APPENDIX II APPENDIX II   An Answer to a Criticism   Milford accepts, (incidentally, with special regard to the word frosty in Clough's line about the Cairngorm1), the rule that two consonants after a short vowel make the short vowel long, even if they are outside the word and come in another word following it. To my mind this rule accepted and generally applied would amount in practice to an absurdity; it would result, not indeed in ordinary verse where quantity by itself has no metrical value, but in any attempt at quantitative metre, in eccentricities like the scansions of Bridges. I shall go on pronouncing the y of   as short whether it has two co

Appreciation of Beauty Appreciation of Beauty   The Right Way of Appreciating Beauty   That is the right consciousness, not to desire or to be attached to the possession of anything for oneself, but to take the universal beauty etc. for a spiritual selfless Ananda. 6 November 1933   *   There is nothing harmful in the thing [aspiration for beauty] itself ―on the contrary to awake to the universal beauty and refinement of the Mahalakshmi force is good. It is not an expression of greed or lust ―only into these things a perversion can always come if one allows it, as into the Mahakali experience there may come rajasic anger and violence

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

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

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

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

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  

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

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

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