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Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Remarks on English Usage.htm
Remarks on English Usage
Some Questions of Pronunciation and Usage
I am in general agreement with your answer to Mendonca strictures on certain points in your style and your use of the English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are
not unquestionably valid; they would be so only if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium
demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French; but this language is constantly changing
and escaping from boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the
wri
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/On Savitri.htm
On Savitri
On Savitri
On the Composition of the Poem
Letters of 1931 1936
You once quoted to me two lines written by yourself:
Piercing the limitless unknowable,
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace.
Where do they occur? They produce such a wonderful impression of a
slow, majestic widening out into infinity.
The lines I quoted from myself are not in any published poem, but
in the unfinished first book of "Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol"
which was in intention a sort of symbolic epic of the aim of
supramental Yoga! I may send it to you for typing when I have
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/English Poetic Forms.htm
English Poetic Forms
The Sonnet ―Regular and Irregular Rhyme Schemes
The two regular sonnet rhyme-sequences are (1) the Shakespearean ab ab cd cd ef
ef gg ―that is three quatrains with alternate rhymes with a closing couplet and
(2) the Miltonic with an octet abba abba (as in your second and third quatrains)
and a sestet of three rhymes arranged according to choice. The Shakespearean is
closer to the natural lyric rhythm, the Miltonic to the ode movement ―i.e.
something large and grave. The Miltonic is very difficult for it needs either a
strong armoured structure of the thought or a carefully developed unity of the
building which all
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style.htm
Grades of Perfection in Poetic
Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style
Grades of Perfection in Poetry
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
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/precontent.htm
VOLUME 27
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2004
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
Letters on Poetry and Art
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Comments on Some Passages of Prose.htm
Comments on Some Passages of Pr
Comments on Some Passages of Prose
Anatole France's Irony
I so much enjoyed Anatole France's joke about God in the mouth of the arch-scoffer Brotteaux in his book
Les dieux ont
soif
that I must ask you to read it.
Ou Dieu veut empêcher le mal et ne le peut, ou il ne peut et ne le veut, ou il ne le peut ni ne le veut, ou il le veut et le
peut. S'il le veut et ne le peut, il est impuissant; s'il le peut et ne le veut, il est pervers; s'il ne le peut ni ne le veut, il
est impuissant et pervers; s'il le peut et le veut, que ne le fait-il, mon Père?1
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Translation - Theory.htm
Section Four
Translation
Translation: Theory
Literalness and Freedom
A translator is not necessarily bound to the exact word and letter
of the original he chooses; he can make his own poem out of it, if he likes, and that is what is very often done. This is all the more
legitimate since we find that literal translations more completely betray than those that are reasonably free
―turning life into
death and poetic power into poverty and flatness. It is not many who can carry over the spirit of a poem, the characteristic power
of its expression and the turn of its rhythmical movement fro
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Comments on the Work of Poets of the Ashram.htm
Comments on the Work
of Poets of the Ashram
Dilip Kumar Roy
It is again a beautiful poem that you have written,1 but not better than the other. Why erect mental theories and suit your poetry to
them whether your father's or Tagore's? I would suggest to you not to be bound by either, but to write as best suits your own inspiration and poetic genius. I imagine that each of them wrote in the way suited to his own inspiration and substance and, as is the
habit of the human mind, put that way forward as a general rule for all. You have developed an original poetic turn of your own,
quite unlike
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/Twentieth-Century Poetry.htm
Twentieth-Century Poetry
Georgian Poetry
The stanzas are not quite successful. [Certain lines] have too much a
stamp of what I think was called Georgian poetry ―though I suppose it would
more properly be called late-Victorian-Edwardian-early-Georgian. The defect
of that poetry is that it has a fullness of language which fails to go home
―things that ought to be very fine, but miss being so; so much of the poetry
of Rupert Brooke as I have seen, for instance, always gives me that
impression. In our own language I might say that it is an inspiration which
tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflati
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/CWSA/Letters on Poetry And Art/ Psychic, Mystic and Spiritual Poetry.htm
Section Two
The Poetry of the Spirit
Psychic, Mystic and Spiritual Poetry
Inspiration from the Illumined Mind
and from the Psychic
Your question
―"What distinguishes, in manner and quality,
a pure inspiration from the illumined mind from that which has the psychic for its origin?"
―reads like a poser in an examination paper. Even if I could give a satisfactory definition, Euclideanly rigid, I don't know that it would be of much use
or would really help you to distinguish between the two kinds: these things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would
prefer to give examples. I suppose