Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Indian Poetry in English

Remarks on Minor Indian Writers [2]

The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because it is always just missing what it ought to achieve,— one feels a considerable poetic possibility which does not produce work of some permanence because it is not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who are quite out of date and learned a poetic style and language full of turns that smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm’s closet. Such awful things as “unsoughten”, “a-journeying”, “a-knocking”, “strayèd gift” and the constant abuse of the auxiliary verb “to do” would be enough to damn even the best poem. If he would rigorously modernise his language, one obstacle to real poetic success would perhaps disappear,— provided he does not, on the contrary, colloquialise it too much — e.g. “my dear”, etc. But the other grave defect is that he is constantly composing out of his brain, while one feels that a pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through; if only he would let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do their poetic best in a learned medium; but still the defect is there.

22 June 1931