II SRI AUROBINDO AND THE HEXAMETER       1       Blank verse, ever since Shakespeare and Milton gave it the shape of their genius, has been the mould par excellence of English poetry. Its unrhymed lines of five feet, variously modulating on the iambic base of a light unstressed syllable followed by a heavy stressed one (x/), have proved capable of equalling the epic effects of the Greek and Latin hexameter. English poets, however, have been haunted by the cadences of the ancient world and have often tried to transfer into their language the hexameter itself — the "heroic" blank verse of Greece and Rome. The mould which Shakespear

  . THE POETIC GENIUS OF SRI AUROBINDO           THE POETIC GENIUS OF SRI AUROBINDO     K. D. SETHNA (Amal Kiran)             CLEAR RAY TRUST PUDUCHERRY - INDIA © Clear Ray Trust, Puducherry - 605 012 First Edition: 1947 Revised Second Edition: 1974 Third Edition: 2008                   ISBN 978-81-87916-07-9 Price: Rs. 125.00 Printed at All India Press, Puducherry - 605 0

III SRI AUROBINDO -A NEW AGE OF MYSTICAL POETRY 1         Every poet is in essence a Platonist. No poet but feels he is serving a sacred mission beyond his own self, the mission of some perfect beauty waiting to be revealed. He may be as poignantly personal and fired with the body's hunger as Sappho and Catullus, yet the urge to his lyrical self-expression is not merely the joys and griefs of a personal libido: it is also an aspiration for a flawless magic of verbal form. Sappho and Catullus were not lovers grown vocal and nothing more: they were pre-eminently idealists of speech, their passion was for an irreproachable

PROLOGUE       How shall we crown Sri Aurobindo? Is he greater as a Yogi than as a philosopher? Does the literary critic in him outtop the sociological thinker? Does he shine brighter as a politician or as a poet? It is difficult to decide. Everywhere Mount Everest seems to face Mount Everest. But when we study this Himalaya of various extremes of height, the first eminence that strikes us is Sri Aurobindo the poet. Even in his teens the Muse had touched his lips and drawn from them the perfect note, at once exquisite and grand, with apt imaginative suggestion running from phrase to phrase; Love, a moment drop thy hands; Night within my soul expands.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION       This book first appeared in 1947 under the auspices of the Sri Aurobindo Circle. It reappears in a second edition which is "revised". But the revision is significantly restricted. On the one side, in a couple of instances Sri Aurobindo's final versions of his poetry those that were originally quoted. On the other, a few touches, corrective or additive, by the author deal with what may be termed small critical or technical oversights. For the rest, the book has been deliberately kept the same in matter as well as manner. The main reason for this is not only the fact that its scheme, both as a whole and in detail, di

-004_ Sri Aurobindo^s Blank-Verse Inspiration.htm I SRI AUROBINDO'S BLANK-VERSE INSPIRATION       Ruskin could not follow Browning's bold leap from crag to distant crag of poetic thought, even as Arnold "came a cropper" with the sky-arches of Shelley's iridescent imagination. Francis Jeffrey, before them, had uttered his notorious verdict on the lyricism of Wordsworth and Coleridge: "This will never do!" Johnson, still earlier, had found Milton's Lycidas commonplace if not crude. When such minds could show blindspots, it is hardly surprising that an Indian reviewer of moderate talent should miss the mark altogether in judging Sri Aurobindo. And the divagation from the bu