Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Here is another poem of the new series of four verses each in prabahamān [flowing] mātrā-vṛtta – my new successful chhanda – Prabodh Sen has adjudged. So I am reassured about the technique (by technique here I mean the technique about enjambement, structure, etc. – ). I have experimented long in this chhanda as you know and, after many stumblings pointed out by Prabodh Sen, because it is the most difficult chhanda in a sense, have acquired an easy flow in it). But I want to ask you about one thing.
You know how hard I had to work at my artistry effect, etc. I did the same in music too though I could sing spontaneously since I was four and would beat time since I was two – I am told. But then should artistry be too conscious? How will this new series of poems look? The last line of each verse repeats in a way the first line of the same verse in a sort of refrain-like cadence. This is conscious and deliberate. I don’t mean it is laboured – for it isn’t, I now-a-days write fairly easily and with very little effort – but about its artistry and architecture, the first three verses leading up to the fourth – the enjambements, etc. are all conscious and the metre perfected after a great deal of effort, after many first failures. Now, I am sure about the technique now – in fact now-a-days I receive letters from so many poets, poetesses, etc. asking me to adjudicate on the intricatest points of metrical gymnastics even and I can, if I like, do gymnastics too like Satyen Dutta, only I never do it. I never write poems, as you know, regularly, [I] write only when I feel a kind of urge. But to resume my question:
As I understand, Swinburne spent a lot of labour on conscious artistry and thereby spoilt the spontaneity of many poems! I don’t fancy that. That is why I ask you – should I try such conscious artistry as I do in this poem? I mean the artistry about assonances (note here the liquid 
hidden rhymes in every line – the rhyming is deliberate for mellifluousness – duhkha bedan majheo kehan [who even in pain and sorrow], etc. every long line has such internal rhymes within) enjambements, stanza-formation, etc. Are these risky? But I don’t feel any artificiality about it – except in the sense that all perfection of rhythmic utterance is of necessity somewhat artificial. Still I do feel a natural flow. Many others also feel it, even my enemy Girija as I wrote to you, started praising my poems now. But nevertheless I don’t care to emulate Yeats whom you praise for his artistry but are indifferent to at bottom. My diffidence arises from my having acquired my technical mastery by a great deal of conscious determined study of technique and metrical research. It would not be too much to say that I pondered over each syllable once for hours when it was necessary. Now, of course, I don’t have to – but can direct my concentration to artistry and chiselling of structure, etc. But my question still remains.
I don’t know that Swinburne really did that – before assenting to such a proposition about him I should like to know which were these poems he spoiled by too much artistry of technique. So far as I remember, his best poems are those in which he is most perfect in his technique. I think his decline came when he became too much at ease and poured out an endless melody without caring for substance and the finer finenesses of form. Attention to technique harms only when a writer is so busy with his technique that he becomes indifferent to substance. But if the substance is adequate, the attention to technique can only give it greater beauty. Things like a refrain, internal rhymes, etc. can indeed be great aids to the inspiration and the expression – just as can ordinary rhyme. It is in my view a great error to regard metre, rhyme etc. as artificial. Metre is on the contrary the most natural form of expression for a certain state of creative emotion and vision, much more natural and easy than a non-metrical form; they express themselves best and most powerfully in a balanced rather than in a loose and shapeless rhythm. The search for technique is simply the search for the best and most appropriate form for expressing what has to be said and once it is found, the inspiration can flow quite naturally and fluently into them. There can be no harm therefore in attention to technique so long as there is no inattention to substance.
There are only two conditions about artistry: (1) that the artistry does not become so exterior as to be no longer art and (2) that substance (in which of course I include bhāva) is not left behind in the desert or else art and bhāva not woven into each other.