Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Great Poets of the World

The World’s Greatest Poets [4]

Yes, I plead guilty. But that, I hope, will be no reason why Vyasa and Sophocles should remain unclassified by you. And “the others” — they intrigue me even more. Who are these others? Saintsbury as good as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetry — Spenser alone, to his mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser: the fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using “divinité”, “infinité” “éternité”, as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose Hyperion compelled even the sneering Byron to forget his usual condescending attitude towards “Johnny” and confess that nothing grander had been seen since Aeschylus. Racine, too, cannot be left out — can he? Voltaire adored him, Voltaire who called Shakespeare a drunken barbarian. Finally, what of Wordsworth, whose Immortality Ode was hailed by Mark Pattison as the ne plus ultra of English poetry since the days of Lycidas? Kindly shed the light of infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling opinions.

I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe — it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter — only Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send into the third row with Goethe, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.

Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or if Wordsworth had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol, it might be different, but we have to take things as they are. As it is, all began magnificently, but none of them finished, and what work they did, except a few lyrics, sonnets, short pieces and narratives, is often flawed and unequal. If they had to be admitted, what about at least fifty others in Europe and Asia?

The critical opinions you quote are, many of them, flagrantly prejudiced and personal. The only thing that results from Aldous Huxley’s opinion, shared by many but with less courage, is that Spenser’s melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spenser’s art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded his weight, because his height was at the best considerable, even magnificent, but his depth insufficient and especially because he was often too oratorical to be quite sincere. The remarks of Voltaire and Mark Pattison go into the same basket.

2 April 1932