberal elements among the Allies do not also consider that Germany as a whole is smitten with an original sin and is beyond redemption. They say Germany too has men and groups of men who are totally against Hitler and Hitlerism; they may have fallen on evil days, but yet they can be made the nucleus of a new and regenerated Germany.Furthermore, they say if Germany has come to be what she is, considerable portion of the responsibility must be shared by the unprogressive and old-world elements among the Allies themselves who helped or pitied or feared the dark Germany.
02.07 - George Seftris, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsGeorge Seftris
George Seftris
Seferis is a poet of sighs. I do not know the cadence, the breath of the original Greek rhythm. But if something of that tone and temper has been carried over into English, what can be more like a heave of sigh than
Stoop down, if you can, to the dark sea, forgetting
--
It is the Virgilian "tears of things"lacrimae rerum the same that moved the muse of the ancient Roman poet, moves the modern Greek poet.
Seferis' poetry sobsexplicit or muffledmuttering or murmuring like a refraina mantra:
Oh the pity of it all!
--
Indeed a great cry shoots out of your heart; an indescribable pity, the upsurge of a divine Piet, seizes upon your being and you are another person, you become a poet, a prophet, a God's warrior. Seferis too became in this way a poet and something of a prophet.
His poetry fulfils perfectly the function of the tragic drama, in the Aristotelian waypurification by evoking terror and pityevoking terror, for example in these lines:
On our left the south wind blows and drives us mad,
--
Yet was he a Christian in mood or feeling or faith in the wake of his friend and comrade, kindred in spirit and in manner, the English poet T. S. Eliot? There was a difference between the two and Seferis himself gave expression to it. The English poet after all was an escapist: he escaped, that is to say, in, his consciousness, into the monastery, the religious or spiritual sedativeopium? Seferis speaks approvingly of a poet of his country, alike in spirit, who declared that he was no reformer in this sad world,14 he let things happen, he was satisfied with being a witness, seeing nature unroll her inexhaustible beauty. Eliot's was more or less a moral revulsion whereas the Greek poet was moved rather by an aesthetic repulsion from the uglinesses of life. It was almost a physical reaction.
This reaction led him not to escape the reality but to detach himself and rise to heights from where he could see a clearer beauty in earthly things. He says:
--
Neither wholly an earthbound poet nor clearly an otherworldly prophet his question still remains:
What is god? What is not god? What is in-between?
--
This is what exactly Seferis says about this "old man" of Greece. "He has no inclination to reform. On the contrary, he has an obvious loathing for any reformer. He writes as though he were telling us: if men are such as they are, let them go where they deserve to be. It is not my business to correct them." poetry (Chicago), October 1964.
"Just a little more", Mythistorema.
02.08 - Jules Supervielle, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsJules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle
Jules supervielle is a French poet and a modern French poet. He belongs to this century and died only a few years ago. Although he wrote in French, he came of a Spanish colonist family settled in South America (Montevideo). He came to France early in life and was educated there. He lived in France but maintained his relation with his mother-country.
His poetry is very characteristic and adds almost a new vein to the spirit and manner of French poetry. He has bypassed the rational and emotional tradition of his adopted country, brought in a mystic way of vision characteristic of the East. This mysticism is not however the normal spiritual way but a kind of oblique sight into what is hidden behind the appearance. By the oblique way I mean the sideway to enter into the secret of things, a passage opening through the side. The mystic vision has different ways of approachone may look at the thing straight, face to face, being level with it with a penetrating gaze, piercing a direct entry into the secrets behind. This frontal gaze is also the normal human way of knowing and understanding, the scientific way. It becomes mystic when it penetrates sufficiently behind and strikes a secret source of another light and sight, that is, the inner sight of the soul. The normal vision which I said is the scientist's vision, stops short at a certain distance and so does not possess the key to the secret knowledge. But an aspiring vision can stretch itself, drill into the surface obstacle confronting it, and make its contact with the hidden ray behind. There is also another mystic way, not a gaze inward but a gaze upward. The human intelligence and the higher brain consciousness seeks a greater and intenser light, a vaster knowledge and leaps upward as it were. There develops a penetrating gaze towards heights up and above, to such a vision the mystery of the spirit slowly reveals itself. That is Vedantic mysticism. There is a look downward also below the life-formation and one enters into contact with forces and beings and creatures of another type, a portion of which is named Hell or Hades in Europe, and in India Ptl and rastal. But here we are speaking of another way, not a frontal or straight movement, but as I said, splitting the side and entering into it, something like opening the shell of a mother of pearl and finding the pearl inside. There is a descriptive mystic: the suprasensuous experience is presented in images and feeling forms. That is the romantic way. There is an explanatory mysticism: the suprasensuous is set in intellectual or mental terms, making it somewhat clear to the normal understanding. That is I suppose classical mysticism. All these are more or less direct ways, straight approaches to the mystic reality. But the oblique is differentit is a seeking of the mind and an apprehension of the senses that are allusive, indirect, that move through contraries and negations, that point to a different direction in order just to suggest the objective aimed at. The Vedantic (and the Scientific too) is the straight, direct, rectilinear gaze the Vedantin says, May I look at the Sun with a transfixed gaze'; whether he looks upward or inward or downward. But the modem mystic is of a different mould. He has not that clear absolute vision, he has the apprehension of an aspiring consciousness. His is not religious poetry for that matter, but it is an aspiration and a yearning to perceive and seize truth and reality that eludes the senses, but seems to be still there. We shall understand better by taking a poem of his as example. Thus:
Alter Ego
--
These hands do not grasp that thing, these eyes do not see that. Try to capture through the senses that tenuous substance, you find it nowhere. You cannot throttle that reality with your solid fist. Chop off your hands, pluck out your eyes, then perhaps something will stir in that darkness, something that exists not but wields a sovereign power. The eyes that see are not these winkless wide eyes, blank, vacant and dry, before which blackness is the only reality. One must have something of the bedewed gentle hesitating human eyes; it is there that the other light condescends to cast its reflection. The poet says, man with his outward regalia seems to have lost all trace of the Divine in him, what is still left of God in him is just the 'humidity' of his soul1; the 'tears of things' as a great poet says.
The sense that seizes and captures and makes an object its own is not any robust material sense, but something winged and vast and impalpable like your sleep the other consciousness.
The poet speaks obliquely but the language he speaks by itself is straight, clear, simple, limpid. No rhetoric is there, no exaggeration, no effort at effect; the voice is not raised above the normal speech level. That is indeed the new modern poetic style. For according to the new consciousness prose and poetry are not two different orders, the old order created poetry in heaven, the new poetry wants it upon earth; level with earth, the common human speech, the spoken tongues give the supreme intrinsic beauty of poetic cadence. The best poetry embodies the quintessence of prose-rhythm, its pure spontaneousand easy and felicitous movement. In English the hiatus between the poetic speech and prose is considerable, in French it is not so great, still the two were kept separate. In England Eliot came to demolish the barrier, in France a whole company has come up and very significant among them is this foreigner from Spain who is so obliquely simple and whose Muse has a natural yet haunting magic of divine things:
Elle lve les yeux et la brises'arrte
02.09 - Two Mystic Poems in Modern French, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsTwo Mystic Poems in Modern French
Two Mystic Poems in Modern French
--
poetry, Volume 104, No 5, August 1964.
"Et Les l Ies Feront Silence," 6.
02.10 - Independence and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Independence is not a gift which one can receive from another, it is a prize that has to be won. In the words of the poet Bhasa, used in respect of empire, we can say also of liberty:
Talloke na tu yacyate na tu punardinaya diyate
02.10 - Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsTwo Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali
Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali
--
Can you make any sense out of it? This seems to be surrealistic with a vengeance. Anyhow there is no doubt that it is a puzzle, a veritable Chinese puzzle. The puzzle however appeared to me interesting. I felt that the poet, through this crypticmantriccollocation of words and images, attempted to give expression to an uncommon experience. It was as though I entered into a Tantric experience but of the left-handed path (vmcra).
There is a Tantric discipline which speaks of the body-fulfilment (kysiddhi), a spiritual consummation in and through the body; the body-consciousness, according to this view, is the greatest reality. And whatever is achieved must have its final and definitive expression and manifestation there, in that concrete reality.
The body, the body-consciousness, our poet says here, is to be a confluence, where all the streams of consciousness, all the movements of the being, flow in: movements of life-force, movements of the mind, secret urges of the subliminal physical consciousness pure and impure, things foreign to its nature, things that are its own, elements friendly and unfriendly, all assemble in a market-place, as it were, the result being a huge horrid discordant music, a groaning, a bellowing of a queer orchestra the bass, the lowest note of the system that the human vehicle is.
There is a call for all the parts of the being to precipitate to the very foundation of the being, coalesce and evoke a wild and weird, doleful and discordant symphonya painful cry. Unrealised dreams, that had faded into oblivion, are now like possessed beings and hang like bats on darkling branches:they are about to begin their phantom dance. Even so, the body, the material precipitate into which they gather, gives them a basic unity. These elements with their ardour and zeal kindle a common Fire. There is a divine Flame, Agni, burning within the flesh, burning brighter and brighter, making the bones whiter and whiter, as it were the purificatory Flame,Pvaka, of which the Vedic Rishis spoke, Master of the House, ghapati, dwelling in the inner heart of the human being, impelling it to rise to purer and larger Truth. But here our modern poet replaces the Heart by the Liver and makes of this organ the central altar of human aspiration and inspiration. We may remember in this connection that the French poet Baudelaire gave a similar high position and functionto the other collateral organ, the spleen. The modern Bengali poet considers that man's consciousness, even his poetic inspiration, is soaked in the secretion of that bilious organ. For man's destiny here upon earth is not delight but grief, not sweetness but gall and bitterness; there is no consolation, no satisfaction here; there is only thirst, no generosity but narrowness, no consideration for others, but a huge sinister egoism.
The cry of our poet is a cry literally deprifundis, a deep cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed underground abysses.
The cry has nothing in it, very evidently, like the thrill of a skylark's throat.
02.11 - Hymn to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali Mysticism in Bengali poetry
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsHymn to Darkness
Hymn to Darkness
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Invocation to Darkness has, it appears, become quite fashionable among a certain group of modern poets. It is a favourite theme on which many a poet, many a good poet has played each in his way, a characteristic variation. Curiously enough, I came across about the same time the work of another poet, a French poet, also modern and almost modernist and, curio user still, in the same manner, a worshipper of Darkness. He is Yves Bonnefoy, originally belonging to the school of Jouve, an earlier modern. He speaks of two kinds of Night, one darker than the other the less dark one is our common day with its grey light. The other is on the other shore:
Vers l' autre rive encore plus nocturne1
--
But why bitterly? Perhaps the day (the common day) tasted bitter in the mouth of the poet.
The poet has not perhaps the spiritual sense as we in India understand it. He speaks in effect of a dark goddess, he calls her
Douve profonde et noire3
He names her Douve, perhaps in memory of his first master Jouve, and addresses her as Sombre Lumire (Dark Light). He evidently means his poetic inspiration; his vision of the other shore is that of the world of his poetic experiences and realisations. But the nature of the contents of that world is very characteristic. They are apparently qualities and objects fundamentally spiritualtransparent fire and even motionless silence. Yes, that world is of wind and fire (compare our world of Tapas) and yet calm and tranquil. So the poet sings:
Douve sera ton nom au loin parmi les pierres,
--
Inspiration, according to the poet, is not the high swell of garrulousness and anxious effort. It is the solid bedrock underground when all the surface effusions have ebbed awaya shadowy dark strong tranquil repose.
A modern English poetRobert Graves -worships a White Goddess. But from the description he gives of the lady, she would appear to be more black than white; for she seems to be intimately connected with the affairs that is to say the mysteries of Hades and Hecate, underground worlds and midnight rites. She incarnates as the sow, although a white sow, she flows as the sap within plants and rises as passion and lust in man.
We in India have a dark god and a dark goddessKrishna and Kali. Krishna is dark, his is the deep blue of the sky. Kali is dark, hers is the blackness of the earthly night. The Vaishnava poet and saint sang:
Oh, I love black,
--
Something of these supraphysical experiences must have entered into the consciousness of the modern poets who have also fallen in love with darkness and blackness -have become adorers, although they do not know, of Shyma and Shyma.
Here, for example, is a hymn from the Rig Veda, a whole hymn addressed by Rishi Kushika to Night. Listen how the Rishi invokes his black goddess: Night and Light are unified almost one -in his consciousness. The Vedic Rishis considered Night as only another form or function of Daynaktoasa samans *virpeNight and Dawn have the same mind although the forms are different.
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Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali Mysticism in Bengali poetry
02.12 - Mysticism in Bengali Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:02.12 - Mysticism in Bengali poetry
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsMysticism in Bengali poetry
Mysticism in Bengali poetry
Bengali poetry was born some time towards the end of an era of decline in the Indian consciousness, almost towards the close of what is called the Buddhist period, but it was born with a veritable crown on its head. For it was sheer mystic poetry, mystic in substance, mystic in manner and expression. The poets were themselves mystics, that is to say spiritual seekers, sadhaks they were called Siddhas or Siddhacharyas. They told of their spiritual, rather occult experiences in an occult or oblique manner, the very manner of the ancient Vedic Rishis, in figures and symbols and similes. It was a form of beauty, not merely of truthof abstract metaphysical truth that rose all on a sudden, as it were, out of an enveloping darkness. It shone for a time and then faded slowly, perhaps spread itself out in the common consciousness of the people and continued to exist as a backwash in popular songs and fables and proverbs. But it was there and came up again a few centuries later and the crest is seen once more in a more elevated, polished and dignified form with a content of mental illumination. I am referring to Chandidasa, who was also a sadhak poet and is usually known as the father of Bengali poetry, being the creator of modern Bengali poetry. He flourished somewhere in the fourteenth century. That wave too subsided and retired into the background, leaving in interregnum again of a century or more till it showed itself once more in another volume of mystic poetry in the hands of a new type of spiritual practitioners. They were the Yogis and Fakirs, and although of a popular type, yet possessing nuggets of gold in their utterances, and they formed a large family. This almost synchronised with the establishment and consolidation of the Western Power, with its intellectual and rational enlightenment, in India. The cultivation and superimposition of this Western or secular light forced the native vein of mysticism underground; it was necessary and useful, for it added an element which was missing before; a new synthesis came up in a crest with Tagore. It was a neo-mysticism, intellectual, philosophical, broad-based, self-conscious. Recently however we have been going on the downward slope, and many, if not the majority among us, have been pointing at mysticism and shouting: "Out, damned spot!" But perhaps we have struck the rock-bottom and are wheeling round.
For in the present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us.
In order to give you a taste of what this poetry is and how it evolved I shall cite samples of the various waves at their crest as they rose from epoch to epoch till today.
The earliest Siddhacharya says:
--
That is not the end or the nec plus ultranothing beyond for there is a beyond and Sri Aurobindo has shown and taught what it can be like. Here is one daring poet:
Thy firm galaxies
--
A mysticism that evokes the soul's delights and experiences in a language that has so transformed itself as to become the soul's native utterance is the new endeavour of the poet's Muse.
***
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mechanical and totalitarian equality does injustice, to say the least, to the individual, for it does not take into account the variable value and the particularity of each individual. It usually gives him a position and function in the society to which his inner nature and character do not at all respond. The result of such indifference to individuality is evident also in a modern society based as it is on so-called freedom, that is to say, on open competition and struggle. The tragedy of a Bankim eking out his subsistence as a bureaucratic official is not a rare spectacle but the very rule of the social system in vogue. Indeed the so-called steel-frame of governmental organization of our days sucks in all the best brains and few can survive this process of "evisceration, deprivation, destitution, desiccation and evacuation", to use the glowing and graphic words of T. S. Eliot, although in another connection; few can maintain or express after passing through this grinding or sucking machine their inner reality, the truth and beauty personal to them. The poet1 regrets:
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
--
What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modern conceptions, a high stage in economic evolution: the production and distribution of wealth, the classification and organization of producers and consumers, their relation and functions were, in many respects, what is called primitive. An American of today would laugh at their uncouth simplicity. And yet America has to bow down to those creators of other values that are truly valuable. And the values are the creations of the great poets, artists, philosophers, law-givers; sages and seers. It is they who made the glory that was Greece or Rome or China or India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and made subservient to economic and other cruder forces. That was what Julien Benda, the famous French critic and moralist, once stigmatised as "La Trahison des Clercs"; only, the "clercs" did not voluntarily betray, but circumstanced as they were they could do no better. The process reached its climaxperhaps one should say the very nadirin the Nazi experiment and something of it still continues in the Russian dispensation. There the intellectuals or the intelligentsia are totally harnessed to the political machine, their capacities are prostituted in the service of a socio-economic plan. poets and artists and thinkers are made to be protagonists and propagandists of the new order. It is a significant sign of the times how almost the whole body of scientists the entire Brain Trust of mankind today, one might sayhave been mobilised for the fabrication of the Atom Bomb. Otherwise they cannot subsist, they lose all economic status.
In the older order, however, a kindlier treatment was meted out to this class, this class of the creators of values. They had patrons who looked after their physical well-being. They had the necessary freedom and leisure to follow their own bent and urge of creativity. Kings and princes, the court and the nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and art or man's creative genius hardly ever rose to that height ever since. The downward curve started with the advent and growth of the bourgeoisie when the artist or the creative genius lost their supporters and had to earn their own living by the sweat of their brow. Indeed the greatest tragedies of frustration because of want and privation, occur, not as much among the "lowest" classes who are usually considered as the poorest and the most miserable in society, but in that section from where come the intellectuals, "men of light and leading," to use the epithet they are honoured with. For very few of this group are free to follow their inner trend and urge, but have either to coerce and suppress them or stultify them in the service of lesser alien duties, which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives in.
02.13 - Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mysticism in Bengali poetry Appendix
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsRabindranath and Sri Aurobindo
Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo
"Tagore has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way." Sri Aurobindo wrote these words in the thirties and their full significance can be grasped only when it is understood that the two master-souls were at one in the central purpose of their lives. Also there is a further bond of natural affinity between them centring round the fact that both were poets, in a deeper sense, seer poetsRabindranath the poet of the Dawn, Sri Aurobindo the poet and Prophet of the Eternal Day, a new Dawn and Day for the human race.
And both had the vision of a greater Tomorrow for their Motherl and and that was why both regarded her freedom as the basic necessity for the recovery of her greatness. How the inspired songs and speeches of Rabindranath and the flaming utterances of Sri Aurobindo created a psychological revolution almost overnight in the mind and heart of the people during the Swadeshi days forms a glorious chapter in the history of India's freedom movement. Profoundly touched by Sri Aurobindo's soul-stirring lead to the country, Rabindranath wrote a memorable poem, addressing Sri Aurobindo, which is still enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen. Rabindranath himself called on Sri Aurobindo and read out to him his heart's homage. We remember with thrill the majestic opening lines:
--
Sri Aurobindo retired from the outer political world to devote himself more intensively to the discovery and conquestof a new consciousness and force, glimpses of which he was having at the time and which alone could save mankind and recreate it. From 1910 to 1914 he was, he said, silently developing this new power in seclusion and in 1914 he began to give to the world the result of his realisations through his monthly review Arya. In five major sequences published month after month through several years, he envisaged, in the main, the progressive march of man towards a divine life on earth, towards the unity of mankind and a perfect social order. One of these serials was called The Future poetry in which he traced the growth and development that world poetry is undergoing towards its future form that would voice the dawn of a New Age of the Spirit. Sri Aurobindo hailed those who feel and foresee this distant dawn behind the horizon as the Forerunners of the new Spirit, among whom he included Rabindranath, because he saw in Tagore's the first beginnings, "a glint of the greater era of man's living", something that "seems to be in promise." "The poetry of Tagore," Sri Aurobindo says, "owes its sudden and universal success to this advantage that he gives us more of this discovery and fusion for which the mind of our age is in quest than any other creative writer of the time. His work is a constant music of the overpassing of the borders, a chant-filled realm in which the subtle sounds and lights of the truth of the spirit give new meanings to the finer subtleties of life."
Characterising Tagore's poetry, in reference to a particular poem, Sri Aurobindo once wrote: "But the poignant sweetness, passion and spiritual depth and mystery of a poem like this, the haunting cadences subtle with a subtlety which is not of technique but of the soul, and the honey-laden felicity of the expression, these are the essential Rabindranath and cannot be imitated because they are things of the spirit and one must have the same sweetness and depth of soul before one can hope to catch any of these desirable qualities." Furthermore: "One of the most remarkable peculiarities of Rabindra Babu's genius is the happiness and originality with which he has absorbed the whole spirit of Vaishnava poetry and turned it into something essentially the same and yet new and modern. He has given the old sweet spirit of emotional and passionate religion an expression of more delicate and complex richness voiceful of subtler and more penetratingly spiritual shades of feeling than the deep-hearted but simple early age of Bengal could know."
Certain coincidences and correspondences in their lives may be noticed here. The year 1905 and those that immediately followed found them together on the crest wave of India's first nationalist resurgence. Again both saw in the year 1914 a momentous period marked by events of epochal importance, one of which was the First World War. For Tagore it was yuga-sandhi, the dying of the old age of Night to the dawning of a new with its blood-red sunrise emerging through the travail of death, sorrow and pain". For Sri Aurobindo it was a cataclysm intended by Nature to effect a first break in the old order to usher in the new. The significant year 1914 was also the period when Rabindranath expressed in the magnificent series of poems of the Balaka his visions and experiences of the forces at work on earth, and Sri Aurobindo began revealing through the pages of the Arya the truths of the supramental infinities that were then pouring down into him and through him into the earth's atmosphere.
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Mysticism in Bengali poetry Appendix
02.14 - Appendix, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Seer poetsAppendix
Appendix
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I did not come to appreciate the poetry of Wordsworth in my school days, it happened in college, and to a large extent thanks to Professor Manmohan Ghose. In our school days, the mind and heart of Bengali students were saturated with the poetry of Tagore: .
In the bower of my youth the love-bird sings,
--
This poetry belongs to the type once characterised as follows by our humorous novelist Prabhat Mukherji through one of his characters, asdhu, describing the charms of the Divine Name:
It has the sweetness and the sugar
--
Let me in this connection tell you a story. We were then in college. The Swadeshi movement was in full flood, carrying everything before it. We the young generation of students had been swept off our feet. One day, an elder among us whom I used to consider personally as my friend, philosopher and guide, happened to pass a remark which rather made me lose my bearings a little. He was listing the misdeeds of the British in India. "This nation of shopkeepers!" he was saying, "There is no end to their trickeries to cheat us. Take, for instance, this question of education. The system they have set up with the high-sounding title of 'University' and 'the advancement of learning' is nothing more than a machine for creating a band of inexpensive clerks and slaves to serve them. They have been throwing dust into our eyes by easily passing off useless Brummagem ware with the label of the real thing. One such eminently useless stuff is their poet Wordsworth, whom they have tried to foist on our young boys to their immense detriment." This remark was no doubt a testimony to his inordinate love of country. But it remains to be seen how far it would bear scrutiny as being based on truth.
For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, artless and homely manner:
Behold her, single in the field,
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On the gates of entry to the poetic world of Wordsworth is engraved this motto:
The Gods approve
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It is as if the hermitage of old, an abode of peace and quiet, nta-rasspadam-ramam-idam. All here is calm and unhurried, simple and natural and transparent, there is no muddy current of tempestuous upheavals. That is why the poet feels in his heart as if he were
. quiet as a nun
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Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded apartment of the soul where poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill lends to words the supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's art. How often we have read these lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:
A voice so thrilling never was heard. . .
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Sri Aurobindo has referred to another point of greatness in Wordsworth, where the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an intimacy but to the voice of a highest infinity:
The marble index of a mind for ever
--
Thus, with this poet we gain admittance to the very heart, the innermost sanctuary of poetry where we fully realise what our old Indian critics had laid down as their final verdict, namely, that the poetic delight is akin to the Delight of Brahman.
But even the moon has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic and non- poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic and is by and large rhetoric, with very little real poetry in it. I must confess however that to me personally, some of its passages have a particular charm, like
Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:
--
Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.11
write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power."-Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism.
--
are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry.
Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is sweetness and charm, masculinity implies hard restraint; the feminine has movement, like the flow of a stream, the play of melody, while the masculine has immobility, like the stillness of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, di-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge, on polity and ethics, culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic,dhyn, tapasv indeed,
quiet as a nun Breathless
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him.2 It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this however an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps Socrates whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely, the genesis should be ascribed rather to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its fundamental character that which gave it its very namewas a protest against, a turning away from whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Well, I am not sure if the poet was anything more than being metaphorically rhapsodical, at the most he had only a poetic perception, he did not give us the scientific truth of the matter.
In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).
--
Plato would not tolerate the poets in his ideal society since they care too much for beauty and very little for the true and good. He wanted it all to be a kingdom of philosophers. I am afraid Plato's philosopher is not true to type, the type set up by his great disciple. Plato's philosopher is no longeran artist, he has become a mystica Rishi in our language.
For we must remember that Plato himself was really more of a poet than a philosopher. Very few among the great representative souls of humanity surpassed him in the true poetic afflatus. The poet and the mysticKavi and Rishiare the same in our ancient lore. However these two, Plato and Aristotle, the mystic and the philosopher, the master and the disciple, combine to form one of these dual personalities which Nature seems to like and throws up from time to time in her evolutionary marchnot as a mere study in contrast, a token of her dialectical process, but rather as a movement of polarity making for a greater comprehensiveness and richer values. They may be taken as the symbol of a great synthesis that humanity needs and is preparing. The role of the mystic is to envisage and unveil the truth, the supernal reality which the mind cannot grasp nor all the critical apparatus of human reason demonstrate and to bring it down and present it to the understanding and apprehending consciousness. The philosopher comes at this stage: he receives and gathers all that is given to him, arranges and systematises, puts the whole thing in a frame as it were.
The poet-philosopher or the philosopher- poet, whichever way we may put it, is a new formation of the human consciousness that is coming upon us. A wide and rationalising (not rationalistic) intelligence deploying and marshalling out a deep intuitive and direct Knowledge that is the pattern of human mind developing in the new age. Bergson's was a harbinger, a definite landmark on the way. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine arrives and opens the very portals of the marvellous temple city of a dynamic integral knowledge.
Comus, I, 477-8.
03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In a general way we may perhaps say, without gross error, that every man has the right to become a poet, a scientist or a politician. But when the question rises in respect of a particular person, then it has to be seen whether that person has a natural ability, an inherent tendency or aptitude for the special training so necessary for the end in view. One cannot, at will, develop into a poet by sheer effort or culture. He alone can be a poet who is to the manner born. The same is true also of the spiritual life. But in this case, there is something more to take into account. If you enter the spiritual path, often, whether you will or not, you come in touch with hidden powers, supra-sensible forces, beings of other worlds and you do not know how to deal with them. You raise ghosts and spirits, demons and godsFrankenstein monsters that are easily called up but not so easily laid. You break down under their impact, unless your adhr has already been prepared, purified and streng thened. Now, in secular matters, when, for example, you have the ambition to be a poet, you can try and fail, fail with impunity. But if you undertake the spiritual life and fail, then you lose both here and hereafter. That is why the Vedic Rishis used to say that the ear then vessel meant to hold the Soma must be properly baked and made perfectly sound. It was for this reason again that among the ancients, in all climes and in all disciplines, definite rules and regulations were laid down to test the aptitude or fitness of an aspirant. These tests were of different kinds, varying according to the age, the country and the Path followedfrom the capacity for gross physical labour to that for subtle perception. A familiar instance of such a test is found in the story of the aspirant who was asked again and again, for years together, by his Teacher to go and graze cows. A modern mind stares at the irrelevancy of the procedure; for what on earth, he would question, has spiritual sadhana to do with cow-grazing? In defence we need not go into any esoteric significance, but simply suggest that this was perhaps a test for obedience and endurance. These two are fundamental and indispensable conditions in sadhana; without them there is no spiritual practice, one cannot advance a step. It is absolutely necessary that one should carry out the directions of the Guru without question or complaint, with full happiness and alacrity: even if there comes no immediate gain one must continue with the same zeal, not giving way to impatience or depression. In ancient Egypt among certain religious orders there was another kind of test. The aspirant was kept confined in a solitary room, sitting in front of a design or diagram, a mystic symbol (cakra) drawn on the wall. He had to concentrate and meditate on that figure hour after hour, day after day till he could discover its meaning. If he failed he was declared unfit.
Needless to say that these tests and ordeals are mere externals; at any rate, they have no place in our sadhana. Such or similar virtues many people possess or may possess, but that is no indication that they have an opening to the true spiritual life, to the life divine that we seek. Just as accomplishments on the mental plane,keen intellect, wide studies, profound scholarship even in the scriptures do not entitle a man to the possession of the spirit, even so capacities on the vital plane,mere self-control, patience and forbearance or endurance and perseverance do not create a claim to spiritual realisation, let alone physical austerities. In conformity with the Upanishadic standard, one may not be an unworthy son or an unworthy disciple, one may be strong, courageous, patient, calm, self-possessed, one may even be a consummate master of the senses and be endowed with other great virtues. Yet all this is no assurance of one's success in spiritual sadhana. Even one may be, after Shankara, a mumuksu, that is to say, have an ardent yearning for liberation. Still it is doubtful if that alone can give him liberation into the divine life.
03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The spirit, the pure self in man is formless; but his soul the spirit cast into the evolutionary mould in manifestationhas a form: it possesses a personal identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an imagea faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life,of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its evolutionary march through terrestrial life. A mystic poet says:
All dreams of the soul
--
This is not the utterance of a mere profane consciousness; such also is the experience of a deeper spiritual truth. For the Divine in one of its essential aspects is Ardhanarishwara, the original transcendental Man-Woman. And we feel and almost see that it is a human Face to which our adoration goes when we hear another mystic poet chant for us the mantra:
Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There was no department of life or culture in which it could be said of India that she was not great, or even, in a way, supreme. From hard practical politics touching our earth, to the nebulous regions of abstract metaphysics, everywhere India expressed the power of her genius equally well. And yet none of these, neither severally nor collectively, constituted her specific genius; none showed the full height to which she could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not names of warriors or statesmen, nor of poets who were only poets, nor of mere intellectual philosophers, however great they might be, but of Rishis, who saw and lived the Truth and communed with the gods, of Avataras who brought down and incarnated here below something of the supreme realities beyond.
The most significant fact in the history of India is the unbroken continuity of the line of her spiritual masters who never ceased to appear even in the midst of her most dark and distressing ages. Even in a decadent and fast disintegrating India, when the whole of her external life was a mass of ruins, when her political and economical and even her cultural life was brought to stagnation and very near to decomposition, this undying Fire in her secret heart was ever alight and called in the inevitable rebirth and rejuvenation. Ramakrishna, with Vivekananda as his emanation in life dynamic and material, symbolises this great secret of India's evolution. The promise that the Divine held out in the Gita to Bharata's descendant finds a ready fulfilment in India, in Bharata's land, more perhaps than anywhere else in the world; for in India has the. Divine taken birth over and over again to save the pure in heart, to destroy the evil-doer and to establish the Right Law of life.
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him. It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this, however, an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps the father of European culture itself, Socrates, whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely the genesis should be ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance.It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character that which gave it its Very namewas a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Greek Apollo or Venus or a Madonna of Raphael is a human form idealized to perfection,moulded to meet the criterion of beauty which the physical eye demands. The purely sthetic appeal of such forms consists in the balance and symmetry, the proportion and adjustment, a certain roundedness and uniformity and regularity, which the physical eye especially finds beautiful. This beauty is akin to the beauty of diction in poetry.
Apart from the beauty of the mere form, there is behind it and informing it what may be called the beauty of character, the beauty revealed in the expression of psychological movement. It corresponds to the beauty of rhythm in poetry. Considered sthetically, the beauty of character, in so far as it is found in what we have called formal art, is a corollary,an ornamental and secondary theme whose function is to heighten the effect of the beauty of form, or create the atmosphere and environment necessary for its display.
A Chinese or a Japanese piece of artistic creation is more of a study in character than in form; but it is a study in character in a deeper sense than the meaning which the term usually bears to an European mind or when it is used in reference to Europe's art-creations.
03.09 - Art and Katharsis, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Art does not tend towards the Good in the manner of the moralist. It does not teach or preach that virtue is to be pursued and vice to be shunned, that a good deed is rewarded and a wrong one punished. poetic justice, of the direct and crude style, is a moral code or dogma, and, if imposed upon the sthetic movement, serves only to fetter and curb and twist it. Art opens the vision to a higher good than what the conventions of moral idealism can frame. Great art does not follow the lines laid down by the ethical mentality, not only because this mentality cannot embody the true truth, but also because it does not give us the Good which art should aim at, that is to say, the purest and the highest good.
Aristotle speaks of the purifying function of the tragic art. How is the purification effected? By the evocation of the feelings of pity and terror. For such feelings widen the sympathies, pull us out of our small egoistic personal ephemeral pleasures and put us in contact with what is to be shared and enjoyed in wide commonalty. Tragedy, in this way, initiates the spectator into the enjoyment that is born not of desire and gain but of detachment and freedom.
The uplifting power of Art is inherent in its nature, for Art itself is the outcome of an uplifted nature. Art is the expression of a heightened consciousness. The ordinary consciousness in which man lives and moves is narrow, limited, obscure, faltering, unhappyit is the abode of all that is evil and ugly; it is inartistic. The poetic zeal, enthusiasm or frenzy, when it seizes the consciousness, at once lifts it high into a state that is characterised by wideness and depth and a new and fresh exhilarating intensity of perception and experience. We seem to arrive at the very fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with the whole tragedy of earthly existence such as Shakespeare's:
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...
--
even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood that these seem to be sublimatedas if by a process of oxygenationto a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understandsee and experience the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like the Creator could contemplate all and declare it all as good. Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to envisage and embody the summum bonum that accompanies a summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have this revelatory vision of the SeerRishi but a poet is a poet in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more or less either a moralist or a mere sthete.
Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senseswhen they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute natureeven a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.
The voice of Art is sweetly persuasivekntsmmita, as the Sanskrit rhetoricians say-it is the voice of the beloved, not that of the school-master. The education of poetry is like the education of Nature: the poet said of the child that grew in sun and shower
And beauty born of murmuring sound
--
Even so the beauty of poetic creation, when we contemplate it and live in it, automatically and inevitably steals into our consciousness, works a subtle change in our nature and by elevating and refining it makes us, for the moment at least, less crude and obscure and earthy things that we usually are.
***
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Art and Katharsis Modernist poetry
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the CenturyHamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul
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Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere biological man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise the bourgeoisinto the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.
What is the crisis that confronts the ascending visionary soul? What is the obstacle that the Idealist has to face, the danger zone that he has to traverse in order to arrive at- the realisation of his ideal?
--
In these latter the human consciousness has reached its high water-mark of normal development. They are the finest expression of mans capacities and powers in the ordinary nature. Here we have the play of the higher, even perhaps the highest ranges of the Mind the mind, that is to say, of the poet and the philosopher. But here also stands revealed the counterfoil, the obverse of that high achievement the feet of clay on which is reared the head of gold, the flesh that is tied irrevocably to the spirit.
The human soul, as represented in Hamlet, has evolved so far as to stand on a summit from where it can contemplate the entire creation. It has attained a kind of universal consciousness and has the vision of a global movement of natureeven as Arjuna had of the Lord's universal body, and like him is awed and overwhelmeda harsh world, in which one draws one's breath in pain. But this is a mental summit, and the contradiction that is revealed here can be resolved only by passing beyond into a higher domain of consciousness.
--
Art and Katharsis Modernist poetry
03.11 - Modernist Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:03.11 - Modernist poetry
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the CenturyModernist poetry
Modernist poetry
A Modernist poet sings
O bright Apollo
--
and a modernist critic acclaims it as a marvellous, aye, a stupendous piece of poetic art; it figures, according to him, the very body of the modern consciousness and resthesis. The modern consciousness, it is said, is marked with two characteristics: first, it is polyphonic, that is to say, it is not a simple and unilateral thing, but a composite consisting of many planes and strands, both horizontal and vertical. A modern consciousness is a section of world-consciousness extending in space as well as in time; there is, on one hand, the bringing together and intermingling of diverse and even disparate contemporary cultures, produced by free and easy and rapid communication between different parts of the world; on the other hand, there is the connection and communion with all the past civilisations brought about by modern scientific researches. A modern man, who is representative of the age, when he looks close into himself, would find in him a texture of consciousness, the warp of which is spread out from the culture of the Greenlander in the North Pole to that of the Polynesian near the South Pole as well as from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon in the far West to that of the Korean and Nipponese in the far East; and the woof consists of traditions and legends threading past the Egyptian, the Sumerian and Atlantean glyphs and runes, and forward to present-day ideologiestotalitarianism and proletarianism or others like and unlike.
A modern artist when he creates, as he cannot but create himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we are allowed the liberty of comparing the flippant with the serious, even so, a fact of Anglo-vernacular consciousness was given graphic expression in the well-known lines of the famous Bengali poet and dramatist, D. L. Roy, ending in
mara (we) ...
--
Indeed it has been pointed out that the second great characteristic of modern art is the curious and wondrous amalgam in it of the highly serious and the keenly comic. It is not, however, the Shakespearean manner; for in that old-world poet, the two are merely juxtaposed, but they remain separate; very often they form an ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture the sthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree, in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as part and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra Pound quoted above, the obvious pun (Greek tin' or tina, meaning "some one" and English "tin"), the cheap claptrap, it may be explained, is intentional: the trick is meant to bring out a sense of lightness and even levity in the very heart of seriousness and solemnity. The days of Arnold's high seriousness, of grand style pure and severe, are gone. Today the high lights are no longer set on a high pedestal away and aloof, they are brought down and immixed with the low lights and often the two are indistinguishable from each other. The grand style rides always on the crest of the waves, the ballad style glides in the trough; but the modern style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement. Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be supposed to illustrate:
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
--
Bottrall, a modernist poet himself, says in effect the same thing. His poetic credo runs in this wise:
Nightingales, Anangke, a sunset or the meanest flower
Were formerly the potentiates of poetry,
But now what have they to do with one another
--
What Bottrall means is this in plain language: we reject the old-world myths and metaphors, figures and legends, wornout ornamentsmoon and star and flower and colour and musicwe must have a new set of symbols commensurate with our present-day mentality and environmentstone and steel and teas and talkies; yes, we must go in for new and modern terms, we have certainly to find out a menu appropriate to our own sthetic taste, but, Bottrall warns, and very wisely, that we must first be sure of digesting whatever we choose to eat. In other words, a new poetic mythology is justified only when it is made part and parcel, flesh and blood and bone and marrow, of the poetic consciousness. Bottralls epigram "A man is what he eats" can be accepted without demur; only it must also be pointed out that things depend upon how one eats (eating well and digesting thoroughly) as much as what one eatsbread or manna or air and fire and light.
The modernist may chew well, but, I, am afraid, he feeds upon the husk, the chaff, the offal. Not that these things too cannot be incorporated in the poetic scheme; the spirit of poetry is catholic enough and does not disdain them, but can transfigure them into things of eternal beauty. Still how to characterise an inspiration that is wholly or even largely pre-occupied with such objects? Is it not sure evidence that the inspiration is a low and slow flame and does not possess the transfiguring white heat? Bottrall's own lines do not seem to have that quality, it is merely a lessona rhetorical lesson, at bestin poetics.
A poeta true poetdoes not compose to exemplify a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path, a new organisation, a "new order", as it were, in the poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy its present inner urge. But solution of the problem does not lie in a sort of mechanical fabrication of novelties. A new creation is new, that is to say, fresh and living, not because of skilful manipulation of externals, but because of a new, a fresh and living inspiration. The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released.
It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the RomanticsWordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byroneach of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few poets have actually shown how or what that can be,a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzassuch lines, for example, from Eliot
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Modernist poetry The March of Civilisation
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the CenturyTagore poet and Seer
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A great literature seems to have almost invariably a great name attached to it, one name by which it is known and recognised as great. It is the name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goe the and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such namesnumina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic consciousness of the race to which he belongs. Even in the case of France whose language and literature are more a democratic and collective and less an individualistic creation, even there one single Name can be pointed out as the life and soul, the very cream of the characteristic poetic genius of the nation. I am, of course, referring to Racine, Racine who, in spite of Moliere and Corneille and Hugo, stands as the most representative French poet, the embodiment of French resthesis par excellence.
Such a great name is Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali literature. We need not forget Bankim Chandra, nor even Madhusudan: still one can safely declare that if Bengali language and literature belonged to any single person as its supreme liberator and fosterer savitand pit is Rabindranath. It was he who lifted that language and literature from what had been after all a provincial and parochial status into the domain of the international and universal. Through him a thing of local value was metamorphosed definitively into a thing of world value.
The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the raceits soul of lyric fervour and grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner heart that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagores art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world of gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.
I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tagore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.
--
In such a world Tagore is a voice and a beacon from over the heights of the old world declaring and revealing the verities that are eternal and never die. They who seek to kill them do so at their peril. Tagore is a great poet: as such he is close to the heart of Bengal. He is a great Seer: as such humanity will claim him as its own.
***
Modernist poetry The March of Civilisation
03.12 - The Spirit of Tapasya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Virgil, the great poet of a diviner order in human life, expressed the idea most beautifully and aptly in those well-known lines, one of the characteristic passages showing his genius at its best:
. . . superasque evadere ad auras,
03.16 - The Tragic Spirit in Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Jeanne d'Arc, another glorious creature, Deliverer of France, the sweetest thing that ever put on a human body, was burnt as a witch. Socrates had to drink the hemlock for having brought down heavenly knowledge upon earth. The Christ, God's own son and beloved, perished on the Cross. Krishna, the Avatara, was killed by a chance arrow; and Arjuna, the peerless hero of Kurukshetra, Krishna's favourite, had to see days when he could not even lift his own bow with which he once played havoc. And in our own days, a Ramakrishna, who could cure souls could not cure his own cancer. This is the tears of thingsspoken of by a great poet the tragedy that is lodged in the hearts of things.
There runs a pessimistic vein in Nature's movement. Due to the original Inconscience out of which she is built and also because of a habit formed through millenniums it is not possible for her to expect or envisage anything else than decay, death and frustration in the end or on the whole. To every rise there must be a fall, a crest must end in a trough. Nature has not the courage nor the faculty to look for any kind of perfection upon earth. Not that within her realm one cannot or should not try for the good; the noble, even the perfect, but one must be ready to pay the price. Good there is and may be, but it is suffered only on payment of its Danegeld to Evil. That is the law of sacrifice that seems to be fundamental to Nature's governance.
--
A great personality means a great rise in consciousness, therefore it means also a strain upon the normal consciousness and hence a snap or scission sometime and somewhere. As the poet describes the tragic phenomenon
poised on the unreachable abrupt
03.17 - The Souls Odyssey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Rarely has a poeta secular poet, I meangiven utterance to deep spiritual and occult truth with such clarity and felicity. It is, however, quite open to doubt whether Wordsworth himself was fully cognisant of the truth he expressed; the words that were put into his mouth carry a significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to have received and understood. The passage may be taken as one more illustration of Matthew Arnold's characterisation of Wordsworth's genius at its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet.
The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality. It is a nucleus, a centre of individuation, a projection in a particular name and form of the infinite and eternal Being and Consciousness and Bliss on this side of manifestation or evolutionary Nature. Being in and with the Divine, merged within it, the Soul has, at the same time, its own proper domain, exclusively its own, and its own inalienable identity. It is the domain where the Soul enjoys its swarjya, its absolute freedom, dwelling in its native light and happiness and glory. But the story changes, the curve of its destiny takes a sudden new direction when it comes down upon earth, when it inhabits a mortal body. Within the body, it no longer occupies its patent frontal position, but withdraws behind a veil, as it were: it takes its stand behind or within the depth of the heart, as spiritual practice experiences it. It hides there, as in a cavern, closed in now by the shades of the prison-house which its own body and life and mind build round it. Yet it is not wholly shut out or completely cut off; for from its secret home it exerts its influence which gradually, slowly, very slowly indeed, filters throughba thes, clarifies, illumines the encasement, makes it transparent and docile in the end. For that is the Soul's ultimate function and fulfilment.
--
Man, in his terrestrial body, although fallen, because shrouded and diverted from his central being of light and fire, is yet not, as I have said, wholly forsaken and cut adrift. He always carries within him that radiant core through all the peregrinations of earthly sojourn. And though the frontal consciousness, the physical memory has no contact with it, there is a stream of inner consciousness that continues to maintain the link. That is the silver lining to the dark cloud that envelops and engulfs our normal life. And that is why at timesnot unoften there occurs a crack, a fissure in the crust of our earthly nature of ignorance and a tongue of flame leaps outone or other perhaps of the seven sisters of which the Upanishad speaks. And then a mere man becomes a saint, a seer, a poet, a prophet, a hero. This is the flaming godhead whom we cherish within, Agni, the leader of our progressive life, the great Sacrifice, the child whom we nourish, birth after birth, by all that we experience and do and achieve. To live normally and naturally in that fiery elementlike the legendary Salamanderto mould one's consciousness and being, one's substance and constitution, even the entire cellular organisation into the radiant truth is the goal of man's highest aspiration, the ultimate end of Nature's evolutionary urge and the cycle of rebirth.
Wordsworth: Ode on the Intimations of Immortality
04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is a truth, a fact of creationgiving the whole clue to the riddle of this world that has not been envisaged at all in the past or otherwise overlooked and not given the value and importance that it has. poets and seers, sages and saints along with common men from the very birth of humanity have mourned this vale of tears, this sorrowful transient earthly life, anityam asukha lokam ima1, into which they have been thrown: they have wished and willed and endeavoured to change or reform or re-create it, but have always failed, and in the end, finding it ultimately incorrigible, concluded that escape was the only solution, the only issue, either like the sage going out into Nirvana, spiritual dissolution, or like the atheist stoically going down with a crumbling world into a material disintegration. The truth of the matter is, however, different as Sri Aurobindo sees it. The spectacle is not so gloomy and irremediable. The world has a future and man has hope.
The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable felicity in pain and suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward drive of evolution that brings out gradually, step by step, the various modes of the consciousness in different degrees and potentials till the original summit is revealed.
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its origins, we find at the source the Grco-Roman culture. It was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one the earlierphase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-consciousearth-bound and mind-boundas a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a priori theorising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.
We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances: but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that agestalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Or sung like a chanted thought by the poet Fame.
But like a sacred symbol's was that cult.
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The poets lend their voice to outward dreams,
A homeless fire inspires the prophet tongues.
