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		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>The Poetry in the Making</i> </font>
		</b></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Is the artist—the supreme artist, when he is a genius, that is to
say—conscious 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We take a third view of the matter and say that genius is
neither unconscious or conscious but <i>superconscious.</i> And when
one&nbsp; is superconscious, one can be in appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a
little this psychological riddle.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one
is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational
intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For 
one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness. In the average
or normal man the consciousness is linked to or identified
with the brain function, the rational intelligence and so we
conclude that without this wakeful brain activity there can
be no consciousness. But the fact is otherwise. The experiences
of the mystic prove the point. The mystic is conscious on a
level which we describe as higher than the mind and reason,
he has what may be called the overhead consciousness. (Apart
from the normal consciousness, which is named <i>jagrat,</i> waking,
the Upanishad speaks of three other increasingly subtler states
of consciousness, <i>swapna, sushupti</i> and <i>turvya.)</i> And then one
can be quite unconscious, as in <i>samadhi—</i>that can be <i>sushupti
</i>or <i>tunya—</i>or partially conscious—in <i>swapna,</i> for example,</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">the external behaviour may be like that of a child or a lunatic
or even a goblin.<b> </b> One can also remain normally conscious and
still be in the superconscience. Not only so, the mystic—the
Yogi—can be conscious on infraconscious levels also; that is to say, he can 
enter into and identify with the consciousness involved in life and even in Matter; he can feel and realise his
oneness with the animal world, the plant world and finally the
world of dead earth, of &quot;stocks and stones&quot; too. For all these
strands of existence have .each its own type of consciousness and
all different from the mode of mind which is normally known
as consciousness. When St. Francis addresses himself to the
brother Sun or the sister Moon, or when the Upanishad
speaks of the tree silhouetted against the sky, as if stilled in
trance, we feel there is something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: 
his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness
and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentality—his
ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-up—serves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity
in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. 
First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression.
The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle world—Words-worth's &quot;recollected in tranquillity&quot;—and comes back with<br>
the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the
gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and
sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity
of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental
i vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it
is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a
faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are
precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental
faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute
fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In
Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears
down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording
mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed
resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference
between the two, the secret norm and the recording form,
determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens
often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and
self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of
something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down
and waited for an opportunity.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their <i>inspiration:</i> 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<br>
feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrument—nothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic
plate—is illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His <i>Kubia Khan,</i> 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 some-<br>
where 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 &quot;one at a time&quot;: 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 all—he does not know how he has created, the
sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious<br>
of them, gone through them all as if<i> per saltum.</i> Such seems to
have been the case with the <i>primitives,</i> as they are called, the
elemental poets—Shakespeare 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 versification—although 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.</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 <i>primitive,</i> 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 <i>enthousiasmos.</i> 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 down—we 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 simultaneously—above, 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</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">it were—there 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
Inspirer—in other words, the poet is both a <i>seer (kavih)</i> and a<br>
<i>creator</i> or <i>doer (poietes).</i></font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 <i>pari passu</i> 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 &quot;primitives&quot;, the later one, that of conscious artists,
usually goes by the name of &quot;classicists.&quot; 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 &quot;primitives&quot; is almost an impossible pheno-menon 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 command the tide to roll back,
Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and
new orientation discovered.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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, </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">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 &quot;psychoses&quot; 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<b> 
</b>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
Mallarme and constitutes almost the whole of Valery'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.</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 &quot;given&quot; 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
Nature—against God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns
deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the
insignificant and the trifling—tins and teas, bone and dust
and dustbin, hammer and sickle—he is still a prophet, a violent</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">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 qualities—-
such 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 <i>modus operandi</i> 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<br>
Shakespearean phrase, his &quot;be-all and end-all&quot;, 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 dreamt 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of <i>Homo Faber,
</i>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.</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">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<br>
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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 mystic—in 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<br>
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</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">awareness but the free and untrammelled activity 
and expression of the truth and reality it is.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 &quot;mystic&quot; to express its unfamiliar nature—unless, of
course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 <i>inner</i> consciousness. As the super-consciousness is
imaged as lying <i>above</i> the normal consciousness, so the inner
consciousness may be described as lying <i>behind or within</i> 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
&quot;spontaneous&quot;, 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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<br>
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 &quot;the pain of the present and the passion for the
future&quot;: they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets,
but prophets for the moment crying in the wilderness—
although 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:                ,</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what
is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes,</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 320<hr>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective
sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately
or at all ?</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of
today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher.
