Culture should be a study of perfection

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Matthew Arnold's influence on Sri Aurobindo was significant, particularly in the areas of literary criticism and education. Rather than a total dominance, it was a point of reference and departure for Sri Aurobindo, who eventually developed his own unique spiritual perspectives. 

The key ways in which Arnold's influence can be observed are:

• Emphasis on Morality in Literature and Education: Like Arnold, who believed good literature should teach lessons of morality and that culture should be a "study of perfection," Sri Aurobindo viewed education as the ideal medium for teaching people about good and bad and developing their moral faculties.
• The Concept of "Poetry and Criticism of Life": Sri Aurobindo often referred to and engaged with Arnold's well-known idea that poetry is a "criticism of life". While Arnold used this as a defining principle for all great poetry, Sri Aurobindo eventually expanded this view, integrating it into his own broader spiritual and aesthetic theories, suggesting that this "criticism" must come from a deeper, more inward strand of consciousness or the "soul".
• Literary Criticism Terminology: Sri Aurobindo utilized specific phrases and judgments from Arnold's criticism, such as Arnold's famous description of Shelley as an "ineffectual angel". He also cited Arnold's assessment of Dryden and Pope as "classics not of poetry, but of prose," indicating familiarity with and initial acceptance of Arnold's critical standards.
• Inspiration for his own theories: Sri Aurobindo noted that Arnold had declared "genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul". Sri Aurobindo saw this as a very significant statement, but felt that Arnold "simply made the statement and left it at that," without fully exploring its implications. Sri Aurobindo's own extensive work on poetics, including his theory of "overhead poetry" and the "Mantra," can be seen as an attempt to fully elucidate and expand upon this Arnoldian critical creed from a spiritual perspective.
• Metrical Experimentation (and its limitations): Arnold attempted to adapt Greek classical metres to English, though Sri Aurobindo noted he had "scant success". Sri Aurobindo was interested in metrical innovation himself (evident in his epic Savitri) and likely considered Arnold's efforts in his own exploration of new forms of English poetic expression suitable for a spiritual message. 

Ultimately, Arnold provided a critical framework and a set of ideas that Sri Aurobindo initially engaged with, before going on to develop his own distinct and comprehensive philosophy of life and art, rooted in Indian spirituality and aimed at expressing "spiritual truth in the English tongue". 

- GoogleAI 

https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+Matthew+Arnold%27s+influence+was+dominant+on+Sri+Aurobindo&oq

Both film and theatre share a fundamental DNA: the rectangular frame. It is this shared architecture that makes their dialogue possible. But what cinema did with this rectangle in the twentieth century fundamentally altered how humans understand visual storytelling. Through montage, through the close-up, through the edited cut that collapses space and time, cinema revolutionized the art of showing. It fragmented vision into planes and angles. It froze moments, reversed them, fast-forwarded through them. It layered sound with image in unprecedented ways. It made the invisible visible through the power of editing and perspective.

These innovations—montage, ellipsis, camera movement, temporal jump-cuts, the interplay of multiple narrative threads; were revolutionary precisely because they taught our eyes a new language. They taught us that stories need not unfold in real time. That space can be fractured and reassembled. That past and present can occupy the same frame. That what we see depends entirely on where we are asked to look.

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