Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa
On Translating Kalidasa [4]
[All these are essential before really great verse can be produced; everyone knows that verse may scan well enough and yet be very poor verse; there may beyond this be skilful placings of pause and combinations of sound as in Tennyson’s blank verse, but the result is merely artificially elegant and skilful technique; if emotion movement is super-added, the result is melody, lyric sweetness or elegiac grace or flowing and sensuous beauty, as in Shelley, Keats, Gray1, but the poet is not yet a master of great harmonies; for this intellect is necessary, a great mind seizing, manipulating and moulding all these by some higher law of harmony, the law of its own spirit. But such management is not possible without the august poetical delight of which I have spoken, and that again is but the outflow of the mighty spirit within, its sense of life and power and its pleasure in the use of that power with no ulterior motive beyond its own delight.]2
Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 27.- Supplement.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Asram, 1972.- 511 p.
1 1972 ed.: Shelley or Keats or Gray
2 Paragraph bracketed in the manuscript. Written at the end of the piece, it was apparently intended for insertion here. — Ed.