04.03 - The Eternal East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The East is no longer the traditional East of the poet who viewed it as eternally static and meditative, drowned in an "eyeless muse" away and aloof from earth and world. Even if it had and has still in its essential nature a nostalgia for the transcendence, yet it seeks today more and more for a hold upon the physical realities: it seems to remember again what the Upanishadic Rishi sought the Rishi being asked whether he came for the mundane wealth of a thousand heads of cattle, with golden rings round their horns, or for the knowledge of the Transcendent Reality, replied that he had come for both. And the hidebound materialist West, the positivist scientific West, finds this day many fissures and loopholes in the solid Laplacian scheme; as it dives down and enters into the secrecies of even the most material things, curious mysteries surge up and its eyes demand another look and another vision than those to which the mere senses have accustomed them. Physical Scientists bending towards or being compelled to bend towards metaphysics and even mysticism are no longer an anomaly in the scientific world.
The Spirit is not the static transcendent absolute entity only. It is dynamic Force, creative conscious Energy. The spiritual is not mere silence and status it is expression and movement also. Any silence and any status are not the silence and the status of the Spirit the silence and status of death, for example; so too any expression and movement are not of the Spirit either but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic beinga somewhat aggrandised human beingtreating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally. Again, at the other end, Matter is not mere dead mechanical matter. It is vibrant energy, but energy that conceals within it life and consciousness. Besides, the whirl and motion of energies is not all, something inherently static looms large behind: you call it ether, field, space or substratumit is being, one would like to say, infused with a secret consciousness and will.
04.05 - The Freedom and the Force of the Spirit, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first thing that has to be learnt in life is that circumstances are not all in all: however powerful and overwhelming they may appear to be at a given moment, man can always react against them. If there is not an immediate success externally as desired, the will thus exerted does not go in vain. First of all, it declares and asserts the independence and autonomy of the inner man: something within is found and established which is not touched by the environment, which lives by its own au thentic truth and reality and is ever contented and happy. It is in reference to such a poise of consciousness that the great poet says:
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
04.07 - Matter Aspires, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is asked now if the machine is capable of so much mathematics, may it not be capable also of poetic creation? The possibility has been discussed in a very lively and interesting manner in The Hibbert Journal (October, '49 and January, '50). The writer Sir Robert Watson-Watt thinks it is not impossible, indeed quite possible, for a machine to write, for example, a sonnet. Only the question will be with regard to the kind the quality and standardof the poetic creation. What will come out of the machine will depend upon what has been put into it, that is to say, what the brain that constructed it succeeded in transplanting into it. The writer after weighing the pros and cons arrives at the remarkable and amusing conclusion that a machine built by a second class brain may succeed in producing a poem of third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out in the end only a second class or worse production.
I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component parts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the parts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him whichupsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machine. poetry, art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.
But there is another even more interesting aspect of the matter. The attempt of the machine to embody or express something non-mechanical, to leap as high as possible from material objects to psychological values has a special significance for us today and is not all an amusing or crazy affair. It indicates, what we have been always saying, an involved pressure in Matter, a presence, a force of consciousness secreted there that seeks release and growth and expression.
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of earth-natureearth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortalitychildren of Mahasaraswatiwere originally men, men who have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downshis path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workingsna me thate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saintit is sttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rjasicpride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every stepfrom outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.
Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.
05.04 - Of Beauty and Ananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech.
Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The nature of the speech shows the nature of the self-consciousness. The degree of perfection in utterance measures also the extent to which one is conscious of oneself.
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no personality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every momentas the poet says:
They take birth in you and they dissolve in you like
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us, even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very small part of a much greater and wider form of knowing. poets and artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form: without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Apart from that, modern inquiries and observations have established beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational perceptionof clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy, of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence. Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no great success. In the end she seems to say these freaks do not come within her purview and she is not concerned with them. However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for the moment.
The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in close contact with two disconcerting facts or two ends of one fact the infinitely small and the infinitely large. They have disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally, in the case of the infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the infinite we begin squaring the circle.
--
In fact, we are forced to the conclusion that the picture of a solid massive material nature is only a mask of the reality; the reality is,that matter is a charge of electricity and the charge of electricity is potentially a mode of light. The ancient distinction between matter and energy is no longer valid. In fact energy is the sole reality, matter is only an appearance that energy puts on under a certain condition. And this energy too' is not mechanical (and Newtonian) but radiant and ethereal. We can no longer regret with, the poet:
They have gone into the world of light
--
After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm unequivocally what is being suggested and implied and pointed to in a thousand indirect ways. And Science will be transformed. The scientist too, like the famous Saltimbanque (clown) of a French poet, may one day in turning a somersault, suddenly leap up and find himself rolling into the bosom of the stars.
***
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, all the luminaries of heaven have each its conscious personality, the planets, the moon and above all the great sun. It is not a fancy or idle imagination that made the astrologers ascribe definite influences to these heavenly bodies. In Hindu astrology, for example, they are considered as real persons, each with a definite form and character, a dhyna rpa. The so-called Nature-gods in the Vedas or in ancient mythology generally are in the same way not creations of mere poetic imagination: they are realities, more real in a sense than the real objects that represent and incarnate them.
Not only so. Our limited mind and senses are accustomed to view and recognise individuals alone as persons. But there are group personalities too. Thus each species has a generic personality, a consciousness and an ideal or intrinsic form also: the individuals on the physical plane are its various incarnations, projections and formations. Old Plato was not so naive, as we of today are apt to believe, when he spoke of the real reality of general ideas. The attributes, qualities and functions of the generic personality are the source and pattern of what the individuals that form the group actually are. The group person is the king, he is also the body of the Dharma ruling the domain. Any change in the law of being of the group person is necessarily translated in a similar change in the nature and activity of the individuals of the species. What evolutionists describe as sudden variation or mutation and whose cause or genesis they are at a loss to trace, is precisely due to an occult change in the consciousness and will of the group soul.
Man too as a species has a generic personality, his prototype. Only, in opposition to the scientific view, that is an earlier phenomenon belonging to the very origin of things. Man in his essential form and reality is found at the source and beginning of creation. When the unmanifest Transcendent steps forward to manifest, when there is the first expression of typal variations in the infinite as the basis of physical creation, then and there appears Man in his essential and eternal divine form. He is there almost as a sentinel, guarding the passage from the formless to form. Indeed, he is the first original form of the formless. A certain poet says that man is the archetype of all living forms. A bird is a flying man, a fish a swimming man, a worm a crawling man, even a plant is but a rooted man. His form belongs to a region beyond even the first principles of creation. The first principles that bring out and shape and uphold the manifested universe are the trinity: Life, Light and Delightin other terms, Sachchidananda. The whole complex of the manifest universe is resolvable into that unity of triple status. But behind even this supernal, further on towards the final disappearance into the absolute Unmanifestsumming up, as it were, in him the whole manifestationstands this original primordial form, this first person, this archetypal Man.
The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurability between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extractedor abstractedout of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-particles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the old world, before Science was born, sufficient distinction or discrimination was not made between the observer and the observed. The observer mixed himself up or identified himself with what he observed and the result was not a scientific statement but a poetic description. Personal feelings, ideas, judgments entered into the presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth off act somewhere, it was almost by chance. Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe was born out of an egg, the cosmos consisted of concentric circles of worlds that were meant to reward the virtuous and punish the sinner in graded degrees. These are some of the very well-known instances of pathetic fallacy, that is to say, introducing the element of personal sentiment in our appreciation of events and objects. Even today Nazi race history and Soviet Genetics carry that unscientific prescientific tradition.
Science was born the day when the observer cut himself aloof from the observed. Not only so, not only he is to stand aside, outside the field of observation and be a bare recorder, but that he must let the observed record itself, that is, be its own observer. Modern Science means not so much the observer narrating the story of the observed but the observed telling its own story. The first step is well exemplified in the story of Galileo. When hot discussion was going on and people insisted on sayingas Aristotle decided and common sense declared that heavier bodies most naturally fall quicker from a height, it was this prince of experimenters who straightaway took two different weights, went up the tower of Pisa and let them drop and astounded the people by showing that both travel with equal speed and fall to the ground at the same time.
05.09 - The Changed Scientific Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is, of course, more than one line of scientific outlook at the present day. It is well known that continental scientists generally and Marxist scientists in particular belong to a different category from Jeans and Eddington. But the important point is this: a considerable body of scientists frankly hold the "idealist" view, and these come from the very front rank quascientists. Discussion arises when it is seriously put forward that Eddington and Jeans are not authorities in science equalling any other great names; as if it is contended that because a scientist holds the idealist view, ergo, he is a pseudo-scientist, a third-degree luminary, a back-bencher, a mediaevalist. The Marxists also declare, we may recall in this connection, that the bourgeois cannot be a true poet, in order to be a poet one must be a proletarian.
There is a scientific obscurantism, which is not less obscure because it is scientific, and one must guard against it with double care and watchfulness. It is the mentality of the no-changer whose motto seems to be: plus a change, plus a reste le mme.. Let me explain. The scientist who prefers still to be called a materialist must remember that the (material) ground under his feet has shifted considerably since the time he first propounded his materialistic position: he does not stand in the same place (or plane?) as he did even twenty years ago. The change has been basic and fundamentalfundamental, because the very definitions and postulates with which we once started have been called in question, thrown overboard or into the melting-pot.
05.10 - Children and Child Mentality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the very central character of the child consciousness? It is confidence in life, the surety that nothing can baulk the fulfilment of life's purpose, the trust that overrides all set-backs and stumbles, gaily passes through dangers and difficulties. This confidence, this assurance the very body shares in and impels it to movements of daring and adventure. It is this that is the cause of the body's growth, and so long as it is maintained, keeps the body young. So the poet says:
AA simple child
05.10 - Knowledge by Identity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us go back to our illustration. I am angry means both I am anger and I know I have anger. It is true in fact and experience. Similarly I am (existent) means both I am existence and I know I am existent. The transcendence of the subject (of which Prof. Das speaks) is nothing but the poise of the consciousness as the apprehending Purusha: it does not negate or exclude identification, which is another arm of a biune process. The two are complementary to each other. Also Purusha and Prakriti are nor contradictories, not mutually exclusive; they are dual aspects or dispositions of the same consciousness or self-conscious reality. Consciousness involved and lost to itself and in itself is Prakriti, consciousness evolved and looking out at itself is Purusha. I am aware of myself and I am myself are two ways of saying the same thing. We imagine Shakespeare expressed the experience graphically and poetically when he made his character say:
Richard loves Richard, that is I am I.
05.12 - The Revealer and the Revelation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower flight among known, familiar and nameable ranges to a transcendent soaring in mystic regions beyond. He has made a somewhat trenchant distinction between the Revelation and the Revealer. He says we can know God only by his qualities: what he is, if anything, besides his qualities none can define. In the words of the poet,
These are His works and His veils and His shadows;
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We may try to illustrate by examples, although it is a rather dangerous game and may tend to put into a too rigid and' mathematical formula something that is living and variable. Still it will serve to give a clearer picture of the matter. Napoleon, evidently was a child of Mahakali; and Caesar seems to have been fashioned largely by the principle of Maheshwari; while Christ or Chaitanya are clearly emanations in the line of Mahalakshmi. Constructive geniuses, on the other hand, like the great statesman Colbert, for example, or Louis XIV, Ie grand monarque, himself belong to a family (or gotra, as we say in India) that originated from Mahasaraswati. poets and artists again, although generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the godhead that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, LoveMahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and our Kalidasa. Michael Angelo in his fury of inspirations seems to have been impelled by Mahakali, while Mahalakshmi sheds her genial favour upon Raphael and Titian; and the meticulous care and the detailed surety in a Tintoretto makes us think of Mahasaraswati's grace. Mahasaraswati too seems to have especially favoured Leonardo da Vinci, although a brooding presence of Maheshwari also seems to be intermixed there.
For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
05.21 - Being or Becoming and Having, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, in this ceaseless continuity of progression it is indeed not necessary at all to stop a while or somewhere and become something for one's perfection or fulfilment. The normal ideal that is placed before man or which he himself seeks is that he should become something, a definite pattern of some particular achievement, and possess something in the sense of an acquisition. An ordinary man must have an occupation and even an extraordinary man, the saint or the sage, must embody, that is to say, enchain himself in the name and form of a particular realisationa siddhnta or a siddhi. A man has to be -a soldier, a merchant, a politician or a poet, a philosopher: even so he has to be a bhaktaor a jni, a maunior a vksiddha. Each human being should have a ticket and a roll number, an identity card. Now, for the soul of man none of these or other adjuncts are necessary: its progress and its growth are independent of such auxiliaries or correlates. A soul can be and even express itself perfectly at the highest point of its being without formulating itself, binding itself in a scheme of some external achievement or functioning. The soul need not possess any of the gloriesaiwaryasto realise itself, in order to be the abode of the Divine. Its very existence is full to the brim of the substance of the truth and its simple living marks the law or rhythm of that Truth.
A soulful man, whatever he says, thinks, feels or acts, always embodies wholly the Divine. Not that because he says, acts, thinks or feels in a certain manner that he has attained perfection or is in dynamic union with the summit a d integral consciousness. As the Mother brings out the distinction, although in a somewhat different context, the perfect soul-existence .cannot be judged by the forms it takes, the forms themselves have to be judged by the soul-existence.
06.01 - The End of a Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We know of worldsvital worldswhich are made of the most unimaginable horror and ugliness and devilry. Many have contacted such domains either consciously in the course of their yogic experiences or unconsciously in nightmare. They bear testimony to the stark monstrosity of these worlds the gloom, the fear, the pain and torture, the doom and damnation that reign there. That entire inner world seems to have precipitated itself upon earth and taken a body here. A radiant poet spoke of Paradise being transplanted upon earth in the shape of a happy city (the city of the Raghus): today we have done the opposite miracle, the devil's capital city is installed upon earth, or even something worse. For, in the subtler worlds there is a saving grace, after all. If you have within you somewhere an aspiration, a trust, a faith, a light the enemy cannot touch you or maul you badly. You may have also around you there beings who help you, a teacher, a guide who is near visibly or invisibly to give you the necessary warning or protection. But here below when the enemy has clothed himself in a material form and armed himself with material weapons, you are almost helpless. To save yourself from a physical blow, it is not always enough to have the proper inner consciousness only. Something more is needed.
Therefore misery stalks large upon the earth. Nothing com-parable to it, either in quality or quantity, can history offer as an example. Man finds no remedy for his ills, he does not dare to hope for any. He feels he is being irretrievably drawn into the arms of the Arch-enemy.
06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The eternal poet, universal Mind,
Has paged each line of his imperial act;
06.30 - Sweet Holy Tears, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The tears that the soul sheds are holy, are sweet; they come bidden by the Divine and are blessed by His Presence. They are like the dew from heaven. For they are pure, they are spontaneous, welling out of a heart of innocent freedom. The feeling is infinitely impersonal, completely egoless: there is only an intense movement of self-giving, total simple self-giving. Tears are the natural expression in one who needs help, who has the complete surrender and simplicity of a child, the abdication of all vanity. Such tears are beautiful in their nature and beneficent in character. They are therefore like dewdrops that belong to heaven as it were and come from there with a sovereign healing virtue. Such tears are not idle tears, as the English poet says in a vein of melancholy, they are instinct with a power, an effective energy which brings you relief, ease and peace. And it is not only pure but purifying, this feeling made of quiet intensity and aspiration and surrender: it is unmixed, free from any demand or need of reward or return; it is so impersonal that the aspiration is, so to say, even independent of the object for which it exists.
At a supreme crisis of the soul when there seems to be no issue before you, if you come, in the naked simplicity of your whole being, pour yourself out in a flood of self-giving, to one who can be your refugein the end the Divine alone can be such a oneand who can respond fully to the intensity and ardent sincerity of your approach, you come holding your tearful soul as a complete self-offering, you do not know what tremendous response you call forth, the blessing divine you bring down in and around you.
07.10 - Diseases and Accidents, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Not necessarily, to be sure. Illnesses are, as I have told you, generally a dislocation among the different parts of the being, a kind of disharmony. It may well be that the body has not followed the movement of progress, it might have lagged behind while the other parts have, on the contrary, made progress. In that case there is an unbalance, a breaking of harmony and that produces an illness, I mean, in the body, for the mind and the vital also might remain all right. There are many people who have been ill for years, suffering from terrible and incurable diseases, and still maintained their mental power marvellously clear and active and continuing to make progress in that domain. There was a French poet, a very good poet, named Sully Prudhomme; he was mortally ill and it was during that time that he wrote his most beautiful poems. He was always in a very good humour, charming, smiling, pleasant to everyone even while his body was going to bits. You may remember how the great Louis XIV used to joke and laugh, while, in his last days, his body was being lacerated and given over to leeches by his doctors and surgeons. It depends upon individual and individual. For there are people of the other type who get thoroughly disturbed from head to foot if there is the slightest bodily indisposition. Each one has his own combination of the elements.
There is of course a relation between the mind and the body, quite a close relation. In most cases it is the mind that makes the body ill, at least it is the most important factor in the illness. I have said, there are people who keep their mind clear although their body suffers. But it is very rare and very difficult to keep the body healthy when the mind suffers or is un-balanced. It is not impossible, but very, very exceptional. For I explained to you that it is the mind which is the master of the body, the body is an obedient and obliging servant. Unfortunately, one does not usually know how to make use of one's mind, not only so, one makes bad use of it and as bad as possible. The mind possesses a considerable power of formation and of direct action on the body. It is precisely this power which is used by people to make their body ill. As soon as there is something which does not go well, the mind begins to worry about it, makes formations of coming catastrophes, indulges in all kinds of imaginary dangers ahead. Now, instead of thus letting the mind run amuck and play havoc, if the same energy were used for a better purpose, if good formations were made, namely, giving self-confidence to the body, telling it that there is nothing to be anxious about, it is only a passing unease and so on, in that case, the body would be put in a right condition of receptivity and the illness pass away quietly even as it came. That is how the mind is to be taught to give good suggestions to the body and not to throw mud into it. Marvellous results follow if you do it properly.
07.22 - Mysticism and Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a thing, however, that can be learnt. But one must have the aptitude. If you have the power latent in you, you can develop it by practice; but if you have not, you can try for 50 years, it will come to nothing. Everybody cannot have the occult power; it is as if you said that everybody in the world could be a musician or a painter or a poet. There are people who can and there are those who cannot. Usually, if you are interested in the subject, unless it is a mere idle curiosity, it is a sign that you have the gift. You then try. But, as I say, it is to be done with great precaution.
Thus, for example, when one goes out of the body I have often spoken to you of this phenomenon-even if it be just to a little extent, even if only mentally then what goes out is a part of the consciousness that controls the normal activities of the body, what remains is the portion that is automatic, producing the spontaneous involuntary movements such as blood circulation or secretion etc., also other nervous or automatic thought movements; this region is no longer under the control of the conscious thinking part. Now, there is always in the atmosphere around you a good number of small entities, quite small often, that are generally formed out of the disintegrated remains of a dead human being: they are like microbes, the microbes of the vital. They have forms and can be visible and they have a will of their own. You cannot say they are always wicked, but they are full of mischief, that is to say, they like amusing themselves at the cost of human beings. & soon as they see that someone is not sufficiently protected, they rush in and take possession of the mechanical mind and bring about all kinds of disagreeable happeningsnightmares, various physical disturbancesyou feel choked, bite or swallow your tongue and even more serious things. When you wish to go into trance, to have the experience of being outside the body, you must have someone by your side, not only to keep watch on your physical body, but also to prevent the vital entities from getting possession of the nerve centres which, as I said, are no longer under the control and protection of the conscious intelligence. There is a still greater danger. When one goes out of the body in a more or less concrete or material way, retaining only a thin and fragile contacta thread of light, as it werewith the body, this thread of contact must be protected, for the attack of the hostiles may come upon it and cut it; if it is cut one can no longer return into the body, and that means death.
07.28 - Personal Effort and Will, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Supposing under given circumstances a work has come upon you. Take an artist, for example, a painter. He has an inspiration and has decided to do a painting. He knows very well that if he has not the inspiration he will not be able to do anything good, the painting would be nothing more than a daub. If he were simply passive, with neither effort nor will, he would tell the Divine: Here I leave the palette, the brush and the canvas, you will do the painting now. But the Divine does not act in that way. The painter himself must arrange everything, concentrate upon his subject, put all his will upon a perfect execution. On the other hand, if he has not the inspiration, he may take all the trouble and yet the result be nothing more than a work like other thousands of examples. You must feel what your painting is to express and know or find out how to express it. A great painter often gets a very exact vision of the painting he is to do. He has the vision and he sets himself to work out the vision. He labours day by day, with a will and consciousness, to reproduce as exactly as possible what he sees clearly with his inner sight. He works for the Divine; his surrender is active and dynamic. For the poet too it is the same thing. Anyone who wants to do something for the Divine, it is the same.
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07.43 - Music Its Origin and Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a graded scale in the source of music. A whole category of music is there that comes from the higher vital, for example: it is very catching, perhaps even a little vulgar, something that twines round your nerves, as it were, and twists them. It catches you somewhere about your loinsnavel centre and charms you in its way. As there is a vital music there is also what can be called psychic music coming from quite a different source; there is further a music which has spiritual origin. In its own region this higher music is very magnificent; it seizes you deeply and carries you away somewhere else. But if you were to express it perfectlyexecute ityou would have to pass this music too through the vital. Your music coming from high may nevertheless fall absolutely flat in the execution, if you do not have that intensity of vital vibration which alone can give it its power and splendour. I knew people who had very high inspiration, but their music turned to be quite commonplace, because their vital did not move. Their spiritual practice put their vital almost completely to sleep; yes, it was literally asleep and did not work at all. Their music thus came straight into the physical. If you could get behind and catch the source, you would see that there was really something marvellous even there, although externally it was not forceful or effective. What came out was a poor little melody, very thin, having nothing of the power of harmony which is there when one can bring into play the vital energy. If one could put all this power of vibration that belongs to that vital into the music of higher origin we would have the music of a genius. Indeed, for music and for all artistic creation, in fact, for literature, for poetry, for painting, etc. an intermediary is needed. Whatever one does in these domains depends doubtless for its intrinsic value upon the source of the inspiration, upon the plane or the height where one stands. But the value of the execution depends upon the strength of the vital that expresses the inspiration. For a complete genius both are necessary. The combination is rare, generally it is the one or the other, more often it is the vital that predominates and overshadows.
When the vital only is there, you have the music of caf concert and cinema. It is extraordinarily clever and at the same time extraordinarily commonplace, even vulgar. Since, however, it is so clever, it catches hold of your brain, haunts your memory, rings in (or wrings) your nerves; it becomes so difficult to get rid of its influence, precisely because it is done so well, so cleverly. It is made vitally with vital vibrations, but what is behind is not, to say the least, wholesome. Now imagine the same vital power of expression joined to the inspiration coming from above, say, the highest possible inspiration when the entire heaven seems to open out, then it is music indeed; Some things in Csar Franck, some in Beethoven, some in Bach, some in some others possess this sovereignty. But after all it is only a moment, it comes for a moment and does not abide. There is not a single artist whose whole work is executed at such a pitch. The inspiration comes like a flash of lightning, most often it lasts just long enough to be grasped and held in a few snatches.
08.08 - The Mind s Bazaar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is nothing like an idea belonging to oneself and an idea belonging to others. No one has an idea exclusively his own. There is an immensity out of which one can draw according to one's personal affinity. Ideas are a collective possession, a joint property. Only there are different stages. There is the most common or commonplace stage where all of us have our brain sunk in a crowded mass of impersonal notions. It is the stage of Mr. Everybody. The next stage is a little higher, that of thinkers, as they are called. There are other stages further up, many others, some beyond the domain of words, others still within the domain of ideas. Those who can mount sufficiently high are able to catch something that looks like light and bring it down with its packet of ideas or its bundle of thoughts. An idea brought down from a higher region organises itself, crystallises itself into a variety of thoughts that are capable of expressing the idea in different ways. Then, if you are a writer, a poet or an artist and bring it further down into more concrete forms, then you can have all kinds of expressions, infinite ways of presenting a single idea, a single small idea perhaps, but coming down from a great height. If you can do that, you know also how to distinguish between the pure idea and the manner of expressing it. If you are unable to do it by yourself, you can take the help of others, you can learn from persons and books. You can, for example, note how one particular idea has been given so many different forms by different poets. There is the pure or essential idea, then there is the typal or generic idea and then the many formulations.
You can exercise your mind in this way, teach it suppleness, subtlety, strength and other virtues.
08.13 - Thought and Imagination, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thought the Creator poetry and poetic Inspiration
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part EightThought and Imagination
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Thought the Creator poetry and poetic Inspiration
08.14 - Poetry and Poetic Inspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:08.14 - poetry and poetic Inspiration
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part Eight poetry and poetic Inspiration
poetry and poetic Inspiration
I have said: " poetry is sensuality of the mind". How is it so? It is because poetry is in relation with the forms and images of ideasforms, images, sensations, impressions, emotions attached to ideas are the sensual or, if you prefer to call it, the sensuous side of things. All such relations are sensuousness. And poetry concerns itself with this idea of mind and thought. It approaches the world of ideas through their appearances, through the play of sensations and emotions around them. It is not like philosophy or metaphysics which endeavours to look into the inside of ideas. poetry, on the other hand, cannot be poetry unless it evokes, that is to say, unless it gives a form, a sensuous form to the idea. I have used an epigrammatic phrase to express this truth and even chosen the stronger word to give an edge to it. People are called sensual when they are occupied solely with the sensations of the physical life, with the forms and formations and movements of the material world, when they live with their senses and enjoy the things of the senses. The same tendency instead of going out towards the external life, the physical world, when it turns towards objects of the mind, towards ideas gives rise to poetry. poetry is a world under the aspect of the beauty of form. It expresses the beauty of an idea, the harmony or rhythm of a thought, giving all that a concrete shape or image: it becomes a play of images, a play of sounds, a play of words. Thus instead of a sensuality of matter, we have a sensuality of the mind. I have not taken the word in a pejorative sense, nor in a moral sense; it is simply descriptive.
I do not mean, in other words, that such a view, the poetic view, necessarily prevents you from seeing the truth of things. It only describes the way of the poet's approach as poet. Indeed, if it were a choice between reading a book of good poetry and reading a book of metaphysics, personally I would prefer poetry, for that is less arid! My definition of poetry, I assure you, is not a condemnation, it is only a description, a statement of fact, namely, that poetry is the sensual or sensuous approach to truth. It is perhaps a somewhat paradoxical way of putting the thing: it is meant to strike the thought, to awaken it to the perception of a reality which is usually obscured by the habitual, traditional or "classical" way of thinking.
If you mean by inspiration that the poet does not think when he writes a poem, that is to say, he has gone beyond all thought, has made his mind silent, silent and immobile, has opened himself to inner or higher regions and writes almost automatically, well, such a thing happens perhaps once a thousand years. It is not a common phenomenon. A Yogi has the power to do that. What you normally mean, however, by an inspired poet is something quite different. People who have some kind of genius, who have an opening into other and higher regions are called "inspired" ; persons who have made some discovery are also included in that category. Each time you are in relation with a thing belonging to a domain superior to the normal human consciousness, you are inspired. And when you are not totally bound to the very ordinary level you do receive "inspirations" from above. It is the same in the case of a poet. The source of his creation is elsewhere up above the ordinary mind; for that he need not possess an empty vacant mind.
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08.15 - Divine Living, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
poetry and poetic Inspiration Perfection and Progress
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part EightDivine Living
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poetry and poetic Inspiration Perfection and Progress
09.13 - On Teachers and Teaching, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But when did I say that a student is free to come and go as he likes? You must not confuse matters. I said and I repeat that if a student feels that a particular subject is foreign to him, if for example, he has a capacity for literature and poetry and a disgust or even dislike for mathematics, in that case, if the student comes and tells me, "I prefer not to follow the course of mathematics", I cannot answer him, "No, you must absolutely do it". But once a student has decided to follow a class, it is quite an elementary discipline for him to follow the class, to attend it regularly, to behave decently while he is there. Otherwise it is not becoming of him to go to the school at all. I have never encouraged people to loiter about during class hours or to come one day and be absent the next day, never, for, to begin with, if you are not able to submit yourself to this very elementary discipline, you will never succeed in having the least control over yourself; you will be always the slave of every impulse and fancy of yours.
If you do not want to pursue a certain line of knowledge, it it is all right, you are not obliged to do so. But if you decide to do a thing in life, whatever it is, you must do it honestly in a disciplined, regular and methodical manner, without allowing yourself to be fanciful. I have never approved of a person being the plaything of his impulses and caprices. You can never get sanction for that out of me, for you are then no longer a human being but an animal.
10.04 - Lord of Time, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The traditional poet rejoiced in the epic
The creation of full rhythm is his With deep satisfaction
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Laughter-mixed kindness then, let the poet see
poetry then creates life, happiness and sorrow
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I am sure that Solomon was too good a poet, and too experienced a Guru, to tail off with the anticlimax "wise."
6. Minerval. What is the matter? All you have to do is understand it: just a dramatization of the process of incarnation. Better run through it with me: I'll make it clear, and you can make notes of your troubles and their solution for the use of future members.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
for they shall see God. And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet,
Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: The astrolabe of the mysteries of
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spiritual knowledge. When poets or metaphysicians talk about the subject matter of
the Perennial Philosophy, it is generally at second hand. But in every age there have
1.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
There is Sri Aurobindo the philosopher, and Sri Aurobindo the poet, which he was essentially, a visionary of evolution; but not everyone is a philosopher or a poet, much less a seer. But would we not be content if he gave us a way to believe in our own possibilities,
not only our human but our superhuman and divine possibilities, and not only to believe in them but to discover them ourselves, step by step, to see for ourselves and to become vast, as vast as the earth we love and all the lands and all the seas we hold within us? For there is Sri Aurobindo the explorer, who was also a yogi; did he not say that Yoga is the art of conscious self-finding? 3 It is this exploration of consciousness that we would like to undertake with him. If we proceed calmly, patiently, and with sincerity, bravely facing the difficulties of the road and God knows it is rugged enough there is no reason that the window should not open at some point and let the sun shine on us forever. Actually, it is not one but several windows that open one after another, each time on a wider perspective, a new dimension of our own kingdom; and each time it means a change of consciousness as radical as going from sleep to the waking state. We are going to outline the main stages of these changes of consciousness,
1.00 - PRELUDE AT THE THEATRE, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
MANAGER ==== DRAMATIC poet ==== MERRY-ANDREW
MANAGER
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This miracle alone can work the poet
On men so various: now, my friend, pray show it.
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The purer joys that round the poet throng,
Where Love and Friendship still divinely fashion
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What dreams are yours in high poetic places?
You're pleased, forsooth, full houses to behold?
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What! shall the poet that which Nature gave,
The highest right, supreme Humanity,
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Propel the high poetic function,
As in a love-adventure they might play!
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If poetry be your vocation,
Let poetry your will obey!
Full well you know what here is wanting;
1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
42. In Psychological Types, Jung articulated this primacy of the image through his notion of esse in anima (CW 6, 66ff, 7IIff). In her diary notes, Cary Baynes commented on this passage: What struck me especially was what you said about the Bild [image] being half the world. That is the thing that makes humanity so dull. They have missed understanding that thing. The world, that is the thing that holds them rapt. Das Bild, they have never seriously considered unless they have been poets (February 8,1924, CFB).
43. The Draft continues: He who strives only for things will sink into poverty as outer wealth increases, and his soul will be afflicted by protracted illness (p. 17).
10.15 - The Evolution of Language, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet poets, mystic poets have always sought to express themselves, to express something of their experience and illumination through the word, the human tongue. It is extremely interesting to see how a material, constructed or formed to satisfy the requirements of an ordinary physical life is being turned into an instrument for luminous and effective communication and expression of other truths and realities in the hands of these seer-creators (kavi-kratu). They take the materials from ordinary normal life, familiar objects and happenings but use them as images and allegories putting into them a new sense and a new light. Also they give a new, unfamiliar turn to their utterance, a new syntax, sometimes uncommon construction and novel vocabulary to the language itself so that it has even the appearance of something very irregular and twisted and obscure. Indeed obscurity itself in the expression, in the form of the language has often been taken as the very sign of the higher and hidden experience and illumination.
The Vedic rishis speak of the different levels of speech the human language is only one form of speech, its lowest, in fact the crudest formulation. There are other forms of speech that are subtler and subtler as one rises in the scale of consciousness. The highest formulation of language, the supreme Word vkis 'OM'ndaabda-brahma. That is the supreme speech-vibration, the rhythmic articulation of the Supreme Consciousness Sachchidananda; the expression there is nearest to silence, almost merges into silence.
Our human language cannot expect to attain that supreme height of felicity of expression but wherever something of the vibration has been communicated to it by the magic hand of the creative poet, we have the 'mantra', the supreme, the mantric poetry.
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10.17 - Miracles: Their True Significance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A miracle is nothing but the intervention of a force from another plane of consciousness. It must be recognised at the very outset that the physical plane of existence is not the only reality, there are many other planes superimposed' one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other levels like these. A miracle happens, that is to say, a material formation behaves in an abnormal way because a force has come down from the vital region and has influenced or taken control of the material object. So the material object instead of obeying the material law is obliged to obey a vital law which is of a much greater potency. Yogis who do miracles possess this vital power, they have acquired it through a regular discipline and training. Spirit-calling, table-turning, even curing diseases and ailments in a moment and many other activities of the kind are manifestations of very elementary energies of life. From the occult point of view these are very crude and rudimentary examples of what a different kind of force can achieve on a different plane. Even the vital plane possesses deeper and higher energies whose action on the material plane is of deeper and higher category. A deeper or higher vital power can change radically your character and long-standing habits, help to mould them into a different, nobler and more beautiful pattern. The mind too is capable of performing miracles, a strong mental energy can dictate its terms to life and even to the body. Only the miracles here are not of a dazzling kind that astound or confound you. They have a subtler composition, yet they belong to the same category. In the mind itself miracles happen also when a higher light, a superior consciousness intuition, inspiration, revelationdescends into the normal mental working and creates there a thing that is abnormal in beauty and truth and reality. Thus for example, a matter of fact mind is seen turned into a fine poet or a workaday hand is transmuted into a consummate artist.
A miracle can be said to be doubly a miracle; first of all, because it means an intervention from another plane, a superior level of being, and secondly because the process or the action of the intervention is not deployed or staged out but is occult and telescoped, the result being almost simultaneous with the pressure of the moving force. .
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
feet. To us, he comments, this is merely a poetical image.
As if this were all, as if the men of those days would have
so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this
of the body of Brahma. ... We read always our mentality
1.01 - An Accomplished Westerner, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
not England, but France.5 The poet had begun to awaken in him; he was already listening to the footsteps of invisible things, as he put it in one of his early poems; his inner window had already opened,
On Himself, 26:1
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Paul's School, where he had enrolled, was so surprised at the aptitude of his young student that he personally coached him in Greek. Three years later, Sri Aurobindo could skip half his classes and spend most of his time engrossed in his favorite occupation:reading. Nothing seemed to escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goe the in the original peopled a solitude of which he has said nothing. He never sought to form relationships, while Manmohan, the second brother, roamed through London in the company of his friend Oscar Wilde and would make a name for himself in English poetry. Each of the three brothers led his separate life. However, there was nothing austere about Sri Aurobindo, and certainly nothing of the puritan (the prurient,8 as he called it); it was just that he was "elsewhere," and his world was 6
Life of Sri Aurobindo, 8
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replete. He even had a way of jesting with a straight face, which never left him: Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance it is unbalanced enough already and rushed to a blaze long ago. 9 For there is also Sri Aurobindo the humorist, and that Sri Aurobindo is perhaps more important than the philosopher whom Western universities speak of so solemnly. Philosophy, for Sri Aurobindo, was only a way of reaching those who could not understand anything without explanations; it was only a language, just as poetry was another, clearer and truer language. But the essence of his being was humor, not the sarcastic humor of the so-called spiritual man, but a kind of joy that cannot help dancing wherever is passes. Now and then, in a flash that leaves us somewhat mystified, we sense behind the most tragic, the most distressing human situations an almost facetious laughter, as if a child were playing a tragedy and suddenly made a face at himself because it is his nature to laugh, and ultimately because nothing in the world and no one can affect that place inside ourselves where we are ever a king.
Indeed, perhaps this is the true meaning of Sri Aurobindo's humor: a refusal to see things tragically, and, even more so, a sense of inalienable royalty.
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
7 8 Zarathustra is more for Nietzsche than a poetic figure; he is
an involuntary confession, a testament. Nietzsche too had lost
1.01 - BOOK THE FIRST, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
The deathless poet, and the poem, crown.
Thou shalt the Roman festivals adorn,
And, after poets, be by victors worn.
Thou shalt returning Caesar's triumph grace;
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each others eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, poetry,
Mythology!I know of no reading of anothers experience so startling and informing as this would be.
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We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses. He adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.
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It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a mans building his own house that there is in a birds building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.
Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another _may_ also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
--
Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. What! exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, is not this railroad which we have built a good thing? Yes, I answer, _comparatively_ good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
of wisdom, a great mass of inspired poetry, the work of
Rishis, seers and sages, who received in their illumined minds
--
afterwards came to mean any poet, but at the time had the sense
of a seer of truth, - the Veda itself describes them as kavayah.
--
That was the general aspect of the ancient worship in Greece, Rome, India and among other ancient peoples. But in all these countries these gods began to assume a higher, a psychological function; Pallas Athene who may have been originally a Dawn-Goddess springing in flames from the head of Zeus, the Sky-God, Dyaus of the Veda, has in classical Greece a higher function and was identified by the Romans with their Minerva, the Goddess of learning and wisdom; similarly, Saraswati, a river Goddess, becomes in India the goddess of wisdom, learning and the arts and crafts: all the Greek deities have undergone a change in this direction - Apollo, the Sun-God, has become a god of poetry and prophecy, Hephaestus the Fire-God a divine smith, god of labour. In India the process was arrested half-way, and the Vedic Gods developed their psychological functions but retained more fixedly their external character and for higher purposes gave place to a new pantheon. They had to give precedence to Puranic deities who developed out of the early company but assumed larger cosmic functions, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahma - developing from the Vedic Brihaspati, or Brahmanaspati, - Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga. Thus in India the change in the gods was less complete, the earlier deities became the inferior divinities of the Puranic pantheon and this was largely due to the survival of the Rig Veda in which their psychological and their external functions co-existed and are both given a powerful emphasis; there was no such early literary record to maintain the original features of the Gods of Greece and Rome.
This change was evidently due to a cultural development in these early peoples who became progressively more mentalised and less engrossed in the physical life as they advanced in civilisation and needed to read into their religion and their deities finer and subtler aspects which would support their more highly mentalised concepts and interests and find for them a true spiritual being or some celestial figure as their support and sanction.
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It has been the tradition in India from the earliest times that the Rishis, the poet-seers of the Veda, were men of this type, men with a great spiritual and occult knowledge not shared by ordinary human beings, men who handed down this knowledge and their powers by a secret initiation to their descendants and chosen disciples. It is a gratuitous assumption to suppose that this tradition was wholly unfounded, a superstition that arose suddenly or slowly formed in a void, with nothing whatever to support it; some foundation there must have been however small or however swelled by legend and the accretions of centuries. But if it is true, then inevitably the poet-seers must have expressed something of their secret knowledge, their mystic lore in their writings and such an element must be present, however well-concealed by an occult language or behind a technique of symbols, and if it is there it must be to some extent discoverable.
It is true that an antique language, obsolete words, - Yaska counts more than four hundred of which he did not know the meaning, - and often a difficult and out-of-date diction helped to obscure their meaning; the loss of the sense of their symbols, the glossary of which they kept to themselves, made them unintelligible to later generations; even in the time of the Upanishads the spiritual seekers of the age had to resort to initiation and meditation to penetrate into their secret knowledge, while the scholars afterwards were at sea and had to resort to conjecture and to concentrate on a mental interpretation or to explain by myths, by the legends of the Brahmanas themselves often symbolic and obscure. But still to make this discovery will be the sole way of getting at the true sense and the true value of the Veda. We must take seriously the hint of Yaska, accept the Rishi's description of the Veda's contents as "seer-wisdoms, secret words", and look for whatever clue we can find to this ancient wisdom. Otherwise the Veda must remain for ever a sealed book; grammarians, etymologists, scholastic conjectures will not open to us the sealed chamber.
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Many of the lines, many whole hymns even of the Veda bear on their face a mystic meaning; they are evidently an occult form of speech, have an inner meaning. When the seer speaks of Agni as "the luminous guardian of the Truth shining out in his own home", or of Mitra and Varuna or other gods as "in touch with the Truth and making the Truth grow" or as "born in the Truth", these are words of a mystic poet, who is thinking of that inner Truth behind things of which the early sages were the seekers.
He is not thinking of the Nature-Power presiding over the outer element of fire or of the fire of the ceremonial sacrifice. Or he speaks of Saraswati as one who impels the words of Truth and awakes to right thinkings or as one opulent with the thought: Saraswati awakes to consciousness or makes us conscious of the "Great Ocean and illumines all our thoughts." It is surely not the River Goddess whom he is thus hymning but the Power, theRiver if you will, of inspiration, the word of the Truth, bringing its light into our thoughts, building up in us that Truth, an inner knowledge. The Gods constantly stand out in their psychological functions; the sacrifice is the outer symbol of an inner work, an inner interchange between the gods and men, - man givingwhat he has, the gods giving in return the horses of power, the herds of light, the heroes of Strength to be his retinue, winning for him victory in his battle with the hosts of Darkness, Vritras, Dasyus, Panis. When the Rishi says, "Let us become conscious whether by the War-Horse or by the Word of a Strength beyond men", his words have either a mystic significance or they have no coherent meaning at all. In the portions translated in this book we have many mystic verses and whole hymns which, however mystic, tear the veil off the outer sacrificial images covering the real sense of the Veda. "Thought", says the Rishi, "has nourished for us human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens; it is the milch-cow which milks of itself the wealth of many forms" - the many kinds of wealth, cows, horses and the rest for which the sacrificer prays; evidently this is no material wealth, it is something which Thought, the Thought embodied in the Mantra, can give and it is the result of the same Thought that nourishes our human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens. A process of divinisation, and of a bringing down of great and luminous riches, treasures won from the Gods by the inner work of sacrifice, is hinted at in terms necessarily covert but still for one who knows how to read these secret words, nin.ya vacamsi, sufficiently expressive, kavaye nivacana. Again, Night and Dawn the eternal sisters are like "joyful weaving women weaving the weft of our perfected works into the form of a sacrifice."
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the primitive poet might well believe that rain was the perspiration of Indra's horses.
2 This is Sayana's rendering of the passage and rises directly from the words.
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of the Vedic poets, but also how the writers of the Upanishads
Foreword
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these ancient mystics. But any rendering of such great poetry as
the hymns of the Rig Veda, magnificent in their colouring and
--
least a faint echo of their poetic force, - more cannot be done
in a prose translation and in so different a language. The turn
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Mage ; Madame Blavatsky, that lion-hearted woman who brought Eastern esoteric philosophy to the attention of western students ; Arthur Edward Waite, who made available expository summaries of various of the Qabalistic works ; and the poet Aleister Crowley to whose Liber 777 and Sepher Sephiroth, among many other fine philosophic writings, I am in no little degree indebted - all these have provided a wealth of vital information which could be utilized for the construction of a philosophical alphabet.
1.01 - 'Imitation' the common principle of the Arts of Poetry., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
object:1.01 - 'Imitation' the common principle of the Arts of poetry.
I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one: another in three respects,--the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.
For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of colour and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' either singly or combined.
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There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse--which, verse, again, may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind--but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or ' poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet. So much then for these distinctions.
There are, again, some arts which employ all the means above mentioned, namely, rhythm, tune, and metre. Such are Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, and also Tragedy and Comedy; but between them the difference is, that in the first two cases these means are all employed in combination, in the latter, now one means is employed, now another.
Such, then, are the differences of the arts with respect to the medium of imitation.
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In India, as in Persia, Mohammedan thought came to be enriched by the doctrine that God is immanent as well as transcendent, while to Mohammedan practice were added the moral disciplines and spiritual exercises, by means of which the soul is prepared for contemplation or the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. It is a significant historical fact that the poet-saint Kabir is claimed as a co-religionist both by Moslems and Hindus. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.
Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig Veda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Sury, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that figure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things. This symbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.
We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe. Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice,even as this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea,to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship.
Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of the fourfold order, caturvara, miscalled the system of the four castes,for caste is a conventional, vara a symbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;1 but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and looked always first and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears in the Purushasukta of the Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Sury, would have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefa thers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in Gods house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creators body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
--
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hierarchies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid faade. So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised, not accomplished,4 but the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention.
For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great swallowers of formulas, who, rejecting robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.
1.01 - The Dark Forest. The Hill of Difficulty. The Panther, the Lion, and the Wolf. Virgil., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
--
"O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting as
the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
(Illustration: Man has used the idea of God to dictate his personal conduct, to obtain power over his fellows, to excuse his crimes, and for innumerable other purposes, including that of realizing himself as God. He has used the irrational and unreal conceptions of mathematics to help him in the construction of mechanical devices. He has used his moral force to influence the actions even of wild animals. He has employed poetic genius for political purposes.)
15. Every force in the Universe is capable of being transformed into any other kind of force by using suitable means. There is thus an inexhaustible supply of any particular kind of force that we may need.
--
(Illustration: A microscope, however perfect, is useless in the hands of savages. A poet, however sublime, must impose himself upon his generation if he is to enjoy (and even to understand) himself, as theoretically should be the case.)
23. Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.
10.23 - Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This wonder-lyre has three strings, giving out a triple note or strain: there is a strain of philosophy, there is a strain of yoga and there is a strain of poetry. We may also call them values and say there is a philosophical, a yogic and a poetic value in these contemplations. The philosophical strain or value means that the things said are presented, explained to the intellect so that the human mind can seize them, understand them. The principles underlying the ideal, the fundamental ideas are elaborated in terms of reason and logical comprehension, although the subject-matter treated is in the last analysis' beyond reason and logic. For example, here is true philosophy expressed in a philosophic manner as neatly as possible.
A quoi servirait l'homme s'il n'tait pas fait pour jeter un pont entre Ce qui est ternellement, mais qui n' est pas manifest, et ce qui est manifest, entre toutes les transcendances, toutes les splendeu-rs de la vie divine et toute l'obscure et douloureuse ignorance du monde matriel? L'homme est le lien entre ce qui doit tre et ce qui est; il est la passerelle jete sur l' abme, il est le grand X en croix, le trait d'union quaternaire. Son domicile vritable, le sige effectif de sa conscience doit tre dans le monde intermdiaire au point de jonction des quatre bras de la croix, l, o tout l'infini de l'impensable vient prendre forme prcise pour tre projet dans l'innombrable manifestation.1
--
Once again we see emerging the third note, the note of poetry. In fact the Prayers and Meditations abound in the most beautiful poetry, what can be more beautiful, even more poetically beautiful than these cadences!
