Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
Letter ID: 791
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
July 21, 1936
This admission of Nishikanta’s success is a recognition of the fact in spite of a denial of the principle. But is it true that the laghu guru is to the Bengali ear as impossible as would be to the English ear the line made up by Tagore: “Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers”? In English such a violence could not be entertained for a moment. It was because Spencer1 and 
others tried to base their hexameters and pentameters on this flagrant violation of the first law of English rhythm that the attempt to introduce Quantitative metres in English proved a failure. Accent cannot be ignored in English rhythm and in my attempts at quantitative metre I always count an accentuated syllable even if the vowel is short as a long one – for it does become long for metrical purposes.
1 Edmund Spencer (1552-1599): English poet. The Faerie Queene is his major contribution to English Poetry. It is a long dense allegory in the epic form of Christian virtues, tied into England’s mythology of King Arthur.