Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

Grades of Perfection in Poetry [1]

I suppose “inevitability of expression” consists of two things producing one effect: (1) the rightness of individual words and phrases, (2) the rightness of the general lingual reconstruction of the poetic vision — that is, the manner, syntactical and psychological, of whole sentences and their coordination.

To the two requisites you mention which are technical, two others have to be added, a certain smiling sureness of touch and inner breath of perfect perfection, born not made, in the words themselves, and a certain absolute winging movement in the rhythm. Without an inevitable rhythm there can be no inevitable wording. If you understand all that, you are lucky. But how to explain the inexplicable, something that is self-existent? That simply means an absoluteness, one might say, an inexplicably perfect and in-fitting thusness and thereness and thatness and everything-elseness so satisfying in every way as to be unalterable. All perfection is not necessarily inevitability. I have tried to explain in The Future Poetry — very unsuccessfully I am afraid — that there are different grades of perfection in poetry: adequateness, effectivity, illumination of language, inspiredness — finally, inevitability. These are things one has to learn to feel, one can’t analyse.

All the styles, “adequate”, “effective”, etc. can be raised to inevitability in their own {{0}}line.[[This item is composed of parts of three letters that were typed together and revised by Sri Aurobindo in that form. This sentence is from a letter reproduced in full on page 191. — Ed.]]

The supreme inevitability is something more even than that, a speech overwhelmingly sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classifications and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style — Keats’ “magic casements”, Wordsworth’s [lines on] Newton and his “fields of sleep”, Shakespeare’s “Macbeth has murdered sleep”, Homer’s descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil’s “Sunt lachrimae rerum” and his “O passi graviora”.

16 September 1934