-014_Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri and Tennysonian Blank Verse.htm SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND TENNYSONIAN BLANK VERSE A LETTER I was much interested to read the views you have sent me of the two dons - one English, the other Irish - on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. The first of these Academics seems to me rather misguided in his evaluation of the epic's blank verse. No doubt, he is right in saying that there was plenty of end-stopped blank verse in English before Savitri - but did you actually say that the only type had been the enjambed? Most probably, when you pointed out the "originality" of Sri Aurobindo's metrical form, you had more things in mind than merely its abste

-023_Dr. V. K. Gokak and Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri.htm DR. V. K. GOKAK AND SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI In the Indian Express, Saturday, September 11, 1982, p. 14, Dr. V. K. Gokak was interviewed on his latest literary work, an epic in Kannada due to be published in November of the same year. Asked why, being an English scholar who had taught the language for more than three decades, he wrote his epic in Kannada, Dr. Gokak was quoted as replying: "...I was hesitant to write in a language which I have not mastered completely. Aurobindo who had mastered the language wrote his Savitri in English and, though it contained most beautiful passages, I felt the language was a bit awkward. If a schol

AGNI IN THE RIG-VEDA AND ASWAPATHY IN SAVITRI (SOME REFLECTIONS APROPOS OF A TERM COMMENTED UPON BY NOLINI KANTA GUPTA) 1 In the Mother India of August 15, 1976 Nolini Kanta Gupta has given a very pointed and appealing interpretation of a term in Savitri which had puzzled Huta and me and led us to consult him. The term occurs in the course of a description of the Yogic development which Aswapathy, Savitri's father, undergoes. The context runs: A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time. For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above. In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day A gap was rent i

-007_Some Notes on Sri Aurobindo^s Poems.htm SOME NOTES ON SRI AUROBINDO'S POEMS1 Apropos of the incarnation of the Divine and the advent of the Age of Gold on the heels of the Iron Age after "the last fierce spasms of the dying past" have shaken the nations, as suggested at the end of In the Moonlight, we may quote the magnificent passage from Book III, Canto 4 of Savitri: A giant dance of Shiva tore the past, There was a thunder as of worlds that fall; Earth was o'errun with fire and the roar of Death Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made; There was a clangour of Destruction's wings: The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears, Alarm and rumour shook

THE LONGEST SENTENCE IN ENGLISH POETRY1 The longest sentence in English poetry - 143 words and, if a compound is counted as two, 144 - is in Savitri, Book IV, Canto 3, p. 426 [p. 375]. We must understand, of course, that true sentence-length does not really depend on putting a full-stop as late as possible and substituting commas and semi-colons and colons for it wherever we can. The true length is organic. The construction is such that the components, however independent-seeming, are grammatically inseparable. Many of them are really subordinate clauses or else contain words that internally link them together, as against mere ext