Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1968

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

June 13, 1937

Guru, do you find anything in this poem?

Very fine lyric – This time you have hit the bull’s eye. I have altered only a few phrases that were weak.

“Wandering on the wild seas of thought” won’t do perhaps?

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, is a piece of highway robbery – you might just as well write “To be or not to be that is the question” and call it yours.

Please read Surawardy’s poems and give your opinion on the one about the “old man’s” tears. Amal says that he is under Yeats’ influence.

Am obliged to postpone these tears – mine as well as the old man’s.

At places his poetry is very fine. If only he had left out the melancholic old man’s tears it would have perhaps sounded better, what?

Evidently – the old man’s tears and the young woman’s tennis.

[Regarding J’s narrative:] This whole part seems very poetic, but can poetry come in narrative poems?

Do you mean to say that the rest of the poem is prose or mere verse? Poetry does not consist only in images or fine phrases. When Homer writes simply “Sing, Goddess, the baleful wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which laid a thousand woes on the Achaeans and hurled many strong souls of heroes down to Hades and made their bodies a prey for dogs and all the birds; and the will of Zeus was accomplished”, he is writing in the highest style of poetry.