Now about this poem, I fear to ask you about the merit, as it is so simple, and written so easily.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1938
Letter ID: 2232
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
November 10, 1938
[Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]
[Mother:] By mistake yesterday I wrote Bangalore1 when I meant Cuddalore. Srinivas Rao comes often here, that is why I mentioned his name.
Guru, “Shakespeare at his best”? The very name of Shakespeare makes my breath shake with fear, and to talk of equalling him at his best, oh, people will call me mad, Sir. If someone else had told me that, I would have called him mad! But I don’t know what to say to you! You stagger me so much!
Well, but look at logic. G.B.S. declares himself the equal, if not superior, of Shakespeare. You write better poetry than Shaw ever did (which is easy because he never wrote any). So you are the equal (if not the superior) of Shakespeare.
But, if I remember aright, some of my lines you have called “damn fine”! So?
Did I indeed? Then, logically, it must have been equal to the best of Shakespeare, otherwise it couldn’t have been so damned. This also is logic.
Now about this poem, I fear to ask you about the merit, as it is so simple, and written so easily.
Simplicity is not the test. There can be a supreme beauty of simplicity and there can be the opposite.
1 The Mother in fact had written “Cuddalore”.