Ta 'voix est si modeste, si impartiale, si sublime de patience et de misricorde qu' elle ne se fait entendre avec aucune autorit, aucune puissance de volont, mais comme une brise frache, douce et pure, comme un murmure cristallin qui donne la note d' harmonic dans le concert discordant. Seulement, pour celui qui sait couter la note, respirer la brise, elle contient de tels trsors de beaut, un tel parfum de pure srnit et de noble grandeur, que toutes les folles illusions s' vanouissent ou se transforment dans une joyeuse acceptation de la merveilleuse vrit entrevue.7
--
Once, in connection with Shakespeare, I said that a poet's language, which is in truth the poet himself, may be considered as consisting of unit vocables, syllables, that are as it were fundamental particles, even like the nuclear particles, each poet having his own type of particle, with its own charge and spin and vibrations. Shakespeare's, I said, is a particle of Life-energy, a packet of living blood-vibration, pulsating as it were, with real heart-beat. Likewise in Dante one feels it to be a packet of Tapasof ascetic energy, a bare clear concentrated flame-wave of consciousness, of thought-force. In the Prayers and Meditations the fundamental unit of expression seems to be a packet of gracious lightone seems to touch the very hem of Mahalakshmi.
The voice in the Prayers and Meditations is Krishna's flute calling the souls imprisoned in their worldly household to come out into the wide green expanses of infinity, in the midst of the glorious herds of light, to play and enjoy in the company of the Lord of Delight.
10.26 - A True Professor, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If the teacher is to be a yogi, the pupil on his side must be at least an aspirant. But I suppose a pupil, so long as he is a child, is a born aspirant. For, as the Mother says, a child's consciousness retains generally something of the pure inner consciousness for sometime at least until it is overshadowed by the development of the body and the mind in the ordinary normal way. Something of this, we know, has been expressed in the famous lines of the visionary English poet:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
turned to poetry in his attempt to conceptualize this place:
No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is other,
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
physical sense, no figurative idea, no poetical language, it
emanates that purity wherever it goes. Whosoever comes in
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
4 . Maurice Maeterlinck (18621949), Belgian poet, dramatist, and essayist. In Paris he gained a reputation through Symbolist verse and became a leading Symbolist playwright. He was awarded a Nobel prize for literature in 1911.
Many people are completely unaware that their judgments dont spring from the primal source of human nature but from elements implanted in our outer culture since the fourteenth cen- tury as a result of the materialistic paradigm. The duty of teach- ers, of educatorsreally the duty of all human beings that have anything to do with childrenis to look more deeply into what it means to be human. In other words, we need to become more aware of how anything acting as a stimulus in the environment continues to resonate within the child. We have to be very clear that, in this sense, were dealing with imponderables.
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
the classical norms in the arts, as did the symbolist poets
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarm in literature. All this, and
--
we have some ideas from his letters, his poetry, and Nirod-
barans Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. At times his re-
1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.
To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
--
Our earth shaped out of the dark inconscient ocean of existence lifts its high formations and ascending peaks heavenward; heaven of mind has its own formations, clouds that give out their lightnings and their waters of life; the streams of the clarity and the honey ascend out of the subconscient ocean below and seek the superconscient ocean above; and from above that ocean sends downward its rivers of the light and truth and bliss even into our physical being. Thus in images of physical Nature the Vedic poets sing the hymn of our spiritual ascension.
That ascension has already been effected by the Ancients, the human forefa thers, and the spirits of these great Ancestors still assist their offspring; for the new dawns repeat the old and lean forward in light to join the dawns of the future. Kanwa, Kutsa, Atri, Kakshiwan, Gotama, Shunahshepa have become types of certain spiritual victories which tend to be constantly repeated in the experience of humanity. The seven sages, the Angirasas, are waiting still and always, ready to chant the word, to rend the cavern, to find the lost herds, to recover the hidden Sun. Thus the soul is a battlefield full of helpers and hurters, friends and enemies. All this lives, teems, is personal, is conscious, is active.
1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Shankara (788-820 A.D.), mystic and poet, theorist of Mayavada or the doctrine of illusionism, which supplanted Buddhism in India.
play of the three gunas, which rock us endlessly from light to dark,
--
himself that is the creator and the energy of creation and the cause and the method and the result of the working, the mechanist and the machine, the music and the musician, the poet and the poem,
supermind, mind, and life and matter, the soul and Nature.18
1.02 - The Great Process, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
One has to admit to a major flaw in the method, and first, to a flaw in the goal pursued. What do we know of the goal, really, sunk in matter as we are, blinded by the onrush of the world? Our first immediate reaction is to cry, It can't be here! It's not here! Not in this mud, this evil, this whirlwind, not in this dark and burdened world! We must get out at all costs, free ourselves from this weight of flesh and struggle and from that surreptitious erosion in which we seem to be eaten up by thousands of voracious trivialities. So we have proclaimed the Goal to be up above, in a heaven of liberated thoughts, a heaven of art and poetry and music any heaven at all is better than this darkness! We came here merely to earn the leisure for our own private heaven, bookish, religious, pictorial or aesthetic the long vacation of the Spirit free at last. So we have climbed and climbed, poeticized, intellectualized, evangelized; we have rid ourselves of all that might weigh us down, erected a protective wall around our eremite contemplations, our cloistered yoga, our private meditations, traced the white circle of the Spirit, like new spiritual witch doctors. Then we stepped into it, and here we are.
But, in so doing, we are perhaps making as great a mistake as that of the apprentice human in his first lake dwelling who would have claimed that the Goal, the mental heaven he was gropingly discovering, was not in the commonplaceness of daily life, in those tools to carve, those mouths to feed, those entangling nets, those countless snares, but in some ice cave or Australasian desert and who would have discarded his tools. Einstein's equations would never have seen the light of day. By losing his tools, man loses his goal; by discarding all the grossness and evil and darkness and burden of life, we may go dozing off into the blissful (?) reaches of the Spirit, but we are completely outside the Goal, because the Goal might very well be right here, in this grossness and darkness and evil and burden which are gross and dark and burdensome only because we look at them erroneously, as the apprentice human looked erroneously at his tools, unable to see how his tying that stone to that club was already tying the invisible train of our thought to the movement of Jupiter and Venus, and how the mental heaven actually teems everywhere here, in all our gestures and superfluous acts, just as our next heaven teems under our eyes, concealed only by our false spiritual look, imprisoned in the white circle of a so-called Spirit which is but our human approximation for the next stage of evolution. Life... Life alone is the field of our Yoga, exclaimed Sri Aurobindo.4
1.02 - The Necessity of Magick for All, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Let me sum up, very succinctly; as usual, my enthusiasm has lured me into embroidering my sage discourse with poets' Imagery!
Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly. You are on the links, whether you like it or not; why go on topping your drive, and slicing your brassie, and fluffing your niblick, and pulling your iron, and socketing your mashie and not being up with your putt that's 6, and you are not allowed to pick up. It's a far cry to the Nineteenth, and the sky threatens storm before the imminent night.
1.02 - The Refusal of the Call, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
This is the aspect of the hero-problem illustrated in the won drous Arabian Nights adventure of the Prince Kamar al-Zaman and the Princess Budur. The young and handsome prince, the only son of King Shahriman of Persia, persistently refused the repeated suggestions, requests, demands, and finally injunctions, of his father, that he should do the normal thing and take to himself a wife. The first time the subject was broached to him, the lad responded: "O my father, know that I have no lust to marry nor doth my soul incline to women; for that concerning their craft and perfidy I have read many books and heard much talk, even as saith the poet:
Now, an of women ask ye, I reply:
--
After a year, the father pressed again his question, but the youth persisted in refusal, with further stanzas from the poets.
The king consulted with his wazir, and the minister advised:
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
the most dangerous enemies on the way to knowledge of the higher worlds lurk in such fantastical reveries and superstitions. Yet no one need to believe that the student loses all sense of poetry in life, all power of enthusiasm because the words: You must be rid of all prejudice, are written over the portal leading to the second trial of initiation, and because over the portal at the entrance to the first trial he read: Without normal common sense all thine efforts are in vain.
If the candidate is in this way sufficiently advanced, a third trial awaits him. He finds here no definite goal to be reached. All is left in his own hands. He finds himself in a situation where nothing impels him to act. He must find his way all alone and out of himself. Things or people to stimulate him to action are non-existent. Nothing and nobody can give him the strength he needs but he himself alone. Failure to find this inner strength will leave him standing where he was. Few of those, however, who have successfully passed the previous trials will fail to find the necessary strength at this point. Either they will have turned back already or they succeed at this point also. All that the candidate requires is
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
Besides their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges. It was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three-dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.
2. The Perspectival World
Although already shaped in the Mediterranean world of late antiquity, the perspectival world began to find expression about 1250 A.D. in Christian Europe. In contrast to the impersonal, pre-human, hieratic, and standardized sense of the human Body in our sense virtually nonexistent held by the Egyptians, the Greek sensitivity to the body had already evidenced a certain individuation of man. But only toward the close of the Middle Ages did man gradually become aware of his body as a support for his ego. And, having gained this awareness, he is henceforth not just a human being reflected in an idealized bust or miniature of an emperor, a philosopher, or a poet, but a specific individual such as those who gaze at us from a portrait by Jan van Eyck.
The conception of man as subject is based an a conception of the world and the environment as an object. It is in the paintings of Giotto that we See first expressed, however tentatively, the objectified, external world. Early Sienese art, particularly miniature painting, reveals a yet spaceless, self-contained, and depthless world significant for its symbolic content and not for what we would today call its realism. These "pictures" of an unperspectival era are, as it were, painted at night when objects are without shadow and depth. Here darkness has swallowed space to the extent that only the immaterial, psychic component could be expressed. But in the work of Giotto, the latent space hitherto dormant in the night of collective man's unconscious is visualized; the first renderings of space begin to appear in painting signalling an incipient perspectivity. A new psychic awareness of space, objectified or externalized from the psyche out into the world, begins a consciousness of space whose element of depth becomes visible in perspective.
This psychic inner-space breaks forth at the very moment that the Troubadours are writing the first lyric "I"-Poems, the first personal poetry that suddenly opens an abyss between man, as poet, and the world or nature (1250 A.D.). Concurrently at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, following the thought of his teacher Albertus Magnus, asserts the validity of Aristotle, thereby initiating the rational displacement of the predominantly psychic-bound Platonic world.
And this occurred in the wake of Petrus Hispanus (PetrusLucitanus), the later Pope John XXI (d. 1277), who had authored the first comprehensive European textbook on psychology (De anima), introducing via Islam and Spain the Aristotelian theory of the soul. Shortly thereafter, Duns Scotus (d. 1308) freed theology from the hieratic rigors of scholasticism by teaching the primacy of volition and emotion. And the blindness of antiquity to time inherent in its unperspectival, psychically-stressed world (which amounted to a virtual timelessness) gave way to the visualization of and openness to time with a quantifiable, spatial character. This was exemplified by the erection of the first public clock in the courtyard of Westminister Palace in 1283,an event anticipated by Pope Sabinus, who in 604ordered the ringing of bells to announce the passing of the hours.
--
Although then unaware of its full significance, the present writer saw the mountain years ago and sensed its attraction. Certainly this attraction must have been sensed by others as well; it is no accident that Petrarch's discovery of landscape occurred precisely in this region of France. Here, the Gnostic tradition had encouraged investigation of the world and placed greater emphasis on knowledge than on belief; here, the tradition of the Troubadours, the Cathari, and the Albigensi remained alive. This is not to say that the affinity makes Petrarch a Gnostic, but merely points to the Gnostic climate of this part of douce France which is mentioned in the opening lines of France's first major poetic work, the Chanson de Roland (verse16): "Li empereres Carles de France dulce."
Petrarch's letter is in the nature of a confession; it is addressed to the Augustinian professor of theology who had taught him to treasure and emulate Augustine's Confessions. Now, a person makes a confession or an admission only if he believes he has transgressed against something; and it is this vision of space, as extended before him from the mountain top, this vision of space as a reality, and its overwhelming impression, together with his shock and dismay, his bewilderment at his perception and acceptance of the panorama, that are reflected in his letter. It marks him as the first European to step out of the transcendental gilt ground of the Siena masters, the first to emerge from a space dormant in time and soul, into "real" space where he discovers landscape.
--
Once again he turns away and yields to something indicative of his poetic sensibility. Helpless in the face of the expanse before him and groping for some kind of moral support, he opens a copy of Augustine's Confessions where he chances upon a phrase. It stems from that realm of the soul to which he had turned his gaze after his initial encounter with landscape. "God and my companion are witnesses," he writes, "that my glance fell upon the passage: `And men went forth to behold the high mountains and the mighty surge of the sea, and the broad stretches of the rivers and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars, and so doing, lose themselves in wonderment [et relinquunt se ipsos].' "
Once more, he is terrified, only this time less by his encounter with space than by the encounter with his soul of which he is reminded by the chance discovery of Augustine's words. "I admit I was overcome with wonderment," he continues; "I begged my Brother who also desired to read the Passage not to disturb me, and closed the book. I was irritated for having turned my thoughts to mundane matters at such a moment, for even the Pagan philosophers should have long since taught me that there is nothing more wondrous than the soul [nihilpraeteranimumessemirabile], and that compared to its greatness nothing is great."
--
Aperspectivity, through which it is possible to grasp and express the new emerging consciousness structure, cannot be perceived in all its consequences be they positive or negative unless certain still valid concepts, attitudes, and forms of thought are more closely scrutinized and clarified. Otherwise we commit the error of expressing the "new" with old and inadequate means of statement. We will, for example, have to furnish evidence that the concretion of time is not only occurring in the previously cited examples from painting, but in the natural sciences and in literature, poetry, music, sculpture, and various other areas. And this we can do only after we have worked out the new forms and modes necessary for an understanding of aperspectivity.
The very amalgamation of time and the psyche noted earlier, with its unanticipated chaotic effect as manifested by surrealism and later by tachism, clearly demonstrate that we can show the arational nature of the aperspectival world only if we take particular precautions to prevent aperspectivity from being understood as a mere regression to irrationality (or to an unperspectival world), or as a further progression toward rationality (toward a perspectival world). Man's inertia and desire for continuity always lead him to categorize the new or novel along familiar lines, or merely as curious variants of the familiar. The labels of the venerated "Isms" lie ever at hand ready to be attached to new victims. We must avoid this new idolatry, and the task is more difficult than it first appears.
1.02 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; its complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,I never heard what compensation he received for that, and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.
--
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again. I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homers requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the airto a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something.
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.
--
Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that there was a kings son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his fathers ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul, continues the Hindoo philosopher, from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be _Brahme_. I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that _is_ which _appears_ to be.
If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the Mill-dam go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquitos wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through
Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call _reality_, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a _point dappui_, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.
10.31 - The Mystery of The Five Senses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Continuing farther, if we go beyond the five senses, we have still another sense, it is mind, the sixth sense; it is in and through the mind that the other five senses distil their perceptions allowing a coordinated picture of the sense-experiences. Now, to attain, to realise, to possess the Truth means, first of all, to know the Truth: for, knowing as we know, is the function of the mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is declared, the mind is to be expunged altogether or silenced at least. One must get away, one must withdraw from that play of activity and be far from it. True knowledge comes through revelations. It descends from above, it does not enter by a level side-door and it comes only when the mind is not there. But this also, as in the other cases, as in respect of the other senses, is an extreme view. Like the other senses the mind too can be turned inward or upward, made a receptive organ or instrument. When turned round, when it is the Mind of the mind, then there begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contri bution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surpa (beautiful and perfect form) chanted by the Vedic Rishis that the purified mind models for the Gods to inhabitit is what the poets and prophets always aspire for in their creative consciousness.
But these separate senses with their separate qualities are not really separate. In the final account of things, the account held in the Supreme Consciousness, at the highest height, these diverse elements or movements are diverse but not exclusive of one another. When they find themselves in the supreme consciousness, they do not, like the rivers of which the Upanishads speak, move and merge into the sea giving up their separate individual name and function. These senses do maintain their identity, each its own, even when they together are all of them part and parcel of the Supreme Universal Consciousness. Only, they become supple and malleable, they intertwine, mix together, even one doing another's work. Also, as things exist at present, modern knowledge has found out that a blind man can see, literally see, through some part of his body; the sense of hearing is capable of bringing to you the vision of colours. And the olfactory organ can reveal to you the taste of things. Indeed it has been found that not only at the sight of good food, but in contemplating an extraordinarily beautiful scenery or while listening to an exquisite piece of music, the mouth waters. It is curious to note that Indra, the Lord of the gods, the Vedic lord of the mind and the senses, is said to have transformed the pores of his skin into so many eyes, so that he could see all things around at once, globally: it is why he was called Sahasralochana or Sahasraksha, one with a thousand eyes. The truth is that all the different senses are only extensions of one unitary sensibility and the variation depends on a particular mode or stress on the generalised sensibility.
10.32 - The Mystery of the Five Elements, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The material world, as the ancient sages viewed it, is composed of five elements. They are, as we know, (I) earth (kiti), (2) water (ap), (3) fire (tej), (4) air (marut), and (5) space or ether (vyom), mounting from the grossest to those that are more and more subtle. The subtlest, the topmost in the scale is space or ether. As we descend in the scale, each succeeding element becomes more and more concrete than the preceding one. Thus air is denser than space, fire is denser than air, water is denser than fire and earth is the densest of allsolidity belongs to earth alone. Water is liquid, fire gaseous, air is fluid, and ether is the most tenuous. Now this hierarchy can be considered also as a pyramid of qualities, qualities of matter and the material world tapering upward. The first one, the topmost, space, possesses the quality of sound or vibration; it is the field giving out waves that originate sound.1 The next element is air, its special quality as found in the ancient knowledge is the quality of touch: it gives the sensation of touch, you can touch it, it touches you and you recognise its existence in that way. Touch however is its own, its primary quality but it takes up also the quality of the previous, the subtler element, in order to become more and more evolved, more and more concrete, that is to say, in the material way. Air has thus a double quality, sound and touch It is tactile, and it is sonorous. The third one, fire, has the quality of possessing a form; it has visibility in addition to the two qualities of the two previous elements, which it takes up: thus fire is visible, it can be touchedyes, it may burn also and it gives out sound. The fourth element, water, adds a fourth quality which is its own, namely, taste. Water has taste, very delightful taste to mortals. A Greek poet2 says water has the best taste, hudor men ariston. So you can taste water, you can see its form, you can touch it, you can hear it gurgle. Coming to the last, earth has all these, qualities: in addition, what it has is, curious to say, smell. So you can hear earth's vibrations, you can touch it, see it, taste it for some earth has a very savoury taste but its own special quality is smell: it is odorous, it is sweet-scented. Kalidasa speaks with ecstasy of the strange scent that the earth emits when the fresh rains fall upon it.
So, the five senses open out to the five elements, each sense linked to its own element, each sense presenting a particular aspect of the material universe. Thus ether, the subtlest element, is present to the ear, the organ of hearing, air to the skin (twak) the organ of touch, the fire-element (radiant energy) to the eye, the liquid to the organ of taste, and earth is given over to smell. Earth is linked with smell, perhaps because it is the perfume of creation, the dense aroma of God's material energy. Also earth is the summation of all the elements and all the qualities of matter. It is the epitome of the material creation. The physical beauty of earth is well-known, the landscape and seascape, its rich variegated coloration, we all admire standing upon its bosom, but up in the air, in the wide open spaces earth appears with even a more magical beauty to which cosmonauts have given glowing tri bute. But even this visible beauty pales, I suppose, before the perfume it emits which is its celestial quality, that can only be described indeed as the sweet-scented body of the Divine Substance.
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Science, that is modem Science, will perhaps demur a little; for Science holds sound to be the exclusive property of air, it is the vibration of air that comes to the ear as sound, Where there is no air, there is no sound. But Science itself admits now that sound audible to the human ear is only a section of a whole gamut of vibrations of which the ear catches only a portion, vibrations of certain length and frequency. Those that are outside this limit, below or above, are not seized by the ear. So there is a sound that is unheard. The poets speak of unheard melodies. The vibrations the sound-vibrationsare in fact not merely in the air; but originally and fundamentally in a more subtle material medium, referred to by the ancients as vyom.. The air-vibrations are derivations or translations, in a more concrete and gross medium, of these subtler vibrations. These too are heard as sound by a subtle hearing. The very original seed-sound is, of course, Om, nda. That, however, is another matter.
Like inaudible sound, we know now, there is also invisible light. The visible light, as given in the spectrum, is only a section of the entire series of light-vibrations. There is a range above and one belowboth are invisible to the normal physical eye.
10.35 - The Moral and the Spiritual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indian artists and poets were steeped in that tradition, wholly inspired by that spirit. Orthodox morality often wonders, is even shocked at the frankness, the daring nonchalance in Indian art creations ,a familiar prudery would call it shamelessness and even vulgarity, but to the Indian view, 'the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant' are of equal value and merit. The movement conventional morality calls 'libidinous' has a nobler name in Indian tradition: it is dirasa, the first or primary delight of existence. As I have said, the modern consciousness finds it a horror and is therefore all the more fascinated by it and dives into it head foremost.
To cure the modern malady we have to go back again to something of the ancient mentality. We have to cultivate a consciousness, now forgotten and alienated but once natural to the human mind, the consciousness and status of a transcendence built with the sense of absolute calm, an equality, all serene and all englobing, that is God's consciousness.
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
In Indian tradition, we have the mantras which are also associated with certain factors other than merely a combination of words, one aspect of which is what is known as chandas. This a peculiar feature of the formation of a mantra. A chandas is a particular method of combining words according to a rule called ghana shastra, which is known in mystical circles in India. A particular word, when it is combined with another particular word, produces a particular effect. Rhetoricians are well acquainted with this subject. Great novelists and poets in India, especially those endowed with special genius and charged with divine power, such as Kalidasa, followed this technique of ghana shastra, and knowing the power of words, composed their poems or their works in such a way that they follow the rules of accepted rhetoric. Ordinary literature is not acquainted with this secret of Sanskrit literature. The greatness of a poet can be judged from the way he starts the work. How does he start the work? What is the word that he uses in the beginning? It is the belief among great writers in India that the initial phrases at the commencement of the work tell upon the nature of the entire work that is to follow.
This system of the combination of particular words with other words of the requisite character is followed in the composition of a mantra, which literally means, 'that which protects a person who thinks of it'. Mananat trayate iti mantrah a mantra is that which protects us when we chant it. It protects us like armour, like a shield that we wear in a war, by generating in us a resisting power against any kind of influence which is extraneous in nature, and which is unwanted for the purpose on hand. Chandas is the peculiar chemical combination of the letters, we may say. Particular chemical substances produce special results or effects when they are combined with certain types of other chemical components. But when they are mixed together, they may create a third force altogether.
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The mantra, when it is chanted, generates a force which is the object of the realisation of the sadhaka. A mantra has a chandas, or the combining feature, which is the determining factor of the particular shape that the effect takes, and so the mantra determines the deity, and vice versa. So we have a deity, or the aim or the goal of the mantra, and the chandas of the mantra, as well as another thing altogether, namely, the discoverer of the mantra has some say in this matter. The discoverer of the mantra is called the rishi of the mantra. A rishi is a seer of the mantra not merely a composer like a writer, or an author, or a poet but a seer into the truth of a mantra, to whom the mantra, in its truth, has been revealed in his meditations; and so the will of the seer also is present there. So, according to our tradition, when we chant a mantra we remember the rishi of the mantra, the chandas of the mantra, and the deity of the mantra. Rishis, chandas, devata these three are always remembered before the mantra is chanted, so that we have the grace of these divine precedents of the sacred mantra that we are going to chant, because these are the causes behind the action that the mantra takes.
The mantra that Patanjali particularly refers to in his sutra is pranava or omkara. This is something very difficult to understand and cannot easily be explained however much we may try, because these are very great secrets which are invisible to the eyes and, therefore, ordinarily incapable of explanation. It is believed that the chanting of pranava or Om, in the prescribed manner, sets up a novel type of vibration in the system, which is free from every kind of distraction or particularisation in respect of any external object. Every name in this world particularises itself in respect of an external object, such as tree, mountain, sun, moon, star, etc. they are external objects. But here, the object of pranava or Om is not any given object in particular. It is a general being, and anything that is general is also harmonious. Hence the chanting of pranava or Om in the prescribed manner, with the required intonation, produces a generalised harmonious vibration in the entire physical and psychological system, and this is what is conducive to the concentration of the mind in meditation, because meditation is nothing but the harmonious condition of the mind.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The recoil from the brute facts of life, the concrete living realities has affected even the world of artistic creation. We are very much familiar with what has been called abstract art, that is to say, art denuded of all content. The supreme art today is this sketch of bare skeletoneven a skeleton, not in its organised form but merely dismembered bits strewn about. Even poetry, the art that is perhaps most bound to the sense pattern, as no other, so indissolubly married to sense-life, seems to be giving way to the new impact and inspiration. A poetry devoid of all thought-content, pure of all sentiment and understandable imagery is being worked out in the laboratory, as it were, a new poetry made of a bizarre combination of tones and syllables with a changed form too in regard to arrangement of lines and phrases. It is the pure form that is aimed at the very essence, it is said, what is quintessential!
In other words, mind, that is to say, the rational mind on which stands man's superiority has now been so developed, developed along a single line, has specialised itself so much that it has almost defeated its own purpose. Today it has entered a cul-de-sac, a blind alley where it has bogged itself and does not know where and how to move.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples have taken not excepting a few prose writers
today in whose ear there dwells an inexorable conscience for the sake of some foolishness, as
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
the attentions of the poets. There are excellent descriptions of
her, which at the same time tell us about the symbolic context
1.03 - ON THE AFTERWORLDLY, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
when it poetizes and raves and flutters with broken
wings. It learns to speak ever more honestly, this ego:
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The will is free and we are at liberty to identify our being either exclusively with our selfness and its interests, regarded as independent of indwelling Spirit and transcendent Godhead (in which case we shall be passively damned or actively fiendish), or exclusively with the divine within us and without (in which case we shall be saints), or finally with self at one moment or in one context and with spiritual not-self at other moments and in other contexts (in which case we shall be average citizens, too theocentric to be wholly lost, and too egocentric to achieve enlightenment and a total deliverance). Since human craving can never be satisfied except by the unitive knowledge of God and since the mind-body is capable of an enormous variety of experiences, we are free to identify ourselves with an almost infinite number of possible objectswith the pleasures of gluttony, for example, or intemperance, or sensuality; with money, power or fame; with our family, regarded as a possession or actually an extension and projection of our own selfness; with our goods and chattels, our hobbies, our collections; with our artistic or scientific talents; with some favourite branch of knowledge, some fascinating special subject; with our professions, our political parties, our churches; with our pains and illnesses; with our memories of success or misfortune, our hopes, fears and schemes for the future; and finally with the eternal Reality within which and by which all the rest has its being. And we are free, of course, to identify ourselves with more than one of these things simultaneously or in succession. Hence the quite astonishingly improbable combination of traits making up a complex personality. Thus a man can be at once the craftiest of politicians and the dupe of his own verbiage, can have a passion for brandy and money, and an equal passion for the poetry of George Meredith and under-age girls and his mother, for horse-racing and detective stories and the good of his country the whole accompanied by a sneaking fear of hell-fire, a hatred of Spinoza and an unblemished record for Sunday church-going. A person born with one kind of psycho-physical constitution will be tempted to identify himself with one set of interests and passions, while a person with another kind of temperament will be tempted to make very different identifications. But these temptations (though extremely powerful, if the constitutional bias is strongly marked) do not have to be succumbed to; people can and do resist them, can and do refuse to identify themselves with what it would be all too easy and natural for them to be; can and do become better and quite other than their own selves. In this context the following brief article on How Men Behave in Crisis (published in a recent issue of Harpers Magazine) is highly significant. A young psychiatrist, who went as a medical observer on five combat missions of the Eighth Air Force in England says that in times of great stress and danger men are likely to react quite uniformly, even though under normal circumstances, they differ widely in personality. He went on one mission, during which the B-17 plane and crew were so severely damaged that survival seemed impossible. He had already studied the on the ground personalities of the crew and had found that they represented a great diversity of human types. Of their behaviour in crisis he reported:
Their reactions were remarkably alike. During the violent combat and in the acute emergencies that arose during it, they were all quietly precise on the interphone and decisive in action. The tail gunner, right waist gunner and navigator were severely wounded early in the fight, but all three kept at their duties efficiently and without cessation. The burden of emergency work fell on the pilot, engineer and ball turret gunner, and all functioned with rapidity, skilful effectiveness and no lost motion. The burden of the decisions, during, but particularly after the combat, rested essentially on the pilot and, in secondary details, on the co-pilot and bombar ther. The decisions, arrived at with care and speed, were unquestioned once they were made, and proved excellent. In the period when disaster was momentarily expected, the alternative plans of action were made clearly and with no thought other than the safety of the entire crew. All at this point were quiet, unobtrusively cheerful and ready for anything. There was at no time paralysis, panic, unclear thinking, faulty or confused judgment, or self-seeking in any one of them.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
everything to an amanuensis, poetry as well as prose. All
the same, he could not refuse a request from the Mother forpr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr Camar Uddn Mast,
Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines. I kept Homers Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that _I_ lived.
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The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.
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English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him,my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the ordinary human existence an outgoing action is obviously three-fourths or even more of our life. It is only the exceptions, the saint and the seer, the rare thinker, poet and artist who can live more within themselves; these indeed, at least in the most intimate parts of their nature, shape themselves more in inner thought and feeling than in the surface act. But it is not either of these sides separated from the other, but rather a harmony of the inner and the outer life made one in fullness and transfigured into a play of something that is beyond them which will create the form of a perfect living. A Yoga of works, a union with the Divine in our will and acts - and not only in knowledge and feeling - is then an indispensable, an inexpressibly important element of an integral Yoga. The conversion of our thought and feeling without a corresponding conversion of the spirit and body of our works would be a maimed achievement.
But if this total conversion is to be done, there must be a consecration of our actions and outer movements as much as of our mind and heart to the Divine. There must be accepted and progressively accomplished a surrender of our capacities of working into the hands of a greater Power behind us and our sense of being the doer and worker must disappear. All must be given for a more direct use into the hands of the divine Will which is hidden by these frontal appearances; for by that permitting Will alone is our action possible. A hidden Power is the true Lord and overruling Observer of our acts and only he knows through all the ignorance and perversion and deformation brought in by the ego their entire sense and ultimate purpose. There must be effected a complete transformation of our limited and distorted egoistic life and works into the large and direct outpouring of a greater divine Life, Will and Energy that now secretly supports us. This greater Will and Energy must be made conscious in us and master; no longer must it remain, as now, only a superconscious, upholding and permitting Force. There must be achieved an undistorted transmission through us of the all-wise purpose and process of a now hidden omniscient Power and omnipotent Knowledge which will turn into its pure, unobstructed, happily consenting and participating channel all our transmuted nature.
1.03 - Spiritual Realisation, The aim of Bhakti-Yoga, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Bhakti-Yoga, as we have said, is divided into the Gauni or the preparatory, and the Par or the supreme forms. We shall find, as we go on, how in the preparatory stage we unavoidably stand in need of many concrete helps to enable us to get on; and indeed the mythological and symbological parts of all religions are natural growths which early environ the aspiring soul and help it Godward. It is also a significant fact that spiritual giants have been produced only in those systems of religion where there is an exuberant growth of rich mythology and ritualism. The dry fanatical forms of religion which attempt to eradicate all that is poetical, all that is beautiful and sublime, all that gives a firm grasp to the infant mind tottering in its Godward way the forms which attempt to break down the very ridge-poles of the spiritual roof, and in their ignorant and superstitious conceptions of truth try to drive away all that is life-giving, all that furnishes the formative material to the spiritual plant growing in the human soul such forms of religion too soon find that all that is left to them is but an empty shell, a contentless frame of words and sophistry with perhaps a little flavour of a kind of social scavengering or the socalled spirit of reform.
The vast mass of those whose religion is like this, are conscious or unconscious materialists the end and aim of their lives here and hereafter being enjoyment, which indeed is to them the alpha and the omega of human life, and which is their Ishtpurta; work like street-cleaning and scavengering, intended for the material comfort of man is, according to them, the be-all and end-all of human existence; and the sooner the followers of this curious mixture of ignorance and fanaticism come out in their true colours and join, as they well deserve to do, the ranks of atheists and materialists, the better will it be for the world. One ounce of the practice of righteousness and of spiritual Self-realisation outweighs tons and tons of frothy talk and nonsensical sentiments. Show us one, but one gigantic spiritual genius growing out of all this dry dust of ignorance and fanaticism; and if you cannot, close your mouths, open the windows of your hearts to the clear light of truth, and sit like children at the feet of those who know what they are talking about the sages of India. Let us then listen attentively to what they say.
1.03 - Supernatural Aid, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
of her the poet Al-Walahan:
She hath wrists which, did her bangles not contain,
1.03 - The House Of The Lord, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo, we were told, used to take his bath about midnight with very hot water, all the year round mixing very little cold water, even for the head. The story is quite believable, for we were asked to pour extremely hot water on the fractured leg to cure the occasional itching he had. "A very drastic, but effective method," he pronounced with a smile, "but not many could bear such heat." Sometimes while returning from the bath, he was seen moving his lips as though murmuring something. It prompted Champaklal to suggest to him that if he wanted to dictate some lines of poetry, I would be willing to take them down. His intuition was correct. For a few days Sri Aurobindo did dictate verses and then stopped. Perhaps he felt that I must be given rest before I resumed my next round of duty.
There was another tiny operation he allowed us to do, the cutting of his nails. Satyendra used to clean them daily, but we cut them only every month or two after they had grown sufficiently long and could be preserved intact. It was a very delicate operation, for the knife or scissors would sometimes graze the skin, specially when the operator's eyesight was affected. When this did happen which was fortunately very rare he would give a quick shake to the leg! When a small bit of nail fell on the carpet and got lost, a search would start for the quarry in which Sri Aurobindo himself smilingly participated, asking, "Have you got it?" All these nails, like the hair, were the legitimate property of our custodian Champaklal.
1.03 - The Manner of Imitation., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
There is still a third difference--the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration--in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged--or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.
These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation,--the medium, the objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer--for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes--for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some say, the name of 'drama' is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians,--not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them called {kappa omega mu alpha iota}, by the Athenians {delta eta mu iota}: and they assume that Comedians were so named not from {kappa omega mu 'alpha zeta epsilon iota nu}, 'to revel,' but because they wandered from village to village (kappa alpha tau alpha / kappa omega mu alpha sigma), being excluded contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word for 'doing' is {delta rho alpha nu}, and the Athenian, {pi rho alpha tau tau epsilon iota nu}.
This may suffice as to the number and nature of the various modes of imitation.
1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
PUNDIT ISWAR CHANDRA VIDYASAGAR was born in the village of Beersingh, not far from Kamarpukur, Sri Ramakrishna's birthplace. He was known as a great scholar, educator, writer, and philanthropist. One of the creators of modern Bengali, he was also well versed in Sanskrit grammar and poetry. His generosity made his name a household word with his countrymen, most of his income being given in charity to widows, orphans, indigent students, and other needy people. Nor was his compassion limited to human beings: he stopped drinking milk for years so that the calves should not be deprived of it, and he would not drive in a carriage for fear of causing discomfort to the horses. He was a man of indomitable spirit, which he showed when he gave up the lucrative position of principal of the Sanskrit College of Calcutta because of a disagreement with the authorities. His affection for his mother was especially deep. One day, in the absence of a ferryboat, he swam a raging river at the risk of his life to fulfil her wish that he should be present at his brother's wedding. His whole life was one of utter simplicity. The title Vidyasagar, meaning "Ocean of Learning", was given him in recognition of his vast erudition.
Master's visit to the scholar
--
Again, the poet says:
Even the six darsanas are powerless to reveal Her.
1.04 - Body, Soul and Spirit, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
In the course of the childhood of a human being, there comes a moment in which, for the first time, he feels himself to be an independent being distinct from the whole of the rest of the world. For persons with finely-strung natures it is a significant experience. The poet Jean Paul says in his autobiography, "I shall never forget the event which took place within me, hitherto narrated to no one, and of which I can give place and time, when I stood present at the birth of my self-consciousness. As a very small child I stood at the door of the house one morning, looking toward the wood pile on my left, when suddenly the inner revelation 'I am an I' came to me like a flash of lightning from heaven and has remained shining ever since. In that moment my ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Any deception of memory is hardly to be conceived as possible here, for no narrations by outsiders could have
p. 42
1.04 - BOOK THE FOURTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Still the dead poet strings his deathless lyre,
And lovers still with fancy'd darts expire.
--
As Grecian poets artfully have sung,
And in the name confest, from whence I sprung.
1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
[London: Penguin, 1986], p. 46, line 244). Socrates distinguished four types of divine madness: (I) inspired divination, such as by the prophetess at Delphi; (2) instances in which individuals, when ancient sins have given rise to troubles, have prophesied and incited to prayer and worship; (3) possession by the Muses, since the technically skilled untouched by the madness of the Muses will never be a good poet; and (4) the lover. In the Renaissance, the theme of divine madness was talcen up by the Neoplatonists such as Ecino and by humanists such as Erasmus. Erasmus's discussion is particularly important, as it fuses the classical Platonic conception with Christianity.
For Erasmus, Christianity was the highest type of inspired madness. Like Plato, Erasmus
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds may be thought of, in Ren Gunons phrase, as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godheads creative energy. The creature, as creature, may be very far from God, in the sense that it lacks the intelligence to discover the nature of the divine Ground of its being. But the creature in its eternal essenceas the meeting place of creatureliness and primordial Godheadis one of the infinite number of points where divine Reality is wholly and eternally present. Because of this, rational beings can come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, non-rational and inanimate beings may reveal to rational beings the fulness of Gods presence within their material forms. The poets or the painters vision of the divine in nature, the worshippers awareness of a holy presence in the sacrament, symbol or imagethese are not entirely subjective. True, such perceptions cannot be had by all perceivers, for knowledge is a function of being; but the thing known is independent of the mode and nature of the knower. What the poet and painter see, and try to record for us, is actually there, waiting to be apprehended by anyone who has the right kind of faculties. Similarly, in the image or the sacramental object the divine Ground is wholly present. Faith and devotion prepare the worshippers mind for perceiving the ray of Godhead at its point of intersection with the particular fragment of matter before him. Incidentally, by being worshipped, such symbols become the centres of a field of force. The longings, emotions and imaginations of those who kneel and, for generations, have knelt before the shrine create, as it were, an enduring vortex in the psychic medium, so that the image lives with a secondary, inferior divine life projected on to it by its worshippers, as well as with the primary divine life which, in common with all other animate and inanimate beings, it possesses in virtue of its relation to the divine Ground. The religious experience of sacramentalists and image worshippers may be perfectly genuine and objective; but it is not always or necessarily an experience of God or the Godhead. It may be, and perhaps in most cases it actually is, an experience of the field of force generated by the minds of past and present worshippers and projected on to the sacramental object where it sticks, so to speak, in a condition of what may be called second-hand objectivity, waiting to be perceived by minds suitably attuned to it. How desirable this kind of experience really is will have to be discussed in another section. All that need be said here is that the iconoclasts contempt for sacraments and symbols, as being nothing but mummery with stocks and stones is quite unjustified.
The workmen still in doubt what course to take,
--
It is in the literature of Mahayana and especially of Zen Buddhism that we find the best account of the psychology of the man for whom Samsara and Nirvana, time and eternity, are one and the same. More systematically perhaps than any other religion, the Buddhism of the Far East teaches the way to spiritual Knowledge in its fulness as well as in its heights, in and through the world as well as in and through the soul. In this context we may point to a highly significant fact, which is that the incomparable landscape painting of China and Japan was essentially a religious art, inspired by Taoism and Zen Buddhism; in Europe, on the contrary, landscape painting and the poetry of nature worship were secular arts which arose when Christianity was in decline, and derived little or no inspiration from Christian ideals.
Blind, deaf, dumb!
--
These phrases about the unmoving first mover remind one of Aristotle. But between Aristotle and the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy within the great religious traditions there is this vast difference: Aristotle is primarily concerned with cosmology, the Perennial Philosophers are primarily concerned with liberation and enlightenment: Aristotle is content to know about the unmoving mover, from the outside and theoretically; the aim of the Perennial Philosophers is to become directly aware of it, to know it unitively, so that they and others may actually become the unmoving One. This unitive knowledge can be knowledge in the heights, or knowledge in the fulness, or knowledge simultaneously in the heights and the fulness. Spiritual knowledge exclusively in the heights of the soul was rejected by Mahayana Buddhism as inadequate. The similar rejection of quietism within the Christian tradition will be touched upon in the section, Contemplation and Action. Meanwhile it is interesting to find that the problem which aroused such acrimonious debate throughout seventeenth-century Europe had arisen for the Buddhists at a considerably earlier epoch. But whereas in Catholic Europe the outcome of the battle over Molinos, Mme. Guyon and Fnelon was to all intents and purposes the extinction of mysticism for the best part of two centuries, in Asia the two parties were tolerant enough to agree to differ. Hinayana spirituality continued to explore the heights within, while the Mahayanist masters held up the ideal not of the Arhat, but of the Bodhisattva, and pointed the way to spiritual knowledge in its fulness as well as in its heights. What follows is a poetical account, by a Zen saint of the eighteenth century, of the state of those who have realized the Zen ideal.
Abiding with the non-particular which is in particulars,
--
Before going on to discuss the means whereby it is possible to come to the fulness as well as the height of spiritual knowledge, let us briefly consider the experience of those who have been privileged to behold the One in all things, but have made no efforts to perceive it within themselves. A great deal of interesting material on this subject may be found in Bucks Cosmic Consciousness. All that need be said here is that such cosmic consciousness may come unsought and is in the nature of what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace. One may have a gratuitous grace (the power of healing, for example, or foreknowledge) while in a state of mortal sin, and the gift is neither necessary to, nor sufficient for, salvation. At the best such sudden accessions of cosmic consciousness as are described by Buck are merely unusual invitations to further personal effort in the direction of the inner height as well as the external fulness of knowledge. In a great many cases the invitation is not accepted; the gift is prized for the ecstatic pleasure it brings; its coming is remembered nostalgically and, if the recipient happens to be a poet, written about with eloquenceas Byron, for example, wrote in a splendid passage of Childe Harold, as Wordsworth wrote in Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. In these matters no human being may presume to pass definitive judgment upon another human being; but it is at least permissible to say that, on the basis of the biographical evidence, there is no reason to suppose that either Wordsworth or Byron ever seriously did anything about the theophanies they described; nor is there any evidence that these theophanies were of themselves sufficient to transform their characters. That enormous egotism, to which De Quincey and Keats and Haydon bear witness, seems to have remained with Wordsworth to the end. And Byron was as fascinatingly and tragi-comically Byronic after he had beheld the One in all things as he was before.
In this context it is interesting to compare Wordsworth with another great nature lover and man of letters, St. Bernard. Let Nature be your teacher, says the first; and he goes on to affirm that
1.04 - Sounds, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some travellers wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
--
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. _Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!_ sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks.
Then_that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!_ echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and_bor-r-r-r-n!_ comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.
--
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any birds, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,think of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign birds note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and
Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale,a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,no gate,no front-yard, and no path to the civilized world!
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
clearly their links with primary concern stand out.... This rooting of poetic myth in primary concern
accounts for the fact that mythical themes, as distinct from individual myths or stories, are limited in
--
fermented a rich poetic literature to extract a different kind of verbal essence, and on a smaller scale the
same process can be seen in the New Testament.... The editorial work done on this earlier poetic
material was not an attempt to reduce it from poetry to a kind of plain prose sense, assuming that there is
193
--
a poetic and mythic presentation that takes us past myth to something else. In doing so it will elude
those who assume that myth means only something that did not happen.382
--
conceptual idioms, and ignored or denied the existence of poetic and imaginative thought. This attitude
continued into the twentieth century with I.A. Richardss Science and poetry, with its suggestion that
mythical thinking has been superseded by scientific thinking, and that consequently poets must confine
themselves to pseudo-statements. The early criticism of T.S. Eliot, though considerably more cautious
--
between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poete maudit, the attitude of
poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.448
1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Cybele, the Bacchic frenzy of Dionysos, the poetic frenzy in
spired by the Muses, the warrior frenzy of the god Ares (=Mars),
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The great determining force has been the example and the aggression of Germany; the example, because no other nation has so self-consciously, so methodically, so intelligently, and from the external point of view so successfully sought to find, to dynamise, to live itself and make the most of its own power of being; its aggression, because the very nature and declared watchwords of the attack have tended to arouse a defensive self-consciousness in the assailed and forced them to perceive what was the source of this tremendous strength and to perceive too that they themselves must seek consciously an answering strength in the same deeper sources. Germany was for the time the most remarkable present instance of a nation preparing for the subjective stage because it had, in the first place, a certain kind of visionunfortunately intellectual rather than illuminated and the courage to follow itunfortunately again a vital and intellectual rather than a spiritual hardihood,and, secondly, being master of its destinies, was able to order its own life so as to express its self-vision. We must not be misled by appearances into thinking that the strength of Germany was created by Bismarck or directed by the Kaiser Wilhelm II. Rather the appearance of Bismarck was in many respects a misfortune for the growing nation because his rude and powerful hand precipitated its subjectivity into form and action at too early a stage; a longer period of incubation might have produced results less disastrous to itself, if less violently stimulative to humanity. The real source of this great subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germanys statesmen and soldiers for the most part poor enough types of men but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music, is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of a subjective age.
This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organisers. It was the industry, the conscientious diligence, the fidelity to ideas, the honest and painstaking spirit of work for which the nation has been long famous. A people may be highly gifted in the subjective capacities, and yet if it neglects to cultivate this lower side of our complex nature, it will fail to build that bridge between the idea and imagination and the world of facts, between the vision and the force, which makes realisation possible; its higher powers may become a joy and inspiration to the world, but it will never take possession of its own world until it has learned the humbler lesson. In Germany the bridge was there, though it ran mostly through a dark tunnel with a gulf underneath; for there was no pure transmission from the subjective mind of the thinkers and singers to the objective mind of the scholars and organisers. The misapplication by Treitschke of the teaching of Nietzsche to national and international uses which would have profoundly disgusted the philosopher himself, is an example of this obscure transmission. But still a transmission there was. For more than a half-century Germany turned a deep eye of subjective introspection on herself and things and ideas in search of the truth of her own being and of the world, and for another half-century a patient eye of scientific research on the objective means for organising what she had or thought she had gained. And something was done, something indeed powerful and enormous, but also in certain directions, not in all, misshapen and disconcerting. Unfortunately, those directions were precisely the very central lines on which to go wrong is to miss the goal.
