Part Three   Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga     Section One   Appreciation of Poetry and the Arts   Appreciation of Poetry   The Subjective Element   All criticism of poetry is bound to have a strong subjective element in it and that is the source of the violent differences we find in the appreciation of any given author by equally "eminent" critics. All is relative here, Art and Beauty also, and our view of things and our appreciation of them depends on the consciousness which views and appreciates. Some critics recognise this and go in frankly for a purely subjec

Indian Poetry in English Indian Poetry in English   Writing in a Learned Language   I was surprised last night how les mots justes sprang ready to the pen's call. Alas I can't say the same thing for my English poetry, where I always fumble so.   One cannot expect to seize in poetry the finer and more elusive tones, which are so important, in a learned language, however well-learnt, as in one's native or natural tongue. Unless of course one succeeds in making it natural, if not native. 5 December 1935 *   What do you think of Yeats' letter to Purohit Swami, in which he says: "Write in your

Metrical Experiments in Bengali   New Metres in Bengali   Of course, Prabodh Sen is right. I suppose what Buddhadev means is that none of the very great poets invented a metre ―they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring ―introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European

Painting in the Ashram Painting in the Ashram   A General Remark   What you write about the expression of beauty through painting and the limitations of the work as yet done here, is quite accurate. The painters here have capacity and disposition, but as yet the work done ranks more as studies and sketches, some well done, some less well, than as great or finished art. What they need is not to be easily satisfied because they have put their ideas or imaginations in colour or because they have done some good work, but always to see what has not been yet achieved and train vision and execution-power till they have reached a truly high power of thems

Section Two Section Two   On Poets and Poetry   Great Poets of the World   The World's Greatest Poets   Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supr

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