Sri Aurobindo
The Future Poetry
CWSA.- Volume 26
Appendixes to The Future Poetry
New Ways in English {{0}}Literature[[Appendix I is an
incomplete review of James Cousins’ book New Ways in English Literature.
Written in November 1917, the review was abandoned when Sri Aurobindo decided to
make his consideration of Cousins’ book the starting-point for a presentation of
his own ideas on poetry. The two paragraphs of the review were rewritten as the
first two paragraphs of the first chapter of The Future Poetry.]]
(Review)
Amid the commonplace, vapid and undiscriminating stuff
which mostly does duty for literary criticism in India, here is at last a work
of the first order, something in which the soul can take pleasure for the beauty
of its style, its perfect measure, its insight, its subtle observation and just
appreciation. Such a book would be a miracle in its environment, but the miracle
disappears when we know the name of the author; Mr. James Cousins is one of the
leading spirits of the Irish movement which has given contemporary English
literature its two greatest poets. This book therefore comes to us from Ireland,
although it is published in India. One would like to see a significant link in
this circumstance of Mr. Cousins’ presence and activities among us. For Ireland
is a predestined home of the new spiritual illumination rising in Europe from
the ashes of the age of rationalism and she has already, in literature at least,
found the path of her salvation: India, that ancient home of an imperishable
spirituality, has still, Rabindranath and the Bengal school of painting
notwithstanding, to find hers, has yet to create the favourable imaginative,
intellectual and aesthetic conditions for her voice to be heard again with the
old power, but a renewed message. The atmosphere is at present raw and chill,
thick with the crude mists of a false education and a meagre and imitative
culture. Mr. Cousins’ work is avowedly part of a movement intended to make a
salutary change and bring in the large air and light of a living culture and
education.
Mr. Cousins deals here with the contemporary and recent
English poets, a subject for the most part quite unfamiliar to the Indian mind.
He treats it with an admirable sympathy, an illuminating power of phrase and a
fine certainty of touch; but 
for the purpose for
which these essays were put together, his criticism has one great fault,— there
is too little of it. The first part deals with four contemporary poets, three of
them of the first importance, and a group; the second deals with five recent
poets and a dramatist and of these writers three again are of the first
importance; but this slender volume of 135 pages is a small pedestal for so many
figures. To catch the eye of the Indian reader [he tries] to give the greater of
these something like life size, while putting the rest in smaller proportions —
after a convention familiar to Indian art. Each essay is indeed excellent in
itself; that on Emerson is a masterpiece of fullness in brevity, for it says
perfectly in a few pages all that need be said about Emerson the poet and
nothing that need not be said; others are quite full and conclusive enough for
their purpose, for instance the admirable “defence” of Alfred Austin; and in all
the essential things are said and said finely and tellingly. There is quite
enough for the experienced reader of English poetry who can seize on
implications and follow out suggestions; but the Indian reader is inexperienced
and has not ordinarily a well-cultivated critical faculty or receptiveness; he
needs an ampler treatment to familiarise him with the subject and secure his
permanent interest. The essays do act admirably as finger-posts; but
finger-posts are not enough for him, he needs to be carried some miles along the
road before he will consent to follow it.