Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

On a Review of Six Poems [2]

About Swaminathan, I think his chief defect as a critic must be that he has no ear or very little of an ear. The man who can approve of the dictum “Take care of the sense and the metre will take care of itself”, ignoring the fact that the metre is only the basis of the rhythm without which poetry cannot exist or who says that the true quantity of “its” and of the last syllable of “delivered” cannot be short, must have something lacking in his auditory sense. He has also totally mistaken my phrase “Read in the ordinary {{0}}way”[[See page 239.]] which means read in the way of the ordinary conventional iambic or trochaic metre. For instance

Ocean | self en|raptured | and a|lone.

If that is read as a trochaic line with a fictitious accent on “and”, the lyrical movement disappears. If it is read as it would be in ordinary speech with the natural stresses and quantities, you get the exact movement of my verse. If for example you find in prose “As he looked on the ocean’s radiant solitude, the seen passed into the unseen and he seemed to be looking on his own ocean self enraptured and alone”; the notation of the last words would be ocean self | enraptured | and alone|, which is just the metre of the even lines in my poem. The rhythm is at once accentual and quantitative. I quite agree that you cannot ignore the accentual basis of the English language, but what you can do is to take account of both stress accent and quantity, assuming it as a rule that a major and true accent (as opposed to minor and fictitious ones) is sufficient to transform a naturally short syllable into a long one for practical purposes. That is what I have done, and that is why the accented syllables in delivered, magic, implacable are taken as long. The result may be a success for this kind of quantitative verse or not, but the basis must be understood before it can be judged, and Swaminathan has missed the basis altogether. I shall have to write someday an essay on the data of the problem of quantitative verse in English and the true road to the solution of the difficulty — it is badly needed.

15 February 1935