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Another complicated illness I was confronted with during this period was that of a sadhak. A typical Englishman, stiff but polite, a cultured, sensitive poet; the poor man had never enjoyed good health since his childhood and in later years was also mentally shaken. I had been treating him for chronic liver trouble, indigestion, etc., for some years before he had this illness. Either because of this, or by nature, he was none too optimistic. Besides, he had suffered from rheumatism and infantile paralysis too. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo knew his temperament very well and instructed me to look after him with a large consideration as they themselves had always done. He was turned into a fine poet by Sri Aurobindo's Force. I wonder how with such a poor health he managed to do Yoga. That, however, is none of my business. Failing to diagnose his illness, I called in other doctors, and as is often the case, opinions differed. Neither were there proper facilities for making specific tests in the hospital. He began to suffer from fever, jaundice, abscesses, joint pains, and a host of diverse complaints which made him extremely irritable. He pestered me like Socrates with all sorts of questions, the why and the how of his ailments, their remedy, and the last question, when would he be all right? I reported faithfully all this to the Mother and to Sri Aurobindo who would often side with him, appreciating his inquisitiveness and his refusal to gulp down docilely all that was given to him. When I told Sri Aurobindo that he would not allow his old dusty heaps of the journal, Manchester Guardian to be removed, Sri Aurobindo approved of his feelings. One day the Mother said, "Once when you were fanning Sri Aurobindo, I had a vision of the patient crying to you, 'Why don't you cure me?' "On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo had told me that the patient was disgusted with his ailing body and would like to leave it. We are made of many conflicting parts! My inner comment was: the Mother's occult sight could read all our movements. Only if she could always prescribe remedies! To that question Sri Aurobindo gave, in our correspondence, a rather evasive answer. He said, "Why do you want us to do your work?" Of course, I understood what he meant. There is a humorous episode connected with this patient's ailment, which will be interesting to note here. The Mother had advised me in my medical practice to develop the power of intuition. One of the methods I followed was to go into meditation and see, hear or feel something relating to a particular case. Now, in the present quandary, I tried the method; after a couple of failures, what I saw in the meditation was a brinjal! When I blurted it out to Sri Aurobindo and to my colleagues, they all roared with laughter. Thenceforth they would taunt me with "Nirod's brinjal intuition"!
To end the sad story: the case was not showing any improvement; one after another complications began to develop. Above all, his outer consciousness failed to respond actively to the Force. The Mother saw that the only way that could save the patient was to send him to Bangalore where he could be treated by an efficient German doctor well-known to us, Sri Aurobindo asked me to prepare a clear and complete history of the patient's malady, let the Mother hear it and then send it to the doctor. When it was ready, I read it out to both of them. Sri Aurobindo commented, "Excellent!" I felt gratified. On receiving the report the doctor came down to take the patient. He concurred with our view that it must be a case of septicaemia. When the patient was being sent off, the Mother came and stood on her terrace waiting a long time for him. At last the car came before her and she and the patient looked at each other for quite a while. He had a premonition that he would not come back.
1.04 - The First Circle, Limbo Virtuous Pagans and the Unbaptized. The Four Poets, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. The Noble Castle of Philosophy., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
object:1.04 - The First Circle, Limbo Virtuous Pagans and the Unbaptized. The Four poets, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. The Noble Castle of Philosophy.
Broke the deep lethargy within my head
--
Began the poet, pallid utterly;
"I will be first, and thou shalt second be."
--
"All honour be to the pre-eminent poet;
His shade returns again, that was departed."
--
That one is Homer, poet sovereign;
He who comes next is Horace, the satirist;
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The beliefs and conclusions of today are, in these rapid and unsettled times, seldom the beliefs and conclusions of tomorrow. In religion, in thought, in science, in literature we march daily over the bodies of dead theories to enthrone fresh syntheses and worship new illuminations. The realms of scholarship are hardly more quiet and secure than these troubled kingdoms; and in that realm nowhere is the soil so boggy, nowhere does scholastic ingenuity disport itself with such light fantastic footsteps over such a quaking morass of hardy conjecture and hasty generalisation as in the Sanscrit scholarship of the last century. But the Vedic question at least seemed to have been settled. It was agreedfirmly enough, it seemed that the Vedas were the sacred chants of a rude, primitive race of agriculturists sacrificing to very material gods for very material benefits with an elaborate but wholly meaningless & arbitrary ritual; the gods themselves were merely poetical personifications of cloud & rain & wind, lightning & dawn and the sky & fire to which the semi-savage Vedic mind attributed by crude personal analogy a personality and a presiding form, the Rishis were sacrificing priests of an invading Aryan race dwelling on the banks of the Panjab rivers, men without deep philosophical or exalted moral ideas, a race of frank cheerful Pagans seeking the good things of life, afraid of drought & night & various kinds of devils, sacrificing persistently & drinking vigorously, fighting the black Dravidians whom they called the Dasyus or robbers,crude prototypes these of Homeric Greek and Scandinavian Viking.All this with many details of the early civilisation were supposed to be supplied by a philological and therefore scientificexamination of the ancient text yielding as certain results as the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyph and Persian inscription. If there are hymns of a high moral fervour, of a remarkable philosophical depth & elevation, these are later compositions of a more sophisticated age. In the earlier hymns, the vocabulary, archaic and almost unintelligible, allows an adroit & industrious scholarship waving in its hand the magic wand of philology to conjure into it whatever meaning may be most suitable to modern beliefs or preferable to the European temperament. As for Vedanta, it can be no clue to the meaning of the mantras, because the Upanishads represent a spiritual revolt against Vedic naturalism & ceremonialism and not, as has been vainly imagined for some thousands of years, the fulfilment of Vedic truth. Since then, some of these positions have been severely shaken. European Science has rudely scouted the claims of Comparative Philology to rank as a Science; European Ethnology has dismissed the Aryo-Dravidian theory of the philologist & tends to see in the Indian people a single homogeneous race; it has been trenchantly suggested and plausibly upheld that the Vedas themselves offer no evidence that the Indian races were ever outside India but even prove the contraryan advance from the south and not from the north. These theories have not only been suggested & widely approved but are gaining upon the general mind. Alone in all this overthrow the European account of Vedic religion & Vedic civilisation remains as yet intact & unchallenged by any serious questioning. Even in the minds of the Indian people, with their ancient reverence for Veda, the Europeans have effected an entire divorce between Veda & Vedanta. The consistent religious development of India has been theosophic, mystical, Vedantic. Its beginnings are now supposed to have been naturalistic, materialistic, Pagan, almost Graeco-Roman. No satisfactory explanation has been given of this strange transformation in the soul of a people, and it is not surprising that theories should have been started attri buting to Vedanta & Brahmavada a Dravidian origin. Brahmavada was, some have confidently asserted, part of the intellectual property taken over by the Aryan conquerors from the more civilised races they dispossessed. The next step in this scholars progress might well be some counterpart of Sergis Mediterranean theory,an original dark, pacific, philosophic & civilised race overwhelmed by a fairskinned & warlike horde of Aryan savages.
The object of this book is to suggest a prior possibility,that the whole European theory may be from beginning to end a prodigious error. The confident presumption that religion started in fairly recent times with the terrors of the savage, passed through stages of Animism & Nature worship & resulted variously in Paganism, monotheism or the Vedanta has stood in the way of any extension of scepticism to this province of Vedic enquiry. I dispute the presumption and deny the conclusions drawn from it. Before I admit it, I must be satisfied that a system of pure Nature worship ever existed. I cannot accept as evidence Sun & Star myth theories which, as a play of ingenious scholastic fancy, may attract the imagination, but are too haphazard, too easily self-contented, too ill-combined & inconsequent to satisfy the scientific reason. No other religion of which there is any undisputed record or sure observation, can be defined as a system of pure Nature worship. Even the savage-races have had the conception of gods & spirits who are other than personified natural phenomena. At the lowest they have Animism & the worship of spirits, ghosts & devils. Ancestor-worship & the cult of snake & four-footed animal seem to have been quite as old as any Nature-gods with whom research has made us acquainted. In all probability the Python was worshipped long before Apollo. It is therefore evident that even in the lowest religious strata the impulse to personify Nature-phenomena is not the ruling cult-idea of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that at any time this element should have so far prevailed as to cast out all the others so as to create a type of cult confined within a pure & rigid naturalism. Man has always seen in the universe the replica of himself. Unless therefore the Vedic Rishis had no thought of their subjective being, no perception of intellectual and moral forces within themselves, it is a psychological impossibility that they should have detected divine forces behind the objective world but none behind the subjective.
These are negative and a priori considerations, but they are supported by more positive indications. The other Aryan religions which are most akin in conception to the Vedic and seem originally to have used the same names for their deities, present themselves to us even at their earliest vaguely historic stage as moralised religions. Their gods had not only distinct moral attri butes, but represented moral & subjective functions. Apollo is not only the god of the sun or of pestilencein Homer indeed Haelios (Saurya) & not Apollo is the Sun God but the divine master of prophecy and poetry; Athene has lost any naturalistic significance she may ever have had and is a pure moral force, the goddess of strong intelligence, force guided by brain; Ares is the lord of battles, not a storm wind; Artemis, if she is the Moon, is also goddess of the free hunting life and of virginity; Aphrodite is only the goddess of Love & Beauty There is therefore a strong moral element in the cult & there are clear subjective notions attached to the divine personalities. But this is not all. There was not only a moral element in the Greek religion as known & practised by the layman, there was also a mystic element and an esoteric belief & practice practised by the initiated. The mysteries of Eleusis, the Thracian rites connected with the name of Orpheus, the Phrygian worship of Cybele, even the Bacchic rites rested on a mystic symbolism which gave a deep internal meaning to the exterior circumstances of creed & cult. Nor was this a modern excrescence; for its origins were lost to the Greeks in a legendary antiquity. Indeed, if we took the trouble to understand alien & primitive mentalities instead of judging & interpreting them by our own standards, I think we should find an element of mysticism even in savage rites & beliefs. The question at any rate may fairly be put, Were the Vedic Rishis, thinkers of a race which has shown itself otherwise the greatest & earliest mystics & moralisers in historical times, the most obstinately spiritual, theosophic & metaphysical of nations, so far behind the Orphic & Homeric Greeks as to be wholly Pagan & naturalistic in their creed, or was their religion too moralised & subjective, were their ceremonies too supported by an esoteric symbolism?
The immediate or at any rate the earliest known successors of the Rishis, the compilers of the Brahmanas, the writers of theUpanishads give a clear & definite answer to this question.The Upanishads everywhere rest their highly spiritual & deeply mystic doctrines on the Veda.We read in the Isha Upanishad of Surya as the Sun God, but it is the Sun of spiritual illumination, of Agni as the Fire, but it is the inner fire that burns up all sin & crookedness. In the Kena Indra, Agni & Vayu seek to know the supreme Brahman and their greatness is estimated by the nearness with which they touched him,nedistham pasparsha. Uma the daughter of Himavan, the Woman, who reveals the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle & mystical of human scriptures, the gods & Titans are the masters, respectively, of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces & functions of sense, mind & intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the Vedic ritual, to their very syllables a profound significance is everywhere attached; several incidents related in the Upanishads show the deep sense then & before entertained that the sacrifices had a spiritual meaning which must be known if they were to be conducted with full profit or even with perfect safety. The Brahmanas everywhere are at pains to bring out a minute symbolism in the least circumstances of the ritual, in the clarified butter, the sacred grass, the dish, the ladle. Moreover, we see even in the earliest Upanishads already developed the firm outlines and minute details of an extraordinary psychology, physics, cosmology which demand an ancient development and centuries of Yogic practice and mystic speculation to account for their perfect form & clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the three Vyahritis, the five sheaths, the five (or seven) psychological strata, (bhumi, kshiti of the Vedas), the worlds that await us, the gods who help & the demons who hinder go back to Vedic origins.All this may be a later mystic misconception of the hymns & their ritual, but the other hypothesis of direct & genuine derivation is also possible. If there was no common origin, if Greek & Indian separated during the naturalistic period of the common religion supposed to be recorded in the Vedas it is surprising that even the little we know of Greek rites & mysteries should show us ideas coincident with those of Indian Tantra & Yoga.
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But even such a science, when completed, could not, owing to the paucity of our records be, by itself, a perfect guide. It would be necessary to discover, fix & take always into account the actual ideas, experiences and thought-atmosphere of the Vedic Rishis; for it is these things that give colour to the words of men and determine their use. The European translations represent the Vedic Rishis as cheerful semi-savages full of material ideas & longings, ceremonialists, naturalistic Pagans, poets endowed with an often gorgeous but always incoherent imagination, a rambling style and an inability either to think in connected fashion or to link their verses by that natural logic which all except children and the most rudimentary intellects observe. In the light of this conception they interpret Vedic words & evolve a meaning out of the verses. Sayana and the Indian scholars perceive in the Vedic Rishis ceremonialists & Puranists like themselves with an occasional scholastic & Vedantic bent; they interpret Vedic words and Vedic mantras accordingly. Wherever they can get words to mean priest, prayer, sacrifice, speech, rice, butter, milk, etc, they do so redundantly and decisively. It would be at least interesting to test the results of another hypothesis,that the Vedic thinkers were clear-thinking men with at least as clear an expression as ordinary poets have and at least as high ideas and as connected and logical a way of expressing themselvesallowing for the succinctness of poetical formsas is found in other religious poetry, say the Psalms or the Book of Job or St Pauls Epistles. But there is a better psychological test than any mere hypothesis. If it be found, as I hold it will be found, that a scientific & rational philological dealing with the text reveals to us poems not of mere ritual or Nature worship, but hymns full of psychological & philosophical religion expressed in relation to fixed practices & symbolic ceremonies, if we find that the common & persistent words of Veda, words such as vaja, vani, tuvi, ritam, radhas, rati, raya, rayi, uti, vahni etc,an almost endless list,are used so persistently because they expressed shades of meaning & fine psychological distinctions of great practical importance to the Vedic religion, that the Vedic gods were intelligently worshipped & the hymns intelligently constructed to express not incoherent poetical ideas but well-connected spiritual experiences,then the interpreter of Veda may test his rendering by repeating the Vedic experiences through Yoga & by testing & confirming them as a scientist tests and confirms the results of his predecessors. He may discover whether there are the same shades & distinctions, the same connections in his own psychological & spiritual experiences. If there are, he will have the psychological confirmation of his philological results.
Even this confirmation may not be sufficient. For although the new version may have the immense superiority of a clear depth & simplicity supported & confirmed by a minute & consistent scientific experimentation, although it may explain rationally & simply most or all of the passages which have baffled the older & the newer, the Eastern & the Western scholars, still the confirmation may be discounted as a personal test applied in the light of a previous conclusion. If, however, there is a historical confirmation as well, if it is found that Veda has exactly the same psychology & philosophy as Vedanta, Purana, Tantra & ancient & modern Yoga & all of them indicate the same Vedic results which we ourselves have discovered in our experience, then we may possess our souls in peace & say to ourselves that we have discovered the meaning of Veda; its true meaning if not all its significance. Nor need we be discouraged, if we have to disagree with Sayana & Yaska in the actual rendering of the hymns no less than with the Europeans. Neither of these great authorities can be held to be infallible. Yaska is an authority for the interpretation of Vedic words in his own age, but that age was already far subsequent to the Vedic & the sacred language of the hymns was already to him an ancient tongue. The Vedas are much more ancient than we usually suppose. Sayana represents the scholarship & traditions of a period not much anterior to our own. There is therefore no authoritative rendering of the hymns. The Veda remains its own best authority.
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Saraswati is known to us in the Purana,the Muse with her feet on the thousand leaved lotus of the mind, the goddess of thought, learning, poetry, of all that is high in mind and its knowledge. But, so far as we can understand from the Purana, she is the goddess of mind only, of intellect & imagination and their perceptions & inspirations. Things spiritual & the mightier supra-mental energies & illuminations belong not to her, but to other powers. Well, we meet Saraswati in the Vedas;and if she is the same goddess as our Puranic & modern protectress of learning & the arts, the Personality of the Intellect, then we have a starting pointwe know that the Vedic Rishis had other than naturalistic conceptions & could call to higher powers than the thunder-flash & the storm-wind. But there is a difficultySaraswati is the name of a river, of several rivers in India, for the very name means flowing, gliding or streaming, and the Europeans identify it with a river in the Punjab. We must be careful therefore, whenever we come across the name, to be sure which of these two is mentioned or invoked, the sweet-streaming Muse or the material river.
The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchchhanda Vaisvamitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invokedapparently in order to conduct an ordinary material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen,to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?
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It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Mahachamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being,therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth &ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat,the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam & ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihatSacchidananda objectivisedis the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth, the principle of infinite & divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things selfarranged; Brihat is full content & fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being & law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or half-illumined things of mind & sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true & self-existent. Nalpe sukham asti bhumaiva sukham. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness & constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power & peace. The harmony of creative power & peace, pravritti & nivritti, jana & shama, is the divine state which we feelas Wordsworth felt itwhen we go back to the brihat, the wide & infinite which, containing & contented with its works, says of it Sukritam, What I have made, is good. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smritisees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memoryjust as we say of a friend This is he and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselvesthough we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self-evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied & divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati & atmastha, confines itself to itself & does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satyapratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees,he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya,is in all things true. Truth is his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works & destinies from decay & dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas.The psychological conceptions of our remote forefa thers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought & experience that they may be a little difficult to follow & more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand & grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre & keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides & connects the human in us from the divine, & to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small & divided finite to that one, great & infinite, from this death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation & final aim of Veda & Vedanta.
We can now understand the intention of the Rishi in his last verse and the greatness of the climax to which he has been leading us. Saraswati is able to give impulsion to Truth and awaken to right thinking because she has access to the Maho Arnas, the great ocean. On that level of consciousness, we are usually it must be remembered asleep, sushupta. The chetana or waking consciousness has no access; it lies behind our active consciousness, is, as we might say, superconscious, for us, asleep. Saraswati brings it forward into active consciousness by means of the ketu or perceptive intelligence, that essential movement of mind which accepts & realises whatever is presented to it. To focus this ketu, this essential perception on the higher truth by drawing it away from the haphazard disorder of sensory data is the great aim of Yogic meditation. Saraswati by fixing essential perception on the satyam ritam brihat above makes ideal knowledge active and is able to inform it with all those plentiful movements of mind which she, dhiyavasu, vajebhir vajinivati, has prepared for the service of the Master of the sacrifice. She is able to govern all the movements of understanding without exception in their thousand diverse movements & give them the single impression of truth and right thinkingvisva dhiyo vi rajati. A governed & ordered activity of soul and mind, led by the Truth-illuminated intellect, is the aim of the sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda son of Viswamitra is offering to the Gods.
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Saraswati is not even here the goddess of speech whose sole function is to inspire & guide the singer in his hymn. In other passages she may be merely Bharati,theMuse. But here there are greater depths of thought & soul-experience. She has to do things which mere speech cannot do. And even if we were to take her here as the divine Muse, still the functions asked of her are too great, there is too little need of all these high intellectual motions, for a mere invitation to Rain&Star Gods to share in a pouring of the Soma-wine. She could do that without all this high intellectual & spiritual labour. Even, therefore, if it be a material sacrifice whichMadhuchchhanda is offering, its material aspects can be no more than symbolical. Unless indeed the rest of the hymn contradicts the intellectual & spiritual purport which we have discovered in these closing verses, fullon the face of them & accepting the plainest & most ordinary meaning for each single word in themof deep psychological knowledge, moral & spiritual aspiration & a supreme poetical art.
I do not propose to study the earlier verses of the hymn with the same care as we have expended on the closing dedication to Saraswati,that would lead me beyond my immediate purpose. A rapid glance through them to see whether they confirm or contradict our first results will be sufficient. There are three passages, also of three verses each, consecrated successively to the Aswins, Indra & the Visve Devah. I shall give briefly my own view of these three passages and the gods they invoke.
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We are no longer with Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitra. It is Medhatithi of the Kanwas who has taken the word, a soul of great clearness & calmness who is full of a sort of vibrating peace. Yet we find the same strain, the same fixed ideas, the same subjective purpose & spiritual aspiration. A few words here & there in my translation may be challenged and given a different meaning. Throughout the Veda there are words like radhas etc to which I have given a sense based on reasons of context & philology but which must be allowed to remain conjectural till I am able to take up publicly the detailed examination of the language & substance of the Rigveda. But we have sumati again and the ever recurring vaja, the dhartara charshaninam, holders of actions, & rayah which certainly meant felicity in the Veda. It is clear from the third verse that Varuna and Indra are called to share in the felicity of the poets soul,that felicity is his material of sacrifice,anukamam tarpayetham, he says, Delight in it to your hearts content; and again in the seventh shloka he tells them, Vam aham huve chitraya radhase, a phrase which, in view of verse 3, I can only translate I call you for rich and varied ecstasy; for it is evidently meant to describe that felicity, that heart-filling satisfaction which he has already offered in the third sloka. In return he asks them to give victory. Always in the Veda there is the idea of the spiritual battle as well as the outer struggles of life, the battle with the jealous forces of Nature, with Vala, the grudging guardian of light, with the great obscuring dragon Vritra & his hosts, with the thieving Panis, with all the many forces that oppose mans evolution & support limitation and evil. A great many of the words for sacrifice, mean also war and battle, in Sanscrit or in its kindred tongues.
Indra and Varuna are called to give victory, because both of them are samrat. The words samrat & swarat have in Veda an ascertained philosophical sense.One is swarat when, having self-mastery & self-knowledge, & being king over his whole system, physical, vital, mental & spiritual, free in his being, [one] is able to guide entirely the harmonious action of that being. Swarajya is spiritual Freedom. One is Samrat when one is master of the laws of being, ritam, rituh, vratani, and can therefore control all forces & creatures. Samrajya is divine Rule resembling the power of God over his world. Varuna especially is Samrat, master of the Law which he follows, governor of the heavens & all they contain, Raja Varuna, Varuna the King as he is often styled by Sunahshepa and other Rishis. He too, like Indra & Agni & the Visvadevas, is an upholder & supporter of mens actions, dharta charshaninam. Finally in the fifth sloka a distinction is drawn between Indra and Varuna of great importance for our purpose. The Rishi wishes, by their protection, to rise to the height of the inner Energies (yuvaku shachinam) and have the full vigour of right thoughts (yuvaku sumatinam) because they give then that fullness of inner plenty (vajadavnam) which is the first condition of enduring calm & perfection & then he says, Indrah sahasradavnam, Varunah shansyanam kratur bhavati ukthyah. Indra is the master-strength, desirable indeed, (ukthya, an object of prayer, of longing and aspiration) of one class of those boons (vara, varyani) for which the Rishis praise him, Varuna is the master-strength, equally desirable, of another class of these Vedic blessings. Those which Indra brings, give force, sahasram, the forceful being that is strong to endure & strong to overcome; those that attend the grace of Varuna are of a loftier & more ample description, they are shansya. The word shansa is frequently used; it is one of the fixed terms of Veda. Shall we translate it praise, the sense most suitable to the ritual explanation, the sense which the finally dominant ritualistic school gave to so many of the fixed terms of Veda? In that case Varuna must be urushansa, because he is widely praised, Agni narashansa because he is strongly praised or praised by men,ought not a wicked or cruel man to be nrishansa because he is praised by men?the Rishis call repeatedly on the gods to protect their praise, & Varuna here must be master of things that are praiseworthy. But these renderings can only be accepted, if we consent to the theory of the Rishis as semi-savage poets, feeble of brain, vague in speech, pointless in their style, using language for barbaric ornament rather than to express ideas. Here for instance there is a very powerful indicated contrast, indicated by the grammatical structure, the order & the rhythm, by the singular kratur bhavati, by the separation of Indra & Varuna who have hitherto been coupled, by the assignment of each governing nominative to its governed genitive and a careful balanced order of words, first giving the master Indra then his province sahasradavnam, exactly balancing them in the second half of the first line the master Varuna & then his province shansyanam, and the contrast thus pointed, in the closing pada of the Gayatri all the words that in their application are common at once to all these four separated & contrasted words in the first line. Here is no careless writer, but a style careful, full of economy, reserve, point, force, and the thought must surely correspond. But what is the contrast forced on us with such a marshalling of the stylists resources? That Indras boons are force-giving, Varunas praiseworthy, excellent, auspicious, what you will? There is not only a pointless contrast, but no contrast at all. No, shansa & shansya must be important, definite, pregnant Vedic terms expressing some prominent idea of the Vedic system. I shall show elsewhere that shansa is in its essential meaning self-expression, the bringing out of our sat or being that which is latent in it and manifesting it in our nature, in speech, in our general impulse & action. It has the connotation of self-expression, aspiration, temperament, expression of our ideas in speech; then divulgation, publication, praiseor in another direction, cursing. Varuna is urushansa because he is the master of wide self-expression, wide aspirations, a wide, calm & spacious temperament, Agni narashansa because he is master of strong self-expression, strong aspirations, a prevailing, forceful & masterful temperament;nrishansa had originally the same sense, but was afterwards diverted to express the fault to which such a temper is prone,tyranny, wrath & cruelty; the Rishis call to the gods to protect their shansa, that which by their yoga & yajna they have been able to bring out in themselves of being, faculty, power, joy,their self-expression. Similarly, shansya here means all that belongs to self-expression, all that is wide, noble, ample in the growth of a soul. It will follow from this rendering that Indra is a god of force, Varuna rather a god of being and as it appears from other epithets, of being when it is calm, noble, wide, self-knowing, self-mastering, moving freely in harmony with the Law of things because it is aware of that Law and accepts it. In that acceptance is his mighty strength; therefore is he even more than the gods of force the king, the giver of internal & external victory, rule, empire, samrajya to his votaries. This is Varuna.
We see the results & the conditions of the action ofVaruna in the four remaining verses. By their protection we have safety from attack, sanema, safety for our shansa, our rayah, our radhas, by the force of Indra, by the protecting greatness of Varuna against which passion & disturbance cast themselves in vain, only to be destroyed. This safety & this settled ananda or delight, we use for deep meditation, ni dhimahi, we go deep into ourselves and the object we have in view in our meditation is prarechanam, the Greek katharsis, the cleansing of the system mental, bodily, vital, of all that is impure, defective, disturbing, inharmonious. Syad uta prarechanam! In this work of purification we are sure to be obstructed by the powers that oppose all healthful change; but Indra & Varuna are to give us victory, jigyushas kritam. The final result of the successful purification is described in the eighth sloka. The powers of the understanding, its various faculties & movements, dhiyah, delivered from self-will & rebellion, become obedient to Indra & Varuna; obedient to Varuna, they move according to the truth & law, the ritam; obedient to Indra they fulfil with that passivity in activity, which we seek by Yoga, all the works to which mental force can apply itself when it is in harmony with Varuna & the ritam. The result is sharma, peace. Nothing is more remarkable in the Veda than the exactness with which hymn after hymn describes with a marvellous simplicity & lucidity the physical & psychological processes through which Indian Yoga proceeds. The process, the progression, the successive movements of the soul here described are exactly what the Yogin experiences today so many thousands of years after the Veda was revealed. No wonder, it is regarded as eternal truth, not the expression of any particular mind, not paurusheya but impersonal, divine & revealed.
1.04 - The Origin and Development of Poetry., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
object:1.04 - The Origin and Development of poetry.
poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.
Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry.
poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited,--his own Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate metre was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse.
As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy. But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art.
Whether Tragedy has as yet perfected its proper types or not; and whether it is to be judged in itself, or in relation also to the audience,--this raises another question. Be that as it may, Tragedy--as also Comedy--was at first mere improvisation. The one originated with the authors of the Dithyramb, the other with those of the phallic songs, which are still in use in many of our cities. Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed.
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Moreover, it was not till late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of Tragedy. The iambic measure then replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the Satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing. Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure.
For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation. The additions to the number of 'episodes' or acts, and the other accessories of which tradition; tells, must be taken as already described; for to discuss them in detail would, doubtless, be a large undertaking.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The alchemical conception of the universal Mercury was that of a flowing, shifting, and unstable principle, ever changing. This may account for the baboon or monkey ever in attendance upon Thoth, for the monkey is restless, ever moving, and never still, typifying the human Ruach, which must be quieted. The Norwegian Odin - the infinite wanderer, would possibly be attri buted here for precisely this reason. He is the spirit of life who, according to the legends, does not create the world himself, but only plans and arranges it. All knowledge issues from him, and he too is the inventor of poetry and the Norse runes.
Its magical weapon is the Caduceus wand, which has particular reference to the phenomenon of Kundalini arising in the course of Yoga practices, particularly
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Msenads of poetry and mythology, among more beautiful proofs of their superhuman character, have always to tear bulls in pieces and taste of the blood. The reader will also recall to mind the fair promise of Lord Dunsany's most interesting story, The Blessing of Pan.
In India we see the sacred bull revered as typifying Shiva in his creative aspect ; also as glyphed in their temples by an erect Lingam. Here, the Goddess of Marriage, and
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Its plants are the Red Poppy and Hibiscus. Knowing the above attri butions one well understands and feels the plaintive cry of the poet : " Crown me with poppy and hibiscus ". The jewel of this Path is the fire Opal, and its perfumes Olibanum and all fiery odours. The Sepher
Yetsirah title is " The Perpetual Intelligence ".
1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
its archetypal context- a task that is usually discharged by poets
and prophets. Thus Holderlin, in his "Hymn to Liberty," lets
1.04 - THE STUDY (The Compact), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
Go, league thyself with a poet,
Give the rein to his imagination,
1.04 - Vital Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Vital education is greatly aided by stress on different kinds of fine arts and crafts. Sri Aurobindo has written at length on the contri bution that Art can make to the integral education in his important book, "The National Value of Art". He has pointed out that the first and the lowest use of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the intellectual and the third and the highest is the spiritual. He has even stated that music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movement purified, deep and harmonious. He has added, "These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character. They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilizing forces."1
A great lesson in vital education is to develop the will of the individual and to encourage the exercise of the will in which what is valued most is not the result, but application and doing one's best.
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And this chaos was already an admirable harmony in comparison with the greater chaos which preceded it, just as the actual existing order hymned by the poets of Nature is an impossible chaos compared with the more perfect order that is yet to be born.
Thus all that is in actuality must first be in potentiality. All that is, virtually was. Nothing can be in effect and result which was not in some way and some form in the origin of things. The phenomenon only manifests what was before concealed.
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be ones own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any projected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same capacity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil. All this has been summed up in Augustines formula: Love, and do what you like. Among the later elaborations of the Augustinian theme we may cite the following from the writings of John Everard, one of those spiritually minded seventeenth-century divines whose teachings fell on the deaf ears of warring factions and, when the revolution and the military dictatorship were at an end, on the even deafer ears of Restoration clergymen and their successors in the Augustan age. (Just how deaf those ears could be we may judge by what Swift wrote of his beloved and morally perfect Houyhnhnms. The subject matter of their conversations, as of their poetry, consisted of such things as friendship and benevolence, the visible operations of nature or ancient traditions; the bounds and limits of virtue, the unerring rules of reason. Never once do the ideas of God, or charity, or deliverance engage their minds. Which shows sufficiently clearly what the Dean of St. Patricks thought of the religion by which he made his money.)
Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can! Just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, You are at liberty to beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to.
1.05 - Definition of the Ludicrous, and a brief sketch of the rise of Comedy., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
The successive changes through which Tragedy passed, and the authors of these changes, are well known, whereas Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously. It was late before the Archon granted a comic chorus to a poet; the performers were till then voluntary. Comedy had already taken definite shape when comic poets, distinctively so called, are heard of. Who furnished it with masks, or prologues, or increased the number of actors,--these and other similar details remain unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers Crates was the first who, abandoning the 'iambic' or lampooning form, generalised his themes and plots.
Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then, is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in Tragedy as in Epic poetry.
Of their constituent parts some are common to both, some peculiar to Tragedy, whoever, therefore, knows what is good or bad Tragedy, knows also about Epic poetry. All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem.
author class:Aristotle
1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
From what has been said, it naturally follows that we cannot be taught to love, appreciate, and assimilate religion everywhere and by everybody. The "books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything" is all very true as a poetical figure: but nothing can impart to a man a single grain of truth unless he has the undeveloped germs of it in himself. To whom do the stones and brooks preach sermons? To the human soul, the lotus of whose inner holy shrine is already quick with life.
And the light which causes the beautiful opening out of this lotus comes always from the good and wise teacher. When the heart has thus been opened, it becomes fit to receive teaching from the stones or the brooks, the stars, or the sun, or the moon, or from any thing which has its existence in our divine universe; but the unopened heart will see in them nothing but mere stones or mere brooks. A blind man may go to a museum, but he will not profit by it in any way; his eyes must be opened first, and then alone he will be able to learn what the things in the museum can teach.
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the next hymn the word ritam does not occur, but the continual refrain of its strophes is the cognate word ritunpibartun, Medhatithi cries to each of the gods in turn,ritun yajnam sh the .. ritubhir ishyata, pibatam ritun yajnavhas, ritun yajnanr asi. Ritu is supposed to have here & elsewhere its classical & modern significance, a season of the year; the ritwik is the priest who sacrifices in the right season; the gods are invited to drink the soma according to the season! It may be so, but the rendering seems to me to make all the phrases of this hymn strangely awkward & improbable. Medhatithi invites Indra to drink Soma by the season, Mitra & Varuna are to taste the sacrifice, this single sacrifice offered by this son of Kanwa, by the season; in the same single sacrifice the priests or the gods are to be impelled by the seasons, by many seasons on a single sacrificial occasion! the Aswins are to drink the Soma by the sacrifice-supporting season! To Agni it is said, by the season thou art leader of the sacrifice. Are such expressions at all probable or even possible in the mouth of a poet using freely the natural language of his age? Are they not rather the clumsy constructions of the scholar drawn to misinterpret his text by the false clue of a later & inapplicable meaning of the central word ritu? But if we suppose the sacrifice to be symbolic &, as ritam means ideal truth in general, so ritu to mean that truth in its ordered application, the ideal law of thought, feeling or action, then this impossible awkwardness vanishes & gives place to a natural construction & a lucid & profound significance. Indra is to drink the wine of immortality according to or by the force of the ideal law, by that ideal law Varuna &Mitra are to enjoy the offering of Ananda of the human mind & the human activity, the gods are to be impelled in their functioning ritubhih, by the ideal laws of the truth,the plural used, in the ordinary manner of the Veda, to express the particular actions of the law of truth, the singular its general action. It is the ideal law that supports the human offering of our activities to the divine life above us, ritun yajnavhas; by the force of the law of Truth Agni leads the sacrifice to its goal.
In this suggestive & significant hymn packed full of the details of the Vedic sacrificial symbolism we again come across Daksha in close connection with Mitra, Varuna & the Truth.
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The second verse neither confirms as yet nor contradicts this initial suggestion. These three great gods, it says, are to the mortal as a multitude of arms which bring to him his desires & fill him with an abundant fullness and protect him from any who may will to do him hurt, rishah; fed with that fullness he grows until he is sarvah, complete in every part of his being(that is to say, if we admit the sense of a spiritual protection and a spiritual activity, in knowledge, in power, in joy, in mental, vital & bodily fullness)and by the efficacy of that protection he enjoys all this fullness & completeness unhurt. No part of it is maimed by the enemies of man, whose activities do him hurt, the Vritras, Atris, Vrikas, the Coverer on the heights, the devourer in the night, the tearer on the path.We may note in passing how important [it] is to render every Vedic word by its exact value; rish & dwish both mean enemy; but if we render them by one word, we lose the fine shade of meaning to which the poet himself calls our attention by the collocation pnti rishaharishta edhate. We see also the same care of style in the collocation sarva edhate, where, as it seems to me, it is clearly suggested that the completeness is the result of the prosperous growth, we have again the fine care & balance with which the causes pipratipnti are answered by the effects arishtahedhate. There is even a good literary reason of great subtlety & yet perfect force for the order of the words & the exact place of each word in the order. In this simple, easy & yet faultless balance & symmetry a great number of the Vedic hymns represent exactly in poetry the same spirit & style as the Greek temple or the Greek design in architecture & painting. Nor can anyone who neglects to notice it & give full value to it, catch rightly, fully & with precision the sense of the Vedic writings.
In the third verse we come across the first confirmation of the spiritual purport of the hymn. The protected of Varuna, Mitra & Aryama the plural is now used to generalise the idea more decisivelyare travellers to a moral & spiritual goal, nayanti durit tirah. It follows that the durgni, the obstacles in the path are moral & spiritual obstacles, not material impediments. It follows equally that the dwishah, the haters, are spiritual enemies, not human; for there would be no sense or appropriateness in the scattering of human enemies by Varuna as a condition of the seeker after Truth & Rights reaching a state of sinlessness. It is the spiritual, moral & mental obstacles, the spiritual beings & forces who are opposed to the souls perfection, Brahmadwishah, whom Varuna, Mitra & Aryama remove from the path of their worshippers. They smite them & scatter them utterly, vi durg vi dwishah,the particle twice repeated in order to emphasise the entire clearance of the path; they scatter them in front,not allowing even the least struggle to be engaged before their intervention, but going in front of the worshippers & maintaining a clear way, suga anrikshara, in which they can pass not only without hurt, but without battle. The image of the sins, the durit is that of an army besetting the way which is scattered to all sides by the divine vanguard & is compelled beyond striking distance. The armed pilgrims of the Right pass on & through & not an arrow falls across their road. The three great Kings of heaven & their hosts, rjnah, have passed before & secured the great passage for the favoured mortal.
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In this simple, noble & striking hymn we arrive at a number of certainties about the ideas of the Vedic Rishis & usual images of their poetry which are of the last importance to our inquiry. First we see that the ascension or the journey of the human soul to a state of divine Truth is among the chief objects of the prayers & sacrifices of the Veda. Secondly, we see that this Truth is not merely the simple primitive conception of truth-speaking, but a condition of consciousness consisting in delight & resulting in a perfect spontaneous & free activity in which there is no falsehood or error; it is a state of divine nature, the Vedantic amritam. Thirdly, we see that this activity of self-perfection, the sadhana of modern Yoga, is represented in the Veda under the image of a journey or of a battle or both in one image. It is a struggle to advance beset by pitfalls & difficult passages, assailed & beset by hostile spiritual forces, the enemies, hurters or destroyers. Whenever therefore we have the image of a battle or a journey, we have henceforth the right to enquire whether it is not in every case the symbol of this great spiritual & psychological process. Fourthly we see that the Vedic sacrifice is in some hymns & may be in all a symbol of the same purport. It is an activity offered to the gods, led by them in this path, directed towards the attainment of the divine Truth-Consciousness & Truth-Life &, presumably, assailed by the same spiritual enemies. Fifthly, we find that words like vasu & tokam, representing the result of the sacrifice, & usually understood as material wealth & children, are used here, must presumably be used in passages & may, possibly, be used in all in a symbolic sense to express by a concrete figure psychological conceptions like Christs treasure laid up in heaven or the common image of the children of ones brain or of ones works. We have in fact, provided always our conclusions are confirmed by the evidence of other hymns, the decisive clue to the Secret of the Veda.
Sri Aurobindo wrote the following note at the top of a later page of the manuscript.It would seem to have been intended for insertion here: (nayath nara dity I shall take up the discussion of the proper sense of nara in another context, to avoid useless repetition I omit it here).
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
history, and that it is in the more poetic language of the prophets that the true or symbolic meaning of
Egypt, wilderness and Promised Land emerges more clearly.
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Bellows, H.A. (1969). The poetic Edda. New York: Biblo and Tannen.
Berkowitz, C.D. & Senter, S.A. (1987). Characteristics of mother-infant interactions in nonorganic failure
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fictional narrative. poetics, 23, 53-74.
Obrist, P.A., Light, K.C., Langer, A.W., Grignolo, A., & McCubbin, J.A. (1978). Behavioural-cardiac
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The structure of the scenes and the visual images reveal a deeper wisdom than the... [ancient Greek poets
themselves could] put into words and concepts: the same is also observable in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for
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The poetic imagination constructs a cosmos of its own, a cosmos to be studied not simply as a map but as a world
of powerful conflicting forces. This imaginative cosmos is neither the objective environment studied by natural
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anything we have stumble over so far to indicate the quality of the poets authority, and to indicate also the link
between secular and sacred literature that is one of our main themes.
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the etymology of poet as maker, which implied for him an analogy between the poets creative power and the
creative power of God in making the world. He quotes Ovids phrase in the Fasti, est deus in nobis, which would
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Her pleasure is in continuing the game. Therefore the poet said: Out of a hundred thousand kites, at best but one or two break free;
And Thou dost laugh and clap Thy hands, O Mother, watching them!
1.05 - The Second Circle The Wanton. Minos. The Infernal Hurricane. Francesca da Rimini., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
And I began: "O poet, willingly
Speak would I to those two, who go together,
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Until the poet said to me: "What thinkest?"
When I made answer, I began: "Alas!
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion.
Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the utmost simplicity to the most curious richness. Or there are risings and fallings in the same hymn; it proceeds from the most ordinary conventions of the general symbol of sacrifice to a movement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others baffle us at first by their semblance of antique obscurity. But these differences of manner take nothing from the unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the fixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
merely a poetical image, but to the seers among the ancient
forefa thers it was a revelative symbol of the unrevealed ...
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The great Persian mystical poet, Rumi, saw the hu
man otherwise but that was still in what the West calls
1.06 - Definition of Tragedy., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Of the poetry which imitates in hexameter verse, and of Comedy, we will speak hereafter. Let us now discuss Tragedy, resuming its formal definition, as resulting from what has been already said.
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By 'language embellished,' I mean language into which rhythm, 'harmony,' and song enter. By 'the several kinds in separate parts,' I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.
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And these complete the list. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought.
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.
The tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true. It is the same in painting; and here lies the difference between Zeuxis and Polygnotus.
Polygnotus delineates character well: the style of Zeuxis is devoid of ethical quality. Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional: interest in Tragedy Peripeteia or
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It is the same with almost all the early poets.
The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.
Third in order is Thought,--that is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances. In the case of oratory, this is the function of the Political art and of the art of rhetoric: and so indeed the older poets make their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians.
Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character. Thought, on the other hand, is found where something is proved to be, or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated.
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The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.
author class:Aristotle
1.06 - Dhyana and Samadhi, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
All ethics, all human action and all human thought, hang upon this one idea of unselfishness. The whole idea of human life can be put into that one word, unselfishness. Why should we be unselfish? Where is the necessity, the force, the power, of my being unselfish? You call yourself a rational man, a utilitarian; but if you do not show me a reason for utility, I say you are irrational. Show me the reason why I should not be selfish. To ask one to be unselfish may be good as poetry, but poetry is not reason. Show me a reason. Why shall I be unselfish, and why be good? Because Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so say so does not weigh with me. Where is the utility of my being unselfish? My utility is to be selfish if utility means the greatest amount of happiness. What is the answer? The utilitarian can never give it. The answer is that this world is only one drop in an infinite ocean, one link in an infinite chain. Where did those that preached unselfishness, and taught it to the human race, get this idea? We know it is not instinctive; the animals, which have instinct, do not know it. Neither is it reason; reason does not know anything about these ideas. Whence then did they come?
We find, in studying history, one fact held in common by all the great teachers of religion the world ever had. They all claim to have got their truths from beyond, only many of them did not know where they got them from. For instance, one would say that an angel came down in the form of a human being, with wings, and said to him, "Hear, O man, this is the message." Another says that a Deva, a bright being, appeared to him. A third says he dreamed that his ancestor came and told him certain things. He did not know anything beyond that. But this is common that all claim that this knowledge has come to them from beyond, not through their reasoning power. What does the science of Yoga teach? It teaches that they were right in claiming that all this knowledge came to them from beyond reasoning, but that it came from within themselves.
1.06 - Dhyana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
3:They exhaust the possibilities of poetry to declare what is demonstrably untrue. For example, we find in the Shiva Sanhita that "he who daily contemplates on this lotus of the heart is eagerly desired by the daughters of Gods, has clairaudience, clairvoyance, and can walk in the air." Another person "can make gold, discover medicine for disease, and see hidden treasures." All this is filth. What is the curse upon religion that its tenets must always be associated with every kind of extravagance and falsehood?
4:There is one exception; it is the A.'.A.'., whose members are extremely careful to make no statement at all that cannot be verified in the usual manner; or where this is not easy, at least avoid anything like a dogmatic statement. In Their second book of practical instruction, Liber O, occur these words:
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12:All the poetic faculties and all the emotional faculties are thrown into a sort of ecstasy by an occurrence which overthrows the mind, and makes the rest of life seem absolutely worthless in comparison.
13:Good literature is principally a matter of clear observation and good judgment expressed in the simplest way. For this reason none of the great events of history (such as earthquakes and battles) have been well described by eye-witnesses, unless those eye-witnesses were out of danger. But even when one has become accustomed to Dhyana by constant repetition, no words seem adequate.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Acton, the learned Catholic historian, was of opinion that all great men are bad; Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic, thought that to seek for union with God while occupying a throne was an undertaking hardly less senseless than looking for camels among the chimney pots. A slightly more optimistic note is sounded by St. Franois de Sales, whose views on the matter were recorded by his Boswellizing disciple, the young Bishop of Belley.
Mon Pre, I said one day, how is it possible for those who are themselves high in office to practice the virtue of obedience?
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other than its own small earth-gods; it aspires perhaps to a greater comfort, order, pleasure, but asks for no uplifting and no spiritual deliverance. At the centre we meet a stronger Will of life with a greater gusto, but it is a blinded Daemon, a perverted spirit and exults in the very elements that make of life a striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring melodrama of this mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture.
It loves these things and would have more and more of them or, even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept or joy in nothing else; it hates and revolts against higher things and in its fury would trample, tear or crucify any diviner Power that has the presumption to offer to make life pure, luminous and happy and snatch from its lips the fiery brew of that exciting mixture. Another Will-in-Life there is that is ready to follow the ameliorating ideal Mind and is allured by its offer to extract some harmony, beauty, light, nobler order out of life, but this is a smaller part of the vital nature and can be easily overpowered by its more violent or darker duller yoke-comrades; nor does it readily lend itself to a call higher than that of the
1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
They say that they believe the Gospel to contain poetical matters
which are not true. 57
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esse poetica quae non sunt vera." (Hahn, II, pp. 77gf.)
him and his adherents to cherish such bold expectations as the
1.06 - WITCHES KITCHEN, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
They're poets, genuine and sincere.
