Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21087

I suppose all the names you mention can be included among the world’s supreme singers; or if you like you can put them all in three rows – e.g:

First row – Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki.

Second row – Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton.

Third row – Goethe.

And there you are! To speak less flippantly, the first three have at once supreme imaginative originality, supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius. Each is a sort of poetic demiurge who has created a world of his own. Dante’s triple world beyond is more constructed by the poetic seeing mind than by this kind of elemental demiurgic power – otherwise he would rank by their side; the same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by what they have made.