Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Indian Poetry in English
Remarks on Minor Indian Writers [2]
The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because
it is always just missing what it ought to achieve,— one feels a considerable
poetic possibility which does not produce work of some permanence because it is
not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure
can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the
misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who are quite out of date and learned a poetic style and language full of turns that
smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm’s closet. Such awful things as
“unsoughten”, “a-journeying”, “a-knocking”, “strayèd gift” and the constant
abuse of the auxiliary verb “to do” would be enough to damn even the best poem.
If he would rigorously modernise his language, one obstacle to real poetic
success would perhaps disappear,— provided he does not, on the contrary,
colloquialise it too much — e.g. “my dear”, etc. But the other grave defect is
that he is constantly composing out of his brain, while one feels that a
pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through; if only he would
let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do
their poetic best in a learned medium; but still the defect is there.
22 June 1931