Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

Examples from Amal Kiran and Sri Aurobindo [3]

What kind of style are these lines?

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy

To be denied its winged omnipotence,

Its ancient kinship to immensity

And the swift suns?

This seems to me the effective style at a high pitch.

Or these?

But plunged o’er difficult gorge and prone ravine

And rivers thundering between dim walls,

Driven by immense desire, until he came

To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod

Regions as vast and lonely as his love.

This is also high-pitch effective except the last line which is in the inspired style — perhaps!

23 September 1934