The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and 
investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external
sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and
signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities
that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist<br>
are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:</font>&nbsp;

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over
the topless waves of trenched Broceliande, drenched by
&brvbar;the everlasting spray of existence, with no mind's sail
&brvbar;             reefed or set, no slaves at the motived oars,
I drove into and clove the wind from unseen shores. Swept
from all altars, swallowed in a path of power by the wrath
that wrecks the pirates in the Narrow Seas,....multiple without dimension, indivisible without uniformity,
the ship of Solomon (blessed be he) drove on.<sup>1</sup></font><sup> </sup>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">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 &quot;natural&quot; 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,</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and
old,</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman" size="2">1 &quot;The Last Voyage&quot; by Charles Williams—.4 <i>Little Book of Modem Verse,<br>
</i>(Faber and Faber).                       </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman">Page 321</font><hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">and the imaginative idealist, the romantically spiritual poet<br>
says that these or</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a 
lumbering
&nbsp;cart,<b><br>
&nbsp;</b>The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the. wintry</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">mould,           </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">all, all the dark spots and blotches on the fair face of earth
and humanity</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the
deeps of my heart.</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">and he cries out:</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to
be told;</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">and declares the ardent aspiration of his heart and soul:</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">I hunger to build them anew, and sit on a green knoll</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">apart,<br>
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">a casket of gold               .<br>
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">deeps of my heart.<sup>1</sup></font><sup> </sup>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; text-indent:25px" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly
different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary
to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They
are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and
the worst are but two conditions, two potentials of the same
entity. Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the
real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and
consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One:</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">1 W. B. Yeats: &quot;The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart&quot;—<i>The Wind among<br>
the Reeds.</i></font><font size="2"> </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 322<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Une Idee, une Forme, Un Etre </i></font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Parti de I'azur et tombe </i></font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombe </i></font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<i><font face="Times New Roman">Ou</font></i><font face="Times New Roman"><i> nul 
œil du Ciel ne penetre;<sup>1</sup></i></font><sup>
</sup>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {L'Irremediable}</i></font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">And therefore it is not so irremediable as it appears to be. For the miracle happens and is an inevitable natural phenomenon, and that is why</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Par l'operation d'un mystere vengeur<br>
Dans la brute assoupie un ange se reveille.2</i> </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {L'Aube spirituelle)</i> </font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">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:</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite<br>
Ou bout l'imperceptible et vaste Humanite </i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-left:30px; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {Le Couvercle)</i> </font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In other words, the tension in the human consciousness
has been raised to the&nbsp; power, the heat of a brooding consciousness is about to lead it to an outburst of new creation—
<i>sah tapastaptva.</i> Human self-consciousness, the turning of oneself upon oneself, the probing and projecting of oneself into
oneself—self-consciousness raised so often to the degree of
self-torture, marks the acute travail of the spirit. The thousand
&quot;isms&quot; and &quot;logics&quot; that pullulate in all fields of life, from
the political to the artistic or even the religious and the spiritual
indicate how the human laboratory is working at white heat.
They are breaches in the circuit of the consciousness, volcanic
eruptions from below or cosmic-ray irruptions from above,</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; text-indent:25px" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">1 An Idea, a Form, a Being left the azure and fell into the<b> 
</b>mud and grey<b> 
</b>of a Styx where no eye from Heaven can penetrate.</font><font size="2">
</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; text-indent:25px" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">2 An avenging Mystery operating, out of the drowsy animal awakes an angel.
</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; text-indent:25px" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">3 Heaven! it is the dark lid upon the huge cauldron in which the imperceptible
and vast humanity is boiling.
—<i>Les Fleurs du Mal.</i></font><font size="2"> </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 323<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">tearing open the normal limit and boundary—Baudelaire's
<i>Couvercle</i> or the &quot;golden lid&quot; of the Upanishads—disclosing and bringing into the light of common day realities beyond
and unseen till now.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If so 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 other 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.</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 324<hr>

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