The Future Poetry

Style and Substance 29

heights of poetic revelation. Byron’s line is the starting-point in
the emotional sensations for that high world-pessimism and its
spiritual release which finds expression in the Gita’s

Anityam asukhamlokamima ̇ mpr ̇ apya bhajasva m ̄ am ̄ ;^2

and one has only to compare the manner of the two in style and
rhythm, even leaving the substance aside, to see the difference
between the lesser and the greater poetry. Browning’s language
rises from a robust cheerfulness of temperament, it does not
touch the deeper fountain-heads of truth in us; an opposite
temperament may well smile at it as vigorous optimistic fustian.
Pope’s actually falsifies by its poetical inadequacy that great truth
of the Gita’s teaching, the truth of the divine equality, because
he has not seen and therefore cannot make us see; his significant
images of the truth are, like his perception of it, intellectual and
rhetorical, not poetic figures.
There is a higher style of poetry than this which yet falls
below the level to which we have to climb. It is no longer poet-
ical language of a merely intellectual, vital or emotional force,
but instead or in addition a genuinely imaginative style, with a
certain, often a great beauty of vision in it, whether objective or
subjective, or with a certain, often a great but indefinite soul-
power bearing up its movement of word and rhythm. It varies in
intensity: for the lower intensity we can get plenty of examples
from Chaucer, when he is indulging his imagination rather than
his observation, and at a higher pitch from Spenser; for the loftier
intensity we can cite at will for one kind from Milton’s early
poetry, for another from poets who have a real spiritual vision
like Keats and Shelley. English poetry runs, indeed, ordinarily
in this mould. But this too is not that highest intensity of the
revelatory poetic word from which the Mantra starts. It has a
certain power of revelation in it, but the deeper vision is still
coated up in something more external; sometimes the poetic
intention of decorative beauty, sometimes some other deliberate
intention of the poetic mind overlays with the more outward

(^2) “Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, love and turn to Me.”