James Cousins
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James Henry Sproul Cousins (born 1873 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, died 1956) was an Irish writer, playwright, actor, critic, editor, teacher and poet, best known as a writer on Theosophy. He used a pseudonym Mac Oisín and the Hindu name Jayaram. His plays were produced in the first years of the Twentieth century by the Irish National Theatre. He travelled in 1915 to India, converting to Hinduism. He later worked for the Irish Literary Theatre. He wrote a joint autobiography with his wife Margaret.
In his The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo has acclaimed Cousins' New Ways in English Literature as "literary criticism which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think." He has also acknowledged that he learnt to intuit deeper being alerted by Cousins' criticisms of his poems. In 1920 Cousins came to Pondicherry to meet the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The appreciation is palpable in the following citations:
From The Future Poetry by Sri Aurobindo
- "It will be more fruitful to take the main substance of the matter for which the body of Mr.Cousins' criticism gives a good material. Taking the impression it creates for a starting-point and the trend of English poetry for our main text, but casting our view farther back into the past, we may try to sound what the future has to give us through the medium of the poetic mind and its power for creation and interpretation. The issues of recent activity are still doubtful and it would be rash to make any confident prediction; but there is one possibility which this book strongly suggests and which it is at least interesting and may be fruitful to search and consider. That possibility is the discovery of a closer approximation to what we might call the mantra in poetry that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of the Truth, — the discovery of the word, the divine movement, the form of thought proper to the reality which, as Mr.Cousins excellently says,
- " lies in the apprehension of a something stable behind the instability of word and deed, something that is reflection of the fundamental passion of humanity for something beyond itself, something that is a dim foreshadowing of the divine urge which is prompting all creation to unfold itself and to rise out of its limitations towards its Godlike possibilities. Poetry in the past has done that in moments of supreme elevation; in the future there seems to be some chance of its making it a more conscious aim and steadfast endeavour."
From Renaissance in India by Sri Aurobindo
- "Mr. Cousins puts the question in his book whether the word 'renaissance' at all applies since India has always been awake and stood in no need of reawakening. There is a certain truth behind that and to one coming in with a fresh mind from outside and struck by the living continuity of past and present India, it may be especially apparent; but that is not quite how we can see it who are her children and are still suffering from the bitter effects of the great decline which came to a head in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Undoubtedly there was a period, a brief but very disastrous period of the dwindling of that great fire of life, even a moment of incipient disintegration, marked politically by the anarchy which gave European adventure its chance, inwardly by an increasing torpor of the creative spirit in religion and art, - science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or petrified into a mere scholastic Punditism, - all pointing to a nadir of setting energy, the evening-time from which, according to the Indian idea of the cycles, a new age has to start. It was that moment and the pressure of a super-imposed European culture which followed it that made the reawakening necessary.
- "We have practically to take three facts into consideration, the great past of Indian culture and life with the moment of inadaptive torpor into which it had lapsed, the first period of the Western contact in which it seemed for a moment likely to perish by slow decomposition, and the ascending movement which first broke into some clarity of expression only a decade or two ago. Mr. Cousins has his eye fixed on Indian spirituality which has always maintained itself even in the decline of the national vitality; it was certainly that which saved India always at every critical moment of her destiny, and it has been the starting-point too of her renascence. Any other nation under the same pressure would have long ago perished soul and body."
[edit] References
- POEMS BY JAMES H. COUSINS
- The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. Ed. Nicholson & Lee. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917.
- Padraic Colum (1881–1972).
- Anthology of Irish Verse. 1922.
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- The Legend of the Blemished King and Other Poems (1897)
- The Quest (1906)
- The Bell-Branch (1908)
- The Wisdom of the West (1912)
- Etain the Beloved and Other Poems (1912)
- The Renaissance in India (1918)
- The King's Wife (1919)
- Sea-Change (1920)
- The Cultural Unity of Asia (1922)
- Work and Worship: Essays on Culture and Creative Art (1922)
- Heathen Essays (1925)
- A Tibetan Banner (1926)
- Above the Rainbow and Other Poems (1926)
- A Wandering Harp: Selected Poems (1932)
- A Bardic Pilgrimage (1934)
- Collected Poems (1940)
- The Work Promethean (1970)
- BIOGRAPHIES/CRITICISM
- A Wandering Harp: James H. Cousins, a Study. C.N. Mangala. (B.R. Publishing, 1995).
- James Henry Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of Theosophical Movement. Dilip Kumar Chatterjee. (South Asia Books, 1994).
- James Cousins. William A. Dumbleton. (Twayne Publishing, 1980).
- RELATED LINKS
