Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on the Work of Poets of the Ashram

A. E. on Amal Kiran — Sri Aurobindo on A. E. [2]

Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on A. E.’s part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the contrary, sufficiently warm; “a genuine poetic quality” and “many fine lines” — he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he {{0}}makes[[The song-impetuous mind ...(((1)))The Eternal Glory is a wanderer(((1)))Hungry for lips of clay]] certainly deserve the praise he gives them, and they are moreover of the kind A.E. and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem I selected for especial praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a perfectly modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere, like, let us say, the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This apart from the idea and feeling, which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the ideas in the lines quoted by A. E. which are poetically striking but have not the same strong spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly, but the other goes home into the soul.

It is strange that A. E. should say that the line about “inexhaustible vastnesses” could not scan; of course, “as it stands”, there is no possibility of scanning it; but he says “even so”, even supposing it is only a typographical error. Perhaps, he is not inclined to tolerate the two anapaests or rather the initial tribrach and medial anapaest in the line? But that would be strange — for it is precisely this kind of freedom that the poetry of today is supposed to effect even in the pentameter. So at least I understood from a review in the Nation and from the example of poets like Abercrombie and others. Besides an opening tribrach (one could justify it as an iamb by the elision of the e in “the”) and a medial anapaest of this kind are, it seems to me, permissible even in fairly regular pentameters. And what of Shakespeare’s freedoms in blank verse or Swinburne’s or Webster’s famous line

Cover | her face; | my eyes daz|zle; she | died young. |

I only read A. E.’s poetry once and had no time to form a reliable impression; but I seem to remember a too regular and obvious rhythm, not sufficiently plastic, which did not carry the remarkable vision and thought-substance of the poet entirely home. That, however, may be a mistaken memory, and the rest is speculation. I cannot make out why he should say “it is not a verse rhythm”. It is a strong rather than a melodious rhythm, but it is as good a verse rhythm as the others.

5 February 1932