Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Substance, Style, Diction
Austerity and Exuberance [2]
It is not easy to say precisely what is austerity in
the poetic sense — for it is a quality that can be felt, a spirit in the writer
and the writing, but if you put it in the strait-waistcoat of a definition — or
of a set technical method — you are likely to lose the spirit altogether. In the
spirit of the writing you can feel it as something constant,— self-gathered,
grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton,
Wordsworth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly
attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also
an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to
fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the
thing of which you write, thought, object or feeling, in its just form and exact
power without addition and without exuberance. The austerer method of poetry
avoids all lax superfluity, all profusion of unnecessary words, excess of
emotional outcry, self-indulgent daub of colour, over-brilliant scattering of
images, all mere luxury of external art or artifice. To use just the necessary
words and no others, the thought in its simplicity and bare power, the one
expressive or revealing image, the precise colour and nothing more, just the
exact impression, reaction, simple feeling proper to the object,— nothing spun
out, additional, in excess. Any rioting in words, colour, images, emotions,
sound, phrase for their own sake, for their own beauty, attraction, luxury of
abundant expression or creation would, I suppose, be what your friend means by 
ucchvāsa. Even, an extreme contemporary
tendency seems to condemn the use of image, epithet, colour, pitch or emphasis
of any kind, except on the most sparing scale, as a vice. Length in a poem is
itself a sin, for length means padding — a long poem is a bad poem, only brief
work, intense, lyrical in spirit can be throughout pure poetry. Milton, for
example, considered austere by the common run of mortals, would be excluded from
the list of the pure for his sprawling lengthiness, his epic rhetoric, his
swelling phrases, his cult of the grandiose. To be perfect you must be small,
brief and restrained, meticulous in cut and style.
This extremism in the avoidance of excess is perhaps
itself an excess. Much can be done by bareness in poetry — a poetic nudism if
accompanied by either beauty and grace or strength and power has its excellence.
There can be a vivid or striking or forceful or a subtle, delicate or lovely
bareness which reaches to the highest values of poetic expression. There can be
also a compact or a stringent bareness — the kind of style deliberately aimed at
by Landor; but this can be very stiff and stilted as Landor is in his more
ambitious attempts — although he did magnificent things sometimes, like his
lines on Rose Aylmer,— you can see there how emotion itself can gain by a spare
austerity in self-expression. But it is doubtful whether all these kinds —
Wordsworth’s lyrics, for example, the “Daffodils”, the “Cuckoo” — can be classed
as austere. On the other hand there can be a very real spirit and power of
underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression.
Arnold in one of his poems gives the image of a girl beautiful, rich and
sumptuous in apparel on whose body, killed in an accident, was found beneath the
sumptuousness, next to the skin, an under-robe of sackcloth. If that is
admitted, then Milton can keep his claim to austerity in spite of his epic
fullness and Aeschylus in spite of the exultant daring of his images and the
rich colour of his language. Dante is, I think, the perfect type of austerity in
poetry, standing between the two extremes and combining the most sustained
severity of expression with a precise power and fullness in the language which
gives the sense of packed riches — no mere bareness anywhere.
But after all exclusive
standards are out of place in poetry; there is room for all kinds and all
methods. Shakespeare was to the French classicists a drunken barbarian of
genius; but his spontaneous exuberance has lifted him higher than their willed
severity of classical perfection. All depends on the kind one aims at —
expressing what is in oneself — and an inspired faithfulness to the law of
perfection in that kind. That needs some explanation, perhaps,— but I have here
perforce to put a dash and finish —
8 October 1932