(The caldron, which the SHE-APE has up to this time neglected
1.070 - The Seven Stages of Perfection, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The first stage is supposed to be the detection of the defect in the objects or things: there is something wrong with things, and they are not as they appear to be. This is the first awareness that arises in a person. Things are not what they seem, as the poet said. Even the best things are not really what they are. They appear to be best under certain conditions. The valuable things, the worthy things, the virtuous things, the beautiful things all these are conditionally valid, and they are not valid in their essence. That the objects of sense, the things of the world, are constituted of a nature essentially different from what they appear to the senses and the mind is an awareness that arises in the discriminating, and not in all people. Crass perception takes the world for granted, and people run after things as moths run to fire, not knowing that it is their destruction. The awareness arises, pointing out that there is some mystery behind things which is quite different from the colour and the shape of things visible to the senses that there is pain in this world, and it is not pleasure. Pain is rooted behind the so-called pleasure of the world. Sorrow is to follow all the joys of the world, one day or the other. The first step is the awareness or discovery that pain is present and it cannot be avoided under any circumstance as long as things continue to be in the present set-up.
The second stage is the discovery that there is a cause of this pain, that it has not come suddenly from the blue. How has this pain come this suffering, this sorrow? What is the reason for this defect behind everything? There is a reason. Without a cause, there is no effect. The discovery of the cause of this troublesome situation is the second stage of knowledge. That is a greater control that we gain over our situation. When we know that there is some trouble, and we do not know how the trouble has arisen, we are in a difficulty. But the difficulty is a little bit ameliorated when the cause of it is known, because we feel a confidence that, after all, this is the cause, and we shall try to tackle it. So, in the second stage of awareness there is a recognition of the causal background of the troubles of life, the pains of experience.
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
contemporary poet, which were chanted in public and sung in private:
"Of all the gods the greatest and the dearest
1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The word Go in the Vedas appears to bear two ordinary meanings, first, cow, secondly, ray, light or lustre. In the hymns of Madhuchchhanda it occurs 6 times, in five hymns. It occurs twice in the fourth hymn addressed to Indra in the first three verses which are all of them important for the discovery of the proper sense of the word as it is used in this passage. In the third verse which is the key to the passage, we find the prayer Then may we know (of) thy ultimate good thoughts. Then may we know. When? as a consequence to what? Obviously as a consequence to the result of the second verse, which I translate Come to us, O bringer out of the nectar (savana), thou the Soma-drinker; drink of the ecstatic Soma wine, a giver of illumination, enraptured or in better English bringing out the sense & association of the words, Come to us, O thou who art a distiller of the nectar, thou, the Soma-drinker, drink of the impetuously ecstatic Soma wine & be in the rapture of its intoxication our giver of illuminating light. Then may we know thy ultimate perceptions of the intellect. Pass us not byO come! Id lays emphasis on goda as the capacity in which, the purpose for which Indra is to drink. Revato and madah give the conditions under which Indra becomes a giver of illumination, the rushing & impetuous ecstasy produced by the Soma wine. It is then that men know the ultimate perceptions of mind, the highest realisations that can be given by the intellect when Indra, lord of mental force & power, is full of the ecstasy of the immortalising juice. This clear & easy sense being fixed for these two verses, we can return to the first & discover its connection with what follows. From sky to sky, its Rishi says to Indra, thou callest forth for uti, (for favour or kindness, as the ordinary interpretation would have it or for manifestation, expansion in being, as I suggest), the maker of beautiful forms, (who, being compared with a cow, must be some goddess), who is like one that gives milk freely to the milker of the cows, or, as I suggest, who milks freely to the milker of the rays. Undoubtedly, sudugham goduhe may be translated, a good milch cow to the milker of the cows; undoubtedly the poet had this idea in his mind when he wrote. The goddess is in the simile a milch cow, Indra is the milker. In each of the skies (the lower, middle & higher) he calls to her & makes her bring out the beautiful forms which she reveals to the drinker of the Soma. But it is impossible, when we take the connection with the two following verses, to avoid seeing that he is taking advantage of the double sense of go, and that while in the simile Indra is goduh the cow-milker, in the subject of the comparison he is goduh, the bringer out of the illumination, the flashes of higher light which produce the beautiful forms by the power of the goddess. The goddess herself must be one who is habitually associated with illumination, either Ila or Mahi. To anyone acquainted with the processes of Yoga, the whole passage at once becomes perfectly clear & true. The forms are those beautiful & myriad images of things in all the three worlds, the three akashas, dyavi dyavi, which appear to the eye of the Yogin when mental force in the Yoga is at its height, the impetuous & joyous activity (revato madah) of the mingled Ananda and Mahas fills the brain with Ojas and the highest intellectual perceptions, those akin to the supra-rational revelation, become not only possible, but easy, common & multitudinous. The passage describes the condition in which the mind, whether by drinking the material wine, the Karanajal of the Tantrics, or, as I hold, by feeding on the internal amrita, is raised to its highest exalted condition, before it is taken up into mahas or karanam, (whether in the state of Samadhi or in the waking state of the man who has realised his mahan atma, his ideal self), a state in which it is full of revealing thoughts & revealing visions which descend to it from the supra-rational level of the mahat, luminous & unerring, sunrita gomati mahi, where all is Truth & Light. Uti is the state of manifestation in Sat, in being, when that conscious existence which we are is stimulated into intensity & produces easily to the waking consciousness states of existence, movements of knowledge, outpourings of bliss which ordinarily it holds guha, in the secret parts of being.
The next passage to which I shall turn is the eighth verse of the eighth hymn, also to Indra, in which occurs the expression , a passage which when taken in the plain and ordinary sense of the epithets sheds a great light on the nature of Mahi. Sunrita means really true and is opposed to anrita, false for in the early Aryan speech su and s would equally signify, well, good, very; and the euphonic n is of a very ancient type of sandhioriginally, it was probably no more than a strong anuswartraces of which can still be found in Tamil; in the case of su this n euphonic seems to have been dropped after the movement of the literary Aryan tongue towards the modern principle of Sandhi,a movement the imperfect progress of which we see in the Vedas; but by that time the form an, composed of privative a and the euphonic n, had become a recognised alternative form to a and the omission of the n would have left the meaning of words very ambiguous; therefore n was preserved in the negative form, omitted from the affirmative where its omission caused no inconvenience,for to write gni instead of anagni would be confusing, but to write svagni instead of sunagni would create no confusion. In the pair sunrita and anrita it is probable that the usage had become so confirmed, so much of an almost technical phraseology, that confirmed habit prevailed over new rule. The second meaning of the word is auspicious, derived from the idea good or beneficent in its regular action. The Vedic scholars give a third sense, quick, active; but this is probably due to confusion with an originally distinct word derived from the root , to move on rapidly, to be strong, swift, active from which we have to dance, & strong and a number of other derivatives, for although ri means to go, it does not appear that rita was used in the sense of motion or swiftness. In any case our choice (apart from unnecessary ingenuities) lies here between auspicious and true. If we take Mahi in the sense of earth, the first is its simplest & most natural significance.We shall have then to translate the earth auspicious (or might it mean true in the sense observing the law of the seasons), wide-watered, full of cows becomes like a ripe branch to the giver. This gives a clear connected sense, although gross and pedestrian and open to the objection that it has no natural and inevitable connection with the preceding verses. My objection is that sunrita and gomati seem to me to have in the Veda a different and deeper sense and that the whole passage becomes not only ennobled in sense, but clearer & more connected in sense if we give them that deeper significance. Gomatir ushasah in Kutsas hymn to the Dawn is certainly the luminous dawns; Saraswati in the third hymn who as chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam shines pervading all the actions of the understanding, certainly does so because she is the impeller to high truths, the awakener to right thoughts, clear perceptions and not because she is the impeller of things auspiciousa phrase which would have no sense or appropriateness to the context. Mahi is one of the three goddesses Ila, Saraswati and Mahi who are described as tisro devir mayobhuvah, the three goddesses born of delight or Ananda, and her companions being goddesses of knowledge, children of Mahas, she also must be a goddess of knowledge, not the earth; the word mahi also bears the sense of knowledge, intellect, and Mahas undoubtedly refers in many passages to the vijnana or supra-rational level of consciousness, the fourth Vyahriti of the Taittiriya Upanishad. What then prevents us from taking Mahi, here as there, in the sense of the goddess of suprarational knowledge or, if taken objectively, the world of Mahat? Nothing, except a tradition born in classical times when mahi was the earth and the new Nature-worship theory. In this sense I shall take it. I translate the line For thus Mahi the true, manifest in action, luminous becomes like a ripe branch to the giveror, again in better English, For thus Mahi the perfect in truth, manifesting herself in action, full of illumination, becomes as a ripe branch to the giver. For the Yogin again the sense is clear. All things are contained in the Mahat, derived from the Mahat, depend on theMahat, but we here in the movement of the alpam, have not our desire, are blinded & confined, enjoy an imperfect, erroneous & usually baffled & futile activity. It is only when we regain the movement of the Mahat, the large & uncontracted consciousness that comes from rising to the infinite,it is only then that we escape from this limitation. She is perfect in truth, full of illumination; error and ignorance disappear; she manifests herself virapshi in a wide & various activity; our activities are enlarged, our desires are fulfilled. The connection with the preceding stanzas becomes clear. The Vritras, the great obstructors & upholders of limitation, are slain by the help of Indra, by the result of the yajnartham karma, by alliance with the armed gods in mighty internal battle; Indra, the god within our mental force, manifests himself as supreme and full of the nature of ideal truth from which his greatness weaponed with the vajra, vidyut or electric principle, derives (mahitwam astu vajrine). The mind, instinct with amrita, is then full of equality, samata; it drinks in the flood of activity of all kinds as the sea takes in the rivers. For the condition then results in which the ideal consciousness Mahi is like a ripe branch to the giver, when all powers & expansions of being at once (without obstacle as the Vritras are slain) become active in consciousness as masterful and effective knowledge or awareness (chit). This is the process prayed for by the poet. The whole hymn becomes a consecutive & intelligible whole, a single thought worked out logically & coherently and relating with perfect accuracy of ensemble & detail to one of the commonest experiences of Yogic fulfilment. In both these passages the faithful adherence to the intimations of language, Vedantic idea & Yogic experience have shed a flood of light, illuminating the obscurity of the Vedas, bringing coherence into the incoherence of the naturalistic explanation, close & strict logic, great depth of meaning with great simplicity of expression, and, as I shall show when I take up the final interpretation of the separate hymns, a rational meaning & reason of existence in that particular place for each word & phrase and a faultless & inevitable connection with what goes before & with what goes after. It is worth noticing that by the naturalistic interpretation one can indeed generally make out a meaning, often a clear or fluent sense for the separate verses of the Veda, but the ensemble of the hymn has almost always about it an air bizarre, artificial, incoherent, almost purposeless, frequently illogical and self-contradictoryas in Max Mullers translation of the 39th hymn, Kanwas to the Maruts,never straightforward, self-assured & easy. One would expect in these primitive writers,if they are primitive,crudeness of belief perhaps, but still plainness of expression and a simple development of thought. One finds instead everything tortuous, rugged, gnarled, obscure, great emptiness with great pretentiousness of mind, a labour of diction & development which seems to be striving towards great things & effecting a nullity. The Vedic singers, in the modern version, have nothing to say and do not know how to say it. I sacrifice, you drink, you are fine fellows, dont hurt me or let others hurt me, hurt my enemies, make me safe & comfortablethis is practically all that the ten Mandalas have to say to the gods & it is astonishing that they should be utterly at a loss how to say it intelligibly. A system which yields such results must have at its root some radical falsity, some cardinal error.
I pass now to a third passage, also instructive, also full of that depth and fine knowledge of the movements of the higher consciousness which every Yogin must find in the Veda. It is in the 9th hymn of the Mandala and forms the seventh verse of that hymn. Sam gomad Indra vajavad asme prithu sravo brihat, visvayur dhehi akshitam. The only crucial question in this verse is the signification of sravas.With our modern ideas the sentence seems to us to demand that sravas should be translated here fame. Sravas is undoubtedly the same word as the Greek xo (originally xFo); it means a thing heard, rumour, report, & thence fame. If we take it in that sense, we shall have to translate Arrange for us, O universal life, a luminous and solid, wide & great fame unimpaired. I dismiss at once the idea that go & vaja can here signify cattle and food or wealth. A herded & fooded or wealthy fame to express a fame for wealth of cattle & food is a forceful turn of expression we might expect to find in Aeschylus or in Shakespeare; but I should hesitate, except in case of clear necessity, to admit it in the Veda or in any Sanscrit style of composition; for such expressions have always been alien to the Indian intellect. Our stylistic vagaries have been of another kind. But is luminous & solid fame much better? I shall suggest another meaning for sravas which will give as usual a deeper sense to the whole passage without our needing to depart by a hairs breadth from the etymological significance of the words. Sruti in Sanscrit is a technical term, originally, for the means by which Vedic knowledge is acquired, inspiration in the suprarational mind; srutam is the knowledge of Veda. Similarly, we have in Vedic Sanscrit the forms srut and sravas. I take srut to mean inspired knowledge in the act of reception, sravas the thing acquired by the reception, inspired knowledge. Gomad immediately assumes its usual meaning illuminated, full of illumination. Vaja I take throughout the Veda as a technical Vedic expression for that substantiality of being-consciousness which is the basis of all special manifestation of being & power, all utayah & vibhutayahit means by etymology extended being in force, va or v to exist or move in extension and the vocable j which always gives the idea of force or brilliance or decisiveness in action or manifestation or contact. I shall accept no meaning which is inconsistent with this fundamental significance. Moreover the tendency of the old commentators to make all possible words, vaja, ritam etc mean sacrifice or food, must be rejected,although a justification in etymology might always be made out for the effort. Vaja means substance in being, substance, plenty, strength, solidity, steadfastness. Here it obviously means full of substance, just as gomad full of luminousness,not in the sense arthavat, but with another & psychological connotation. I translate then, O Indra, life of all, order for us an inspired knowledge full of illumination & substance, wide & great and unimpaired. Anyone acquainted with Yoga will at once be struck by the peculiar & exact appropriateness of all these epithets; they will admit him at once by sympathy into the very heart of Madhuchchhandas experience & unite him in soul with that ancient son of Visvamitra. When Mahas, the supra-rational principle, begins with some clearness to work in Yoga, not on its own level, not swe dame, but in the mind, it works at first through the principle of Srutinot Smriti or Drishti, but this Sruti is feeble & limited in its range, it is not prithu; broken & scattered in its working even when the range is wide, not unlimited in continuity, not brihat; not pouring in a flood of light, not gomat, but coming as a flash in the darkness, often with a pale glimmer like the first feebleness of dawn; not supported by a strong steady force & foundation of being, Sat, in manifestation, not vajavad, but working without foundation, in a void, like secondh and glimpses of Sat in nothingness, in vacuum, in Asat; and, therefore, easily impaired, easily lost hold of, easily stolen by the Panis or the Vritras. All these defects Madhuchchhanda has noticed in his own experience; his prayer is for an inspired knowledge which shall be full & free & perfect, not marred even in a small degree by these deficiencies.
1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
It is my task in this chapter to give a factual account of the long process that led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final emergence the birth of the Golden Child. But I own that it is a formidable task. Though I had the unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic in its entire revised version, and had some small share in being its scribe, to try in retrospect to reconstruct the imposing edifice from such a distance in memory is indeed difficult, for there are many versions, plenty of revisions, additions, subtractions, emendations from which the final version was made. To give an accurate report of all this process is beyond my capacity. For I am not a scholar, and have no aptitude for research into old (or new) archives, neither did I ever dream that I should one day be called upon to render an account of what the Master had done, or left undone, through this poor mortal as his instrument. Had I not been helped by my esteemed and multi-capable friend Amal Kiran indefatigable researcher no less than a poet and by a young friend as assistant, my readers would have had to remain content with just a bare outline.
The apology submitted, let the rash venture begin. Savitri, according to Dinen Roy,[1] was started by Sri Aurobindo in Baroda. From all the extant versions, for there are quite a number, it appears that originally the scheme of the poem consisted of two parts: I Earth, II Beyond. The first part had four Books and the second had three Books and an epilogue.
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In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost intact because it had already the higher inspiration. Moreover, there have been made several successive revisions, each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."
Sri Aurobindo, sitting on the bed, used to dictate Savitri to Nirod.
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The next step in the development was his re-copying the entire three Books on big white sheets of paper, in two columns in fine handwriting. There is one date at the end of The Book of the Divine Mother: May 7, 1944, which suggests that the copying of the entire three Books had taken about a year. When this was completed I was called in. Perhaps because his eye-sight was getting dim, I was asked to read to him this final copy. Now began alterations and additions in my hand on the manuscript itself. I regret to say that they marred the clean beauty of the original, and I realise now that it was a brutal act of sacrilege on my part, tantamount to desecration of the carved images on the temple wall. But I cannot imagine either how else I could have inserted so many corrections and additions, one line, one word here, two there, more elsewhere, throughout the entire length. We know how prodigious were the corrections and revisions in so far as Savitri was concerned. One is simply amazed at the enormous pains he has taken to raise Savitri to his ideal of perfection. I wonder if any other poet can be compared with him in this respect. He gave me the example of Virgil who, it seems, wrote six lines in the morning, and went on correcting them during the rest of the day. Even so, his Aeneid runs not even half the length of the first three Books of Savitri. Along with all these revisions, Sri Aurobindo added, on separate small sheets of paper, long passages written in his own hand up to the Canto, The Kingdom of the Greater Mind, Book II. All this work was completed, I believe, by the end of 1944.
The next step was to make a fair copy of the entire revised work. I don't know why it was not given straightaway for typing. There was a talk between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo about it; Sri Aurobindo might have said that because of copious additions, typing by another person would not be possible. He himself could not make a fair copy. Then the Mother suggested my name and brought a thick blue ledgerlike book for the purpose. I needed two or three reminders from the Mother before I took up the work in right earnest. Every morning I used to sit on the floor behind the head of the bed, and leaning against the wall, start copying like a student of our old Sanskrit tols. Sri Aurobindo's footstool would serve as my table. The Mother would not fail to cast a glance at my good studentship. Though much of the poetry passed over my head, quite often the solar plexus would thrill at the sheer beauty of the images and expressions. The very first line made me gape with wonder. I don't remember if the copying and revision with Sri Aurobindo proceeded at the same time, or revision followed the entire copying. The Mother would make inquiries from time to time either, I thought, to make me abandon my jog-trot manner or because the newly started Press was clamouring for some publication from Sri Aurobindo. Especially now that people had come to know that after The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo was busy with Savitri, they were eagerly waiting for it. But they had to wait quite a long time, for after the revision, when the whole book was handed to the Mother, it was passed on to Nolini for being typed out. Then another revision of the typescript before it was ready for the Press! Again, I cannot swear if the typing was completed first before its revision or both went on at the same time. At any rate, the whole process went very slowly, since Sri Aurobindo would not be satisfied with Savitri done less than perfectly. Neither could we give much time to it, not, I think, more than an hour a day, sometimes even less. The Press began to bring it out in fascicules by Cantos from 1946. At all stages of revision, even on Press proofs, alterations, additions never stopped. It may be mentioned that the very first appearance of anything from Savitri in public was in the form of passages quoted in the essay "Sri Aurobindo: A New Age of Mystical poetry" by Amal, published in the Bombay Circle and later included as Part III in Amal's book: The poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo.
So far the account of the procedure which was followed for working on the three Books seems approximately correct. We have been considerably helped by some dates mentioned before in the account. But in what follows about the rest of the epic, I am afraid that the report cannot claim as much exactness owing to my lapse of memory. I can sum up the position obtained at this stage by quoting Sri Aurobindo's letter to Amal in 1946. After investigating all the documents available, we have come to the following conclusions about the rest of the Books. Book IV, The Book of Birth and Quest, is fairly revised by Sri Aurobindo. Several versions before the end of 1938 have been worked upon these versions are expansions of much older drafts, one of them possibly dating back to Baroda. The revised version was later corrected and amplified with my help as scribe and has been divided into four Cantos. In re-doing Book V, The Book of Love, Sri Aurobindo took up, at a certain point, an earlier version than that of 1936. There are quite a number of versions with various titles before 1936. Here too, originally there were no different Cantos. There are three old versions of The Book of Fate of equal length. They were called Canto II, and fairly short. One of these versions was expanded into enormous length and developed into two Cantos, the very last touches given almost during the final month of Sri Aurobindo's life. An instance of the expansion is the passage "O singer of the ultimate ecstasy... will is Fate." There was no Book of Yoga in the original scheme of the poem. One old version called Book III, Death, has been changed into The Book of Yoga. It was enormously expanded and named Canto I. All the rest of the six Cantos were totally new and dictated. They were all at first divided into Cantos with different titles. Apparently all these Cantos except the first one are entirely new. I could get no trace of any old versions from which they could have been developed. I am now amazed to see that so many lines could have been dictated day after day, like The Book of Everlasting Day. The Book of Death contains three old versions all called Canto III; the final version is constructed from one of these and from another version some lines are taken to be inserted into The Book of Eternal Night, Canto IV, Night, of the early version served as the basis of The Book of Eternal Night. It was revised, lines were added and split into two Cantos. Then in the typescript further revisions took place. Canto I, first called The Passage into the Void of Night, was changed into Towards the Black Void. Book X, The Book of the Double Twilight, called only Twilight, Canto V in the earlier versions of which there are four or five, had no division into Cantos. From these early versions a fair number of lines have been taken and woven into a larger version. The old lines are now not always in their original form. Book XI had three old drafts. One which was larger than the other two has been used for the final version and was enormously expanded; even whole passages running into hundreds of lines have been added, as I have mentioned before. About The Epilogue, except for a few additions, it almost reproduces the single old version.
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As far as I remember, we worked on these drafts in the evening for an hour or so after all the correspondence work was over. He would sit in a small straight-backed armchair where the big armchair now stands, and listen to my reading. The work proceeded very slowly to start with, and for a long time, either because he didn't seem to be in a hurry or because there was not much time left after attending to the miscellaneous correspondence I have mentioned elsewhere. Later on, the time was changed to the morning. After the selections had been made from one or two versions of a Book, let us say The Book of Fate, we were occupied with it. Never was any Book, except The Book of Death and The Epilogue, taken intact. He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but which were not always kept in their old order. I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet, of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be reread in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of The Book of Yoga and The Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation. In the morning he himself would write out new lines on small notebooks called 'bloc' notes which were incorporated in the text. This was more true as regards The Book of Fate. Sometimes there were two or even three versions of a passage. As his sight began to fail, the letters also became gradually indistinct, and I had to decipher and read them all before him. I had a good sight and, more than that, the gift of deciphering his "hieroglyphics", thanks to the preparatory training I had received during my voluminous correspondence with him before the accident. At times when I got stuck he would help me out, but there were occasions when both of us failed. Then he would say, "Give it to me, let me try." Taking a big magnifying glass, he would focus his eyes but only to exclaim, "No, can't make out!"
When a Book was completed and copied out, it went to Nolini for typing. On the typescript again, fresh lines were added or the order changed. In this respect The Book of Fate gave us a great deal of trouble. Though Sri Aurobindo says in his letter to Amal in 1946 that the Book was almost finished, it was again taken up at the end, and many changes were introduced which contained prophetic hints of his leaving the body very probably after he had taken his decision to do so.
As I have already recorded, one day after his bath Champaklal observed that Sri Aurobindo was moving his lips. Suspecting that he was probably murmuring lines of poetry, he told him that if he wanted to dictate them, I could take them down. He caught up the suggestion and started dictating. Had there been no suggestion he would have retained them in his memory and dictated them next day.
But our routine changed after the Mother started going out in the afternoon. Though the hour of work appointed for Savitri and correspondence was shifted to the morning, we could get very little time for Savitri. Many interruptions came in the way. The preliminary work of reading old versions, selections etc., took up much time before we could actually start writing. We find from the letters to Amal even at the end of 1946 the second part of the Book had not begun. After that too, the work rolled on in a jog-trot fashion till one day in 1950 he exclaimed: "My main work is being delayed." From about the middle of that year the time was fixed from 11 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. without any break or interruption. Only once in between he would ask for a peppermint pastille and Champaklal was always at hand to serve it. As soon as the clock struck 11 a.m. I was ready with the usual small heap of manuscripts and notebooks; would sit on the floor by his left side, and he would sit on the bed in an expectant attitude, give a glance of welcome and we would start from where we had stopped. Sometimes sitting upright, sometimes leaning on the left side cushion, keeping his gaze in front, he would dictate in a quiet, subdued voice slowly and distinctly, with an English accent. There was no rise or fall or any other dramatic quality in the intonation; it was in the manner of simple prose dictation with end stops, of course.
My initiation by him into English poetry rendered the scribe's work congenial as well as convenient. If I missed some words, I would ask again, but sometimes I put down what I thought I heard correct. Later on, after his passing away, experts found the meaning of some words to be dubious, ambiguous, or even wrong. There was faulty punctuation in abundance. Sometimes Sri Aurobindo did not dictate the punctuation and I didn't ask. One couldn't always remind the poet while he was dictating, of the necessity of punctuation, and thus put a curb on his flow. People asked whether I used shorthand for transcribing. There was no need for it at all, for the dictation was very slow and at times halted, waiting for inspiration, I suppose. I don't know what the nature was of Milton's dictation, but one thing was certain: Sri Aurobindo had not Milton's temper, and I didn't suffer his daughter's fate!
The tempo of the work was subsequently speeded up and it proceeded smoothly without break till the seal of incomplete completion was put about two weeks before the November Darshan of 1950. Very probably he had taken the decision to withdraw from this world of the sad music of humanity and leave in compensation his divine music of Savitri. A curious incident has stuck in my memory. One day he continued working even beyond 1.30 p.m. a rare occurrence and that was the day I was invited for lunch at a friend's place. I thought I would certainly be free by 2 p.m. but no, he seemed to be unusually inspired! I believe I was showing some signs of restlessness at which he remarked, "What's the matter?" I don't remember whether I kept quiet or told him the truth. He, however, shut shop soon after. This incident reminds me strongly of Champaklal's valuable admonition that those who want to serve the Divine must have no personal ties or strings.
During this period a long communication that had passed between Amal and a critical friend of his on Savitri as well as on some shorter mystical poems of Sri Aurobindo, was sent to Sri Aurobindo for his opinion or reaction. Amal had also put some questions on beauty and greatness in poetry and whether spiritual poetry could be considered greater than any other. His long illuminating commentary on his own poetry and the detailed answers on the various other topics raised, which were dictated at this time, consumed much of our time, but we could see from the replies how Sri Aurobindo welcomed such discussion from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he been alive, could have discussed with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate expositions on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature.
Sri Aurobindo's quotations from memory from Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others which he said should be verified were, in most cases, correct. When I read Homer's lines trying to imitate Sri Aurobindo's intonation, but forgetting the quantitative length, he corrected me. That reminds me also of how he encouraged me indirectly to learn the Sanskrit alphabet. I didn't know it, as I learnt Pali in my school. So whenever I met with a Sanskrit word while reading correspondences to Sri Aurobindo, I had either to show it to him or get somebody's help. I thought this wouldn't do, I must learn at least the alphabet. I put my mind to it and, getting some smattering of it, began to show my learning before him. He Started taking interest. When I tried to articulate a word in part, he helped me with the rest as one does with a child. Fortunately I managed, after getting the Mother's approval, to learn French also during the break from my work. She said it would be very useful, and so it was, for when some French communications came, I could read them to him.
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I desist from giving my own impression of the incomparable epic. I have no such competence and though I have been made a poet by the Master I leave it to more efficient authorities. One fact alone makes me dumb with a reverent awe and exalted admiration: the colossal labour Sri Aurobindo put forth to build this unique structure. It reminds me of one of those majestic ancient temples like Konarak or of a Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame before which you stand and stare in speechless ecstasy, your soul takes a flight beyond time and space. Before I knew much about Sri Aurobindo, I asked him in my foolish way, why, himself being the master of inspiration and having all higher planes at his command, sending inspiration to others, should he still have to work so hard? With his consciousness entirely silent, he had only to hitch to the right source and words, images, ideas would tumble down in a Brahmaputra of inspiration! To which he answered in his habitual indulgent tone, perhaps a bit piqued by my facile observation: "The highest planes are not so accommodating as all that. If they were so, why should it be so difficult to bring down and organise the supermind in the physical consciousness? What happy-go-lucky fancy-web-spinning ignoramuses you all are. You speak of silence, consciousness, overmental, supramental, etc. as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to press and there you are. It may be one day, but meanwhile I have to discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct roads of connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of a single lifetime. And I have to do it while my blessed disciples are firing off their gay or gloomy a priori reasonings at me from a position of entire irresponsibility and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints but at length. Lord God in omnibus!"
Then, with regard to hard labour on Savitri, he wrote: "That is very simple. I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished; but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. I did not rewrite Rose of God or the sonnets except for two or three verbal alterations made at the moment."
All this was written to me in 1936. Since then the work proceeded slowly and gradually until between 1939 and 1950 he succeeded to a great extent in achieving what he aimed at, as stated in the letter above. I am sure if he had more time at his disposal and could work by himself, he would have raised it to his ideal of perfect perfection. As it is, Savitri is, I suppose, the example par excellence of the Future poetry he speaks of in his book The Future poetry. Founder of the New Age, pioneer in the field of poetry, as in many others, he has left us an inexhaustible heritage of words, images, ideas, suggestions and hints about which we can only say here is God's plenty. Rameshwar Gupta very aptly calls it Eternity in Words.[5] Generation after generation will drink in its soul's nectar from this perennial source. The life span of the English language itself has increased a thousandfold. Shakespeare, it is said, increased the life span of the English language by centuries. Sri Aurobindo said about Shakespeare, "That kind of spear does not shake everywhere." Now we find another far greater that will shake the world to its very roots. If for no other reason, the English speaking races ought to be eternally grateful to the supreme poet of the grand epic for this miracle.
Sri Aurobindo quoting in The Future poetry these lines of an Elizabethan poet,
Or who can tell for what great work in hand
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:IF ALL is in truth Sachchidananda, death, suffering, evil, limitation can only be the creations, positive in practical effect, negative in essence, of a distorting consciousness which has fallen from the total and unifying knowledge of itself into some error of division and partial experience. This is the fall of man typified in the poetic parable of the Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and want, the fruit of a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption comes by the recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual term in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can be allowed to partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live for ever. For then only can the purpose of its descent into material consciousness be accomplished, when the knowledge of good and evil, joy and suffering, life and death has been accomplished through the recovery by the human soul of a higher knowledge which reconciles and identifies these opposites in the universal and transforms their divisions into the image of the divine Unity.
2:To Sachchidananda extended in all things in widest commonalty and impartial universality, death, suffering, evil and limitation can only be at the most reverse terms, shadow-forms of their luminous opposites. As these things are felt by us, they are notes of a discord. They formulate separation where there should be a unity, miscomprehension where there should be an understanding, an attempt to arrive at independent harmonies where there should be a self-adaptation to the orchestral whole. All totality, even if it be only in one scheme of the universal vibrations, even if it be only a totality of the physical consciousness without possession of all that is in movement beyond and behind, must be to that extent a reversion to harmony and a reconciliation of jarring opposites. On the other hand, to Sachchidananda transcendent of the forms of the universe the dual terms themselves, even so understood, can no longer be justly applicable. Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
Numerous psychologists (Bruner, Flavell, Arieti, Cowan, Kramer, Commons, Basseches, Arlin, etc.) have pointed out that there is much evidence for a stage beyond Piaget's formal operational. It has been called "dialectical," "integrative," "creative synthetic," "integral-aperspectival," "postformal," and so forth. I, of course, am using the terms vision-logic or network-logic. But the conclusions are all essentially the same: "Piaget's formal operational is considered to be a problem-solving stage. But beyond this stage are the truly creative scientists and thinkers who define important problems and ask important questions. While Piaget's formal model is adequate to describe the cognitive structures of adolescents and competent adults, it is not adequate to describe the towering intellect of Nobel laureates, great statesmen and stateswomen, poets, and so on."5 True enough. But I would like to give a different emphasis to this structure, for while very few people might actually gain the "towering status of a Nobel laureate," the space of vision-logic (its worldspace or worldview) is available for any who wish to continue their growth and development. In other words, to progress through the various stages of growth does not mean that one has to extraordinarily master each and every stage, and demonstrate a genius comprehension at that stage before one can progress beyond it. This would be like saying that no individuals can move beyond the oral stage until they become gourmet cooks.
It is not even necessary to be able to articulate the characteristics of a particular stage (children progress beyond preop without ever being able to define it). It is merely necessary to develop an adequate competence at that stage, in order for it to serve just fine as a platform for the transcendence to the next stage. In order to transcend the verbal, it is not necessary to first become Shakespeare.
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But one must be adequate to the experience, or it remains an invisible other world. When the yogis and sages and contemplatives make a statement like, "The entire world is a manifestation of one Self," that is not a merely rational statement that we are to think about and see if it makes logical sense. It is rather a description, often poetic, of a direct apprehension or a direct experience, and we are to test this direct experience, not by mulling it over philosophically, but by taking up the experimental method of contemplative awareness, developing the requisite cognitive tools, and then directly looking for ourselves.
As Emerson put it, "What we are, that only can we see."
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In short, no direct experience can be fully captured in words.13 Sex can't be put into words; you've either had the experience or you haven't, and no amount of poetry will take its place. Sunsets, eating cake, listening to Bach, riding a bike, getting drunk and throwing up-believe me, none of those are captured in words.
And thus, so what if spiritual experiences can't be captured in words either? They are no more and no less handicapped in this regard than any other experience. If I say "dog" and you've had the experience, you know exactly what I mean. If a Zen master says "Emptiness," and you've had that experience, you will know exactly what is meant. If you haven't had the experience "dog" or the experience "Emptiness," merely adding more and more words will never, under any circumstances, convey it.
1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
on what were until yesterday the poetically lost islands of Polyne-
sia.
1.07 - The Psychic Center, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Sages of the Vedic Age, at once seers and poets, who composed the Veda.
The Problem of Rebirth, 16:110
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In practice words are used for other purposes than for making statements about facts. Very often they are used rhetorically, in order to arouse the passions and direct the will towards some course of action regarded as desirable. And sometimes, too, they are used poetically that is to say, they are used in such a way that, besides making a statement about real or imaginary things and events, and besides appealing rhetorically to the will and the passions, they cause the reader to be aware that they are beautiful. Beauty in art or nature is a matter of relationships between things not in themselves intrinsically beautiful. There is nothing beautiful, for example, about the vocables, time, or syllable. But when they are used in such a phrase as to the last syllable of recorded time, the relationship between the sound of the component words, between our ideas of the things for which they stand, and between the overtones of association with which each word and the phrase as a whole are charged, is apprehended, by a direct and immediate intuition, as being beautiful.
About the rhetorical use of words nothing much need be said. There is rhetoric for good causes and there is rhetoric for bad causesrhetoric which is tolerably true to facts as well as emotionally moving, and rhetoric which is unconsciously or deliberately a lie. To learn to discriminate between the different kinds of rhetoric is an essential part of intellectual morality; and intellectual morality is as necessary a pre-condition of the spiritual life as is the control of the will and the guard of heart and tongue.
We have now to consider a more difficult problem. How should the poetical use of words be related to the life of the spirit? (And, of course, what applies to the poetical use of words applies equally to the pictorial use of pigments, the musical use of sounds, the sculptural use of clay or stonein a word, to all the arts.)
Beauty is truth, truth, beauty. But unfortunately Keats failed to specify in which of its principal meanings he was using the word truth. Some critics have assumed that he was using it in the third of the senses listed at the opening of this section, and have therefore dismissed the aphorism as nonsensical. Zn + H2SO4 = ZnSO4 + H2. This is a truth in the third sense of the wordand, manifestly, this truth is not identical with beauty. But no less manifestly Keats was not talking about this kind of truth. He was using the word primarily in its first sense, as a synonym for fact, and secondarily with the significance attached to it in the Johannine phrase, to worship God in truth. His sentence, therefore, carries two meanings. Beauty is the Primordial Fact, and the Primordial Fact is Beauty, the principle of all particular beauties; and Beauty is an immediate experience, and this immediate experience is identical with Beauty-as-Principle, Beauty-as-Primordial-Fact. The first of these statements is fully in accord with the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy. Among the trinities in which the ineffable One makes itself manifest is the trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole. In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically denned as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated and harmonized within the totality.
With Keatss statement in its secondary meaning the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy would certainly disagree. The experience of beauty in art or in nature may be qualitatively akin to the immediate, unitive experience of the divine Ground or Godhead; but it is not the same as that experience, and the particular beauty-fact experienced, though partaking in some sort of the divine nature, is at several removes from the Godhead. The poet, the nature lover, the aesthete are granted apprehensions of Reality analogous to those vouchsafed to the selfless contemplative; but because they have not troubled to make themselves perfectly selfless, they are incapable of knowing the divine Beauty in its fulness, as it is in itself. The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater. True, his idolatry is among the highest of which human beings are capable; but an idolatry, none the less, it remains.
The experience of beauty is pure, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free from admixture of any other perception, the very twin brother of mystical experience, and the very life of it is super-sensuous wonder It is enjoyed by those who are competent thereto, in identity, just as the form of God is itself the joy with which it is recognized.
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What follows is the last composition of a Zen nun, who had been in her youth a great beauty and an accomplished poetess.
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of Autumn.
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The silence under windless trees is what Mallarm would call a creux nant musicien. But whereas the music for which the poet listened was merely aesthetic and imaginative, it was to pure Suchness that the self-naughted contemplative was laying herself open. Be still and know that I am God.
This truth is to be lived, it is not to be merely pronounced with the mouth.
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
of whatever nature, and suppress all thoughts by a direct concentration upon a single thought which itself is finally banished. Fichtean philosophy has shown us that the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things : the Object or Non-Ego, which is variable, and the Subject or Ego, apparently invariable. Success in meditation pro- duces the result of making the object as invariable as the subject, this coming as a terrific shock, for a union takes place and the two become one. Rabbi Baer, the Chassidic successor of Israel Baal Shem Tov, taught that when one becomes so absorbed in the contemplation of an object that the whole power of thought is concentrated upon the one point then the self becomes blended and unified with that point. This is the mystical Marriage so often referred to in occult literature, and concerning which so many extrava- gant symbols have been employed. This union has the effect of utterly overthrowing the whole normal balance of the mind, throwing all the poetic, emotional, and spiritual faculties into a sublime ecstasy, making at the same time the rest of life seem absolutely banal. It comes as a tre- mendous experience altogether indescribable even to those who are masters of language, remaining only as a wonder- ful memory - perfect in all its details.
During this state all conditions of limitation such as time and space and thought are wholly abolished. It is impos- sible to explain the real implication of this fact ; only repeated experience can furnish one with apprehension.
1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Purani was already known to Sri Aurobindo from the twenties and had enjoyed his closeness during those years. It was thus with him a resumption or the old relation after a lapse of many years. Compared with him, we were youngsters and had the passport of entry by virtue of our medical profession, but some individual contact was established with the Master through correspondence so that he knew each one of us by name at least. In my own case, perhaps, I can go a little further. Had our written contact not been so intimate and various, I do not know if I could have been so free with him and of use to him in diverse ways. I have always wondered at and failed to probe the mystery of that intimacy. I have even imagined that Sri Aurobindo must have seen in his timeless vision that one day this humble self might be physically of some service to him. He prepared me for that eventual day, initiated me into love for poetry that I might at least transcribe his epic Savitri from his dictation, gave some intellectual training that I might be useful to him in his literary work. He even made me familiar with his often baffling handwriting so that I could read his manuscripts and decipher them. These may be all weavings of fancy, but if I have been of any help in his intellectual pursuits, most of it was undoubtedly due to his previous coaching through voluminous letters, literary training and above all, his patient and persuasive manner. This long preparation had put out all fear of his awe-inspiring personality and made my approach to him free and almost unconventional, sometimes leading to an unpardonable abuse of that unstinted freedom. Things went on like a song and life would have made itself a transformed vision of the Supreme, but alas, after the novelty of the soul-contact had worn off, the other face of our nature, the subconscient, came to light and the pressure of the physical nearness began to tell. Work was no longer a joyous offering, but a duty; service alone was not a sufficient reward, it needed more concrete spiritual touches, failing which other lesser joys and satisfactions were regarded as legitimate recompense. My old maladies doubt and depression renewed their hold and transfused into the act of service their bitter stuff. The Master could at once feel the vibration, even though no word was uttered by the lips. Quite often by a look, by a quiet pressure of hands, he would communicate his understanding sympathy and the affliction would withdraw for a time. Never have I seen any displeasure or loss of temper at my delinquency, no harsh word of disapproval though he was quite aware of all inner and outer movements. A largeness, compassionate forgiveness and divine consideration have made life's stream flow through an apparently trackless solitary journey towards the ultimate vastness.
I do not know if I have the right to speak of my other colleagues, but of Champaklal particularly I must write a few heart-felt words, for his spirit of service has left an indelible impression on my soul and taught me what true service is. Let me prelude it with the Mother's opinion about him when she introduced him to Andre, her son, in 1949. She said with great warmth: "He came here when he was very young. I taught him many kinds of work. He has himself taken up Sri Aurobindo's personal service. He looks into practically everything with regard to Sri Aurobindo. He is extremely careful, meticulous and very particular about details. He has no regular time for food; he takes it when he can. So it is with his sleep. That is why he cannot join the sports activities. He works with joy and devotion. He collects all our little things and keeps them with great care our clothes, nails, hair, etc."
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Often forgetting his gravity, Purani becomes a child and joins us in a plot, when there is nothing to talk about, to draw out Sri Aurobindo who might himself be waiting for the occasion. The ball is set rolling by Purani reporting for instance, "Nirod says that his mind is getting dull and stupid!" On other occasions he starts serious discussions on modern painting, modern poetry, philosophy, politics, history, science and what not. There is hardly any subject on which he cannot say something a versatile man indeed, and a very interesting personality. Once in the evening the Guru and the shishya had a long talk, for more than an hour, on an old legal case (Bapat case?) that must have taken place during Sri Aurobindo's stay in Baroda, and must have been famous for Purani to remember it and discuss it with Sri Aurobindo. He was lying on one side and Purani was sitting on the floor leaning against a couch opposite. It had the air of a very homely talk, as between father and son. Anybody who had seen the Master only during the Darshan could never conceive of this Sri Aurobindo who had put off his mantle of majesty and high impersonality. I stood for a while to listen to the discussion, but found it so dull that I began wondering how they could drag on ad infinitum! It was Purani's versatility that enriched much in our talks with the Master. If, however, by any chance you stepped on his toes, the old lion growled and roared! But wherever Sri Aurobindo's interest was involved, he would not spare himself. The Guru's name acted on him like a Mantra. The Aurobindonians are ever grateful to him for his yeoman service in bringing out so many valuable documents on Sri Aurobindo's early life in England and for trying to get his genius recognised by the English intellectual circle.
One other casual attendant whose name I should include was Dr. Sanyal. He was an eminent surgeon in Calcutta and his active service was called for when Sri Aurobindo's condition became critical in the first week of December, 1950. He was sent an urgent wire to come immediately. Before this he had Sri Aurobindo's private darshan twice. The first occasion was when I consulted him in the beginning about Sri Aurobindo's illness. Next year, when again he visited the Ashram, his contact with Sri Aurobindo was renewed for the same reason. Each time he stayed for about a week and every day he had the Guru's darshan. He would come dressed in simple white dhoti and punjabi with a big bouquet of lotuses or roses and offer his pranam to the Guru in quiet devotion. Then, as Sri Aurobindo sat on the bed, he, kneeling on the floor, massaged his leg and held long talks with him at the same time. Sri Aurobindo's manner was affable and engaging, bearing a smile that egged on the speaker. Once I heard from a distance the Mother talking to Sri Aurobindo about him. From a few words that caught my ear it seemed she was very much impressed by his deportment and physiognomy. I felt that she had already marked him as one of her future instruments. All these paved the way to his last service to his Lord and permanent service to the Mother.
1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism,for it can be called by no other name,that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
The essential barbarism of all this is its pursuit of vital success, satisfaction, productiveness, accumulation, possession, enjoyment, comfort, convenience for their own sake. The vital part of the being is an element in the integral human existence as much as the physical part; it has its place but must not exceed its place. A full and well-appointed life is desirable for man living in society, but on condition that it is also a true and beautiful life. Neither the life nor the body exist for their own sake, but as vehicle and instrument of a good higher than their own. They must be subordinated to the superior needs of the mental being, chastened and purified by a greater law of truth, good and beauty before they can take their proper place in the integrality of human perfection. Therefore in a commercial age with its ideal, vulgar and barbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfaction, productiveness and possession the soul of man may linger a while for certain gains and experiences, but cannot permanently rest. If it persisted too long, Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion. Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole ruet sua.
1.08 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS OF THE ATOM BOMB, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
tion, the first of which may well have attracted poets, but only the
second of which, I think, presents itself to the reflective mind as
1.08 - Sri Aurobindos Descent into Death, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
write on modern poetry and a search was on to provide him
with volumes of such poetry to read. (He appreciated Mal-
larm, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot.) He also dictated, at the
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experience, are little more than poetic metaphors to us. But
Gods riddle sleep is clearly the dark Inconscient, and
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was the mysterious death of Sri Aurobindo. 25 The poet
that was K.D. Sethna had seen better than most of his less
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
And Emerson means this literally! According to Emerson, this cosmic consciousness is not poetry (though he often expresses it with unmatched poetic beauty)-rather, it is a direct realization, a direct apprehension, and "in that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all."
For the Over-Soul is also experienced as the World Soul, since self and world are here finding a "common fountain, common source."8 The Over-Soul (or World Soul) is an initial apprehension of the pure Witness or aboriginal Self, which starts to emerge, however haltingly, as an experiential reality at this psychic stage.9 (We will see how Emerson treats this Witness in a moment.)
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Moreover, even their moralised gods were only the superficial & exterior aspect of the Greek religion. Its deeper life fed itself on the mystic rites of Orpheus, Bacchus, the Eleusinian mysteries which were deeply symbolic and remind us in some of their ideas & circumstances of certain aspects of Indian Yoga. The mysticism & symbolism were not an entirely modern development. Orpheus, Bacchus & Demeter are the centre of an antique and prehistoric, even preliterary mind-movement. The element may have been native to Greek religious sentiment; it may have been imported from the East through the Aryan races or cultures of Asia Minor; but it may also have been common to the ancient systems of Greece & India. An original community or a general diffusion is at least possible. The double aspect of exoteric practice and esoteric symbolism may have already been a fundamental characteristic of the Vedic religion. Is it entirely without significance that to the Vedic mind men were essentially manu, thinkers, the original father of the race was the first Thinker, and the Vedic poets in the idea of their contemporaries not merely priests or sacred singers or wise bards but much more characteristically manishis & rishis, thinkers & sages?We can conceive with difficulty such ideas as belonging to that undeveloped psychological condition of the semi-savage to which sacrifices of propitiation & Nature-Gods helpful only for material life, safety & comfort were all-sufficient. Certainly, also, the earliest Indian writings subsequent to Vedic times bear out these indications. To the writers of the Brahmanas the sacrificial ritual enshrined an elaborate symbolism. The seers of the Upanishad worshipped Surya & Agni as great spiritual & moral forces and believed the Vedic hymns to be effective only because they contained a deep knowledge & a potent spirituality. They may have been in errormay have been misled by a later tradition or themselves have read mystic refinements into a naturalistic text. But also & equally, they may have had access to an unbroken line of knowledge or they may have been in direct touch or in closer touch than the moderns with the mentality of the Vedic singers.
