Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali – no language with a Teutonic base can 
be – but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to give out the most beautiful melodies. Bengali and Italian are soft, easy and mellifluous languages – English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm. These qualities do not repose on metrical structure, but on the less analysable elements of the rhythmic. The metrical basis itself is a peculiar combination by which English rhythm depends without explicitly avowing it on a skilful and most extraordinarily variable combination of three elements – the numeric foot dependent on the number of syllables, the use of the stress foot and a play of stresses, and a recognisable but free and plastic use of quantitative play (not quantitative feet), all three running into each other.
I am afraid your estimate here is marred by the personal or national habit. One is always inclined to make this claim for one’s own language because one can catch every shade and element of it while in another language, however well-learned, the ear is not so clairaudient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyricists. Shakespeare, Swinburne’s best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior.
Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly akṣaravṛtta1. (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali rhythm and tell me how Tagore ought to be read to be truly melodious – like English in stress, with ludicrous effects. That however is by the way.) What I mean is that variety of melodic bases was not conspicuous at that time in Bengali poetry. Nowadays this variety is there and undoubtedly opens 
possibilities such as perhaps do not exist in other languages.
I do not see, however, how the metrical aspect by itself can really be taken apart from other more subtle elements – I do not mean the bhāva [feeling] of the sense only, though without depth or adequacy there metrical melody is only a melodious corpse, but the bhāva or subtle (not intellectual) elements of rhythm and it is on these that English depends for the greater power and plasticity of its harmonic and even to a less extent of its melodic effects. In a word, there is truth in what you say but it cannot be pushed so far as you push it.