Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Guidance in Writing Poetry

Lyric, Narrative, Epic [6]

Is your Love and Death an epic, and Urvasie and Baji Prabhou?

Love and Death is epic in long passages. Urvasie is written on the epic model. Baji Prabhou is not epic in style or rhythm.

Are your twelve recent poems too in the epic style?

No, they are lyrical, though sometimes there may come in an epic elevation.

Will reading Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained help?

Paradise Lost, yes. In the other Milton’s fire had dimmed.

Kindly mention all the epic writers in all the languages — it is good to know, at least.

In English Paradise Lost and Keats’ Hyperion (unfinished) are the two chief epics. In Sanskrit Mahabharata, Ramayana, Kalidasa’s Kumarsambhava, Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante’s Divine Comedy and Tasso’s (I have forgotten the name for the moment) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala) —

4 May 1937