The decision of these questions will determine our whole view of Vedic religions and decide the claim of the Veda to be a living Scripture of Hinduism. It is of primary importance to know what in their nature and functions were the gods of the Veda. I have therefore made this fundamental question form the sole subject matter of the present volume. I make no attempt here to present a complete or even a sufficient justification of the conclusions which I have been led to. Nor do I present my readers with a complete enquiry into the nature & functions of the Vedic pantheon. Such a justification, such an enquiry can only be effected by a careful philological analysis & rendering of the Vedic hymns and an exhaustive study of the origins of the Sanscrit language. That is a labour of very serious proportions & burdened with numerous difficulties which I have begun and hope one day to complete myself or to leave to others ready for completion. But in the present volume I can only attempt to establish a prima facie [case] for a reconsideration of the whole question. I offer the suggestion that the Vedic creed & thought were not a simple, but a complex, not a barbarous but a subtle & advanced, not a naturalistic but a mystic & Vedantic system.
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But why, it might be asked, should each subjective order or stratum of consciousness necessarily involve the co-existence of a corresponding order of beings & objective world-stratum? For the modern mind, speculative & introspective like the Vedic, is yet speculative within the limits of sensational experience and therefore unable to believe in, even if it can conceive of existence, least of all of an objective existence under conditions different from those [with] which we are familiar and of which our senses assure us. We may therefore admit the profundity & subtlety of the subjective distinction, but we shall be apt to regard the belief in objective worlds & beings unseen by our senses as either an early poetic fancy or a crude superstition of savages. But the Vedic mentality, although perfectly rational, stood at the opposite pole of ideas from the modern and its subjective consciousness admitted a class of experiences which we reject and cut short the moment they begin to present themselves by condemning them as hallucinations. The idea of modern men that the ancients evolved their gods by a process of poetic imagination, is an error due to inability to understand an alien mentality & unwillingness to investigate from within those survivals of it which still subsist though with difficulty under modern conditions. Encouraging this order of phenomena, fostering & developing carefully the states of mind in which they were possible and the movements of mind & sense by which they were effected, the Vedic Rishis saw and communed with the gods and threw themselves into the worlds of which they had the conception. They believed in them for the same reason that Joan of Arc believed in her saints & her voices, Socrates in his daemon or Swedenborg in his spirits, because they had constant experience of them and of the validity both of the experiences and of the instruments of mind & sense by which they were maintained in operation. They would have answered a modern objector that they had as good a proof of them as the scientist has of the worlds & the different orders of life revealed to his optical nerve by microscope & telescope. Some of them might even question whether these scientific discoveries were not optical illusions due to the excitation of the nerve by the instruments utilised! We may, similarly, get rid of the Vedic experiences, disbelieve and discount them, saying that they missed one essential instrument of truth, the sceptical distrust of their instruments,but we cannot argue from them in the minds that received them a childish irrationality or a savage superstition. They trusted, like us, their experience, believed their mind & senses and argued logically from their premisses.
It is true that apart from these experiences the existence of various worlds & different orders of beings was a logical necessity of the Vedic conception of existence. Existence being a life, a soul expressing itself in forms, every distinct order of consciousness, every stratum or sea of conscious-being (samudra, sindhu, apah as the Vedic thinkers preferred to call them) demanded its own order of objective experiences (lokas, worlds), tended inevitably to throw itself into forms of individualised being (vishah, ganah, prajah). Moreover, in a world so conceived, nothing could happen in this world without relation to some force or being in the worlds behind; nor could there be any material, vital or mental movement except as the expression of a life & a soul behind it. Everything here must be supported from the worlds of mind or it could not maintain its existence. From this idea to the peopling of the world with innumerable mental & vital existences,existences essentially vital like the Naiads, Dryads, Nereids, Genii, Lares & Penates of the Greeks and Romans, the wood-gods, river-gods, house-gods, tree-deities, snake-deities of the Indians, or mental like the intermediate gods of our old Pantheon, would be a natural and inevitable step. This Animism is a remarkably universal feature in the religious culture of the ancient world. I cannot accept the modern view that its survival in a crude form among the savages, those waifs & strays of human progress, is a proof of their low & savage originany more than the peculiarly crude ideas of Christianity that exist in uneducated negro minds [and] would survive in a still more degraded form if they were long isolated from civilised life, would be a proof to future research that Christianity originated from a cannibal tribe on the African continent. The idea is essentially a civilised conception proceeding from keen susceptibility & only possible after a meditative dwelling upon Naturenot different indeed in rank & order from Wordsworths experience of Nature which no one, I suppose, would consider an atavistic recrudescence of old savage mentality, and impossible to the animal man. The dog & crow who reason from their senses, do not stand in awe of inanimate objects, or of dawn & rain & shine or expect from them favours.
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Saraswati, a name familiar to the religious conceptions of the race from our earliest eras, & of incessant occurrence in poetic phraseology and image, is worshipped yearly even at the present day in all provinces of the peninsula no less than those many millenniums ago in the prehistoric dawn of our religion and literature. Consistently, subsequent to the Vedic times, she has been worshipped everywhere & is named in all passages as a goddess of speech, poetry, learning and eloquence. Epic, Purana and the popular imagination know her solely as this deity of speech & knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests itself: In any given passage may it not be the Aryan river, Saraswati, which the bards are chanting? even if they sing of her or cry to her as a goddess, may it not still be the River, so dear, sacred & beneficent to them, that they worship? Or even where she is clearly a goddess of speech and thought, may it not be that the Aryans, having had originally no intellectual or moral conceptions and therefore no gods of the mind and heart, converted, when they did feel the need, this sacred flowing River into a goddess of sacred flowing song? In that case we are likely to find in her epithets & activities the traces of this double capacity.
For the rest, Sayana in this particular passage lends some support [to] this suggestion of Saraswatis etymological good luck; for he tells us that Saraswati has two aspects, the embodied goddess of Speech and the figure of a river. He distributes, indeed, these two capacities with a strange inconsistency and in his interpretation, as in so many of these harsh & twisted scholastic renderings, European & Indian, of the old melodious subtleties of thought & language, the sages of the Veda come before us only to be convicted of a baffling incoherence of sense and a pointless inaptness of language. But possibly, after all, it is the knowledge of the scholar that is at fault, not the intellect of the Vedic singers that was confused, stupid and clumsy! Nevertheless we must consider the possibility that Sayanas distribution of the sense may be ill-guided, & yet his suggestion about the double role of the goddess may in itself be well-founded. There are few passages of the ancient Sanhita, into which these ingenuities of the ritualistic & naturalistic interpretations do not pursue us. Our inquiry would protract itself into an intolerable length, if we had at every step to clear away from the path either the heavy ancient lumber or the brilliant modern rubbish. It is necessary to determine, once for all, whether the Vedic scholars, prve ntan uta, are guides worthy of trustwhe ther they are as sure in taste & insight as they are painstaking and diligent in their labour,whether, in a word, these ingenuities are the outcome of an imaginative licence of speculation or a sound & keen intuition of the true substance of Veda. Here is a crucial passage. Let us settle at least one side of the account the ledger of the great Indian scholiast.
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This explanation of vjebhir vjinvat leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type & nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions & physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct & true origin & even a previous existence in the religion & psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,were capable of such high thoughts & perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images & symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct & virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech & thought by the abstractions & formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised & the symbol.
What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought & speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great,maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta.We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life & mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately aboveManas, preceding it therefore & containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy&Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness &Self-Being (Chit&Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit & Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness & self-delight. Annam, Prana & Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life & matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah & Swar, mental, vital & material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects & creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahn, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange & subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefa thers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been & cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source & substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad & Purana as only the interpretation & later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.
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In Saraswati we have a deity with subjective functions the first desideratum in our enquiry. Still, there is a doubt, a difficulty. Saraswati of the Epics & Puranas, Saraswati, as she is worshipped today throughout India is, no doubt, a purely subjective goddess and presides only over intellectual and immaterial functions. She is our Lady of Speech, the Muse, the goddess of poetry, Art and Learning. Saraswati, the flowing, is also the name of more than one river in modern India, but especially of the sacred stream in upper India supposed to join secretly in their confluence the waters of theGanges and Yamuna and form with them the holy Triveni or triple braid of waters in which the ceremonial ablution of the devotee is more potent than at almost any other Indian place of pilgrimage and gives the richest spiritual fruit to the believing pilgrim. But in our modern religious ideas there is no real connexion, except of name, between the goddess and the river. In the Veda also there is a Saraswati who is the goddess of speech; in the Veda also there seems to be an ancient river Saraswati, although this stream is placed by Vedic scholars in the Panjab and not in the vicinity of Prayaga and Ayodhya. Were these two deities,for every river and indeed every natural object was to the Vedic Rishis a divine being,the same goddess Saraswati? Sayana accepts, even in this passage, their identity; she is, he tells us, [].1 If this identity were accepted, we would have to ask ourselves by what process of subjective metamorphosis a material Panjab river came to be the deity of Speech, the female power of Brahma, the Muse and tutelar goddess of scholar and poet. Or was not rather the goddess of speech eponymous of the river and subsequently imaged in it by the Vedic symbolists? But before we descend to these ulterior questions, we must first know for certain whether Sayana is right in his identification of the river and the Muse. First of all, are they the same in this passage? secondly, are they the same in any passage of the Veda? It is to the first question alone that we need address ourselves for the present; for on its solution depends the whole purport, value and helpfulness of these three Riks for the purposes of our enquiry into the sense and secret of the Vedas.
Blank in MS; in his commentary on the passage under discussion, Sayana describes Saraswati as: dvividh . . . vigrahavaddevat nadrp ca.Ed.
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We have reached a subjective sense for yuvku. But what of vriktabarhishah? Does not barhih always mean in the Veda the sacred grass strewn as a seat for the gods? In the Brahmanas is it not so understood and have [we] not continually the expression barhishi sdata? I have no objection; barhis is certainly the seat of the Gods in the sacrifice, stritam nushak, strewn without a break. But barhis cannot originally have meant Kusha grass; for in that case the singular could only be used to indicate a single grass and for the seat of the Gods the plural barhnshi would have to be used,barhihshu sdata and not barhishi sdata.We have the right to go behind the Brahmanas and enquire what was the original sense of barhis and how it came to mean kusha grass. The root barh is a modified formation from the root brih, to grow, increase or expand, which we have in brihat. From the sense of spreading we may get the original sense of seat, and because the material spread was usually the Kusha grass, the word by a secondary application came to bear also that significance. Is this the only possible sense of barhis? No, for we find it interpreted also as sacrifice, as fire, as light or splendour, as water, as ether. We find barhana & barhas in the sense of strength or power and barhah or barham used for a leaf or for a peacocks tail. The base meaning is evidently fullness, greatness, expansion, power, splendour or anything having these attri butes, an outspread seat, spreading foliage, the outspread or splendid peacocks tail, the shining flame, the wide expanse of ether, the wide flow of water. If there were no other current sense of barhis, we should be bound to the ritualistic explanation. Even as it is, in other passages the ritualistic explanation may be found to stand or be binding; but is it obligatory here? I do not think it is even admissible. For observe the awkwardness of the expression, sut vriktabarhishah, wine of which the grass is stripped of its roots. Anything, indeed, is possible in the more artificial styles of poetry, but the rest of this hymn, though subtle & deep in thought, is sufficiently lucid and straightforward in expression. In such a style this strained & awkward expression is an alien intruder. Moreover, since every other expression in these lines is subjective, only dire necessity can compel us to admit so material a rendering of this single epithet. There is no such necessity. Barhis means fundamentally fullness, splendour, expansion or strength & power, & this sense suits well with the meaning we have found for yuvkavah. The sense of vrikta is very doubtful. Purified (cleared, separated) is a very remote sense of vrij or vrich & improbable. They can both mean divided, distributed, strewn, outspread, but although it is possible that vriktabarhishah means their fullness outspread through the system or distributed in the outpouring, this sense too is not convincing. Again vrijana in the Veda means strong, or as a noun, strength, energy, even a battle or fight. Vrikta may therefore [mean] brought to its highest strength. We will accept this sense as a provisional conjecture, to be confirmed or corrected by farther enquiry, and render the line The Soma distillings are replete with energy and brought to their highest fullness.
But to what kind of distillings can such terms be applied? The meaning of Soma & the Vedic ideas about this symbolic wine must be examined by themselves & with a greater amplitude. All we need ask here [is], is there any indication in this hymn itself, that the Soma like everything else in the Sukta is subjective & symbolic? For, if so, our rendering, which at present is clouded with doubt & built on a wide but imperfectly solid foundation, will become firm & established. We have the clear suggestion in the next rik, the first of the three addressed to Indra. Sut ime tw yavah. Our question is answered. What has been distilled? Ime yavah. These life-forces, these vitalities. We shall find throughout the Veda this insistence on the life, vitality,yu or jva; we shall find that the Soma was regarded as a life-giving juice, a sort of elixir of life, or nectar of immortality, something at least that gave increased vitality, established health, prolonged youth. Of such an elixir it may well be said that it is yuvku, full of the force of youth in which the Aswins must specially delight, vriktabarhish, raised to its highest strength & fullness so that the gods who drink of it, become in the man in whom they enter and are seated, increased, vriddha, to the full height of their function and activity,the Aswins to their utmost richness of bounty, their intensest fiery activity. Nectarjuices, they are called, indavah, pourings of delight, yavah, life forces, amritsah, elixirs of immortality.
1.08 - The Plot must be a Unity., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the Unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence, the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. But Homer, as in all else he is of surpassing merit, here too--whether from art or natural genius--seems to have happily discerned the truth. In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus--such as his wound on Parnassus, or his feigned madness at the mustering of the host--incidents between which there was no necessary or probable connection: but he made the
Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to centre round an action that in our sense of the word is one. As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This is why the physical life, the individuals participation in the universal light of consciousness has always been considered by popular intuition no less than by the inspiration of poets and thinkers the supreme and sacred boon and all birth is celebrated as a victory, for it is indeed a victory of life and light over the obscurity of the inconscient.
So long as that underworld of subconscient forces whose sole issue is the narrow door opened by physical life on this infinite is not exhausted, the creatures first duty of solidarity and of charity to the creature is to awaken it to the plenitude of existence and light, to enlarge the field of this life that liberates.
1.08 - THINGS THE GERMANS LACK, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
German poets? Are there any good German books?" people ask me abroad. I
blush; but with that pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of
1.09 - A System of Vedic Psychology, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What are those views? They represent the Veda to us as a mass of naturalistic, ritualistic & astrological conceits, allegories & metaphors, crude & savage in the substance of its thought but more artificial & ingenious in its particular ideas & fancies than the most artificial, allegorical or Alexandrian poetry to be found in the worlds literaturea strange incoherent & gaudy jumble unparalleled by the early literature of any other nation,the result of a queer psychological mixture of an early savage with a modern astronomer & comparative mythologist.
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1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Philistine is not dead,quite the contrary, he abounds,but he no longer reigns. The sons of Culture have not exactly conquered, but they have got rid of the old Goliath and replaced him by a new giant. This is the sensational man who has got awakened to the necessity at least of some intelligent use of the higher faculties and is trying to be mentally active. He has been whipped and censured and educated into that activity and he lives besides in a maelstrom of new information, new intellectual fashions, new ideas and new movements to which he can no longer be obstinately impervious. He is open to new ideas, he can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather confused fashion; he can understand or misunderstand ideals, organise to get them carried out and even, it would appear, fight and die for them. He knows he has to think about ethical problems, social problems, problems of science and religion, to welcome new political developments, to look with as understanding an eye as he can attain to at all the new movements of thought and inquiry and action that chase each other across the modern field or clash upon it. He is a reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature,you will find in him perhaps a student of Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about beauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is the great reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are his; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers, the theatre and the cinema and the radio exist for him: Science hastens to bring her knowledge and discoveries to his doors and equip his life with endless machinery; politics are shaped in his image. It is he who opposed and then brought about the enfranchisement of women, who has been evolving syndicalism, anarchism, the war of classes, the uprising of labour, waging what we are told are wars of ideas or of cultures,a ferocious type of conflict made in the very image of this new barbarism,or bringing about in a few days Russian revolutions which the century-long efforts and sufferings of the intelligentsia failed to achieve. It is his coming which has been the precipitative agent for the reshaping of the modern world. If a Lenin, a Mussolini, a Hitler have achieved their rapid and almost stupefying success, it was because this driving force, this responsive quick-acting mass was there to carry them to victorya force lacking to their less fortunate predecessors.
The first results of this momentous change have been inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or streng thened it by this large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modern civilisation; a sensational activism is still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the sensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to coordinate or assimilate, for popularised scientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and which do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the cultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never had before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular success, to put the writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the cultured Greek slave in a Roman household where he has to work for, please, amuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught his fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised, sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for their results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown phenomenon, a race of mennot only a classwho have to some extent found and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.
1.09 - (Plot continued.) Dramatic Unity., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen,--what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal, I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is--for example--what
Alcibiades did or suffered. In Comedy this is already apparent: for here the poet first constructs the plot on the lines of probability, and then inserts characteristic names;--unlike the lampooners who write about particular individuals. But tragedians still keep to real names, the reason being that what is possible is credible: what has not happened we do not at once feel sure to be possible: but what has happened is manifestly possible: otherwise it would not have happened. Still there are even some tragedies in which there are only one or two well known names, the rest being fictitious. In others, none are well known, as in
Agathon's Antheus, where incidents and names alike are fictitious, and yet they give none the less pleasure. We must not, therefore, at all costs keep to the received legends, which are the usual subjects of
--
It clearly follows that the poet or 'maker' should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions. And even if he chances to take an historical subject, he is none the less a poet; for there is no reason why some events that have actually happened should not conform to the law of the probable and possible, and in virtue of that quality in them he is their poet or maker.
Of all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst. I call a plot
'epeisodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity.
But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will thee be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.
1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Life-breath. In the lesser gods the naturalistic interpretation has less ground for confidence; for it is obvious that Varuna is not merely a Vedic Uranus or Neptune, but a god with great and important moral functions; Mitra and Bhaga have the same psychological aspect; the Ribhus who form things by the mind and build up immortality by works can with difficulty be crushed into the Procrustean measure of a naturalistic mythology. Still by imputing a chaotic confusion of ideas to the poets of the Vedic hymns the difficulty can be trampled upon, if not overcome.
But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment. She is, plainly and clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divine
--
spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical and psychological view of Nature and the world and the gods - and this, though by no means certain, is for the present the accepted view,1 - we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at least already advancing from the physical and naturalistic conception of the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is not only the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same time one of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question at once arises, whence came this extraordinary identification? And how does the connection of the two ideas present itself in the
Vedic hymns? And there is more; for Saraswati is important not only in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding farther let us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what they can teach us.
The association of a river with the poetical inspiration occurs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are not conceived of as rivers; they are only connected in a not very intelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This stream is the river Hippocrene, the fountain of the Horse, and to account for its name we have a legend that it sprang from the hoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock with his hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where the mountain had been thus smitten. Was this legend merely a Greek fairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident that if it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to a psychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspiration, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been an attempt to put into concrete figures certain psychological facts.
We may note that the word Pegasus, if we transliterate it into the original Aryan phonetics, becomes Pajasa and is obviously connected with the Sanskrit pajas, which meant originally force,
--
Life, of the vital and nervous energy, and is constantly coupled with other images that symbolise the consciousness. Adri, the hill or rock, is a symbol of formal existence and especially of the physical nature and it is out of this hill or rock that the herds of the Sun are released and the waters flow. The streams of the madhu, the honey, the Soma, are said also to be milked out of this Hill or Rock. The stroke of the Horse's hoof on the rock releasing the waters of inspiration would thus become a very obvious psychological image. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the old Greeks and Indians were incapable either of such psychological observation or of putting it into the poetical and mystic imagery which was the very body of the ancient
Mysteries.
--
Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but with other goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols and especially with Bharati and Ila. In the later Puranic forms of worship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharati and Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi, the Large, Great or Vast. The three, Ila, Mahi or Bharati and
Saraswati are associated together in a constant formula in those hymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to the
1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
Moral-Trumpeter of Sackingen.--Dante, or the hyna that writes poetry
in tombs.--Kant, or _cant_ as an intelligible character.--Victor
--
everything that believes in itself. Enough of a poet and of a female to
be able to feel greatness as power; he is always turning and twisting,
--
of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially
visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole
1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
no doubt that Sri Aurobindo, who had written The poetry
of the Future, conceived Savitri as his poetry of the future, a
poetry of Truth in the age-old tradition of the truth-seers,
1.09 - Talks, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
"Then we shall talk, Mother." The ready answer was followed by a burst of laughter. Rarely did she participate in our talks. Once she asked, "What are you laughing about?" Sri Aurobindo replied with a smile, "I am telling them the story of my poet-brother Mono Mohan." It was one of the most interesting talks we had!
In the beginning, as I said, Dr. Manilal was the spearhead of the attack. What we did not dare to ask because of our youth, our shyness or even our sophistication, he, our elderly doctor, babbled away like a simple child, bluntly and sweetly, and we were greatly rewarded. We were so much charmed by the novelty of the talks that none of us thought of keeping any record. I would make some mental notes and when I visited Dilip's place for tea pour them out and make everybody roar with laughter. He would regale me with a sumptuous breakfast, in return for the divine ambrosia. After about a fortnight of squandering the precious talks which, had they been noted and published, would have made another volume, I realised my mistake and thought, "Why not keep a record?" But I would debate, "What's the use since they will never be published?" Thus in two minds, I started noting them down in the middle of the night after the work was over or at other odd hours. Quite often my colleagues would help me in rescuing some of the points I had lost, or correcting and adding others. Still almost one third of the talks were not recorded for want of time or sheer laziness. Meanwhile the news had gone abroad that Sri Aurobindo was having talks with us. So people began to waylay or hunt us out for some nectar and our stock went up. Groups were formed, according to the law of sympathy and attraction for hearing the "Divine news". Some approached Dr. Manilal, some Purani some Satyendra and others came to me. Many advised us to keep a diary and others must have suspected that we were doing so already. Sri Aurobindo did not know, at least physically, about it and there was even a fear that if he did, he might stop talking altogether. Now I feel that some Hand must have pushed me over my reluctance and turned out a fairly good record, after all.
1.09 - The Chosen Ideal, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
This is indeed the most poetical and forcible way in which the theory of Ishta-Nishtha has ever been put. This Eka-Nishtha or devotion to one ideal is absolutely necessary for the beginner in the practice of religious devotion. He must say with Hanuman in the Rmyana, "Though I know that the Lord of Shri and the Lord of Jnaki are both manifestations of the same Supreme Being, yet my all in all is the lotus-eyed Rma." Or, as was said by the sage Tulasidsa, he must say, "Take the sweetness of all, sit with all, take the name of all, say yea, yea, but keep your seat firm." Then, if the devotional aspirant is sincere, out of this little seed will come a gigantic tree like the Indian banyan, sending out branch after branch and root after root to all sides, till it covers the entire field of religion. Thus will the true devotee realise that He who was his own ideal in life is worshipped in all ideals by all sects, under all names, and through all forms.
next chapter: 1.10 - The Methods and the Means
1.09 - The Furies and Medusa. The Angel. The City of Dis. The Sixth Circle Heresiarchs., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
That I for dread pressed close unto the poet.
"Medusa come, so we to stone will change him!"
1.09 - The Greater Self, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
This all, this great all has been seen by sages in their visions and by a few rare poets and thinkers: All this is Brahman immortal, naught else; Brahman is in front of us, Brahman behind us, to the south of us and to the North of us and below us and above us; it stretches everywhere. All this is Brahman alone, all this magnificent universe.19 Thou art woman and thou art man also; Thou art the boy and girl, and Thou art yonder worn and aged man that walkest bending upon a staff.... Thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet eyed.20 Thou art That, O Swetaketu.21 This great all that is us has shined at the summit of human accomplishment, left a few hieroglyphic traces on the walls of Thebes, and nourished initiates here and there at times we have entered a white radiance above the worlds where, in a flash, we have dissolved the little self and emerged into a cosmic consciousness.... But none of that has changed the world. We still did not have the clue that would connect that vision to this earth and make a new world with a new look. Our truths remained fragile; the earth remained refractory and rightly so. Why should it obey the illuminations from above if that light does not affect its matter, if it itself does not see and it itself is not illuminated? In truth, wisdom is very wise and the earth's darkness is not a negation of the Spirit, any more than night is a negation of day; it is an expectation and a calling for light, and so long as we do not call the light here, why should it trouble itself to move from its summits? So long as we do not turn our nocturnal half toward its sun, why should it be filled with light? If we seek solar wholeness on the summits of the mind, we shall have wholeness there, in a lovely thought; if we seek it in the heart, we shall have it there, in a tender emotion if we seek it in matter at every instant, we shall have that same wholeness in matter and at every instant of matter. We have to know where we are looking. We cannot reasonably find the light where we are not looking. Then, perhaps, we shall realize that this earth was not so dark after all. It was our look that was dark, our want of being that brought about the want of things. The earth's resistance is our own resistance and the promise of a solid truth: an innumerable bursting of rainbows into incarnate myriads instead of an empty radiance on the heights of the Spirit.
But the seeker of the new world has not pursued his quest in a straight line; he has not closed his doors, rejected matter, muffled his soul. He has taken his quest along wherever he went, on the boulevards and on the stairways, in the crowd and in the empty obscurity of millions of senseless gestures. He has pervaded all the wastelands with being, kindled his fire in all the vanities, and fed his need on the very inanity that stifled him. He was not a little one-pointed concentration that rose straight up to the heights and then fell asleep in the white peace of the spirit; he was this chaos and turmoil, this wandering back and forth, in nothing. He pulled all into his net the ups and downs, the blacks and less blacks and so-called whites, the falls and setbacks he held everything within his little circumference, with a fire at the center, a need for truth amid this chaos, a cry for help in this nothingness. He was a tangled course, an endless meandering of which he knew nothing, except that he carried his fire there his fire for nothing, for everything. He no longer even expected anything from anything; he was only like a mellowness of burning, as if that fire were the goal in itself, the being amid all this emptiness, the only presence in this enormous absence. It even ended up becoming a sort of quiet love, for nothing, for everything, here and there. And little by little, this nothingness was lit up; this emptiness was set afire by his look; this futility stirred with the same little warmth. And everything began to answer. The world came to life everywhere, but infinitesimal, microscopic: a powdering of little truths dancing here and there, in facts and gestures, in things and meetings it even seems as if they came to meet him. It was a strange multiplication, a kind of golden contagion.
1.09 - The Worship of Trees, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
each other in a real, and not merely a figurative or poetical, sense
of the word. The notion is not purely fanciful, for plants like
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Newton had spent part of their energies in politics they would not have been able to reach such heights in poetry and in science or even if they had they would have done much less. The main energies have to be concentrated on one thing; the others can only be minor pursuits at leisure or for distraction or interests rather than pursuits useful for keeping up a general culture.
All depends on the aim of the life. To one whose aim is to discover and possess the highest spiritual truth and the divine life, I do not think a University post can count for much, nor do
11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
That, travellers from on high, arrive to us
1.10 - Aesthetic and Ethical Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The conflict arises from that sort of triangular disposition of the higher or more subtle mentality which we have already had occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,which creates the artistic and aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic,for beauty and delight are inseparable powers, and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremesand a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacities.
Society is only an enlargement of the individual; therefore this contrast and opposition between individual types reproduces itself in a like contrast and opposition between social and national types. We must not go for the best examples to social formulas which do not really illustrate these tendencies but are depravations, deformations or deceptive conformities. We must not take as an instance of the ethical turn the middle-class puritanism touched with a narrow, tepid and conventional religiosity which was so marked an element in nineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local variation of the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find everywhere at a certain stage of civilisation,it was Philistinism pure and simple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic any merely Bohemian society or such examples as London of the Restoration or Paris in certain brief periods of its history; that, whatever some of its pretensions, had for its principle, always, the indulgence of the average sensational and sensuous man freed from the conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and aestheticism. Nor even can we take Puritan England as the ethical type; for although there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of character and the ethical being, the determining tendency was religious, and the religious impulse is a phenomenon quite apart from our other subjective tendencies, though it influences them all; it is sui generis and must be treated separately. To get at real, if not always quite pure examples of the type we must go back a little farther in time and contrast early republican Rome or, in Greece itself, Sparta with Periclean Athens. For as we come down the stream of Time in its present curve of evolution, humanity in the mass, carrying in it its past collective experience, becomes more and more complex and the old distinct types do not recur or recur precariously and with difficulty.
--
Its limitations at once appear, when we look back at its prominent examples. Early Rome and Sparta were barren of thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental life, all the amenity and pleasure of human existence; their art of life excluded or discouraged the delight of living. They were distrustful, as the exclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of free and flexible thought and the aesthetic impulse. The earlier spirit of republican Rome held at arms length as long as possible the Greek influences that invaded her, closed the schools of the Greek teachers, banished the philosophers, and her most typical minds looked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek culture as an abomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an enemy, divined a hostile and destructive force fatal to her principle of living. Sparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element of her deliberate ethical training and education a martial music and poetry, and even then, when she wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian. We have a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on a large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the utopian speculations of Plato who felt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the poets from his ideal polity. The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they pass away leaving nothing or little behind them by which the future can be attracted and satisfied, as Sparta passed, or they collapse in a revolt of the complex nature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the early Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and often orgiastic licence of later republican and imperial Rome. The human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy, expand; expansion is its very nature and restriction is only useful to it in so far as it helps to steady, guide and streng then its expansion. It readily refuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble their aim or even however beautiful in itself their order, which have not allowed an intelligent freedom of development.
On the other hand, we are tempted to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely human development and like ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty and the delight of living. But there were in the Athenian development two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the Athens of Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the philosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need of freedom of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens thought, but it thought in the terms of art and poetry, in figures of music and drama and architecture and sculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion, but not so much with any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of thinking and the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for without that no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type, only a conventional and customary morality; and when it thought about ethics, it tended to express it in the terms of beauty, to kalon, to epieikes, the beautiful, the becoming. Its very religion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and festivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a superficial religious sense. But without character, without some kind of high or strong discipline there is no enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its vitality within one wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less, unable to succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for a time precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious pursuit of truth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully practise. The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a straining to something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and not its fulfilment.
This insufficiency of the aesthetic view of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great example, Italy of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one time as pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more than was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and reminiscent of the licence of imperial Rome. It had learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and truth and the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to make free the way for philosophy and science. It so corrupted religion as to provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the Reformation, which, though it vindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was an insurgence not so much of the reason,that was left to Science,but of the moral instinct and its ethical need. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable result of the great defect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its revival the new impulse of thought and will and character given to it by Mazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development of the human being, yet are will, character, self-discipline, self-mastery indispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body.
Neither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle; they are merely two powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole of life; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very doubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite language, but can at best say that its kernel of will, character and self-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection. The aesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection of the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane the right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty and delight of human existence. But neither can be the highest principle of the human order. We can combine them; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the hedonistic side of morals; we can steady, guide and streng then the delight of life by the introduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will give it endurance and purity. These two powers of our psychological being, which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential principle of delight,the Indian terms are more profound and expressive, Tapas and Ananda,2can be thus helped by each other, the one to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression. But that even this much reconciliation may come about they must be taken up and enlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and comprehending both equally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly their purposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be provided for us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning capacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign of our nature.
1.10 - Farinata and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti. Discourse on the Knowledge of the Damned., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
The ancient poet turned my steps, reflecting
Upon that saying, which seemed hostile to me.
1.10 - GRACE AND FREE WILL, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In this context we may mention those sudden theophanies which are sometimes vouchsafed to children and sometimes to adults, who may be poets or Philistines, learned or unsophisticated, but who have this in common, that they have done nothing at all to prepare for what has happened to them. These gratuitous graces, which have inspired much literary and pictorial art, some splendid and some (where inspiration was not seconded by native talent) pathetically inadequate, seem generally to belong to one or other of two main classessudden and profoundly impressive perception of ultimate Reality as Love, Light and Bliss, and a no less impressive perception of it as dark, awe-inspiring and inscrutable Power. In memorable forms, Wordsworth has recorded his own experience of both these aspects of the divine Ground.
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
From within that silence in him a silence that is not empty, not an absence of noise, not a cold and toneless blank, but the smooth breadth of the open sea, an extreme of sweetness that fills him and needs neither words nor thought nor comprehension: it is instant comprehension, the embracing of everything, the absolute here and now. So what could be missing? the seeker, the newborn to be, begins to see the mental play. First, he sees that those thousands of thoughts, gray or blue or paler, do not actually emanate from any brain. Rather, they float in midair, as it were. They are currents, vibrations, which are translated into thoughts in our heads when we capture them, as waves are translated into music or words or images into our television sets; and everything shifts and moves and whirls at different levels, flows universally over our motley little frontiers: captured in English, German, French; colored yellow, black, or blue depending on the height of our antenna; rhythmic, broken, or scattered into a powdering of microscopic thoughts depending on our level of reception; musical, grating, or discordant depending on our clarity or complication. But the seeker, the listener, does not try to pick up one channel or another, to turn the dials of his machine to capture this or that he is tuned in to the infinite, focused on a little flame in the center, so sweet and full, free from interference and preference. He needs only one thing: that that flame in him burn and burn, that that flowing pass again and again through his clearing, without words, without mental meaning, and yet full of meaning and of all meaning, as if it were the very source of meaning. And, at times, without his thinking or wanting it, something comes and strikes him: a little vibration, a little note alighting on his still waters and leaving a whole train of waves. And if he leans a little, to see, stretches toward that little eddy (or that slight note, that point calling out, that rip in the expanse of his being), a thought appears, a feeling, an image or a sensation as though there were really no dividing line between one mode of translation and another; there is just something vibrating, a more or less clear rhythm, a more or less pure light being lit in him, a shadow, a heaviness, an uneasiness, sometimes a glittering little rocket, dancing and light as a powdering of sunshine on the sea, an outpouring of tenderness, a fleeting smile and sometimes a great, solemn rhythm that seems to rise from the depths of time, immense, poignant, eternal, which calls up the unique sacred chant of the world. And It flows effortlessly. There is no need to think or want; the only need is to be again, to burn in unison with a single little flame that is like the very fire of the world. And, when necessary, just for a second, a little note comes knocking at his window, and there comes exactly the right thought, the impulse for the required action, the right or left turn that will open up an unexpected trail and a whole chain of answers and new opportunities. The seeker, the fervent one, then intimately understands the invocation of this five or six-thousand-year-old Vedic poet: O Fire, let there be created in us the correct thought that springs from Thee.24
But wrong thoughts, too, are a surprising source of discoveries. As a matter of fact, more and more, he realizes that this kind of distinction is meaningless. What, in the end, is not for our own good? What does not ultimately turn out to be our greater good? The wrong paths are part of the right one and pave a broader way, a larger view of our indivisible estate. The only wrong is not to see; it is the vast grayness of the terra incognita of our limited maps. And we indeed limit our maps. We have attributed those thoughts, feelings, reactions and desires to the little Mississippi flowing through our lands, to the thriving Potomac rivers lined with stone buildings and fortresses and indeed, they have got into the habit of running through those channels, cascading here or there, boiling a little farther below, or disappearing into our marshes. It is a very old habit, going back even before us or the ape, or else a scarcely more recent one going back to our schooldays, our parents or yesterday's newspaper. We have opened paths, and the current follows them it follows them obstinately. But for the demechanized seeker, the meanders and points of entry begin to become more visible. He begins to distinguish various levels in his being, various channeling centers, and when the current passes through the solar plexus or through the throat, the reactions or effects are different. But, mostly, he discovers with surprise that it is one and the same current everywhere, above or below, right or left, and those which we call thought, desire, will or emotion are various infiltrations of the same identical thing, which is neither thought nor desire nor will nor anything of the sort, but a trickle, a drop or a cataract of the same conscious Energy entering here or there, through our little Potomac or muddy Styx, and creating a disaster or a poem, a millipede's quiver, a revolution, a gospel or a vain thought on the boulevard we could almost say at will. It all depends on the quality of our opening and its level. But the fundamental fact is that this is an Energy, in other words, a Power. And thus, very simply, quite simply, we have the all-powerful source of all possible changes in the world. It is as we will it! We can tune in either here or there, create harmony or cacophony; not a single circumstance in the world, not one fateful event, not one so-called ineluctable law, absolutely nothing can prevent us from turning the antenna one way or the other and changing this muddy and disastrous flood into a limpid stream, instantly. We just have to know where we open ourselves. At every moment of the world and every second, in the face of every dreadful circumstance, every prison we have locked ourselves alive in, we can, in one stroke, with a single cry for help, a single burst of prayer, a single true look, a single leap of the little flame inside, topple all our walls and be born again from top to bottom. Everything is possible. Because that Power is the supreme Possibility.
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Some poets and sages have touched this Harmony, some rare musicians have heard it and attempted to translate a few notes of that singing vastness. It flows on high, on the summits of consciousness, an endless rhythm without high or low, through blue eternities, flowing and flowing like a joy that would sing itself, rolling its immense flood over eternal hills, carrying those heavenly bodies and all those earths and seas, carrying everything in its blazing and tranquil surge an unutterable sound that would contain all sounds and all notes in one, a fusion of music, a golden outburst one single time of a cry of love or a cry of joy issuing from the abyss of time; a pure triumph that has seen all those worlds and ages in a glance, and the sorrow of a child on the bank of that blue river and the softness of the paddy fields and the death of that old man, the tiny tranquillity of a leaf quivering in the south wind, and others, countless others that are always the same, that go up and down the great river, cross here or there, pass without ever passing, grow up and disappear in the distance, into a great golden sea whence they came, carried by a little rhythm of the great rhythm, a little spark of the great undying golden fire, a persisting little note that pervades all lives, all deaths, all sorrows and joys; an ineffable blue expansion of space that fills the lungs with a sort of eternal air, a sort of resurrection; a bursting out of music everywhere as if space were nothing but music, nothing but singing azure a powerful, triumphant flowing that carries us on forever, as if wrapped in its wings of glory. And all is fulfilled. The universe is a miracle.
But the earth, the little earth, reels below, reels in its pain. It does not know or see the joy upholding it, and which it is for how could anything be without that joy which holds everything, that persistent memory of joy which pulls at the heart of things and beings?
1.10 - Laughter Of The Gods, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: Virgil had eyes like that, while Horace used to breathe hard. Once Mycaenas, the great patron of literature in the reign of Augustus Caesar, was sitting between the two poets and remarked, "I am sitting between sighs and tears."
Addressing Dr. Manilal with whom he was very free during the talks, Sri Aurobindo said, "Your mention of bribe and small amount makes me think of X. He said that people simply thrust the money on him and he couldn't but accept it. 'After all, it is a small bribe,' he argued. I was then reminded of the maidservant's story. She got an illegitimate child. The mistress of the house was very angry and rebuked her severely for the fault. She replied, 'But, oh madam, it is such a small one!'"
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I wrote again: X had irregularity in her periods caused by physical and mental strain due to poetry.
Sri Aurobindo: Good Lord! If poetry is to be the parent of irregular menses!
I protested: It is not poetry, but physical and mental strain, Sir! Coming here, going there with the poem to send it to you, etc., etc. Not enough to cause strain?
Sri Aurobindo: You relieve me! I was thinking if poetry could be the parent of i.m., what it would do to you and Dilip and Nishikanto.
Moral purists, I am afraid, will burn with a righteous indignation at such uninhibited levity.
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Sri Aurobindo: As the modernist poet says
O blessed blessed boil within the nostril,
1.10 - The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
"These move" says Vamadeva "from the heart-ocean; penned by the enemy in a hundred enclosures they cannot be seen; I look towards the streams of the clarity, for in their midst is the Golden Reed. Entirely they stream like flowing rivers becoming purified by the heart within and the mind; these move, waves of the clarity, like animals under the mastery of their driver. As if on a path in front of the Ocean (sindhu, the upper ocean) the mighty ones move compact of forceful speed but limited by the vital force (vata, vayu), the streams of clarity; they are like a straining horse which breaks its limits, as it is nourished by the waves." On the very face of it this is the poetry of a mystic concealing his sense from the profane under a veil of images which occasionally he suffers to grow
106
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Ananta upon the ocean of sweet milk. It may perhaps be objected that the Puranas were written by superstitious Hindu priests or poets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun and moon and could easily believe that during the periods of non-creation the supreme Deity in a physical body went to sleep on a physical snake upon a material ocean of real milk and that therefore it is a vain ingenuity to seek for a spiritual meaning in these fables. My reply would be that there is in fact no need to seek for such meanings; for these very superstitious poets have put them there plainly on the very surface of the fable for everybody to see who does not choose to be blind. For they have given a name to Vishnu's snake, the name Ananta, and
Ananta means the Infinite; therefore they have told us plainly enough that the image is an allegory and that Vishnu, the allpervading Deity, sleeps in the periods of non-creation on the coils of the Infinite. As for the ocean, the Vedic imagery shows us that it must be the ocean of eternal existence and this ocean of eternal existence is an ocean of absolute sweetness, in other words, of pure Bliss. For the sweet milk (itself a Vedic image) has, evidently, a sense not essentially different from the madhu, honey or sweetness, of Vamadeva's hymn.
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Such are the mental, vital, physical and psychic discoveries that Sri Aurobindo pursued alone, step by step, between the ages of twenty and thirty, simply by following the thread of consciousness. The remarkable thing is that he practiced yoga in circumstances and places where one would usually not do yoga: while giving his lectures in French or English at the State College of Baroda, during his work at the court of the Maharaja, and more and more in the midst of his secret revolutionary activities. The hours of the night that were not devoted to studying his mother tongue or Sanskrit or to political work were spent writing poetry. "Aurobindo had the habit of writing poetry till late into the night," his Bengali teacher recalls, "and consequently he did not get up very early in the morning. . . . He would concentrate for a minute before starting, then the poetry would flow from his pen like a stream." From writing poetry, Sri Aurobindo would pass to his experimental sleep. In 1901, at the age of twenty-nine, he married Mrinalini Devi and tried to share his spiritual life with her. I am experiencing all the signs and symptoms, he wrote to her in a letter found in the archives of the British police. I should like to take you with me along this path. But Mrinalini did not understand him, and Sri Aurobindo would remain alone. We could search Sri Aurobindo's life in vain for those moving or miraculous anecdotes that adorn the lives of great sages and mystics, in vain for sensational yogic methods;
everything seemed so ordinary, apparently, that nothing attracted one's attention, just as in life itself. Perhaps he had found more miracles in the ordinary than in the extraordinary: With me all is different, all is uncommon, he wrote in a letter to Mrinalini. All is deep and strange to the eyes that see.103 And perhaps that is what he wants us to discover through his example, his work, his yoga all those unknown riches beneath the ordinary crust. Our lives [are] a deeper mystery than we 103
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he, the poet! but because he saw that these images would be prettier still if they were to assume a physical reality upon the earth, if the supraphysical were to become our normal physical, visible to the naked eye. This naturalization of the beyond, and the calm mastery of life, that Sri Aurobindo achieved were possible only because he never separated the two worlds: My own life and my yoga have always been since my coming to India both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side, he wrote in a letter to a disciple. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I
began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere.106
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want to do Yoga but for work, for action, not for sannyasa (renouncing the world) and Nirvana.114 Lele's reply was strange and deserves attention: "It would be easy for you as you are a poet." The two men retired to a quiet room for three days. From then on, Sri Aurobindo's yoga would assume a different direction, seemingly away from action, but actually to the secret of action and of changing the world. The first result, Sri Aurobindo wrote, was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he had never intended . . . and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman.115
113
1.10 - The Scolex School, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
(I am giving you credit for very unusual ability; this test is not easy to make; and, obviously, you may have spoilt the whole composition, especially where its value depends on its form rather than on its substance. But we are not considering poetry, or poetic prose; all we want is intelligible meaning.)
It does not follow that a passage is nonsensical because you fail to understand it; it may simply be too hard for you. When Bertr and Russell writes "We say that a function R is 'ultimately Q-convergent ' if there is a member y of the converse domain of R and the field of Q such that the value of the function for the argument y and for any argument to which y has the relation Q is a member of ." Do we?
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But in spite of this great downfall the ancient tradition, the ancient sanctity survived. The people knew not what Veda might be; but the old idea remained fixed that Veda is always the fountain of Hinduism, the standard of orthodoxy, the repository of a sacred knowledge; not even the loftiest philosopher or the most ritualistic scholar could divest himself entirely of this deeply ingrained & instinctive conception. To complete the degradation of Veda, to consummate the paradox of its history, a new element had to appear, a new form of intelligence undominated by the ancient tradition & the mediaeval method to take possession of Vedic interpretation. European scholarship which regards human civilisation as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander and ending today with Haeckel and Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily primitive culture and primitive culture as necessarily half-savage culture, has turned the light of its Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology on the Veda. The result we all know. Not only all vestige of sanctity, but all pretension to any kind of spiritual knowledge or experience disappears from the Veda. The old Rishis are revealed to us as a race of ignorant and lusty barbarians who drank & enjoyed and fought, gathered riches & procreated children, sacrificed and praised the Powers of Nature as if they were powerful men & women, and had no higher hope or idea. The only idea they had of religion beyond an occasional sense of sin and a perpetual preoccupation with a ritual barbarously encumbered with a mass of meaningless ceremonial details, was a mythology composed of the phenomena of dawn, night, rain, sunshine and harvest and the facts of astronomy converted into a wildly confused & incoherent mass of allegorical images and personifications. Nor, with the European interpretation, can we be proud of our early forefa thers as poets and singers. The versification of the Vedic hymns is indeed noble and melodious,though the incorrect method of writing them established by the old Indian scholars, often conceals their harmonious construction,but no other praise can be given. The Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic Sagas, the Kalewala, the Homeric poems, were written in the dawn of civilisation by semi-barbarous races, by poets not superior in culture to the Vedic Rishis; yet though their poetical value varies, the nations that possess them, need not be ashamed of their ancient heritage. The same cannot be said of the Vedic poems presented to us by European scholarship. Never surely was there even among savages such a mass of tawdry, glittering, confused & purposeless imagery; never such an inane & useless burden of epithets; never such slipshod & incompetent writing; never such a strange & almost insane incoherence of thought & style; never such a bald poverty of substance. The attempt of patriotic Indian scholars to make something respectable out of the Veda, is futile. If the modern interpretation stands, the Vedas are no doubt of high interest & value to the philologist, the anthropologist & the historian; but poetically and spiritually they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge & deep religious wealth, is the most imposing & baseless hoax that has ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout many millenniums.
Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or, and this is the idea I write to suggest, is it not rather the culmination of a long increasing & ever progressing error? The theory this book is written to enunciate & support is simply this, that our forefa thers of early Vedantic times understood the Veda, to which they were after all much nearer than ourselves, far better than Sayana, far better than Roth & Max Muller, that they were, to a great extent, in possession of the real truth about the Veda, that that truth was indeed a deep spiritual truth, karmakanda as well as jnanakanda of the Veda contains an ancient knowledge, a profound, complex & well-ordered psychology & philosophy, strange indeed to our modern conception, expressed indeed in language still stranger & remoter from our modern use of language, but not therefore either untrue or unintelligible, and that this knowledge is the real foundation of our later religious developments, & Veda, not only by historical continuity, but in real truth & substance is the parent & bedrock of all later Hinduism, of Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyaya, Yoga, of Vaishnavism & Shaivism&Shaktism, of Tantra&Purana, even, in a remoter fashion, of Buddhism & the later unorthodox religions. From this quarry all have hewn their materials or from this far-off source drawn unknowingly their waters; from some hidden seed in the Veda they have burgeoned into their wealth of branchings & foliage. The ritualism of Sayana is an error based on a false preconception popularised by the Buddhists & streng thened by the writers of the Darshanas,on the theory that the karma of the Veda was only an outward ritual & ceremony; the naturalism of the modern scholars is an error based on a false preconception encouraged by the previous misconceptions of Sayana,on the theory of the Vedas [as] not only an ancient but a primitive document, the production of semi-barbarians. The Vedantic writers of the Upanishads had alone the real key to the secret of the Vedas; not indeed that they possessed the full knowledge of a dialect even then too ancient to be well understood, but they had the knowledge of the Vedic Rishis, possessed their psychology, & many of their general ideas, even many of their particular terms & symbols. That key, less & less available to their successors owing to the difficulty of the knowledge itself & of the language in which it was couched and to the immense growth of outward ritualism, was finally lost to the schools in the great debacle of Vedism induced by the intellectual revolutions of the centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era.
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The substance of modern philological discovery about the Vedas consists, first, in the picture of an Aryan civilisation introduced by northern invaders and, secondly, in the interpretation of the Vedic religion as a worship of Nature-powers & Vedic myths as allegorical legends of sun & moon & star & the visible phenomena of Nature. The latter generalisation rests partly on new philological renderings of Vedic words, partly on the Science of Comparative Mythology. The method of this Science can be judged from one or two examples. The Greek story of the demigod Heracles is supposed to be an evident sun myth. The two scientific proofs offered for this discovery are first that Hercules performed twelve labours and the solar year is divided into twelve months and, secondly, that Hercules burnt himself on a pyre on Mount Oeta and the sun also sets in a glory of flame behind the mountains. Such proofs seem hardly substantial enough for so strong a conclusion. By the same reasoning one could prove the emperor Napoleon a sun myth, because he was beaten & shorn of his glory by the forces of winter and because his brilliant career set in the western ocean and he passed there a long night of captivity. With the same light confidence the siege of Troy is turned by the scholars into a sun myth because the name of the Greek Helena, sister of the two Greek Aswins, Castor & Pollux, is philologically identical with the Vedic Sarama and that of her abductor Paris is not so very different from the Vedic Pani. It may be noted that in the Vedic story Sarama is not the sister of the Aswins and is not abducted by the Panis and that there is no other resemblance between the Vedic legend & the Greek tradition. So by more recent speculation even Yudhishthira and his brothers and the famous dog of theMahabharat are raised into the skies & vanish in a starry apotheosis,one knows not well upon what grounds except that sometimes the Dog Star rages in heaven. It is evident that these combinations are merely an ingenious play of fancy & prove absolutely nothing. Hercules may be the Sun but it is not proved. Helen & Paris may be Sarama & one of the Panis, but itis not proved. Yudhishthira & his brothers may be an astronomical myth, but it is not proved. For the rest, the unsubstantiality & rash presumption of the Sun myth theory has not failed to give rise in Europe to a hostile school of Comparative Mythologists who adopt other methods & seek the origins of early religious legend & tradition in a more careful and flexible study of the mentality, customs, traditions & symbolisms of primitive races. The theory of Vedic Nature-worship is better founded than these astronomical fancies. Agni is plainly the God of Fire, Surya of the Sun, Usha of the Dawn, Vayu of the Wind; Indra for Sayana is obviously the god of rain; Varuna seems to be the sky, the Greek Ouranos,et cetera. But when we have accepted these identities, the question of Vedic interpretation & the sense of Vedic worship is not settled. In the Greek religion Apollo was the god of the sun, but he was also the god of poetry & prophecy; Athene is identified with Ahana, a Vedic name of the Dawn, but for the Greeks she is the goddess of purity & wisdom; Artemis is the divinity of the moon, but also the goddess of free life & of chastity. It is therefore evident that in early Greek religion, previous to the historic or even the literary period, at an epoch therefore that might conceivably correspond with the Vedic period, many of the deities of the Greek heavens had a double character, the aspect of physical Nature-powers and the aspect of moral Nature-powers. The indications, therefore,for they are not proofs,even of Comparative Mythology would justify us in inquiring whether a similar double character did not attach to the Vedic gods in the Vedic hymns.
The real basis of both the Aryan theory of Vedic civilisation and the astronomical theory of Aryan myth is the new interpretation given to a host of Vedic vocables by the comparative philologists. The Aryan theory rests on the ingenious assumption that anarya, dasyu or dasa in the Veda refer to the unfortunate indigenous races who by a familiar modern device were dubbed robbers & dacoits because they were guilty of defending their country against the invaders & Arya is a national term for the invaders who called themselves, according to Max Muller, the Ploughmen, and according to others, the Noble Race. The elaborate picture of an early culture & history that accompanies and supports this theory rests equally on new interpretations of Vedic words and riks in which with the progress of scholarship the authority of Sayana and Yaska has been more & more set at nought and discredited. My contention is that anarya, dasa and dasyu do not for a moment refer to the Dravidian races,I am, indeed, disposed to doubt whether there was ever any such entity in India as a separate Aryan or a separate Dravidian race,but always to Vritra, Vala & the Panis and other, primarily non-human, opponents of the gods and their worshippers. The new interpretations given to Vedic words & riks seem to me sometimes right & well grounded, often arbitrary & unfounded, but always conjectural. The whole European theory & European interpretation of the Vedas may be [not] unjustly described as a huge conjectural & uncertain generalisation built on an inadequate & shifting mass of conjectural particulars.
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I have thus dwelt on the fragility of the European theory in this introduction because I wish to avoid in the body of the volume the burden of adverse discussion with other theories & rival interpretations. I propose to myself an entirely positive method,the development of a constructive rival hypothesis, not the disproof of those which hold the field. But, since they do hold the field, I am bound to specify before starting those general deficiencies in them which disqualify them at least from prohibiting fresh discussion and shutting out an entirely new point of departure. Possibly Sayana is right and the Vedas are only the hymn-book of a barbarous & meaningless mythological ritual. Possibly, the European theory is more correct and the Vedic religion & myth was of the character of a materialistic Nature worship & the metaphorical, poetical & wholly fanciful personification of heavenly bodies & forces of physical Nature. But neither of these theories is so demonstrably right, that other hypotheses are debarred from appearing and demanding examination. Such a new hypothesis I wish to advance in the present volume. The gods of the Veda are in my view Nature Powers, but Powers at once of moral & of physical Nature, not of physical Nature only; moreover their moral aspect is the substantial part of their physiognomy, the physical though held to be perfectly real & effective, is put forward mainly as a veil, dress or physical type of their psychological being. The ritual of the Veda is a symbolic ritual supposed by those who used it to be by virtue of its symbolism practically effective of both inner & outer results in life & the world. The hymnology of the Veda rests on the ancient theory that speech is in itself both morally & physically creative & effective, the secret executive agent of the divine powers in manifesting & compelling mental & material phenomena. The substance of the Vedic hymns is the record of certain psychological experiences which are the natural results, still attainable & repeatable in our own experience, of an ancient type of Yoga practised certainly in India, practised probably in ancient Greece, Asia Minor & Egypt in prehistoric times. Finally, the language of the Vedas is an ambiguous tongue, with an ambiguity possible only to the looser fluidity belonging to the youth of human speech & deliberately used to veil the deeper psychological meaning of the Riks. I hold that it was the traditional knowledge of this deep religious & psychological character of the Vedas which justified in the eyes of the ancient Indians the high sanctity attached to them & the fixed idea that these were the repositories of an august, divine & hardly attainable truth.
If this hypothesis were wholly at variance with the facts known to the students of Comparative Religion or the interpretation [on] which it is based not clearly justifiable by sound principles of Philology, it would be an act of gross presumption in the present state of our knowledge to advance it without a preliminary examination of the present results held as proved by modern Philology & by the Study of Comparative Religion. But my hypothesis is entirely consistent with the facts of religious history in this & other countries, entirely reconcilable with a sound method of Comparative Religion, entirely baseable on a strict and rational use of Philology. I have criticised & characterised these branches of research as pseudo-Sciences. But I do not for a moment intend to suggest that their results are to be entirely scouted or that they have not done a great work for the advancement of knowledge. Comparative Philology, for instance, has got rid of a great mass of preexistent rubbish and unsoundness and suggested partly the true scientific method of Philological research, though it seems to me that overingenuity, haste & impatience in following up exclusively certain insufficient clues have prevented an excellent beginning from being rightly & fruitfully pursued. If I cannot attach any real value to the Science of Comparative Mythology, yet the study,not the Science, for we have not yet either the materials or the equipment for a true Science,the comparative Study of Religions & of religious myths & ancient traditions as a subordinate part of that study is of the utmost use & importance.
1.10 - THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
no poet has given me the same artistic raptures as those which from
the first I received from an Horatian ode. In certain languages it
would be absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by this poet.
This mosaic of words, in which every unit spreads its power to the
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_par excellence._ By the side of this all the rest of poetry becomes
something popular,--nothing more than senseless sentimental twaddle.
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divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of the _tragic_ poet
Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one's self
1.1.1.01 - Three Elements of Poetic Creation, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.1.1.01 - Three Elements of poetic Creation
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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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 contri butes its own substance and impetus and often determines the form, except when that also comes ready made from the original sources; there is, finally, the transmitting outer consciousness of the poet. The most genuine and perfect poetry is written when the original source is able to throw its inspiration pure and undiminished into the vital and there takes its true native form and power of speech exactly reproducing the inspiration, while the outer consciousness is entirely passive and transmits without alteration what it receives from the godheads of the inner or the superior spaces. When the vital mind and emotion are too active and give too much of their own initiation or a translation into more or less turbid vital stuff, the poetry remains powerful but is inferior in quality and less au thentic. Finally, if the outer consciousness is too lethargic and blocks the transmission or too active and makes its own version, then you have the poetry that fails or is at best a creditable mental manufacture. It is the interference of these two parts either by obstruction or by too great an activity of their own or by both together that causes the difficulty and labour of writing. There would be no difficulty if the inspiration came through without obstruction or interference in a pure transcript that is what happens in a poets highest or freest moments when he writes not at all out of his own external human mind, but by inspiration, as the mouthpiece of the Gods.
The originating source may be anywhere; the poetry may arise or descend from the subtle physical plane, from the higher or lower vital itself, from the dynamic or creative intelligence, from the plane of dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind widenesses. To get the Overmind inspiration is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. When the source of inspiration is in the heart or the psychic there is more easily a good will in the vital channel, the flow is spontaneous; the inspiration takes at once its true form and speech and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind, that great spoiler of the higher or deeper splendours. It is the character of the lyrical inspiration, to flow in a jet out of the beingwhe ther it comes from the vital or the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect is an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the au thentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind; but it is denied free transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When one gets something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say, then there is something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then there results a manufacture or something quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, good on the whole, but not the thing that ought to have come.
2 June 1931
1.1.1.02 - Creation by the Word, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1.1.1.03 - Creative Power and the Human Instrument, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A poem may pre-exist in the timeless as all creation pre-exists there or else in some plane where the past, present and future exist together. But it is not necessary to presuppose anything of the kind to explain the phenomena of inspiration. All is here a matter of formation or creation. By the contact with the source of inspiration the creative Power at one level or another and the human instrument, receptacle or channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-formed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human being is only a channel or receptacle, although he feels the joy of the creation and the joy of the vea, enthousiasmos, elation of the inrush and the passage. On the other hand it may be that the creative source sends down the substance or stuff, the force and the idea, but the language, rhythm etc. are formed somewhere in the instrument; he has to find the human transcription of something that is there in diviner essence above; then there is an illumination or excitement, a conscious labour of creation swift or slow, hampered or facile. Something of the language may be supplied by the mind or vital, something may break through from somewhere behind the veil, from whatever source gets into touch with the transcribing mind in the liberating or stimulating excitement or uplifting of the consciousness. Or a line or lines may come through from some plane and the poet excited to creation may build around them constructing his material or getting it from any source he can tap. There are many possibilities of this nature. There is also the possibility of an inspiration not from above, but from somewhere within on the ordinary levels, some inner mind, emotional vital etc. which the mind practised in poetical technique works out according to its habitual faculty. Here again in a different way similar phenomena, similar variations may arise.
As for the language, the tongue in which the poem comes or the whole lines from above, that offers no real difficulty. It all depends on the contact between the creative Power and the instrument or channel, the Power will naturally choose the language of the instrument or channel, that to which it is accustomed and can therefore readily hear and receive. The Power itself is not limited and can use any language, but although it is possible for things to come through in a language unknown or ill-known I have seen several instances of the formerit is not a usual case, since the sa
1.1.1.04 - Joy of Poetic Creation, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.1.1.04 - Joy of poetic Creation
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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poetry takes its start from any plane of the consciousness, but, like all art, one might even say all creation, it must be passed through the vital, the life-soul, gather from it a certain force for manifestation if it is to be itself alive. And as there is always a joy in creation, that joy along with a certain enthousiasmosnot enthusiasm, if you please, but an invasion and exultation of creative force and creative ecstasy, nandamaya veamust always be there, whatever the source. But where the inspiration comes from the linking of the vital creative instrument to a deeper psychic experience, that imparts another kind of intensive originality and peculiar individual power, a subtle and delicate perfection, a linking on to something that is at once fine to etheriality and potent, intense as fire yet full of sweetness. But this is exceedingly rare in its absolute quality, poetry as an expression of mind and life is common, poetry of the mind and life touched by the soul and given a spiritual fineness is to be found but more rare; the pure psychic note in poetry breaks through only once in a way, in a brief lyric, a sudden line, a luminous passage. It was indeed because this linking-on took place that the true poetic faculty suddenly awoke in you,for it was not there before, at least on the surface. The joy you feel, therefore, was no doubt partly the simple joy of creation, but there comes also into it the joy of expression of the psychic being which was seeking for an outlet since your boyhood. It is this inner expression that makes the writing of poetry a part of sadhana.
29 May 1931
1.1.1.05 - Essence of Inspiration, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1.1.1.06 - Inspiration and Effort, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Inspiration is always a very uncertain thing; it comes when it chooses, stops suddenly before it has finished its work, refuses to descend when it is called. This is a well-known affliction, perhaps of all artists, but certainly of poets. There are some who can comm and it at will; those who, I think, are more full of an abundant poetic energy than careful for perfection; others who oblige it to come whenever they put pen to paper but with these the inspiration is either not of a high order or quite unequal in its level. Again there are some who try to give it a habit of coming by always writing at the same time; Virgil with his nine lines first written, then perfected every morning, Milton with his fifty epic lines a day, are said to have succeeded in regularising their inspiration. It is, I suppose, the same principle which makes gurus in India prescribe for their disciples a meditation at the same fixed hour every day. It succeeds partially of course, for some entirely, but not for everybody. For myself, when the inspiration did not come with a rush or in a stream,for then there is no difficulty,I had only one way, to allow a certain kind of incubation in which a large form of the thing to be done threw itself on the mind and then wait for the white heat in which the entire transcription could rapidly take place. But I think each poet has his own way of working and finds his own issue out of inspirations incertitudes.
26 January 1932
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Few poets can keep for a very long time a sustained level of the highest inspiration. The best poetry does not usually come by streams except in poets of a supreme greatness though there may be in others than the greatest long-continued wingings at a considerable height. The very best comes by intermittent drops, though sometimes three or four gleaming drops at a time. Even in the greatest poets, even in those with the most opulent flow of riches like Shakespeare, the very best is comparatively rare.
13 February 1936
1.1.1.07 - Aspiration, Opening, Recognition, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Perhaps one reason why your mind is so variable is because it has learned too much and has too many influences stamped upon it; it does not allow the real poet in you who is a little at the back to be himselfit wants to supply him with a form instead of allowing him to brea the into the instrument his own notes. It is besides too ingenious. What you have to learn is the art of allowing things to come through and recognising among them the one right thingwhich is very much what you have to do in Yoga also. It is really this recognition that is the one important needonce you have that, things become much easier.
3 July 1932
1.1.1.08 - Self-criticism, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is no use being disgusted because there is a best you have not reached yet; every poet should have that feeling of a miraculous poetic creation existing on a plane he has not reached, but he should not despair of reaching it, but rather he has to regard present achievement not as something final but as steps towards what he hopes one day to write. That is the true artistic temper.
1 May 1934
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It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who dont mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour or fluency to carry it off are usually the abundant writers. There are exceptions, of course. The poetic part caught in the mere mind is an admirable explanation of the phenomenon of interruption. Fluent poets are those who either do not mind if they do not always write their very best or whose minds are sufficiently poetic to make even their not best verse pass muster or make a reasonably good show. Sometimes you write things that are good enough, but not your best, but both your insistence and mine for I think it essential for you to write your best always, at least your level bestmay have curbed the fluency a good deal.
The check and diminution forced on your prose was compensated by the much higher and maturer quality to which it attained afterwards. It would be so, I suppose, with the poetry; a new level of consciousness once attained, there might well be a new fluency. So there is not much justification for the fear.
6 October 1936
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You seem to suffer from a mania of self-depreciatory criticism. Many artists and poets have that; as soon as they look at their work they find it awfully poor and bad. (I had that myself often varied with the opposite feeling, Arjava also has it); but to have it while writing is its most excruciating degree of intensity. Better get rid of it if you want to write freely.
14 December 1936
1.1.1.09 - Correction by Second Inspiration, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11.10 - The Test of Truth, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Who believed that India would be free and Britain go out lock, stock and barrel? Who believe that the Czardom would disappear for ever? And the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, where are they now? And the great Hitler? Even a few years ago who would have believed that man would walk on the moon? And can you believe now that matter can exist and does exist as anti-matter? Not in vain has the mad, bad and sad poet sung: Mais ou sont done les neiges d' antan?1
The physical mind has to be taught, it must learn its lesson, that at every step something new, something unforeseen unpredicted and unpredictable is waiting in front to confound it. And it must gain the perception, the discrimination to recognise it, never to say, "Oh, it is natural, inevitable what is happening, there is nothing to wonder and dismiss the novelty of the thing as an illusion."
The spiritual realities are at your door: they are neither non-existent nor too distant. Freedom, Peace, Calm, Happiness, Delight, Joy, Health are all there as self-existent realities. You have only to turnor tilt as the Mother saysyour consciousness a little and you are in the very midst of the thing. Doubt, hesitation, merely casts a veil and blurs or blocks the view. God, Soul, Immortality, even these are equally available to the human consciousness in the same way. These are existences of daily use, so to say, of "common neighbourhood," in the words of the poethome truth.
A faith, necessarily a blind faith in these impossibles is its own au thenticity, for it brings you immediately in direct contact with those apparently unseen intangible realities. It gives you automatically a sense of certainty, a radiant clarity in the consciousness, that no other approach to Truth or Reality can give you. You feel, you know it is the truth, there is no shadow of any questioning anywhere, it is self-luminous. "Is it not self-hypnotism?" a scoffer might allege. Self-hypnotism is a name: it is the power of consciousness to concentrate itself to such a degree that it can be changed into anything even into its opposite. Self-absorbed consciousness in one form at one extreme is the inconscient, at the other extreme it is the supra conscient Brahman. Consciousness is the power of being and it can give any form or name to the beingyo yatraddha sa eva sa. One becomes whatever one's consciousness wants to become.
11.15 - Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Standing on the mental plane, immured within the dimensions of Reason and mental intelligence, it is not easy to contemplate the type of consciousness that will be; even as it was difficult for the ape to envisage the advent of his successor, man. But certain characteristic signs, rudimentary or fragmentary movements of the higher status are visible in the mental consciousness even as it is: the ape likewise was not without a glimmer of Reason and logic, even the faculty of ratiocination that seems to be the exclusive property of man. There is, for example, a movement we call Intuition, so different from Reason to which even Scientists and Mathematicians acknowledge their debt of gratitude for so many of their discoveries and inventions. There is also the other analogous movement called Inspiration that rules the poet and the artist disclosing to them a world of beauty and reality that is not available to the normal human consciousness. Again, there is yet another group of human beings at the top of the ladder of evolutionmystics and sageswho see the truth, possess the truth direct through a luminous immediacy of perception, called Revelation. Now, all these functionings of consciousness that happen frequently enough within the domain of normal humanity are still expressions of a higher mode of consciousness: they are not the product or play of Reason or logical intelligence which marks the character, the differentia of human consciousness.
But, as at present, these are mere glimmers and glimpses from elsewhere and man has no comm and or control over them. They are beyond the habitual conscious will, they come and go as they like, happy visitations from another world, they do not abide our question and are not at our beck and call. The Supermind, on the contrary, is in full possession of that consciousness of which these are faint beginnings and distant echoes. The Superman will be born when man has risen above his mind and emerged into the supramental consciousness.
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"The poet of patriotism, the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity" he was, in the famous words of his advocate and friend and follower who stood for him before the bar of History for his cause, and not merely before a British Court of Justice. Indeed he was all that, but today we have to add another epithet and complete the description. For he is now the builder of the Life Divine. This was indeed the secret Truth that worked in him from behind and gave to these earlier preoccupations the reality and the beauty they attained and the fullness of their significance. He worked for human evolution, that was his life' mission. He thus formulates the stages of human evolution:
"Family, nationality, humanity are Vishnu's three strides from an isolated to a collective unity. The first has been fulfilled, we yet strive for the perfection of the second, towards the third we are reaching out our hands and the pioneer work is already attempted".
1.11 - BOOK THE ELEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And saw, unsooth'd, their tuneful poet bleed.
The birds, the beasts, and all the savage crew
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Are flung promiscuous at the poet's head.
Those clods of earth or flints discharge, and these
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Then to the poet they return with speed,
Whose fate was, past prevention, now decreed:
1.11 - Correspondence and Interviews, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
All the communications were, however, mostly made orally and did not interfere with Sri Aurobindo's personal work. But gradually correspondence of another sort began to demand his attention. I mean writings on various aspects of his work, either by sadhaks, visitors or outsiders, were sent to him for approval, comment or suggestion, such as Prof. Sisir Maitra's series of articles, Prof. Haridas Chowdhury's thesis on his philosophy, Prof. Sisir Mitra's book on history, books by Prof. Langley, Morwenna Donnelly, Prof. Monod-Herzen, Dr. Srinivas Iyengar, and Lizelle Raymond on Sister Nivedita, to mention a few. In the last three books Sri Aurobindo made extensive additions and changes. Even casual articles from young students were read and received encouragement from him. Arabinda Basu was one of these writers. Poems written by sadhaks, for instance, Dilip, Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna), Nishikanto, Pujalal and Tehmi, or a Goan poet, Prof. Menezies, were also read out. Then came the journals, The Advent and Mother India, the latter particularly, being a semi-political fortnightly, needed his sanction before the matter could be published. Most of the editorial articles of Mother India written by Amal Kiran were found impeccable. But on a few occasions small but significant changes were telegraphically made. Sri Aurobindo's famous message on Korea with its prediction of Stalinist communism's designs on South East Asia and India through Tibet, was originally sent in private to Amal Kiran for his guidance. One of the editorials was based on it. Sri Aurobindo declared privately that Mother India was his paper. When the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education was launched, the Mother wanted to initiate it with an article from Sri Aurobindo. Some days passed. She asked him if he had started writing it. He answered with a smile, "No." After a few days, she reminded him of the urgency. Then he began dictating on the value of sports and physical gymnastics. Quite a series commenced and the most memorable of the lot was the article "The Divine Body". It was a long piece and took more than a week, since we daily had just about an hour to spare. As he was dictating, I marvelled at so much knowledge of Ancient Greece and Ancient India stored up somewhere in his superconscious memory and now pouring down at his command in a smooth flow. No notes were consulted, no books were needed, yet after a lapse of so many decades everything was fresh, spontaneous and recalled in vivid detail! This article, like his others, was then read out to the Mother in front of Sri Aurobindo. She exclaimed, "Magnificent!" Sri Aurobindo simply smiled. All of them have appeared in book-form called The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth.
About some of the articles by others which were being read out to him, he asked, "Have you not read them before?" "No!" I replied. He repeated, "Are you sure?" "How could I? I received them only yesterday," I answered. "Very strange!" he added, "They seem so familiar, as if I had heard them already." He appeared much intrigued by this phenomenon and I wonder if he found an explanation of the mystery. Some articles by a former sadhak were filled with so many quotations from Sri Aurobindo's writings that I muttered my protest, "There is hardly anything here except quotations." He smiled and answered, "It doesn't matter." Once he asked me about a long abstruse article, "Probability in Micro-Physics", written by Amal. It was read out to Sri Aurobindo shortly before he passed away. He asked me, "Do you understand anything of it?" I said, "No!" He smiled and said, "Neither do I." Readings and dictated correspondence, as I have stated before, began to swell in volume and absorbed much of his limited time. Consequently the revision of Savitri suffered and had to be, shelved again and again till one day he declared, "My main work is being neglected."
Dilip's was a special case. Sri Aurobindo's accident had cut off all connection with him and Dilip suffered a lot. After some time, Sri Aurobindo made an exception and maintained correspondence with him almost until his withdrawal from his body. He even granted him an interview. Amal who was living in Bombay at the time was also an exception. Particularly important were the long answers (sometimes 24 typed sheets) Sri Aurobindo dictated to his questions on topics like "Greatness and Beauty in poetry" as well as the correspondence centering on Savitri. All these constituted the last writings dictated by him. They are a work apart and form a permanent contribution to our appreciation of mystic poetry in general and Savitri in particular. It seemed to me that he did this lengthy work with much zest and was glad to have an opportunity to shed some light on his unique poem for its proper understanding in the future. Again, I would gape in wonder at his surprisingly vast knowledge.
And this lengthy communication required very little change. The exchanges between the Master and the disciple went off and on for two years through me and one cannot be too thankful to the disciple for drawing out the Master on his own creation. Another important work that was carried on for some time with Purani was on the Vedas about which I have written in the chapter Attendants.
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I have purposely given long quotations in order to dispel our ignorant notions that Yogis live in a rarefied atmosphere of the Spirit and are indifferent to what passes on this plane of Matter; we forget that Spirit and Matter are two ends of existence. I shall give another minor, even humorous, instance of Matter's reality to Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the poet and the philosopher. Sri Aurobindo was taking his meal, the Mother was serving him and we were standing nearby. She said, "X promised to offer us a big sum, but he has given only Rs.100 with a promise that the rest will follow. Shall we accept or refuse, Lord?" Sri Aurobindo quietly replied "Accept it and hope for the best." All of us, including the Mother, burst out laughing.
Another interview with Sri Aurobindo, which Surendra Mohan almost succeeded in bringing about, but which did not materialise, was with Mahatma Gandhi, in spite of both the parties' willingness to meet. Sri Aurobindo said, "He can come now. You may tell him this." Fate stepped in and foiled what could have been a momentous meeting!
1.11 - Higher Laws, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the
Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true _humanity_, or account of human experience.
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Such is oftenest the young mans introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherds dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. The governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever.
Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
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Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.
It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them; and they lay it down as
--
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eaters heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is
nowhere, my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists, that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to the time of distress.
1.11 - Oneness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Knowledge through Identity We might suppose this cosmic consciousness to be a kind of poetic and mystical superimagination, something purely subjective and without any practical bearing. But first, we could try to clarify what 153
154
1.11 - (Plot continued.) Reversal of the Situation, Recognition, and Tragic or disastrous Incident defined and explained., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Lynceus saved. Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the
Oedipus. There are indeed other forms. Even inanimate things of the most trivial kind may in a sense be objects of recognition. Again, we may recognise or discover whether a person has done a thing or not. But the recognition which is most intimately connected with the plot and action is, as we have said, the recognition of persons. This recognition, combined, with Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents. Moreover, it is upon such situations that the issues of good or bad fortune will depend. Recognition, then, being between persons, it may happen that one person only is recognised by the other-when the latter is already known--or it may be necessary that the recognition should be on both sides. Thus Iphigenia is revealed to Orestes by the sending of the letter; but another act of recognition is required to make Orestes known to Iphigenia.
1.1.1 - The Mind and Other Levels of Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are different kinds of knowledge. One is inspiration, i.e. something that comes out of the Knowledge planes like a flash and opens up the mind to the Truth in a moment. That is inspiration. It easily takes the form of words as when a poet writes or a speaker speaks, as people say, from inspiration.
***
1.11 - The Reason as Governor of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On the other hand, when it attempts a higher action reason separates itself from life. Its very attempt at a disinterested and dispassionate knowledge carries it to an elevation where it loses hold of that other knowledge which our instincts and impulses carry within themselves and which, however imperfect, obscure and limited, is still a hidden action of the universal KnowledgeWill inherent in existence that creates and directs all things according to their nature. True, even Science and Philosophy are never entirely dispassionate and disinterested. They fall into subjection to the tyranny of their own ideas, their partial systems, their hasty generalisations and by the innate drive of man towards practice they seek to impose these upon the life. But even so they enter into a world either of abstract ideas or of ideals or of rigid laws from which the complexity of life escapes. The idealist, the thinker, the philosopher, the poet and artist, even the moralist, all those who live much in ideas, when they come to grapple at close quarters with practical life, seem to find themselves something at a loss and are constantly defeated in their endeavour to govern life by their ideas. They exercise a powerful influence, but it is indirectly, more by throwing their ideas into Life which does with them what the secret Will in it chooses than by a direct and successfully ordered action. Not that the pure empiric, the practical man really succeeds any better by his direct action; for that too is taken by the secret Will in life and turned to quite other ends than the practical man had intended. On the contrary, ideals and idealists are necessary; ideals are the savour and sap of life, idealists the most powerful diviners and assistants of its purposes. But reduce your ideal to a system and it at once begins to fail; apply your general laws and fixed ideas systematically as the doctrinaire would do, and Life very soon breaks through or writhes out of their hold or transforms your system, even while it nominally exists, into something the originator would not recognise and would repudiate perhaps as the very contradiction of the principles which he sought to eternise.
The root of the difficulty is this that at the very basis of all our life and existence, internal and external, there is something on which the intellect can never lay a controlling hold, the Absolute, the Infinite. Behind everything in life there is an Absolute, which that thing is seeking after in its own way; everything finite is striving to express an infinite which it feels to be its real truth. Moreover, it is not only each class, each type, each tendency in Nature that is thus impelled to strive after its own secret truth in its own way, but each individual brings in his own variations. Thus there is not only an Absolute, an Infinite in itself which governs its own expression in many forms and tendencies, but there is also a principle of infinite potentiality and variation quite baffling to the reasoning intelligence; for the reason deals successfully only with the settled and the finite. In man this difficulty reaches its acme. For not only is mankind unlimited in potentiality; not only is each of its powers and tendencies seeking after its own absolute in its own way and therefore naturally restless under any rigid control by the reason; but in each man their degrees, methods, combinations vary, each man belongs not only to the common humanity, but to the Infinite in himself and is therefore unique. It is because this is the reality of our existence that the intellectual reason and the intelligent will cannot deal with life as its sovereign, even though they may be at present our supreme instruments and may have been in our evolution supremely important and helpful. The reason can govern, but only as a minister, imperfectly, or as a general arbiter and giver of suggestions which are not really supreme commands, or as one channel of the sovereign authority, because that hidden Power acts at present not directly but through many agents and messengers. The real sovereign is another than the reasoning intelligence. Mans impulse to be free, master of Nature in himself and his environment cannot be really fulfilled until his self-consciousness has grown beyond the rational mentality, become aware of the true sovereign and either identified itself with him or entered into constant communion with his supreme will and knowledge.
1.1.2.01 - Sources of Inspiration and Variety, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If there were not different sources of inspiration, every poet would write the same thing and in the same way as every other, which would be deplorable. Each draws from a different realm and therefore a different kind and manner of inspirationexcept of course those who make a school and all write on the same lines.
18 July 1936
1.1.2.02 - Poetry of the Material or Physical Consciousness, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.1.2.02 - poetry of the Material or Physical Consciousness
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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Homer and Chaucer are poets of the physical consciousness I have pointed that out in The Future poetry.
31 May 1937
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You cant drive a sharp line between the subtle physical and the physical like that in these matters. If a poet writes from the outward physical only his work is likely to be more photographic than poetic.
1937
1.12 - Brute Neighbors, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
_Hermit._ I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts,no flutter from them. Was that a farmers noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose? And O, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devils door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. O, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble.Eh, Mr. poet, is it you? How do you like the world to-day?
_ poet._ See those clouds; how they hang! Thats the greatest thing I have seen to-day. Theres nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands,unless when we were off the coast of Spain.
Thats a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. Thats the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, lets along.
_Hermit._ I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while.
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Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a winged cat in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Bakers. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun,) but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her wings, which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poets cat be winged as well as his horse?
In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult and ba the in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain.
1.12 - Delight of Existence - The Solution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:Again if we look at World-Existence rather in its relation to the self-delight of eternally existent being, we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child's joy, the poet's joy, the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and re-creating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that selfcreation, of that self-representation, - Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. These three generalisations of the play of existence in its relation to the eternal and stable, the immutable Sachchidananda, starting from the three conceptions of Maya, Prakriti and Lila and representing themselves in our philosophical systems as mutually contradictory philosophies, are in reality perfectly consistent with each other, complementary and necessary in their totality to an integral view of life and the world. The world of which we are a part is in its most obvious view a movement of Force; but that Force, when we penetrate its appearances, proves to be a constant and yet always mutable rhythm of creative consciousness casting up, projecting in itself phenomenal truths of its own infinite and eternal being; and this rhythm is in its essence, cause and purpose a play of the infinite delight of being ever busy with its own innumerable self-representations. This triple or triune view must be the starting-point for all our understanding of the universe.
7:Since, then, eternal and immutable delight of being moving out into infinite and variable delight of becoming is the root of the whole matter, we have to conceive one indivisible conscious Being behind all our experiences supporting them by its inalienable delight and effecting by its movement the variations of pleasure, pain and neutral indifference in our sensational existence. That is our real self; the mental being subject to the triple vibration can only be a representation of our real self put in front for the purposes of that sensational experience of things which is the first rhythm of our divided consciousness in its response and reaction to the multiple contacts of the universe. It is an imperfect response, a tangled and discordant rhythm preparing and preluding the full and unified play of the conscious Being in us; it is not the true and perfect symphony that may be ours if we can once enter into sympathy with the One in all variations and attune ourselves to the absolute and universal diapason.
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14:This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach. We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and poetry, so that we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent;2 and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsa), but only of the thing and its essence. Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supramental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate sorrow, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits them: but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the progressive delight of the universal Soul in things in its manifestation and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience rather chaos and discord. The full liberation can come to us only by a similar liberation in all our parts, the universal aesthesis, the universal standpoint of knowledge, the universal detachment from all things and yet sympathy with all in our nervous and emotional being.
15:Since the nature of suffering is a failure of the consciousforce in us to meet the shocks of existence and a consequent shrinking and contraction and its root is an inequality of that receptive and possessing force due to our self-limitation by egoism consequent on the ignorance of our true Self, of Sachchidananda, the elimination of suffering must first proceed by the substitution of titiks.a, the facing, enduring and conquest of all shocks of existence for jugupsa, the shrinking and contraction: by this endurance and conquest we proceed to an equality which may be either an equal indifference to all contacts or an equal gladness in all contacts; and this equality again must find a firm foundation in the substitution of the Sachchidananda consciousness which is All-Bliss for the ego-consciousness which enjoys and suffers. The Sachchidananda consciousness may be transcendent of the universe and aloof from it, and to this state of distant Bliss the path is equal indifference; it is the path of the ascetic. Or the Sachchidananda consciousness may be at once transcendent and universal; and to this state of present and all-embracing Bliss the path is surrender and loss of the ego in the universal and possession of an all-pervading equal delight; it is the path of the ancient Vedic sages. But neutrality to the imperfect touches of pleasure and the perverse touches of pain is the first direct and natural result of the soul's self-discipline and the conversion to equal delight can, usually, come only afterwards. The direct transformation of the triple vibration into Ananda is possible, but less easy to the human being.
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
The work on Savitri proceeded as usual, but slowed down in pace, especially when we came to a mighty confrontation with the two big Cantos of The Book of Fate. Revision after revision, addition of lines, even punctuations changed so many times! It seemed like a veritable "God's labour" against a rock of resistance. At his time the Press sent up a demand for a new book from him. The Future poetry was given preference and some passages which were meant to be dovetailed into the text of the chapters were written. But since he wanted to write something on modern poetry and for his works of modern poets were needed, orders were sent to Madras for them while whatever few books were available from our small library were requisitioned. As I read them out, he said, "Mark that passage," or "These lines have a striking image" (once the lines referred to were, I think, from C. Day Lewis' Magnetic Mountain).He himself read out a poem of Eliot's to me I don't remember exactly which, and remarked, "This is fine poetry." In this way we proceeded. Since we had to wait for the arrival of the books, he said, "Let us go back to Savitri." His whole attention seemed to be focussed on Savitri, but again, the work had to be suspended owing to the pressure of various extraneous demands. They swelled up to such an extent that he was obliged to remark, "I find no more time for my real work." When the path was fairly clear and I was wondering what his next choice would be, he said in a distant voice, "Take up Savitri. I want to finish it soon." This must have been about two months before his departure. The last part of the utterance startled me, though it was said in a subdued tone. I wondered for a moment if I had heard rightly. I looked at him; my bewildered glance met an impassive face. In these twelve years this was the first time I had heard him reckoning with the time factor. An Avatar of poise, patience and equanimity, this was the picture that shone before our eyes whenever we had thought or spoken about him. Hence my wonder. We took up the same two Cantos that had proved so intractable. The work progressed slowly; words, ideas, images seemed to be repeated; the verses themselves appeared to flow with reluctance. Once a punctuation had to be changed four or five times. When the last revision was made and the Cantos were wound up, I said, "It is finished now." An impersonal smile of satisfaction greeted me, and he said, "Ah, it is finished?" How well I remember that flicker of a smile which all of us craved for so long! "What is left now?" was his next query. "The Book of Death and The Epilogue." "Oh, that? We shall see about that later on." That "later on" never came and was not meant to come. Having taken the decision to leave the body, he must have been waiting for the right moment to go, and for reasons known to himself he left the two last-mentioned Books almost as they were. Thus on Savitri was put the seal of incomplete completion about two weeks before the Darshan of November 24th. Other literary works too came to an end.
And significantly The Book of Fate was the last Book to be revised. What I deemed to be minor flaws or unnecessary repetitions, and thought that a further revision would remove them, appeared, after his passing, to be deliberate and prophetic:
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"I who had depended so much on Sri Aurobindo in all my writing work when he had woken to inspiration the labouring poet, stirred to literary insight the fumbling critic, shaped out of absolute nothing the political commentator I who had almost every day despatched to him some piece of writing for consideration felt a void at the thought that he would not be in that room of his, listening so patiently to my poetry or prose and sending me by letter or telegram his precious guidance. A fellow-sadhak, Udar, spoke to the Mother about my plight. On December 12, the inmates of the Ashram met her again and each received from her hands a photograph of Sri Aurobindo taken after his passing. It was dusk, as far as I recollect. She must have seen a certain helplessness on my face. Smiling as she alone can do, she looked me in the eyes and said, 'Nothing has changed. Call for inspiration and help as you have always done. You will get everything from Sri Aurobindo as before.'"
Champaklal remained sitting at the foot of the bed day and night. The Mother gave him a good quantity of milk to drink at night that was all for physical sustenance.
1.1.2 - Intellect and the Intellectual, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
X asked me the question and I answered it on the basis of the current meaning of intellect and intellectual. People in ordinary speech do not make any distinction between intellect and intelligence, though of course it is quite true that a man may have a good or even a fine intelligence without being an intellectual. But ordinarily all thinking is attributed to the intellect; an intellectual therefore is a man whose main business or activity it is to think about thingsa philosopher, a poet, a scientist, a critic of art and literature or of life, are all classed together as intellectuals. A theorist on economy and politics is an intellectual, a politician or a financier is not, unless he theorises on his own subject or is a thinker on another.
Ys distinction is based on those I have made here, but these distinctions are not current in ordinary speech, except one or two and those even in a very imperfect way. If I go by these distinctions, then the intellectuals will no longer be called intellectuals but thinkers and creatorsexcept a certain class of them. An intellectual or intellectual thinker will then be one who is a thinker by his reason or mainly by his reasone.g. Bertr and Russell, Bernard Shaw, Wells etc. Tagore thinks by vision, imagination, feeling or by intuition, not by the reasonat least that is true of his writings. C. R. Das himself would not be an intellectual; in politics, literature and everything else he was an intuitive and emotive man. But, as I say, these would be distinctions not ordinarily current. In ordinary parlance Tagore, Das and everybody else of the kind would all be called intellectuals. The general mind does not make these subtle distinctions: it takes things in the mass, roughly and it is right in doing so, for otherwise it would lose itself altogether.
1.12 - The Minotaur. The Seventh Circle The Violent. The River Phlegethon. The Violent against their Neighbours. The Centaurs. Tyrants., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Then turned I to the poet; and he said,
"Now he be first to thee, and second I."
1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This view of human life and of the process of our development, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of the place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the intellect has a double working, dispassionate and interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth and of knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to establish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not confined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at a catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its widest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But it is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing to be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the scientist, the savant labouring to add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet and artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be, does not matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when it tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself at fault.
Ordinarily, this is because in concerning itself with action the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and makes itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as possible, and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,still the truths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything of forces over which the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression.
1.12 - The Sacred Marriage, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the glamour shed round these rites by the poetry and philosophy of
later ages there still looms, like a distant landscape through a
1.12 - The Significance of Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- and by the affirmation that the result of such active sacrifice with an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondage of works. "He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when he acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for sacrifice, all his action is dissolved," leaves, that is to say, no result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of the meaning of yajna in the language of the Gita which leaves no doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious, poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni, is no material flame, but brahmagni, the fire of the Brahman, or it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacrifice, into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar
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1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Some seekers may therefore never see beings, but only luminous forces; others will see only beings and never any force; it all depends on their inner disposition, on their form of aspiration, on their religious, spiritual, or even cultural background. This is where subjectivity begins, and with it the possibility of confusion and superstition. But subjectivity should not undermine the experience itself; it is merely a sign that the same thing can be viewed and transcribed differently depending on our nature have two artists ever seen the same landscape in the same way? According to the experts in natural and supernatural phenomena, the criterion for truth should be an unchanging consistency of experience, but this is perhaps more likely a criterion of monotony; the very multiplicity of experiences proves that we are dealing with a living truth, not a wooden substance like our mental or physical truths. Furthermore, these conscious highly conscious forces can take any form at will, not to deceive us but to make themselves accessible to the particular consciousness of the person who opens himself to them or invokes them. A Christian saint having a vision of the Virgin and an Indian having a vision of Durga may see the same thing; they may have entered in contact with the same plane of consciousness, the same forces; yet Durga would obviously mean nothing to the Christian. On the other hand, if this same force manifested itself in its pure state, namely, as a luminous, impersonal vibration, it would be accessible neither to the Virgin worshipper nor to the Durga devotee; it would not speak to their hearts. Devotion, too, has its place, for not everyone has the necessary development to feel the intensity of love contained in a simple little golden light without form. Still more remarkably, if a poet, such as Rimbaud or Shelley, came in contact with these same planes of consciousness, he would see something completely different again, yet still the same thing; obviously, neither Durga nor the Virgin is of particular concern to a poet, so he might perceive instead a great vibration, pulsations of light, or colored waves, which in him would translate into an intense poetic emotion. We may recall Rimbaud: "O happiness, O reason, I drew aside the azure of the sky, which is blackness, and I lived as a golden spark of natural light." This emotional translation may indeed come from the same plane of consciousness, or have the same frequency, we might say, as that of the Indian or Christian mystic, even though the poetic transcription of the vibration seems far removed from any religious belief. The mathematician suddenly discerning a new configuration of the world may have touched the same height of consciousness, the same revelatory vibration. For nothing happens "by chance"; everything comes from somewhere, from a particular plane, and each plane has its own wavelength, its own luminous intensity, its own frequency, and one can enter the same plane of consciousness, the same illumination in a thousand different ways.
Those who have exceeded, or think they have exceeded, the stage of religious forms will jump to the conclusion that all personal forms are deceptive, or of a lower order, and that only impersonal forces are true, but this is an error of our human logic, which always tries to reduce everything to a uniform concept. The vision of Durga is no more false and imaginary than Shelley's poem or Einstein's equations, which were confirmed ten years later. Error and superstition begin with the assertion that only the Virgin is true, or only Durga, or only poetry. The reconciling truth would be in seeing that all these forms come from the same divine Light, in different degrees.
But it would be another mistake to think of the so-called impersonal forces as some improved mechanical forces. They have an intensity, a warmth, a luminous joy that very much suggest a person without a face. Anyone who has experienced a flood of golden light, a sapphire-blue blossoming, or a sparkling of white light knows beyond a doubt that with that gold comes a spontaneous and joyful Knowledge; with that blue, a self-sustaining power; with that whiteness, an ineffable Presence. Some forces can sweep upon us like a smile. Then one truly understands that the opposition between personal and impersonal, consciousness and force, is a practical distinction created by human logic, without much relation to reality, and that one need not see any person to be in the presence of the Person.
Practically, the one essential thing is to open oneself to these higher planes; once there, each person will receive according to his or her capacity and needs or particular aspiration. All the quarrels between materialists and religious men, between philosophers and poets and painters and musicians, are the childish games of an incipient humanity in which each one wants to fit everyone else into his own mold. When one reaches the luminous Truth, one sees that It can contain all without conflict, and that everyone is Its child: the mystic receives the joy of his beloved One, the poet receives poetic joy, the mathematician mathematical joy, and the painter receives colored revelations all spiritual joys.
