Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 20961

You seem to suggest that significance does not matter and need not enter into the account in judging and feeling poetry. .. .Rhythm and word-music are indispensable but are not the whole of poetry.... Certainly the significance and feeling suggested and borne home by the words and rhythms are a capital part of the value of poetry. Shakespeare’s lines

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

have a skilful and consummate rhythm and word combination, but this gets its full value as the perfect embodiment of a profound and moving significance, the expression in a few lines of a whole range of human world-experience.