Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Substance, Style, Diction
Form and Substance
On the general question
[of rhythm vs. substance] the truth seems to me to
be very simple. It may be quite true that fine or telling rhythms without
substance (substance of idea, suggestion, feeling) are hardly poetry at all,
even if they make good verse. But that is no ground for belittling beauty or
excellence of form or ignoring its supreme importance for poetic perfection.
Poetry is after all an art and a poet ought to be an artist of word and rhythm,
even though, necessarily, like other artists, he must also be something more
than that, even much more. I hold therefore that harshness and roughness,
কর্কশতা [karkaśatā], are not merits, but
serious faults to be avoided by anyone who wants his work to be true poetry and
survive. One can be strong and powerful, full of sincerity and substance without
being harsh, rough or aggressive to the ear. Swinburne’s later poetry is a mere
body of rhythmic sound without a soul; but what of Browning’s constant
deliberate roughness or, let us say, excessive sturdiness which deprives much of
his work of the claim to be poetry — it is already much discredited and it is
certain there is much in it that posterity will carefully and with good reason
forget to read. Energy enough there is and abundance of matter and these carry
the day for a time and give fame, but it is only perfection that endures. Or, if
the cruder work lasts, it is only by association with the perfection of the same
poet’s work at his best. I may say also that if mere rhythmic acrobacies of the
kind to which you very rightly object condemn a poet’s work to inferiority and a
literature deviating on to that line to decadence, the drive towards a harsh
strength and rough energy of form and substance may easily lead to other kind of
undesirable acrobacy and an opposite road towards individual inferiority and
general decadence. Why should not Bengali poetry
go on the straight way of its progress without running either upon the rocks of
roughness or into the shallows of mere melody? Austerity of course is another
matter — rhythm can be either austere to bareness or sweet and subtle, and a
harmonious perfection can be attained in either of these extreme directions if
the mastery is there.
As for rules,— rules are necessary but they are not
absolute; one of the chief tendencies of genius is to break old rules and make
departures, which create new ones. English poetry of today luxuriates in
movements which to the mind of yesterday would have been insanity or chaotic
licence, yet it is evident that this freedom of experimentation has led to
discoveries of new rhythmic beauty with a very real charm and power and opened
out possible lines of growth,— however unfortunate many of its results may be.
Not the formal mind, but the ear must be the judge.
Moreover the development of a new note — the expression
of a deeper yogic or mystic experience in poetry — may very well demand for its
fullness new departures in technique, a new turn or turns of rhythm, but these
should be, I think, subtle in their difference rather than aggressive.
4 January 1932