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

Epic Greatness and Sublimity

How do you differentiate between epic power and the Aeschylean sublime? Into what category would the grandeur, at its best, of Marlowe and Victor Hugo fall?

I don’t know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the Légende des siècles tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole. Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare’s line

In cradle of the rude imperious surge

is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, e.g. Homer’s

Bē de kat’ Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr

“He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart”

or Virgil’s

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,

Fortunam ex aliis.

or Milton’s

Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable.

What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare’s and makes them epic (Shakespeare’s of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can’t tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language.

As regards epic and non-epic sublimity, it strikes me that the former has a more natural turn of imagination — that is to say, it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.

Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what he lacks perhaps is the epic élan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result of a certain austerity in the epic Muse. I do not know whether one cannot be coloured provided one keeps that austerity which, be it understood, is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness.

19 May 1937