However "clear austerity" remains a powerful protection, for unfortunately not everyone has the capacity to rise to the high regions where the forces are pure; it is far easier to open oneself at the vital level, which is the world of the great Force of Life and desires and passions (well known to mediums and occultists), where the lower forces can readily take on divine appearances with dazzling colors, or frightening forms. If the seeker is pure, he will see through the hoax either way, and his little psychic light will dissolve all the threats and all the gaudy mirages of the vital melodrama. But how can one ever be sure of one's own purity? Therefore, not to pursue personal forms but only a higher and higher truth, and letting It manifest under any form It chooses, will help us avoid error and superstition.
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We will not attempt here to describe what these higher planes of consciousness are in themselves, independent of man. Each of them is a whole world of existence, vaster and more active than the earth, and our mental language is inadequate to describe them; we would need a language of the visionary or the poet "another language," as Rimbaud said. This is what Sri Aurobindo has created in Savitri, his poetic epic, to which we refer the reader.
A million lotuses swaying on one stem.
--
This luminous flood will translate differently in different people (one is always too quick to give it a form instead of letting it quietly permeate the being and do its work of clarification). For some, there will be a sudden poetic blossoming, others will see new architectural forms, others will pursue new scientific discoveries, while still others will worship their God. Generally, the access to this new consciousness is accompanied by a spontaneous flowering of creative energies, particularly in the poetic field. It is interesting to note the number of poets of all languages Chinese, Indian, English, etc. among Sri Aurobindo's disciples, as if poetry and art were the first practical result of his yoga: I have seen both in myself and others a sudden flowering of capacities in every kind of activity come by the opening of consciousness, so that one who laboured long without the least success to express himself in rhythm becomes a master of poetic language and cadences in a day. It is a question of the right silence in the mind and the right openness to the Word that is trying to express itself for the Word is there ready formed in those inner planes where all artistic forms take birth, but it is the transmitting mind that must change and become a perfect channel and not an obstacle.192
poetry is the most convenient means of conveying what these higher planes of consciousness are. In a poem's rhythm one can easily perceive vibrations. We will therefore use poetry to convey a sense of what these higher planes are, even though the Superconscient is not the sole privilege of poets. In his vast correspondence on poetry and in his Future poetry, Sri Aurobindo has given numerous instances of poetry issuing from the illumined mind. It is naturally Shakespeare who would give us the most abundant examples, provided we let go of the external meaning and listen to what vibrates behind the words; for poetry and all the arts are ultimately a means of capturing a tiny ineffable note, a mere nothing, a "nothing" that still constitutes life's very essence: . . . that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued. . .
--
Along with its beauty, we are also discovering the limits of the illumined mind: illumined poetry produces streams of images and revelatory words (because vision, and even hearing, often open at this stage), almost an avalanche of luxuriant, sometimes incoherent images, as if the consciousness were hard put to contain the flood of light and unaccustomed intensity; it is overwhelmed. Enthusiasm easily changes into exhilaration, and if the rest of the being has not been sufficiently prepared and purified, any of the lower parts can seize hold of the descending light and force and use them for their own ends; this is a frequent snare. Whenever the lower parts of the being, especially the vital, seize upon the luminous flood, they harden it, dramatize it, distort it. There is still power, but compelling and hard while the essence of the illumined mind is joy. Here we could cite the names of many poets and creative geniuses. 193 Furthermore, the substance of the illumined mind is not truly transparent, but only translucent; its light is diffused, somewhat as if it could feel the truth everywhere without concretely touching it; hence the frequent instances of incoherence and vagueness. It is only the beginning of a new birth. Before going higher, more purification is necessary, and above all more peace, more natural equilibrium, and more silence. The higher we ascend in consciousness, the sturdier the equilibrium required.
191 - Letters, 3rd Series, 124
--
The language of intuition is concentrated into a concise phrasing, without superfluous words, in contrast to the opulent language of the illumined mind (which, through its very richness, nevertheless conveys a luminous rhythm and a truth, perhaps less precisely connoted, but warmer). When Plotinus packed the entire cycle of human effort into one phrase "A flight of the Alone to the Alone" he used a highly intuitive language, as do the Upanishads. But this quality also signals the limits of intuition: no matter how replete with meaning our flashes and phrases, they cannot embrace the whole truth; a fuller, more encompassing warmth would be needed, like that of the illumined mind but with a higher transparency. For the Intuition . . . sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. The area unveiled by the flash is striking and irrefutable, but it is only one space of truth.196 Moreover, the mind hastens to seize upon the intuition and, as Sri Aurobindo remarked, it makes at once too little and too much of it.197 Too much, because it unduly generalizes the intuitive message and would extend its discovery to all space; too little, because instead of letting the flash quietly perform its work of illumination and clarification of our substance, it immediately seizes it, coats it with a thinking layer (or a pictorial, poetic, mathematical, or religious one), and no longer understands its flash except through the intellectual, artistic, or religious form it has put over it. It is terribly difficult for the mind to comprehend that a revelation can be allpowerful, even overwhelming, without our understanding anything about it, and that it is especially powerful as long as it is not brought down several degrees, diluted, and fragmented in order, supposedly, to be "understood." If we could remain quiet while the intuitive flash occurs, as if suspended in its own light, without pouncing on it to cut it into intellectual pieces, we would notice, after a while, that our entire being has shifted to a different altitude, and that we possess a new kind of vision instead of a lifeless little phrase. The very act of explaining causes most of the transformative power to evaporate.
If instead of rushing to his pen or brush or into a torrent of words to relieve himself of the excess of light received, the seeker strives to preserve his silence and transparency, if he remains patient, he will see the flashes gradually multiply, draw nearer, as it were, and observe another consciousness slowly dawn within him at once the fulfillment and the source of both the illumined mind and the intuitive mind, and of all human mental forms. This is the overmind.
--
When consciousness rises to that plane, it no longer sees "point by point," but calmly in great masses.198 There is no longer the diffused light of the illumined mind or the isolated flashes of the intuitive mind, but, to quote the wonderful Vedic phrase, "an ocean of stable lightnings." The consciousness is no longer limited to the brief present moment or the narrow range of its visual field; it is unsealed, seeing in a single glance large extensions of space and time.199 The essential difference with other planes lies in the evenness, the almost complete uniformity of the light. In a particularly receptive illumined mind one would see, for example, a bluish background with sudden jets of light, intuitive flashes, or moving luminous eruptions, sometimes even great overmental downpours, but it would be a fluctuating play of light, nothing stable. This is the usual condition of the greatest poets we know; they attain a certain level of rhythm, a particular poetic luminousness, and from time to time they touch upon higher regions and return with those rare dazzling lines (or musical phrases) that are repeated generation after generation like an open sesame. The illumined mind is generally the base (an already very high base), and the overmind a divine kingdom one gains access to in moments of grace.
But for a full and permanent overmental consciousness, such as was realized by the Vedic rishis, for instance, there are no more fluctuations. The consciousness is a mass of stable light. There results an unbroken universal vision; one knows universal joy, universal beauty, universal love; for all the contradictions of the lower planes came from a deficiency of light, or narrowness of light, which lit up only a limited field; while in this even light the contradictions, which are like small shadowy intervals between two flashes or dark frontiers at the end of our light, melt into a unified visual mass. And since there is light everywhere, there are also, necessarily, joy and harmony and beauty everywhere, because opposites are no longer felt as negations or shadowy gaps between two sparks of consciousness but as elements of varying intensity within a continuous cosmic Harmony. Not that the overmental consciousness fails to see what we call ugliness and evil and suffering, but everything is connected within a comprehensive universal play in which each thing has its place and purpose. This is a unifying consciousness, not a dividing one. The degree of unity gives an exact measure of the overmental perfection. Moreover, with the vision of this unity, which is necessarily divine (the Divine is no longer something hypothetical or theoretical, but seen and touched, something that we have become naturally, just as our consciousness has become materially luminous), the overmental being perceives the same light everywhere, in all things and in all beings, just as he perceives it within his own self. There are no more separate gaps, no more lapses of strangeness; everything is bathed continuously in a single substance. The seeker feels universal love, universal understanding, universal compassion for all those other "selves" who are likewise moving toward their own divinity or, rather, gradually becoming the light that they are.
Therefore, we can attain the overmental consciousness in many different ways: through religious passion, through poetic, intellectual, artistic, or heroic zeal, or through anything that helps man to exceed himself. Sri Aurobindo assigned a special place to art, which he considered one of the major means of spiritual progress.
Unfortunately, artists and creators too often have a considerable ego standing in the way, which is their main difficulty. The religious man, who has worked to dissolve his ego, finds it easier, but he rarely attains universality through his own individual efforts, leaping instead beyond the individual without bothering to develop all the intermediate rungs of the personal consciousness, and when he reaches the "top" he no longer has a ladder to come down, or he does not want to come down, or there is no individual self left to express what he sees, or else his old individual self tries its best to express his new consciousness, provided he feels the need to express anything at all. The Vedic rishis, who have given us perhaps the only instance of a systematic and continuous spiritual progression from plane to plane, may be among the greatest poets the earth has ever known, as Sri Aurobindo has shown in his Secret of the Veda. The Sanskrit word kavi had the double meaning of "seer of the Truth" and " poet." One was a poet because one was a seer. This is an obvious and quite forgotten reality. It may be worthwhile, then, to say a few words about art as a means of ascent of the consciousness, and, in particular, about poetry at the overmental level.
198 - On Yoga II, Tome 2, 263
--
Mantric poetry
The planes of consciousness are characterized not only by different intensities of luminous vibrations, but by different sound-vibrations or rhythms one can hear when one has that "ear of ears" the Veda speaks of. Sounds or images, lights or forces or beings are various aspects of the same Existence manifesting differently and in varying intensities according to the plane. The farther one descends the ladder of consciousness, the more fragmented become the sound-vibrations, as well as the light, the beings, and the forces. On the vital plane, for example, one can hear the discordant and jarring vibrations of life, like certain types of music issuing from this plane or certain types of vital painting or poetry, which all express that broken and highly colored rhythm. The higher one rises, the more harmonious, unified and streamlined the vibrations become, such as certain great notes of Beethoven's string quartets, which seem to draw us upward, breathlessly, to radiant heights of pure light. The force of the music is no longer a matter of volume or multi-hued outbursts, but of a higher inner tension. The higher frequency of vibration turns the multi-hued rainbow to pure white, to a note so high that it seems motionless, as if captured in eternity, one single sound-light-force which is perhaps akin to the sacred Indian syllable OM [the] Word concealed in the upper fire.35 "In the beginning was the Word," the Christian Scriptures also say.
There exists in India a secret knowledge based upon sounds and the differences of vibratory modes found on different planes of consciousness. If we pronounce the sound OM, for example, we clearly feel its vibrations enveloping the head centers, while the sound RAM affects the navel center. And since each of our centers of consciousness is in direct contact with a plane, we can, by the repetition of certain sounds (japa), come into contact with the corresponding plane of consciousness.200 This is the basis of an entire spiritual discipline, called "tantric" because it originates from sacred texts known as Tantra. The basic or essential sounds that have the power to establish the contact are called mantras. The mantras, usually secret and given to the disciple by his Guru,201 are of all kinds (there are many levels within each plane of consciousness), and may serve the most contradictory purposes. By combining certain sounds, one can at the lower levels of consciousness generally at the vital level come in contact with the corresponding forces and acquire many strange powers: some mantras can cause death (in five minutes, with violent vomiting), some mantras can strike with precision a particular part or organ of the body, some mantras can cure, some mantras can start a fire, protect, or cast spells. This type of magic, or chemistry of vibrations, derives simply from a conscious handling of the lower vibrations. But there is a higher magic, which also derives from handling vibrations, on higher planes of consciousness. This is poetry, music, the spiritual mantras of the Upanishads and the Veda, the mantras given by a Guru to his disciple to help him come consciously into direct contact with a special plane of consciousness, a force or a divine being. In this case, the sound holds in itself the power of experience and realization it is a sound that makes one see.
Similarly, poetry and music, which are but unconscious processes of handling these secret vibrations, can be a powerful means of opening up the consciousness. If we could compose conscious poetry or music through the conscious manipulation of higher vibrations, we would create masterpieces endowed with initiatory powers. Instead of a poetry that is a fantasy of the intellect and a nautch-girl of the mind,202 as Sri Aurobindo put it, we would create a mantric music or poetry to bring the gods into our life. 203 For true poetry is action; it opens little inlets in the consciousness we are so walled in, so barricaded! through which the Real can enter. It is a mantra of the Real,204 an initiation. This is what the Vedic rishis and the seers of the Upanishads did with their mantras, which have the power of communicating illumination to one who is ready. 205 This is what Sri Aurobindo has explained in his Future poetry and what he has accomplished himself in Savitri.
Mantras, great poetry, great music, or the sacred Word, all come from the overmind plane. It is the source of all creative or spiritual activity (the two cannot be separated: the categorical divisions of the intellect vanish in this clear space where everything is sacred, even the profane). We might now attempt to describe the particular vibration or rhythm of the overmind. First, as anyone knows who has the capacity to enter more or less consciously in contact with the higher planes a poet, a writer, or an artist it is no longer ideas one perceives and tries to translate when one goes beyond a certain level of consciousness: one hears. Vibrations, or waves, or rhythms, literally impose themselves and take possession of the seeker, and subsequently garb themselves with words and ideas, or music, or colors, during the descent. But the word or idea, the music or color is merely a result, a byproduct: it only gives a body to that first, highly compelling vibration. If the poet, the true one, next corrects and recorrects his draft, it is not to improve the form, as it were, or to find a more adequate expression, but to capture the vibrating life behind more accurately; if the true vibration is absent, all the magic disintegrates, as a Vedic priest mispronouncing the mantra of the sacrifice. When the consciousness is transparent, the sound can be heard distinctly, and it is a seeing sound, as it were, a sound-image or a sound-idea, which inseparably links hearing to vision and thought within the same luminous essence. All is there, self-contained, within a single vibration. On all the intermediate planes higher mind, illumined or intuitive mind the vibrations are generally broken up as flashes, pulsations, or eruptions, while in the overmind they are great notes.
They have neither beginning nor end, and they seem to be born out of the Infinite and disappear into the Infinite 206 ; they do not "begin" anywhere, but rather flow into the consciousness with a kind of halo of eternity, which was vibrating beforeh and and continues to vibrate long afterward, like the echo of another voyage behind this one:
--
At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate sometimes much later into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light in the process. There are some rare and silent sages on this earth who can wield and combine these forces and draw them down onto the earth, the way others combine sounds to write a poem. Perhaps they are the true poets. Their existence is a living mantra precipitating the Real upon earth. This concludes the description of the ascent Sri Aurobindo underwent alone in his cell at Alipore. We have only presented a few human reflections of these higher regions; we have said nothing about their essence, nothing about these worlds as they exist in their glory, independently of our pale translations: one must hear and see that for oneself!
Calm heavens of imperishable Light,
--
203 - The Future poetry, 9:233
204 - The Future poetry, 9:9
205 - Unfortunately, these texts have reached us in translation, such that all the magic of the original sound has vanished. The remarkable thing, however, is that if one hears the original Sanskrit text chanted by someone who has knowledge, one can receive an illumination without understanding a word of what has been chanted.
1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Christianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of mans temporal ends. Even St. Francis attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick mans craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciples intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property. It was not until the nineteenth century, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruthless with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex hypothesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically.
Selfishness and partiality are very inhuman and base qualities even in the things of this world; but in the doctrines of religion they are of a baser nature. Now, this is the greatest evil that the division of the church has brought forth; it raises in every communion a selfish, partial orthodoxy, which consists in courageously defending all that it has, and condemning all that it has not. And thus every champion is trained up in defense of their own truth, their own learning and their own church, and he has the most merit, the most honour, who likes everything, defends everything, among themselves, and leaves nothing uncensored in those that are of a different communion. Now, how can truth and goodness and union and religion be more struck at than by such defenders of it? If you ask why the great Bishop of Meaux wrote so many learned books against all parts of the Reformation, it is because he was born in France and bred up in the bosom of Mother Church. Had he been born in England, had Oxford or Cambridge been his Alma Mater, he might have rivalled our great Bishop Stillingfleet, and would have wrote as many learned folios against the Church of Rome as he has done. And yet I will venture to say that if each Church could produce but one man apiece that had the piety of an apostle and the impartial love of the first Christians in the first Church at Jerusalem, that a Protestant and a Papist of this stamp would not want half a sheet of paper to hold their articles of union, nor be half an hour before they were of one religion. If, therefore, it should be said that churches are divided, estranged and made unfriendly to one another by a learning, a logic, a history, a criticism in the hands of partiality, it would be saying that which each particular church too much proves to be true. Ask why even the best amongst the Catholics are very shy of owning the validity of the orders of our Church; it is because they are afraid of removing any odium from the Reformation. Ask why no Protestants anywhere touch upon the benefit or necessity of celibacy in those who are separated from worldly business to preach the gospel; it is because that would be seeming to lessen the Roman error of not suffering marriage in her clergy. Ask why even the most worthy and pious among the clergy of the Established Church are afraid to assert the sufficiency of the Divine Light, the necessity of seeking only the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit; it is because the Quakers, who have broke off from the church, have made this doctrine their corner-stone. If we loved truth as such, if we sought for it for its own sake, if we loved our neighbour as ourselves, if we desired nothing by our religion but to be acceptable to God, if we equally desired the salvation of all men, if we were afraid of error only because of its harmful nature to us and our fellow-creatures, then nothing of this spirit could have any place in us.
1.13 - And Then?, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We do not have the power because we do not have total vision. If, by some miracle, power were given to us any power, on any level we would instantly turn it into a lovely prison corresponding to our small ideas and sense of good, we would lock our whole family up in it, and the world, if we could. But what do we know of the good of the world? What do we know even of our own good, we who today lament this misfortune only to realize tomorrow that it was knocking at the door of a greater good? For the last two thousand years and more, we have been devising beneficial systems, which crumble one after another fortunately. Even the wise Plato banished poets from his Republic, much as today we would perhaps banish those useless eccentrics who roam the world and knock blindly at the doors of the future. We complain about our incapacity (to heal, help, cure, save), but it is exactly, minutely commensurate with our capacity of vision and the philanthropists are far from being the most gifted. We are forever running up against the same mistake: we want to change the world without first changing ourselves.
The superman has lost his small self, lost his small ideas of family and country, good and evil he has in effect no more ideas, or has them all, exactly when needed. And when one comes, it is carried out, very simply, because its time and moment have come. For him, ideas and feelings are simply the imperative translation of a movement of force a will-idea or force-idea which is expressed here by this gesture, there by that action or plan, this poem, that architecture or cantata. But it is one and the same Force in different languages pictorial, musical, material or economic. He is tuned in to the Rhythm, and he translates according to his particular talent and place in the whole. He is a translator of the Rhythm.
1.13 - Conclusion - He is here, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Again the unexpected! All of a sudden the curtain dropped on the divine drama that had been unrolled for twelve years. Who could have foreseen it? The Supreme Actor who had apparently been quite well and given darshan to the bhaktas on his birthday, August 15, as well as on November 24, most unexpectedly left the stage! When the news was announced on the radio, it came as a heart-rending to the devotees all over the world and just at a time when his name spelt a word of hope to aspiring humanity, as a Yogi, Rishi, poet, philosopher, lover of mankind and bringer of new Light. It was hard to believe and many rushed to Pondicherry by whatever means available to have the last darshan of the Sage.
It is now twenty-two years since he left us; His Birth Centenary in which the Government of India is taking a significant part as a modest recognition of Sri Aurobindo's greatness, is going to be observed all over India and in many parts of the world. Meanwhile the Supramental Manifestation has taken place and the Ashram in consequence has come to be regarded by the world as a spiritual institution from which a new Light is radiating upon earth. Politically, India is gaining a world-status and a serious obstacle to her greatness has been partially removed fulfilling his prophecy. We see then the purpose for which Sri Aurobindo took birth and the dreams he cherished and worked for are on their way to realisation. He did not come for a few individuals only, or for a single nation or race; he came for the transformation of earth-nature which had been abandoned to herself by God and man. God-men came to give some relief to the suffering humanity or to show it a door of escape from suffering, but none before Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental Avatar, accepting Matter as essentially Brahman, came to divinise it. When the work was going apace the curtain dropped, all of a sudden.
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
whom the poet speaks somewhat as follows: Oceanus, the origin
of gods and of men. 134 Putting this into other words, he says that
1.1.3 - Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I am glad to know that your vital has been frightened into acquiescence in self-givingeven if only by the imaginary horror of being obliged to become the policeman of yourself. But to explain why these contradictions existed in you one has to have recourse to this very business of harmonies and disharmonies and the inner knowledge. You were in fact a piano played on by several pianists at a time each with his own different musical piece to play! In plain words and without images, every man is full of these contradictions because he is one person, no doubt, but made up of different personalities the perception of multiple personality is becoming well-known to psychologists nowwho very commonly disagree with each other. So long as one does not aim at unity in a single dominant intention, like that of seeking and self-dedication to the Divine, they get on somehow together, alternating or quarrelling or muddling through or else one taking the lead and compelling the others to take a minor part but once you try to unite them in one aim, then the trouble becomes evident. One element wanted the Divine from the first, another wanted music, literature, poetry, a third wanted life at its best, a fourth wanted lifewell, not at its best. Finally there was another element which wanted life not at all, but was rather disgusted with it and wanted either a better (diviner) life or something better than life. It was this element evidently that created the vairgya and in the struggle between that and the life-partisans, a black element stole in (not one of the personalities, but a formation, a dark intrusion from outside), which wanted to turn the whole thing into a drama or tragedy of despairdespair of life but despair of the Divine also. That has to be rejected, the rest changed and harmonised. That is the only true explanation of the whole difficulty in your nature.
***
--- Overview of noun poet
The noun poet has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (14) poet ::: (a writer of poems (the term is usually reserved for writers of good poetry))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun poet
1 sense of poet
Sense 1
poet
=> writer, author
=> communicator
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun poet
1 sense of poet
Sense 1
poet
=> bard
=> elegist
=> odist
=> poetess
=> poet laureate
=> poet laureate
=> sonneteer
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HAS INSTANCE=> Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
HAS INSTANCE=> Pope, Alexander Pope
HAS INSTANCE=> Pound, Ezra Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound
HAS INSTANCE=> Pushkin, Alexander Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
HAS INSTANCE=> Racine, Jean Racine, Jean Baptiste Racine
HAS INSTANCE=> Riley, James Whitcomb Riley
HAS INSTANCE=> Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke
HAS INSTANCE=> Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud
HAS INSTANCE=> Robinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson
HAS INSTANCE=> Rostand, Edmond Rostand
HAS INSTANCE=> Seeger, Alan Seeger
HAS INSTANCE=> Sexton, Anne Sexton
HAS INSTANCE=> Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Shakspere, William Shakspere, Bard of Avon
HAS INSTANCE=> Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley
HAS INSTANCE=> Shevchenko, Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko
HAS INSTANCE=> Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney
HAS INSTANCE=> Silverstein, Shel Silverstein, Shelby Silverstein
HAS INSTANCE=> Sitwell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
HAS INSTANCE=> Southey, Robert Southey
HAS INSTANCE=> Spender, Stephen Spender, Sir Stephen Harold Spender
HAS INSTANCE=> Spenser, Edmund Spenser
HAS INSTANCE=> Stevens, Wallace Stevens
HAS INSTANCE=> Suckling, Sir John Suckling
HAS INSTANCE=> Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne
HAS INSTANCE=> Symons, Arthur Symons
HAS INSTANCE=> Synge, J. M. Synge, John Millington Synge, Edmund John Millington Synge
HAS INSTANCE=> Tasso, Torquato Tasso
HAS INSTANCE=> Tate, Allen Tate, John Orley Allen Tate
HAS INSTANCE=> Teasdale, Sara Teasdale
HAS INSTANCE=> Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, First Baron Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson
HAS INSTANCE=> Thespis
HAS INSTANCE=> Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dylan Marlais Thomas
HAS INSTANCE=> Trumbull, John Trumbull
HAS INSTANCE=> Tzara, Tristan Tzara, Samuel Rosenstock
HAS INSTANCE=> Uhland, Johann Ludwig Uhland
HAS INSTANCE=> Verlaine, Paul Verlaine
HAS INSTANCE=> Villon, Francois Villon
HAS INSTANCE=> Virgil, Vergil, Publius Vergilius Maro
HAS INSTANCE=> Voznesenski, Andrei Voznesenski
HAS INSTANCE=> Warren, Robert Penn Warren
HAS INSTANCE=> Watts, Isaac Watts
HAS INSTANCE=> Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley
HAS INSTANCE=> Whitman, Walt Whitman
HAS INSTANCE=> Whittier, John Greenleaf Whittier
HAS INSTANCE=> Williams, William Carlos Williams
HAS INSTANCE=> Wordsworth, William Wordsworth
HAS INSTANCE=> Wyatt, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Wyat, Sir Thomas Wyat
HAS INSTANCE=> Wylie, Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie
HAS INSTANCE=> Yeats, William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats
HAS INSTANCE=> Yevtushenko, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
HAS INSTANCE=> Young, Edward Young
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun poet
1 sense of poet
Sense 1
poet
=> writer, author
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun poet
1 sense of poet
Sense 1
poet
-> writer, author
=> abstractor, abstracter
=> alliterator
=> authoress
=> biographer
=> coauthor, joint author
=> commentator, reviewer
=> compiler
=> contributor
=> cyberpunk
=> drafter
=> dramatist, playwright
=> essayist, litterateur
=> folk writer
=> framer
=> gagman, gagster, gagwriter
=> ghostwriter, ghost
=> Gothic romancer
=> hack, hack writer, literary hack
=> journalist
=> librettist
=> lyricist, lyrist
=> novelist
=> pamphleteer
=> paragrapher
=> poet
=> polemicist, polemist, polemic
=> rhymer, rhymester, versifier, poetizer, poetiser
=> scenarist
=> scriptwriter
=> space writer
=> speechwriter
=> tragedian
=> wordmonger
=> word-painter
=> wordsmith
HAS INSTANCE=> Aiken, Conrad Aiken, Conrad Potter Aiken
HAS INSTANCE=> Alger, Horatio Alger
HAS INSTANCE=> Algren, Nelson Algren
HAS INSTANCE=> Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen
HAS INSTANCE=> Anderson, Sherwood Anderson
HAS INSTANCE=> Aragon, Louis Aragon
HAS INSTANCE=> Asch, Sholem Asch, Shalom Asch, Sholom Asch
HAS INSTANCE=> Asimov, Isaac Asimov
HAS INSTANCE=> Auchincloss, Louis Auchincloss, Louis Stanton Auchincloss
HAS INSTANCE=> Austen, Jane Austen
HAS INSTANCE=> Baldwin, James Baldwin, James Arthur Baldwin
HAS INSTANCE=> Baraka, Imamu Amiri Baraka, LeRoi Jones
HAS INSTANCE=> Barth, John Barth, John Simmons Barth
HAS INSTANCE=> Barthelme, Donald Barthelme
HAS INSTANCE=> Baum, Frank Baum, Lyman Frank Brown
HAS INSTANCE=> Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir
HAS INSTANCE=> Beckett, Samuel Beckett
HAS INSTANCE=> Beerbohm, Max Beerbohm, Sir Henry Maxmilian Beerbohm
HAS INSTANCE=> Belloc, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Hilaire Peter Belloc
HAS INSTANCE=> Bellow, Saul Bellow, Solomon Bellow
HAS INSTANCE=> Benchley, Robert Benchley, Robert Charles Benchley
HAS INSTANCE=> Benet, William Rose Benet
HAS INSTANCE=> Bierce, Ambrose Bierce, Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
HAS INSTANCE=> Boell, Heinrich Boell, Heinrich Theodor Boell
HAS INSTANCE=> Bontemps, Arna Wendell Bontemps
HAS INSTANCE=> Borges, Jorge Borges, Jorge Luis Borges
HAS INSTANCE=> Boswell, James Boswell
HAS INSTANCE=> Boyle, Kay Boyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Bradbury, Ray Bradbury, Ray Douglas Bradbury
HAS INSTANCE=> Bronte, Charlotte Bronte
HAS INSTANCE=> Bronte, Emily Bronte, Emily Jane Bronte, Currer Bell
HAS INSTANCE=> Bronte, Anne Bronte
HAS INSTANCE=> Browne, Charles Farrar Browne, Artemus Ward
HAS INSTANCE=> Buck, Pearl Buck, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck
HAS INSTANCE=> Bunyan, John Bunyan
HAS INSTANCE=> Burgess, Anthony Burgess
HAS INSTANCE=> Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett
HAS INSTANCE=> Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs
HAS INSTANCE=> Burroughs, William Burroughs, William S. Burroughs, William Seward Burroughs
HAS INSTANCE=> Butler, Samuel Butler
HAS INSTANCE=> Cabell, James Branch Cabell
HAS INSTANCE=> Caldwell, Erskine Caldwell, Erskine Preston Caldwell
HAS INSTANCE=> Calvino, Italo Calvino
HAS INSTANCE=> Camus, Albert Camus
HAS INSTANCE=> Canetti, Elias Canetti
HAS INSTANCE=> Capek, Karel Capek
HAS INSTANCE=> Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Dodgson, Reverend Dodgson, Charles Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
HAS INSTANCE=> Cather, Willa Cather, Willa Sibert Cather
HAS INSTANCE=> Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes, Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
HAS INSTANCE=> Chandler, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Thornton Chandler
HAS INSTANCE=> Chateaubriand, Francois Rene Chateaubriand, Vicomte de Chateaubriand
HAS INSTANCE=> Cheever, John Cheever
HAS INSTANCE=> Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton
HAS INSTANCE=> Chopin, Kate Chopin, Kate O'Flaherty Chopin
HAS INSTANCE=> Christie, Agatha Christie, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
HAS INSTANCE=> Churchill, Winston Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill
HAS INSTANCE=> Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain
HAS INSTANCE=> Cocteau, Jean Cocteau
HAS INSTANCE=> Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Colette
HAS INSTANCE=> Collins, Wilkie Collins, William Wilkie Collins
HAS INSTANCE=> Conan Doyle, A. Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Conrad, Joseph Conrad, Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
HAS INSTANCE=> Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper
HAS INSTANCE=> Crane, Stephen Crane
HAS INSTANCE=> cummings, e. e. cummings, Edward Estlin Cummings
HAS INSTANCE=> Day, Clarence Day, Clarence Shepard Day Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Defoe, Daniel Defoe
HAS INSTANCE=> De Quincey, Thomas De Quincey
HAS INSTANCE=> Dickens, Charles Dickens, Charles John Huffam Dickens
HAS INSTANCE=> Didion, Joan Didion
HAS INSTANCE=> Dinesen, Isak Dinesen, Blixen, Karen Blixen, Baroness Karen Blixen
HAS INSTANCE=> Doctorow, E. L. Doctorow, Edgard Lawrence Doctorow
HAS INSTANCE=> Dos Passos, John Dos Passos, John Roderigo Dos Passos
HAS INSTANCE=> Dostoyevsky, Dostoevski, Dostoevsky, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Feodor Dostoevski, Fyodor Dostoevski, Feodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
HAS INSTANCE=> Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
HAS INSTANCE=> Dumas, Alexandre Dumas
HAS INSTANCE=> du Maurier, George du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier
HAS INSTANCE=> du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier, Dame Daphne du Maurier
HAS INSTANCE=> Durrell, Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence George Durrell
HAS INSTANCE=> Ehrenberg, Ilya Ehrenberg, Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenberg
HAS INSTANCE=> Eliot, George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans
HAS INSTANCE=> Ellison, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Waldo Ellison
HAS INSTANCE=> Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson
HAS INSTANCE=> Farrell, James Thomas Farrell
HAS INSTANCE=> Ferber, Edna Ferber
HAS INSTANCE=> Fielding, Henry Fielding
HAS INSTANCE=> Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
HAS INSTANCE=> Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert
HAS INSTANCE=> Fleming, Ian Fleming, Ian Lancaster Fleming
HAS INSTANCE=> Ford, Ford Madox Ford, Ford Hermann Hueffer
HAS INSTANCE=> Forester, C. S. Forester, Cecil Scott Forester
HAS INSTANCE=> France, Anatole France, Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
HAS INSTANCE=> Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
HAS INSTANCE=> Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes
HAS INSTANCE=> Gaboriau, Emile Gaboriau
HAS INSTANCE=> Galsworthy, John Galsworthy
HAS INSTANCE=> Gardner, Erle Stanley Gardner
HAS INSTANCE=> Gaskell, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell
HAS INSTANCE=> Geisel, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss
HAS INSTANCE=> Gibran, Kahlil Gibran
HAS INSTANCE=> Gide, Andre Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
HAS INSTANCE=> Gjellerup, Karl Gjellerup
HAS INSTANCE=> Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
HAS INSTANCE=> Golding, William Golding, Sir William Gerald Golding
HAS INSTANCE=> Goldsmith, Oliver Goldsmith
HAS INSTANCE=> Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz
HAS INSTANCE=> Goncourt, Edmond de Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt
HAS INSTANCE=> Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt
HAS INSTANCE=> Gordimer, Nadine Gordimer
HAS INSTANCE=> Gorky, Maksim Gorky, Gorki, Maxim Gorki, Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, Aleksey Maximovich Peshkov
HAS INSTANCE=> Grahame, Kenneth Grahame
HAS INSTANCE=> Grass, Gunter Grass, Gunter Wilhelm Grass
HAS INSTANCE=> Graves, Robert Graves, Robert Ranke Graves
HAS INSTANCE=> Greene, Graham Greene, Henry Graham Greene
HAS INSTANCE=> Grey, Zane Grey
HAS INSTANCE=> Grimm, Jakob Grimm, Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm
HAS INSTANCE=> Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Wilhelm Karl Grimm
HAS INSTANCE=> Haggard, Rider Haggard, Sir Henry Rider Haggard
HAS INSTANCE=> Haldane, Elizabeth Haldane, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane
HAS INSTANCE=> Hale, Edward Everett Hale
HAS INSTANCE=> Haley, Alex Haley
HAS INSTANCE=> Hall, Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall
HAS INSTANCE=> Hammett, Dashiell Hammett, Samuel Dashiell Hammett
HAS INSTANCE=> Hamsun, Knut Hamsun, Knut Pedersen
HAS INSTANCE=> Hardy, Thomas Hardy
HAS INSTANCE=> Harris, Frank Harris, James Thomas Harris
HAS INSTANCE=> Harris, Joel Harris, Joel Chandler Harris
HAS INSTANCE=> Harte, Bret Harte
HAS INSTANCE=> Hasek, Jaroslav Hasek
HAS INSTANCE=> Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne
HAS INSTANCE=> Hecht, Ben Hecht
HAS INSTANCE=> Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Anson Heinlein
HAS INSTANCE=> Heller, Joseph Heller
HAS INSTANCE=> Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway
HAS INSTANCE=> Hesse, Hermann Hesse
HAS INSTANCE=> Heyse, Paul Heyse, Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse
HAS INSTANCE=> Heyward, DuBois Heyward, Edwin DuBois Hayward
HAS INSTANCE=> Higginson, Thomas Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson
HAS INSTANCE=> Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann
HAS INSTANCE=> Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes
HAS INSTANCE=> Howells, William Dean Howells
HAS INSTANCE=> Hoyle, Edmond Hoyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Hubbard, L. Ron Hubbard
HAS INSTANCE=> Hughes, Langston Hughes, James Langston Hughes
HAS INSTANCE=> Hunt, Leigh Hunt, James Henry Leigh Hunt
HAS INSTANCE=> Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
HAS INSTANCE=> Irving, John Irving
HAS INSTANCE=> Irving, Washington Irving
HAS INSTANCE=> Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
HAS INSTANCE=> Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson
HAS INSTANCE=> Jacobs, Jane Jacobs
HAS INSTANCE=> Jacobs, W. W. Jacobs, William Wymark Jacobs
HAS INSTANCE=> James, Henry James
HAS INSTANCE=> Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
HAS INSTANCE=> Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson
HAS INSTANCE=> Jong, Erica Jong
HAS INSTANCE=> Joyce, James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
HAS INSTANCE=> Kafka, Franz Kafka
HAS INSTANCE=> Keller, Helen Keller, Helen Adams Keller
HAS INSTANCE=> Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
HAS INSTANCE=> Kesey, Ken Kesey, Ken Elton Kesey
HAS INSTANCE=> Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Rudyard Kipling
HAS INSTANCE=> Koestler, Arthur Koestler
HAS INSTANCE=> La Fontaine, Jean de La Fontaine
HAS INSTANCE=> Lardner, Ring Lardner, Ringgold Wilmer Lardner
HAS INSTANCE=> La Rochefoucauld, Francois de La Rochefoucauld
HAS INSTANCE=> Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, David Herbert Lawrence
HAS INSTANCE=> Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia
HAS INSTANCE=> le Carre, John le Carre, David John Moore Cornwell
HAS INSTANCE=> Leonard, Elmore Leonard, Elmore John Leonard, Dutch Leonard
HAS INSTANCE=> Lermontov, Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov
HAS INSTANCE=> Lessing, Doris Lessing, Doris May Lessing
HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Harry Sinclair Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> London, Jack London, John Griffith Chaney
HAS INSTANCE=> Lowry, Malcolm Lowry, Clarence Malcolm Lowry
HAS INSTANCE=> Lyly, John Lyly
HAS INSTANCE=> Lytton, First Baron Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton
HAS INSTANCE=> Mailer, Norman Mailer
HAS INSTANCE=> Malamud, Bernard Malamud
HAS INSTANCE=> Malory, Thomas Malory, Sir Thomas Malory
HAS INSTANCE=> Malraux, Andre Malraux
HAS INSTANCE=> Mann, Thomas Mann
HAS INSTANCE=> Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
HAS INSTANCE=> Manzoni, Alessandro Manzoni
HAS INSTANCE=> Marquand, John Marquand, John Philip Marquand
HAS INSTANCE=> Marsh, Ngaio Marsh
HAS INSTANCE=> Mason, A. E. W. Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley Mason
HAS INSTANCE=> Maugham, Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, William Somerset Maugham
HAS INSTANCE=> Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant, Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant
HAS INSTANCE=> Mauriac, Francois Mauriac, Francois Charles Mauriac
HAS INSTANCE=> Maurois, Andre Maurois, Emile Herzog
HAS INSTANCE=> McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Mary Therese McCarthy
HAS INSTANCE=> McCullers, Carson McCullers, Carson Smith McCullers
HAS INSTANCE=> McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marshall McLuhan
HAS INSTANCE=> Melville, Herman Melville
HAS INSTANCE=> Merton, Thomas Merton
HAS INSTANCE=> Michener, James Michener, James Albert Michener
HAS INSTANCE=> Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Valentine Miller
HAS INSTANCE=> Milne, A. A. Milne, Alan Alexander Milne
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Nancy Freeman Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Jessica Mitford, Jessica Lucy Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Montaigne, Michel Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Montaigne
HAS INSTANCE=> Montgomery, L. M. Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery
HAS INSTANCE=> More, Thomas More, Sir Thomas More
HAS INSTANCE=> Morrison, Toni Morrison, Chloe Anthony Wofford
HAS INSTANCE=> Munro, H. H. Munro, Hector Hugh Munro, Saki
HAS INSTANCE=> Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
HAS INSTANCE=> Musset, Alfred de Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
HAS INSTANCE=> Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir vladimirovich Nabokov
HAS INSTANCE=> Nash, Ogden Nash
HAS INSTANCE=> Nicolson, Harold Nicolson, Sir Harold George Nicolson
HAS INSTANCE=> Norris, Frank Norris, Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Oates, Joyce Carol Oates
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Brien, Edna O'Brien
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Flaherty, Liam O'Flaherty
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Hara, John Henry O'Hara
HAS INSTANCE=> Ondaatje, Michael Ondaatje, Philip Michael Ondaatje
HAS INSTANCE=> Orczy, Baroness Emmusca Orczy
HAS INSTANCE=> Orwell, George Orwell, Eric Blair, Eric Arthur Blair
HAS INSTANCE=> Page, Thomas Nelson Page
HAS INSTANCE=> Parker, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Rothschild Parker
HAS INSTANCE=> Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
HAS INSTANCE=> Paton, Alan Paton, Alan Stewart Paton
HAS INSTANCE=> Percy, Walker Percy
HAS INSTANCE=> Petronius, Gaius Petronius, Petronius Arbiter
HAS INSTANCE=> Plath, Sylvia Plath
HAS INSTANCE=> Pliny, Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus
HAS INSTANCE=> Pliny, Pliny the Younger, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus
HAS INSTANCE=> Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
HAS INSTANCE=> Porter, William Sydney Porter, O. Henry
HAS INSTANCE=> Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
HAS INSTANCE=> Post, Emily Post, Emily Price Post
HAS INSTANCE=> Pound, Ezra Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, John Cowper Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Theodore Francis Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Llewelyn Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Pyle, Howard Pyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Pynchon, Thomas Pynchon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rand, Ayn Rand
HAS INSTANCE=> Richler, Mordecai Richler
HAS INSTANCE=> Roberts, Kenneth Roberts
HAS INSTANCE=> Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
HAS INSTANCE=> Roth, Philip Roth, Philip Milton Roth
HAS INSTANCE=> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
HAS INSTANCE=> Runyon, Damon Runyon, Alfred Damon Runyon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rushdie, Salman Rushdie, Ahmed Salman Rushdie
HAS INSTANCE=> Russell, George William Russell, A.E.
HAS INSTANCE=> Sade, de Sade, Comte Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, Marquis de Sade
HAS INSTANCE=> Salinger, J. D. Salinger, Jerome David Salinger
HAS INSTANCE=> Sand, George Sand, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant
HAS INSTANCE=> Sandburg, Carl Sandburg
HAS INSTANCE=> Saroyan, William Saroyan
HAS INSTANCE=> Sayers, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Leigh Sayers
HAS INSTANCE=> Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
HAS INSTANCE=> Scott, Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott
HAS INSTANCE=> Service, Robert William Service
HAS INSTANCE=> Shaw, G. B. Shaw, George Bernard Shaw
HAS INSTANCE=> Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley
HAS INSTANCE=> Shute, Nevil Shute, Nevil Shute Norway
HAS INSTANCE=> Simenon, Georges Simenon, Georges Joseph Christian Simenon
HAS INSTANCE=> Sinclair, Upton Sinclair, Upton Beall Sinclair
HAS INSTANCE=> Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer
HAS INSTANCE=> Smollett, Tobias Smollett, Tobias George Smollett
HAS INSTANCE=> Snow, C. P. Snow, Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of Leicester
HAS INSTANCE=> Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
HAS INSTANCE=> Sontag, Susan Sontag
HAS INSTANCE=> Spark, Muriel Spark, Dame Muriel Spark, Muriel Sarah Spark
HAS INSTANCE=> Spillane, Mickey Spillane, Frank Morrison Spillane
HAS INSTANCE=> Stael, Madame de Stael, Baronne Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Steal-Holstein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steele, Sir Richrd Steele
HAS INSTANCE=> Stein, Gertrude Stein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steinbeck, John Steinbeck, John Ernst Steinbeck
HAS INSTANCE=> Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen
HAS INSTANCE=> Sterne, Laurence Sterne
HAS INSTANCE=> Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
HAS INSTANCE=> Stockton, Frank Stockton, Francis Richard Stockton
HAS INSTANCE=> Stoker, Bram Stoker, Abraham Stoker
HAS INSTANCE=> Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe
HAS INSTANCE=> Styron, William Styron
HAS INSTANCE=> Sue, Eugene Sue
HAS INSTANCE=> Symonds, John Addington Symonds
HAS INSTANCE=> Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Rabindranath Tagore
HAS INSTANCE=> Tarbell, Ida Tarbell, Ida M. Tarbell, Ida Minerva Tarbell
HAS INSTANCE=> Thackeray, William Makepeace Thackeray
HAS INSTANCE=> Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
HAS INSTANCE=> Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice de Tocqueville
HAS INSTANCE=> Toklas, Alice B. Toklas
HAS INSTANCE=> Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
HAS INSTANCE=> Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
HAS INSTANCE=> Trollope, Anthony Trollope
HAS INSTANCE=> Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
HAS INSTANCE=> Undset, Sigrid Undset
HAS INSTANCE=> Untermeyer, Louis Untermeyer
HAS INSTANCE=> Updike, John Updike, John Hoyer Updike
HAS INSTANCE=> Van Doren, Carl Van Doren, Carl Clinton Van Doren
HAS INSTANCE=> Vargas Llosa, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
HAS INSTANCE=> Verne, Jules Verne
HAS INSTANCE=> Vidal, Gore Vidal, Eugene Luther Vidal
HAS INSTANCE=> Voltaire, Arouet, Francois-Marie Arouet
HAS INSTANCE=> Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut
HAS INSTANCE=> Wain, John Wain, John Barrington Wain
HAS INSTANCE=> Walker, Alice Walker, Alice Malsenior Walker
HAS INSTANCE=> Wallace, Edgar Wallace, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace
HAS INSTANCE=> Walpole, Horace Walpole, Horatio Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford
HAS INSTANCE=> Walton, Izaak Walton
HAS INSTANCE=> Ward, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Mary Augusta Arnold Ward
HAS INSTANCE=> Warren, Robert Penn Warren
HAS INSTANCE=> Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Arthur Saint John Waugh
HAS INSTANCE=> Webb, Beatrice Webb, Martha Beatrice Potter Webb
HAS INSTANCE=> Wells, H. G. Wells, Herbert George Wells
HAS INSTANCE=> Welty, Eudora Welty
HAS INSTANCE=> Werfel, Franz Werfel
HAS INSTANCE=> West, Rebecca West, Dame Rebecca West, Cicily Isabel Fairfield
HAS INSTANCE=> Wharton, Edith Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
HAS INSTANCE=> White, E. B. White, Elwyn Brooks White
HAS INSTANCE=> White, Patrick White, Patrick Victor Martindale White
HAS INSTANCE=> Wiesel, Elie Wiesel, Eliezer Wiesel
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilde, Oscar Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilder, Thornton Wilder, Thornton Niven Wilder
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilson, Sir Angus Wilson, Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilson, Harriet Wilson
HAS INSTANCE=> Wister, Owen Wister
HAS INSTANCE=> Wodehouse, P. G. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
HAS INSTANCE=> Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Clayton Wolfe
HAS INSTANCE=> Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
HAS INSTANCE=> Wood, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ellen Price Wood
HAS INSTANCE=> Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
HAS INSTANCE=> Wouk, Herman Wouk
HAS INSTANCE=> Wright, Richard Wright
HAS INSTANCE=> Wright, Willard Huntington Wright, S. S. Van Dine
HAS INSTANCE=> Zangwill, Israel Zangwill
HAS INSTANCE=> Zweig, Stefan Zweig
--- Grep of noun poet
folk poet
poet
poet-singer
poet laureate
poetess
poetic justice
poetic license
poetic rhythm
poetics
poetiser
poetizer
poetry