Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Metrical Experiments in Bengali

New Metres in Bengali [1]

Of course, Prabodh Sen is right. I suppose what Buddhadev means is that none of the very great poets invented a metre — they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people’s rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring — introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can’t spot a precedent in modern European literature, but there must be some. And after all, hang precedents! A good thing — I mean, combining metric invention with perfect poetry — would be still a good thing to do, even if no one had had the good sense to do it before.

4 November 1932