Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
English Poetic Forms

The Ode

A successful ode must be a perfect architectural design and Keats’ Odes are among the best, if not the best in English poetry, as I think they are, at any rate from the point of view of artistic creation, because of the perfect way in which the central thought is developed and each part related to the whole like the design of the masses in a perfect building — each taking its inevitable place in the whole. In yours the ideas, words, images flow like your “Ocean” with a certain fluent grandeur of diction and richness of colour, but there is not any inevitable beginning, middle, connections and end. An ode in that respect should be like a sonnet though on a bigger scale and with a different principle of structure — but it must be, like the sonnet, a perfect structure.

4 March 1935