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

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

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

On the Publication of His Poetry   The Question of Publication   I do not attach much importance to the publication or non publication of my poetry and never have done. Most of it (the published part) appeared five, ten, fifteen or even thirty or more years after they were written. The few recently published in magazines (not all of them new, e.g. the sonnets) owed their fate to Nolini's eagerness and not to my initiative. But the vast bulk of what I have written (long poems mostly) lies on shelf and in drawer, most of it for more than a decade, awaiting either dissolution or an interminable revision or total recasti

Quantitative Metre in English and Bengali   English Quantitative Verse -Rhythm in English and Bengali   There have been attempts to write in English quantitative verse on the Greek and Latin principle with the classical metres, attempts which began in the Elizabethan times, but they have not been successful because the method was either too slipshod or tried to adhere too rigidly to the rules of quantity natural to Greek and Latin but not to the English tongue instead of making an adaptation of it for the English ear or, still better, discovering directly in English itself the true principle of an English quantitat

Early Poetic Influences   Influences on Love and Death   I shall be really happy if you will tell me the way in which you created Love and Death ―the first falling of the seed of the idea, the growth and maturing of it, the influences assimilated from other poets, the mood and atmosphere you used to find most congenial and productive, the experience and the frequency of the afflatus, the pace at which you composed, the evolution of that multifarious, many-echoed yet perfectly original style . . . In my essay, "Sri Aurobindo ―the Poet", I tried to show the white harmony, so to speak, of Love and Death in a kind of spectrum analy